Poetry: “If I Don’t Get Out There Soon I’ll Die” by Thomas Pescatore

If I don’t get out there soon I’ll die Close as many roads as you like I imagine one straight golden line leading out to the coast through leaning wheat stacked plains and closed snow covered mountain passes, trees taller than the buildings sent to suffocate and teach me to keep my head down, teach […]

Poetry: “Loop” by Thomas Pescatore

Loop I was traveling in a car on a street that was an endless loop like Flintstones background of the same few windows same few doors, I was supposed to do something that I couldn’t —I couldn’t—figure—I stopped and gave a ride to a girl with no face and no memory, when she got in […]

From the Archives: “Mixed Blessings” by Stephen David Glover

My friend Kate makes fun of me because when we go to the grocery store together, which is often (since she has a car and I don’t), I’m always smelling things. I smell the marshmallows through the bag. I smell the circus peanuts and the maple nut goodies and the Necco wafers in the candy […]

From the Archives: “Postmark” by Christopher Barnes

On second-class stamps Paper-castle margins flake And midmost the queen’s A fossil-punch blueprint. Swash your tongue in slaver, Dribble on sticky gum, Thrust a stop-at-nothing thumbprint, Squash that haughty nose. I’m due a letter. Originally published Winter 2009.

From the Archives: “Return to Sender” by Hilary Vaughn Dobel

Don’t you remember the day it froze, nothing in the pantry but oranges? We broke the ice crust on top of the morning’s snow, ate it in slices like bread. Everything tastes out of season now, and there are hunched little women outside, scattering handfuls of blue salt onto the street. In another pastoral, they […]

Fiction: “No Man’s Land” by Nancy Ford Dugan

“I had a dream I was sitting in a car in a mini mall and my tooth fell out. Unusual for me, right? As a city gal to be in a car, much less a mini mall? I was holding the tooth cupped in my hand in my lap. Then somehow I spotted a dental […]

Fiction: “I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night” by S. Frederic Liss

April awoke to the hemming and hawing of an electric tooth brush whose battery was running low. The sound reminded her of the spinning top her daddy had given her for her third birthday, a top with airplanes which took off and landed as it jiggled along the pitted linoleum floor of their double wide. It had been […]

Poetry: “John or Not” by John Harper

John or Not john, don’t scare myself from the start; another bus comes by, another day is loosened by the hours, another decent filet mignon gets eaten, another poem, another airplane ride to the caribbean, another plume out of the oven network of verbs, another unused thing of anything, thing of everything, another armada, another […]

Poetry: “At the Root” by Suzanne Levine

At the Root First came the glamorous hennas, irresistible to my romantic self, with their Moroccan origins and smoky intrigue. Intoxicated by names like by- zantium and aubergine, I religiously bent my head to receive the thick brush strokes of a one-process and scheduled fixed appointments. Bound now to the indigo dyes, decades fell away […]

Poetry: “Rivulets” by Joseph Tate

Rivulets Sitting on the bed’s edge and fumbling with listless sympathies, I pause and notice the L-shaped room: the air ducts hum like wizened birds; a pollen scent dulled with germicide; walls a walking-on-eggshells white; calcite colored, suspended ceiling tiles pitted and crazed with ash grey lines. A palm stretched slow across the sheets abrades […]