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Issue One
Poetry
SM Stubbs: Five Poems
Mice and Crow Perched amongst the leaves, a crow watches mice build stores for winter. Unseen, it flatters the mice and praises their preparations. It tells them their god may not like what they’ve done. “Why wouldn’t they?” ask the mice. “We only gather what we need to survive.” The crow sympathizes. “I know,” it says, “but what if your god needs what you’ve taken? Do you not love your god?” The mice sift the earth, lift the juiciest worms over their heads. The crow laughs.
Phoenix West
I Always Leave the Door Open I always leave the door open, A quirk, a habit, just my way, The breeze rolls in, the night feels soft, The world outside can stay. They laugh and say I’m asking for it, Tempting trouble, teasing fate, But I just grin, shrug it off, What harm’s an open gate? It started small, just little things, A cup moved left, a chair askew, Keys misplaced, a door ajar, Things I swore I didn’t do. “It’s just the wind,” I’d tell myself, With a wink and a care
Taylor Payne: Four Poems
Pebbles His ghost haunts the cornfield across from my grandma’s house—clipped ears and that mangy kitten coat—and I wonder ‘who could kill a little thing like that?’ My mother’s little lover, his first and mine next. I look at his picture and wonder how she could miss a thing I never knew, if she feels like I have been there always, or like he was so, and softer, and never will be again. I imagine the shrapnel passing through his silver-soft skin, and if he thought about his
Amaya Gentry
Monsters in the Woods We moved to a place where there’s monsters in the woods: Roosters in the shape of giraffes (rooraffes), a wendigo with a strawberry pink coat. They’re unsettling, manageable, except for one. That one is me. Not metaphorically, no this one wears my face. She stares at me from the clearing in the backyard, surrounded by a wall of trees. Maybe it’d be fine if it was only at night, (it wouldn’t) but I see them during the day. No one makes comments on them, e
Short Fiction
Dylan Janos
Desiree Thursday A winding hallway is filled with representatives of the press, wannabe sleuths, and locals from this town and another, all dwindling. A lone employee is tasked with keeping them engaged until the conference begins. He is holding his phone out: “Have you seen this? What a dumbass." They have, it’s why they came; Substra Corp paid off City Hall. A pair of aluminum doors are cracked open by someone on the other side, and just like that, their poorly-paid jester
Tatum Lovsey
In order to maintain a modicum of screenplay format here I have added this piece as a pdf below:
Robert Long Foreman
Black Telephone Originally published in New Ohio Review 20 Michael, you are gone, and in this house where you once were there is an antique telephone as black as your coffin. Heavier than it looks, it is as full as the hole the men dug for you, early one morning, as they talked about summer and things they saw on TV. Old things weigh more than they look—dead, leaden things like you and the black telephone. You have been gone three weeks, and now my mother is gone, too. When s
Visual Art
Sierra Hall: Three Pieces
No Kings Death of Education Survive at All Costs
Tatum Lovsey
HandEye
Maeve Rieser
Travis the Menace Drawn in a flow state. No thought just lines and horror. Imagine having your face ripped off by a fat chimp on Xanax and LIVING. The stuff of nightmares. Tickle Me Elmo haunts the scene.
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