the culpability of distance to burn a place by Micah Giraudeau
blue sky was only sun. the kind that keeps you swallowing and raining for the duration of walks or the number of dark needles between your hard toes. warm water softens to let me pluck them from my insensitive skin, the kind that tree roots had inscribed with a marred sense of justice. cellophane […]
Catawba, Virginia by Allie Hoback
Catawba, Virginia nearest hospital: 20 miles My mother clings to the passenger side door of my father’s baby blue pick-up– to be traded for a minivan two years later– watches the golden headlight hit dirt and gravel. My speeding father asks, one last time, if my name could be Samantha. She whips towards […]
What happened to the Chinaberry Trees by Clarissa Kendall
we used to lay beneath each Sunday, hungry, hands like mouths on our answers, like tarnish on silver: didn’t we know the roots would remain—rely on the shade— permanence and god and love? Gentle wind, didn’t we know invincible? And what do we know now? Her father owned guns. My father was one. […]
SkinWalker by Max Torti
in the back of my Mazda Minivan, steaming like, Hot Worms wriggling up, drowning like, Indiana Jones in some pit, slowly gurgling out the last slips of air. my lungs can heave, however, cleaved in two they will operate independently, and hot worms will fill up both spaces, little balloons of flesh, ready to […]
God’s Grand Bravado by Kenny Burchett
I am God’s grand bravado, temporal. Whose hairline recedes like trees forested on a fleeting ball of dirt, and water. Several teeth decayed have been extracted. Soft breasts evolved of pectorals chiseled, and eyesight dims like the drear dusk of Spring. I see things less clearly. And more clearly. I am God’s […]