Archives

ALL THE NAMES WE HAVE TO HAVE FOR LOVE by Lei Wang

April 22, 2025

Someone saw some clouds once upon a time. So what? I can see them, too —a haiku But better to have seen them a thousand years ago. I am not being sentimental. I like plumbing as much as anyone, and I know the more pollution, the more brilliant sunsets. But the first poems, you could write about anything. Day turning into night a real phenomenon, a mouth and another mouth. The first poems had no metaphors because nothing was like anything else yet. The kiss was a courting ritual involving, what else, food. A capybara feeding

PARENTHETICAL by J. A Gullickson

April 21, 2025

The floor-to-ceiling windows let in so much light that the office is sweltering. Before the sun emerges from behind the tree line, the HVAC system will turn on. These brisk breaths signal the start of a new day for the company. Graham cycles through the presentation again, sinking deeper into his chair. Each slide features a corporate incantation coldly justifying decisions few care for. Key stakeholders have already made up their minds. This is only a formality. In the center of the cube farm lives Hannah. She stares blankly at the two screens in front of her, cursor gliding back

DO THESE BOOKS MAKE ME LOOK WEIRD?: JACK SKELLEY RECOMMENDS

April 15, 2025

Madison Murray, My Gaping Masshole (Self-published, 2025) A tart is born: Announcing Madison Murray’s fiction, poems, collages. The collection is replete with references to Boston (especially North Shore, Massachusetts). You know, Dunkin Donuts, clam chowdah, the Red Sox Big Green Monstah, Paul Revere, etc. My Gaping Masshole is one unholy, whole, big-ass jam on the concept. Murray’s lewd charm stains every page. My fave parts are Murray’s stories, with real laff-per-paragraph settings, characters, dialog. Of today’s several new writers who are also sex workers (or sex worker-adjacent), Murray is the raunchiest… and funniest. The geo-specificity reminds me of this essential

CRYING FROM THE DUST by Jace Einfeldt

April 14, 2025

A week after my baptism, I hit my little brother in the head with a tee-ball bat and sent my whole family into a frenzy on a Saturday afternoon in mid-March and got locked out of the family car and told to sit on the couch and think about what I did while my younger brother bled all over mom’s brand-new dishtowels in the middle seat of our 1998 emerald-green Yukon Denali. As my family flew down the street on angel’s wings, I contemplated what I had done while picking at the beige, peeling leather couch in the living room

FISHING FOR KAT by Wendy BooydeGraaff

April 11, 2025

He flies into town, late, rents a room in the neighbourhood, meets her first thing in the morning, holds her, remembers how her mother looked, same dark eyes, same dark curl on the top of her head. Every six months, he catches milestones: crawling, walking, first words, kindergarten, high school. Same room, same turquoise couch, same breakfast snacks. Years. Back and forth. He becomes an intermittent constant. At home, he cleans out the extra room, installs a Murphy Bed, hangs her favorite poster. He investigates the local university, uses it as a lure she won’t resist.

JAKOB, I DO! UNTIL I DON’T! by Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch

April 10, 2025

We drank Prosecco on the number 31, escaping the confetti blizzard, the plastic champagne flute cheap between my lips but the ring heavy on my finger, while my parents returned to their hotel and we continued on the early bus—Who gets married at eight in the morning?—and some passengers clucked and said Cheers, but most looked out to the felt-clad streets where stony-faced bankers marched to the rain, then we chugged up a small mountain on a train, and still in my wedding dress with the matching red patent shoes, I whispered footsteps in snow strewn with autumn leaves, and

OUTSIDE HUSBAND by Natalie Warther

April 9, 2025

The survivalist stuff started as a hobby for my husband. An attempt to disconnect from the tech-dependent modern world. But quickly, our renovated backyard started looking more like a trash dump than a place to entertain the neighbors. He just kept making “tools.” Dental floss snares. Crayon candles. Pantyhose fishing nets. Dryer lint tinder. Maple syrup mouse traps. He used every single trash bag in the house for the water collection system. “Where are your shoelaces?” I called to my sons as they trudged towards the bus stop, flopping out of their sneakers. “Dad took them for his tourniquet kit.”

VINYL HOUSES by Willow Campbell

April 8, 2025

There is a bony woman measuring things on the playground. She has a long tape measure that hooks in place. One end hugs the edge of a railroad tie bordering the perimeter of the wood chips. She measures the circumference of the area. She measures by the slide, the length of the monkey bars, the distance from climbing pyramid to swing set, and writes the numbers down in a three-ring notebook. The kids pay her no mind. They screech and race each other to the swings and climb up ladders and hang upside down. The woman deposits the tape measure

COUSIN FRANCINE by Lynn Marie Rossi

April 7, 2025

All my cousin Francine wanted to ask about when I got to Georgia was 9/11. “You probably saw everything,” she said as we sat cross-legged on her bed. “I was seven,” I said. “That was a long time ago.” By then, I was ten, with only vague memories of that day: my mother talking my father out of packing suitcases; the sound of people shouting outside before my mother shut the windows, fearful of dust and chemicals. But Francine wanted falling bodies and clouds of ash. “You’re, like, right next to Ground Zero!” “We live on the Upper West Side,”

FACIAL GEOMETRY by Sagar Nair

April 6, 2025

When he was a child, my dad lost two fingers working at the matchbox factory and declared three as his lucky number. He owned three of every shirt, prayed three times a day, and went to the Lygon casino on the third of each month. He ate ramen with three chopsticks, and sticky dots of broth sprayed across the table, onto his Tim Winton novels. We liked the crunch of Cajun grilled corn. We toothpicked kernels from between our teeth, and threw the cobs at each other’s heads. Pretended to have seizures on the floor. On the drive to the