“Someone/who loses himself for the damp word of promise/where smoke rolls upward from a Pall Mall.”
Category: Poetry & Fiction
[Poetry] — George Rawlins
“I stalk a weakening current, a mirror/to wandering, tracing faint verse/into sediment just/below whitewater.”
[Review] The Year in Books 2020 — James McLoughlin
“In need of some levity, I ran my finger along the spines on the shelf and, naturally, plucked out Heart of Darkness.”
[Fiction] Rare Old Primate — Brent Crane
“At the time of the heist, the lemur was thirty-two years old.”
[Poetry] — Adam Houle
“You can’t tell / if the snow is fresh, a god-sent snow, falling / or if it’s just wind-lifted, old snow come again”
[Poetry] — Adam Tavel
“Carter gazes at a thousand shadow treasures / he’ll loot to catalog in haughty solitude / until the war, until his cancer comes.”
[Fiction] Chasing Your Tail — Mersiha Bruncevic
“It began with him following me. Then, I decided to follow him instead. Street after street. Bridge after bridge.”
[Fiction] Train — Ali Ackland-Snow
“Eight hours in, the fights begin to break out.”
[Poetry] — Kathryn de Leon
“I watched moving clouds/soften the sky with holiness/then pass their pure hands over me,/blessing me and healing /the sadness of my young life”
[Poetry] — Seirce Mhac Conghail
“It hangs on me, in me, ornament. Reflecting thing, all things in the room absorbed.”
[Fiction] Psycho Femmes — Nicholas Rombes
“Everyone’s mind rushed to give meaning to the box: it was a bomb, most likely, that an audience member had slipped onto the stage during the dark, and it was up to Patti, as leader of Psycho Femmes, to deal with it.”
[Review] The Historians by Eavan Boland — Nicholas Taylor-Collins
“History betrays, dissimulates, and occludes; a counter-history is required that maintains the openness of wounds and the liveliness of memory.”
[Fiction] ‘Affirmation’ — Annabel Banks
“My clients are wealthy—that goes without saying—but that’s all they have in common, so I must acrobat my way through each conversation, with not a moment’s hesitation as we leap and roll.”
[Poetry] ‘Dream Job’ — Mary Peelen
“Disrupting the dream, a holy terror: an alarm clock rings and I’m jolted back to the taupe world,/back to my day job, where, wholly unencumbered by spiritual dignity, I work myself to death.”
[Poetry] ‘Tradition’ — S.T. Brant
“Every garden graveyards in a season. Take Eden.”
[Poetry] — Louis Glazzard
“There was a truce between you and him/when the unbidden noon hurried in”
[Poetry] — Bernard Pearson
“Between the river/And the remains/I watch as my wife and son/Do the grave chores,/Remove the recidivist,/weeds pressing their suit/Around the marble”
[Fiction] — Margo Berdeshevsky
“I light one, and toss it under the slide.”