The pieces featured in this issue come from writers of all ages, from as close as northeast Ohio and southwest Pennsylvania to as far as Delhi and Singapore.
Each is unique and powerful in their own way.
Featured Interview: Ellen Datlow
“The most pleasurable aspect of being an editor is being the first person to read an amazing story.”
Ellen Datlow
Fiction
By the Creek
Frances Koziar
“It wasn’t the first time I’d packed to leave, but it was the first time I’d left.”
CandyGrams
Alyssa Huscroft
“Each phrase falls into place, one after another, until I’ve filled up a sheet of paper with scribbled nonsense and the row of hearts in front of me spells out a clue.”
Fishing Around in the Dog Days of August
Victoria Smith
“The bucket stands in the shade, crayfish clack against its sides, trying to climb out and find their river.”
I Dreamt of Nothing and Nowhere
RW Franklin
“Sometimes people move without taking a step he warned and sometimes they take a step without moving at all.”
Planned Planethood
Torrence Holland
“Here in the beautiful Andromeda Galaxy, there is something for everybody.”
Swamp Legacy
Jacob McElligott
“I slept that night with dreams of the past rampant in my mind. I walked the swamp paths beside my father and grandfather, fishing poles and tackle boxes in our hands.”
Nonfiction
False Memory and I am Choked
Carrie George
“In another memory I didn’t want, I am a thing hooked in an elbow crease.”
How to Become a (Failed) Vegetarian
Hannah Chen
“One year later, your mom orders sushi. You ask her what happened to the no fish rule. She explains that, sometimes, it’s the effort that counts.”
Meltdown
Jennifer Leigh
“I tried hard to fit into a life made for someone else. The more discomfort I felt, the harder I tried.”
Something About Forgetfulness
Anastasios Mihalopoulos
“There is a way that Greece will conflate a place with a name, a name with a meaning and that meaning with something else until the original source is lost.”
The First Dream Pre-Surgery
Carrie George
“Not to worry, she says, we will remember to draw the curtain. The word remember sticks out, as though privacy is conditional.
Poetry
I Am Not Your God
Prezzley Buckhannon
“you bathe in teaspoons of spit
from flesh that followed you and raised you.
we haven’t met.”
Proper Disposal of Sharps
Benjamin Rhodes
“watered-down honey, in the red and hidden
muscle of my standing bits, my running bits,
the parts that make me move”
The Pennsylvania Death Rattle
Milo Wolverton
“Rats moseyed
all over town
after they tore
the steel mills down.”
Featured Artist:
Federico Federici
“‘All series [of my work] fall within one general issue: language as a boundary zone; even more specifically, language as a habit of reality. Different themes are sort of pretexts to investigate it.’”
Federico Federici
(“Asemic texts,”the Journal Literary Magazine)