Tag: spring 2025

  • 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…

  • Dumped

    by Mark Brazaitis             The first time one of Adrienne’s boyfriends ended the night in a dumpster was an accident. His name was Rupert, and besides his talent for riding a unicycle while wearing a Cat-in-the-Hat hat and his ability to speak spontaneously in rhyme, a quality Adrienne at first found charming, he wasn’t good…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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,…

  • 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…

  • Long Live the New Flesh, All Others Must Tip

    by Aaron Barreras I wrote David Cronenberg a poem to invite him to tea. We never did, because he never saw the poem, he never saw it because he’s Canadian. Canadians have too much snow to bother with words (or so I imagine, myself a child of the desert where snow is fiction, like film),…

  • #5532b

    by Ellen June Wright Ellen June Wright’s work revolves around the power of color and the emotions and memories they evoke. She is inspired by the works of Stanley Whitney, Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Frank Bowling, Howardena Pindell, Jamaican Artist Cecil Cooper and others. Her art appears in LETTERS, Gulf Stream Magazine, Wild Roof Journal, Breakwater…