FICTION
The Life Cycle of Fire by Rosaleen Lynch
We can’t take Mam’s new baby to school, the boys guess as much from my silence and nobody wants Mam to wake and make Baby cry, so when I put him to feed there’s quiet, just suckling sounds and…
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When It Gets Cold in the South, You Get a Jesus, You Get a Jesus, Everybody Gets a Goddamn Jesus by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
Honey, MS, 1973 I When it gets cold in the South, Mama puts Devilish-Daddy out, again. It’s where he belongs, she says, cold is like warm milk to funny daddies like the one y’all got. All it gone do…
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Substances: A School Year by Zoe Ballering
September Every day we met for lunch in the art classroom in the school’s east wing. It was the woodshop before the woodshop closed—a cavernous space full of defanged band saws and belt sanders stewing in desuetude. The art…
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Coming Home to Myself by Bryan Okwesili
I am humming along to Lucky Dube’s voice over the radio on the windowpane. The cavernous room swallows his tenor, leaving his words bare, airy, like scattered feathers in the sun. I do not know what it means to…
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Graftings by Stella Lei
Hunger never came naturally to me. As a baby, I didn’t cry for milk, preferring to gaze at the mold-splashed ceiling and grab at dust motes, twining my tiny hands through their light. Elaine told me this was because…
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And a Single Day by Randy William Santiago
We shall leave, for remembrance, one rusty iron heart. The city’s rusty heart, that holds both the hustler and the square. Takes them both and holds them there. For keeps and a single day. —Nelson Algren, Chicago: City on…
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Bear by Ben Loory
My wife and I went camping one day. It was nice! But that night, we met a bear. He came into our tent and sat down and stared at us, kept pawing sort of sadly at the ground. What…
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Always with You by Robert Maynor
Document I: Letter from S. Bethany Dear Father Sister, Mother, Lover who art in Heaven Home, Hell, Hotel, Hospital When you find this, please: Load me like a bullet in the chamber of your gun. Lay me by your…
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Veil of the Cross by Caitlin Rae Taylor
We wanted to feed the bees. We wanted this privilege every year, but only when we were blanketed safely in the hills. We wanted something small and threatening to need us, so we could decide whether it deserved our…
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The Sluagh by Kendra M. Pintor
You’re looking through the hole in your father’s shoulder like it’s a spyglass. Or a kaleidoscope. Except, it isn’t either of those things. It’s a long, dark tunnel, and the other side isn’t magnified or broken into crystal fragments.…
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