ISSUE #24
Alan Beard
Luck
She drove you back through the dark through the burning conurbations, light-thrilled streets, bending round roundabouts; she leaned into corners and pulled up sharp. She came with the night, laughed a lot, and told jokes you couldn’t quite get…
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Melissa Llanes Brownlee
The Mote in God’s Eye
She digs herself a hole in the yard, under a blanket of night, under a sky littered with stars. She remembers her mother telling her once that the stars were motes in the eyes of God. She had imagined, as she prayed, her hands held in supplication, that those motes, were angels, or saints, or little children who had died and gone straight to heaven…
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Olivia De Zilva
In transit
at 3am listening to Paul Simon parked at some small town truck stop. where passengers pile off the bus to buy overpriced pies and watery coffee made by a red-eyed attendant drinking a can of redbull. waking up from sleeping pills taken at the Bordertown servo rubbing their eyes in darkness and undoing the seatbelt clasped around unsettled bellies…
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Adrianna Sanchez-Lopez
Paper Doll
My daughter imagines a new paper family. All women, all slender, all two-dimensional, easy-to-tear bodies. I watch her press clothing stickers to the dolls, complimenting each svelte figure’s style. Her tiny hands attempt steadiness as she snips the scissors along sagging edges. Everything must fit…
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Sarah Turner
Now I See You
You’re standing just inside the park when I arrive and I know before you say it that you want to go to the river. You always do. Sometimes I think it’s the only place you feel OK. The railings are between us, casting shadow on the grass, and it’s so bright I have to shade my eyes to see you. You’re there, and then for a second you’re not,…
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Neil Barrett
Apocalyptic
Satan flared lightly at the tree’s flowered edges. He could wrap up into such dense stuff as space was made of, yet the need to bloom still overwhelmed him…
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J. L. Bermúdez
Juigalpa, Chontales
I don’t remember what festival it was, but I remember the way the duck looked at me.
The crowd hummed with excitement as I sat on Papi’s shoulders, my hands lost in his thick hair. His hair was still black then, his shoulders still strong enough to carry me and the weight of all my questions…
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Roberta Clipper
Why My Green Knit Dress Should Be Immortalized
My mother crocheted it. Of a soft, acrylic yarn, forest green, high-waisted, with long belled sleeves and scallops at the thigh. I wore it with a pair of opaque tights, ballet style, knee-high boots. I was not a woman when I put it on, except, as with the phases of the moon, girls shed their girlhood like so much light or shadow…
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Kate Kaplan
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The Jasmine’s in Bloom
It’s supposed to be good for me to get out, and good for me to go for a walk, so I’m walking to the sandwich shop to buy my lunch. These days, a lot of what I do, I do because it’s supposed to be good for me…
Debra Spark
Farewell (June 1978): an excerpt from the novel “Discipline”
…Later, of course, much later, he’d wonder why he didn’t think to start asking questions right away. Why he didn’t think to resist? Had he been able to avoid the situation he was about to step into, his life might have gone in an entirely different direction. Could he have stopped things? Who might have helped him, if he had realized that, at that very moment, he was in profound need of help?…