Issue 23
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay

v91: Dark Oddities Series

Joe Lugara took up painting and photography as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works depict odd forms, inexplicable phenomena and fantastic dreamscapes, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s.

read more

Lynnhaven

Kenny Williams

She had just turned twenty-six when she was called to step in, at the last minute, as the attending at the Weatherall Home for Girls.

read more

when does a body

alyssa hanna

i heard the nazis studied the stars.
i heard they asked twin children
their favorite constellations
and they all picked gemini.
when they got bored they decided

read more

Desert Island Desiderium

Chuck Mobley

I live on a mostly deserted island on the edge of the Sonoran Desert in Southern California. It is an actual 25-acre island surrounded by a 25-acre lake, which is surrounded by a 200-acre, 18-hole golf course.

read more

Kafka Knocks at the Door

John Better Armella
Translated by Michelle Mirabella

An army of red ants crosses my path on the way from the living room to the kitchen. Marching in a perfect line, they carry an enormous, shiny cockroach.

read more

Mother Charges Me Per Minute

Mialise Carney

Mother charges me per minute. I sit in her creme-colored office, my ankles tucked delicately behind one another, clammy hands clasped and bunching sweatily into the thick folds of my skirt.

read more

Manuel’s Keepsake

Julieta García González
Translated by Toshiya Kamei

Adriana bit her nails—most of them had jagged edges—circled around the table a few times, and sat down to wait.

read more

Name an Asteroid

Maggie Blake Bailey

Orbits are overrated.
The idea we should trace a path,
turn like a wheel, like a gear.

read more

Physical

Kelly Krumrie

Every year at St. Agatha’s there is a physical. Each homeroom takes turns lining up down the hall, and a few sisters and the nurse hand out clipboards to the girls.

read more

The Body Dysmorphia Family Circus

Dan A. Cardoza

From near the top of the mainstay, ten feet below the bale ring, boney metacarpals slip the clinch.
It’s a failed triple somersault. Within the acoustics of the big top, the singular sound is that of a matchstick tossed in a fire, a blaze no one sees coming.

read more

Night Trip

Hwang Jungeun
Translated by Mirae Yang

Hanssi and Kossi had lost their way around the area.
Gom and Mim found them at the corner of a street. Hanssi was wearing a trapper hat and Kossi had a scarf wrapped around her neck.

read more

palm springs poem

gigi bella

maybe we keep waking up in the same day/
nameless & unassuming /melatonin sleep
in drool dried pillows/o the soft jello’d hours
when we are awake/ a melted magma disco ball

read more

The Torturers

Luciano Funetta
Translated by Scott Belluz

It was very late when he came home from work. His wife was sleeping; the apartment was dark. Despite the hour and the building’s noise regulations, he could still hear Frau Paffgen playing her piano.

read more

People Like Me

Deven James Philbrick

Edna Steinsaltz was the kind of woman who, wrinkled face aged with wisdom and wine, always answered your questions with another less clear question.

read more

A way to wait away the news

Genevieve Kaplan

I thought to shelve, I thought to put away, to notice and to ask for
and observe. I’m most of the time usually fine
with others talking
like that, and keeping up with their pleasures or certain

read more

Excerpt from The Meaning of Daughter

Alexia Nader

A girl from Merjan’s school got a boyfriend, which would have been the beginning of the same life as every woman in the town—girlfriend, wife, mother, lover, corpse—not of interest at all, except the couple got into the habit of playing a dangerous game in open air.

read more

Chumi

Jorge Largo
Translated by David Pegg

I don’t really know why I don’t like watching movies at home. My girlfriends set up their devices in bed, in their living rooms; they place their computers, their cell phones, on a side table.

read more

Selections from plain sight

Steven Seidenberg

One clings to trivialities—to one’s trifling indiscretions—not to abjure the consequential, but to confront it. Nothing so deflating as the pettiness of absence—of what one had presumed would prove the majesty of the void…

read more

Green Scene

Masha Tupitsyn

In Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, the word futile appears in a section called “Waiting.” In it, Barthes writes: “I am waiting for an arrival, a return, a promised sign. This can be futile, or immensely pathetic: in Erwartung (Waiting), a woman waits for her lover, at night, in the forest.

read more

Floodway

Casey Plett

I was out front at the bar after closing time with a bunch of other weirdos. This short guy with curly hair and I started talking. You want to get a king can? His name was Owen.

read more

Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

Pin It on Pinterest