The Latest
Two Funerals
Toshiya Kamei
The phone call had come that morning. Etsuko’s sister-in-law, Akiko, her voice thin and stretched tight as a wire. “Kenji passed,” she’d said, no preamble, no softening.
The Inescapable Nightmare: Gods of Unfinished Business by Nina Kossman
Review by Art Beck
“Kossman’s poems evoke Joyce’s characterization of history as a maze of nightmares that his alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is trying to escape.”
Issue 33 | Fall 2025
Prose
Leeuwenhoek’s Lens
Eric Williams
Cate’s Upstate or Fashion After the Apocalypse
Elisabeth Sheffield
from Cityscape with Sybarites
Israel Bonilla
The End of My Sentence
Roberto Ontiveros
Storing Dinosaurs
Dan Weaver
Winners
Julia Meinwald
Tiered Rejections
Stephen Cicirelli
Brother from Another
Jaryd Porter
The Robinson-Barber Thesis
Joyce Meggett
Point of Comparison
Of the Lovers
Addison Zeller
Another Place
Addy Evenson
Poetry
Let’s Sit on the Bench and Chat
Tatyana Bek, translated by Bita Takrimi
Blueberries
Edward Manzi
Crow calls from the top of a pine.
Crow Dreams an Eerie Peacefulness
Peter Grandbois
past is a flame
Karen Earle
Cover Art
Ocean Beach I
Judith Skillman
Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.
—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases”
Author Interview with Herself: Karen An-hwei Lee about Marimo, Mon Amour
“After the pandemic’s saturation of the vernacular lexicon—virus, plague, quarantine—language felt fatigued, emptied of resonance. By writing around the forbidden words, I wanted to recover creative intimacy with expression itself.”
A Highway of Whispered Rain
By Victor D Sandiego
“All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence.”
A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame
By Sage Tyrtle
“My whole big self stumbles into a woman in a baseball hat who mutters fat bitch and I open my mouth to say I’m pregnant, as if she’s right to say it.”
Certain Writers Make Me Want to Die
By Jupi Bowen
“For some masochistic reason, I have a subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine. Mostly because I want to peer into the publishing world and see what normies are reading without completely fucking my algorithm online.”
We Were Just Girls
By Sarah Lynn Hurd
“We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter.”
The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died
By Ashleigh Adams
“That June, I stole a red-and-black checkered flannel from my stepdad and frayed the hem with kitchen shears.”
Listening to Rilke Redux
By Wally Swist
“In Rilke’s praises, we find our own praise—of ourselves, of others, of mostly anything, actually. When anyone experiences an epiphany, that person wants to share that epiphany.”
don’t ask what any of this means
By Carla Bessa
Translated by Elton Uliana
“all I know is that I have to run. that’s the premise of my being-in-the-world: running, that’s how I’m programmed.”
Ask the Sunlight on a Sleeping Dog: Letter to Xhevdet Bajraj by Jeff Weddle
Review by Peter Mladinic
“Jeff Weddle is a poet who reads other poets. Jeff Weddle is a philosopher whose ideas come not out of books but out of lived lives, of friends of now and then, of family, and of people met along the way.”
We’re All Bananas
By Chelsea Stickle
“After my mother’s skin cancer diagnosis, I was bullied by my older sister Sally into scheduling a ‘skin test,’ which is what they call it when you strip in a cold room and show a stranger every part of your body.”
Subjective Condition
By Rebecca Tiger
“A woman swims up to me in the clear blue-green Aegean. We agree that the water is beautiful.”
The Things You Will Do
By Andrea Marcusa
“You will see your mother’s number calling and a strange cardboard voice will strike your ear with She’s passed, and you’ll hang onto your mind, save it from falling into dead air, fingers squeezing the life out of the phone…”