Tag: spring 2025
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La Sonnanbula
by Dale Going Disinclined to dredge up the old efflorescence, my heart, a relatively lucky bauble, operated this trenchant December independent of drenched weather less photogenic than snow. Awakened in whether nor’wester by the Bay’s first-ever tornado warning, we wafted through the cellarless house like Balanchine’s La Sonnambula searching for safe ground: pirouetting remnants of…
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Everytime I Pass This I Wonder What Happens
by Robin Gow Along Route 29 I have seen a dead self standing on the side of the roadlooking for a ride home. I keep going. There was a moment when this farm was vacated.When a body grabbed all her bones and disappeared. Then the ghosts came. The thing about death is thatit is not…
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To Beauty From Beast
by Alaina Hammond I was in you from the very beginning, though it took me years to fully emerge. I let you have your childhood in relative health. I even let you have your daughter, sparing her in every sense. You staved me off as best you could, to starve me even as I starved…
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What Comes Up
by Angela Townsend Everyone is excited about the norovirus. Some people think it starts with negative thinking, or else it wouldn’t be called the “neuro virus.” Some people attribute their immunity to apple cider vinegar, misanthropy, or the Holy Ghost. Some people assume you have the stomach for an unabridged reading of their personal norovirus…
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Frog Diet
by Joseph Charles Mollica Politely as though being watched, Oliver shoved in the same poor excuse for lunch he’d been shoving in for a month, a mostly salad-filled pouch, plus or minus some condiments. He licked the familiar trickle of neon-green dressing clean off his thumb, still unsure that none of his colleagues were watching.…
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I’m So Proud of You
by Tommy Cheis Admission standards for suicide bomber school were low. An applicant needed only be pious, unmarried, psychologically healthy, and thirteen years old. And all criteria were waivable. Graduation standards were lower. The technical demands are so minimal and evaluating the mastery of skills under mission conditions so impossible that no student ever failed…
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A Summer’s Night
by Joel Streicker The flight from San Francisco to Traverse City is delayed, so it’s after 11 pm when we arrive. By the time we—my wife, my kids Rachel and Sam, and I—collect our baggage and sort out the rental car, it’s nearly midnight. But we’re still on West Coast time, so we aren’t sleepy,…
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P. digitatum
by Jean-Luke Swanepoel What about the plants? The bougainvillea, the aloe, and the orange tree, which—sincere efforts notwithstanding—never yielded any fruit. They were all in pots—cerulean, puce—because we no longer had a yard, having scaled down from the house with three bedrooms and a lawn whose hollows we could not manage to fill. Not with…