by Suchita Senthil Kumar | Sep 27, 2024 | Issue #7, Issues, Poetry
after Fiona Lu My mother gathers electric starlight and sows them across the balcony. Plunge into soil, leave behind a flame. The same fingers snap the necks of garlic bulbs, unravel each layer of dead white skin, over and over again. My mother has...
by Anna Schwartzman | Sep 27, 2024 | Issue #7, Issues, Poetry
Anna Schwartzman was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and was taken to Brooklyn, New York when she was five, where she has been living ever since. She earned an MFA in fiction from Columbia University and is Managing Editor of Circumference, a non-profit Brooklyn-based...
by Earl Carlo Guevarra | Sep 27, 2024 | Craft, Issue #7, Issues
It is another unusually cool January evening – while one may say that it is the time for beautiful snow and white Christmas in the Northern Hemisphere, it is a completely different story for us living in the tropics, especially near the equator. Still, the...
by Mandira Pattnaik | Sep 27, 2024 | Craft, Issue #7, Issues
One of the biggest challenges I face as a writer in English (my mother tongue is Bangla) is incorporating direct speech into my fiction and nonfiction work. It seems like a stone fort wall that I haven’t enough ammunition or tenacity to aim a cannonball at. I fail...
by Sabahat Ali Wani | Sep 27, 2024 | Fiction, Issue #7, Issues
For the children of my village who can’t help but steal apricots from our garden.Go ahead, you little thugs, take them. (I) A little girl pulled at her pheran,¹ dragged it over her knees, and secured it under her numb feet. She brought her cold hands before her lips...
by Cee Ellis-Stoneman | Sep 27, 2024 | Issue #7, Issues, Non-fiction
When I was fourteen years old, I discovered that swimming pools are a metaphor for love. The source of my discovery was Macdonald Hall: Go Jump in the Pool! by Canadian writer Gordon Korman. In a story about boarding schools and friendship and refusing to let go, the...
by Maddox Emory Arnold | Sep 27, 2024 | Issue #7, Issues, Non-fiction
I first became a boy in that dingy old dressing room, accordion curtains behind me making ripples in the mirror. Those curtains separated the boys from the girls—a barricade of thick, off-white canvas that never quite managed to keep out the smell of sweat wafting in...
by LaDonna Witmer | Sep 27, 2024 | Craft, Issue #7, Issues
The thing about writing is you’re never over it. Never satisfied. Never finished. You’re always in search of the perfect word, sentence, paragraph, page, manuscript, and then the next idea and the one after that. You are ravenous, scavenging every situation for a...
by ay | Sep 27, 2024 | Issue #7, Issues, Poetry
i This is not the first time; it won’t be the last. It’s a sort of catharsis. I pick apart a dead fish with my bare hands, leftovers from dinner at my parents’ house. I’m vegetarian, but they’d forgotten again and given me the cod I hadn’t touched at dinner in a clear...
by Mark Keane | Sep 27, 2024 | Fiction, Issue #7, Issues
I reach the top of Hawthorne Avenue at 4:30 pm. Another Thursday. Three minutes to gather myself and go through my breathing exercise—deep nasal inhalation, a count to five, and slow release. No more than three minutes, not enough time to attract the attention of...
