By Madeline Vardell
Every Wednesday, before lunch and post-Algebra,
they wipe the red gloss from their lips and put
the Lord in their white socks and shiny black patent
Mary Janes: a billow of plaid-striped corduroy.
X, Y & Z go to Chapel
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Issue 6
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay
If your boy leads
By Elizabeth Savage
a charmed life
let him keep it
& riches of love
suffering misses
let him
keep it
In the Frog of the Vagina
By Madeline Vardell>br/>
Rooted at her center life
unmoves but all
around swirling me
shrapnel , branches. Where
When in Autumn
By Elizabeth Savage
Talk that Roman talk
When in October
scatter candy corn
no backward look
When roads divide
Jack
By Chad Hanson
Jack bought a waterbed and filled it with a hose from
the front yard. Every two minutes he shut off the
water and added a bottle of whiskey
Better Homes & Gardens
By Chad Hanson
Since he retired, Ben has been making toys. He gives them to the kids in the family. This year, when she turned four, he gave a dollhouse to his granddaughter.
Adventures with blahblah
By Michael Pritchett
The day that blahblah rolls into your neighborhood, he shows up out of nowhere, in the middle of winter. Of course nobody moves their kids in January, making them start all over at midyear, unless the reason is something bad.
Fort Myers
By Chad Hanson
Myers works for a company. He understands the bargain that he struck. Most days a paycheck seems
The Key Being Lost
By Suzanne Heagy
When the key slipped from Brandon’s fingers, he cursed his luck with a “Motherfucker.” He swung his shaggy head around, bloodshot eyes searching the floor. He needed to smoke. The damn key bounced when it hit.
The Natives
By Aysegul Savas
Before I moved back to Istanbul to live with my mother, whose escalating illness was getting in the way of daily tasks, I lived with my boyfriend, a Canadian student of mathematics, in a small university town in New Hampshire.
Prelude to a Decoupent
By Heinz Insu Fenkl and Thé T. Nguyen
From the Eye Thief: A Graphic Novel-in-Progress.
It’s Not Every Day That a God Is Born
By Álvaro Enrigue
Translated by Brendan Riley
Augustus, Caesar Augustus, knows that Jupiter is not watching him when he pauses at the foot of the steps leading to the Senate chamber to count each one; there are seven, one for each hill. A wind, still cold and damp after blowing through the Forum, lashes his calves. The gardens have already thickened with flowers although the heavy heat of late spring is many weeks away.
Ice Storm, 2001
By Phyllis Brotherton
My wife
You drive me there, down Highway 99 to Bakersfield, east across the Tehachapi (it is spitting soft sleet at the summit, swirling dark clouds, a foreshadowing we delight in and to which we are oblivious); intersecting with I-40 at Barstow and continuing eastward across the endless rest of California;
A Story About Winter
By E.J. Evans
Iwas living with my girlfriend Laurie in a little house in the Town of Danby, a rural area about 10 miles south of Ithaca, New York. I woke to a gray morning, snowing heavily. I had to leave for work but I wasn’t too concerned about the snow, because I drove a 4-wheel-drive Toyota pickup and like many pickup-driving men I loved my truck and had a certain amount of macho confidence in my truck’s ability to handle any kind of road conditions.
Filling the Feeder with a Sobering Sweet
By Amy Woschek Schmidt
From the nectar I have forged, the hummingbird
is drawn to drink.
Gardens
By Brian McCarty
We keep one eye to the sky, one fixed on parallel mounds
of tilled red loam. The blood knows
apocalypse, stirs as these new leaves stir
in the late spring breeze. The eye knows
the weather; the seasons become mantra.
Spill-O’s Hilton Revelation
By Colin Dodds
Crapping out two days’ liquor and fast food
in the perfunctory luxury of the resort hotel’s handicapped stall,
Spill-O admired the dark wood of the bathroom door
Spill-O, After the Picadors
By Colin Dodds
The mirror shows Spill-O bloated and cross-eyed,
all his bluster revealed to be little else
Filled with a rock-solid down-and-out feeling,
familiar from the Fall to this fall, with the leaves
Spill-O’s Fender Bender
By Colin Dodds
Spill-O’s destination is a rueful interruption
after hours in a church whose confessional is a driver’s seat
and whose altar is the distance
Variety of Experience
Louis Staeble lives in Bowling Green, Ohio. His photographs have appeared in Agave, dislocate magazine, Driftwood, Four Ties Literary Review, Gravel, Iron Gall, On The Rusk, Paper Tape Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, and Up The Staircase Quarterly.
Letter from Lancaster
By Erik Anderson
Much later that morning, as he moves southeast down Fairview, Subject remembers the opening of a video installation inspired by Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Assignment, a book about surveillance told in long run-on sentences, one per chapter, sentences from which the reader can’t escape, that’s the point, and which had a glancing relationship to the network of cameras recording viewers as they passed through a series of rooms, their captured images cleverly remixed and projected throughout.
Dinner for the Ducks
By Johnathan Harper
A boy hates the duck pond. The mallards are clustered at his feet. He is sitting on a bench and sobbing. In his hand a phone — a text. The ducks eye the phone, expecting the boy will shred tiny pieces of plastic off and throw them into the tepid waters.
Sabotaged
By Anne Marie Wirth Cauchon
The commercials begin. A light bulb in black and white fills the screen. You hold one too, the subject and the object. Your face glistens and you say my name aloud again and again until you believe I am here, trapped in the bulb, and so I am.
Prodigal Return Season
By Misty Ellingburg
When he got back to the reservation Sophia was upstairs turning a trick in the master bedroom. He waited. Downstairs in the kitchen the countertops were three layers thick in crumbs stuck to grease and soda spills.
The Fortress
By Carlos Labbé
Translated by William Vanderhyden
Invocation
Words, wrongly directed, can cause you more harm than any enemy or one who wants you dead.