Issue 36

Lana Spendl

The students she had met had written life goals on pieces of construction paper and hung them on her walls, and the notes were now annotated in black pen.

bullets push through flesh, & this sharp/ white background drains the color from
their bodies.

Shawna ervin

The polish soaked into the pale wood, a stark contrast to the piano’s rich red finish. I could not fix the stain. The damage had been done.

Sarah Dickenson Snyder

time to life a thick World Book, open / to the Human Body Systems of many transparencies– / the roped muscle page, / the blue and veined figure

A hybrid review/interview of Alexandra Teague’s The Principles Behind Flotation

I originally overwrote, by several hundred pages, so much of my revising work was winnowing down to hopefully the most resonant of the details that can act as markers for a broader world.

Leah Kuenzi

The sister wonders sometimes about what the mother looks like alone in their house, what she does, how she moves.

 Caroline deBruhl Interviews Kelly Luce

Being unable to communicate with the outside world fine-tuned my internal world, my observational skills, my sensitivity to subtlety, my sense of curiosity. It was an incredibly intense and magical and difficult time.

Molly Miller

“Sometimes things want to be free so much, they don’t think about who they’re leaving behind.”

A review of Monica de la Torre’s The Happy End / All Welcome

Through concision, abstraction and a strong sense of intertexuality, Monica de la Torre breathes life into the often-emotionless mechanism of corporate culture.

A Review of Yuri Herrera’s Kingdom Cons

The language flares up and comes to life, as if Herrera’s antidote to the fixed, predictable narrative to which Lobo feels beholden is a kind of loving and abiding awareness.

A review of Latin@ Rising: An Anthology of Latin@ Science Fiction and Fantasy edited by Matthew David Goodwin

This anthology is place where you can explore how all of these different authors relate to one another and to new and emerging science fiction and fantasy.

 A feature

So many animals die in poems / 
They must be the most dangerous / fields through which animals can wander

Patrick Findler

As I watched Vlad onstage, I heard his rich, textured voice speaking his lines and saw the butterfly awakening to anxious awareness…

Olivia Clare

Disasters in the First World complicates a reader’s expectations and deftly elevates situations that might first appear mundane, into tense moments that delight.

a feature interview

To the younger version of myself, don’t throw away any of your work. Your creative process has an order, yes, but you don’t necessarily understand it yet.

Callie Wofford & Marilyse V. Figueroa

In Issue 36, several of our authors explore trauma and loss.

Original Artwork