here is an alphabet slicing open the belly of a boar. out come pulverized apples. vicodin. shoelaces. the neck of an artisanal soap maker. there is tobacco in the cupboard and a stew of cigarettes boils on the stove. inside the tv set a woman scolds the circumference of your belly. another prays…
Category: Issue Five
Editor’s Note
Dear Reader, Just before the 2020 presidential election, I moved back to the small Ohio town in which I grew up to become a delivery driver. Ferrying packages over the streets I’d walked and driven growing up, I saw the same cultural war that embroiled the rest of America gripping the place and people I’d…
“No Time To Explain” and “Going Through The Motions” by Nance Van Winckel
Nance Van Winckel’s ninth poetry collection, The Many Beds of Martha Washington, appears in August 2021 with the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series/Lynx House Press. She’s also published a book of visual poems with Pleiades Press (1916) and five books of fiction, most recently Ever Yrs, a novel in the form of a scrapbook (Twisted Road Publications, 2014). The…
“Won’t Somebody Please Think of the North American Tree Octopuses?” by Samuel Rafael Barber
Opinions Won’t Somebody Please Think of the North American Tree Octopuses? By Maureen McCurdle Maureen McCurdle is a lecturer and research fellow at Pepperdine University and the founder of the Political Action Committee Humans for a Safer North American Tree Octopus Future. It would be wrong to ignore the fact that we work in a…
“Potpourri” by Christine Sneed
It always started with eye contact. Lucy would focus on one man until he felt the heat of her gaze, and if he looked back at her with a certain serious glint, she knew it had begun. He would ask the bartender to send her a drink, or else he would glide over and introduce…
“Which Way” by Ashwini Bhasi
Traumatic events in early childhood can be catastrophic. They can irrevocably alter the neurobiology of survivors and negatively impact the entire trajectory of their lives. [1, 2, 3]. “Which Way” is a self-exploration attempt to answer the following questions. How do you release cellular memory of a traumatic experience trapped in your body? Can you…
“Hot Takes” by Gardner Mounce
Every Sunday, my family gets together for dinner at my parents’ house. Dinner begins cordially enough with a salvo of how’s-works and what-have-you-been-up-tos. If we all stuck to a single glass of wine we’d continue like this, depleted by the year behind us; by the one ahead. But we don’t. By dessert, our opinions are…
“Act 3/Sonnet #39” and “Act 3/Sonnet #47” by Sean Cho A.
Act 3/Sonnet #39 There. i gave you back a line after writing one too many. i compared the sun bear to something you knew so you could get delight in a new layer of a thing you already know. you feels a little too hostile. Harm means permanent. the dictionary says this. we have to…
“Breaking News” by Noor Hindi
Breaking News We know death is futile know death as 3.5 thousand retweets a trauma a thing named empty in internet measured in the slow bend of your fingers clicking the quiet tempo of expiration your spleen in the shape of a gun in the shape of a pen I am going door to door…