I think of safe places and a single weighted word forms in my mind: home. Continue reading
Category Archives: Issue 4
Issue 4 Nonfiction Editor on Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo’s essay
On Wednesday issue 4 comes to a finale with an essay by Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo. Below are thoughts by editor Courtney Kersten, on why she selected Xochitl’s essay. This past spring, I had the good fortune to take a workshop with the generous, spirited, and wise writer Allison Hawthorne Deming during her time as a … Continue reading
Fiction by Vickie Vertiz
Jenny sees Eva’s gaze drop to Jenny’s shoes. This is it. It’s over.
She smiles, pretending they just met. Pretending she was never afraid of Eva, like nothing ever happened. Fake it till you make it. Whatever gets her out in one piece.
“How funny that we have the same shoes, huh?”
Continue reading
Poetry by Meggie Royer
Once as a child you believed the graveyard shift
meant whole cemeteries uprooting themselves &
passing like ghosts through cities
to some other hills
that would accept them as they were,
would take them in
with the grace of an unhinged door.
Continue reading
Fiction by Lauren Hohle
The successful ticket machine would reply cheerfully to each order… would provide enough agitation and compliance to let someone yell at it, let them explode while it sits silently. But all of these actions would be purely surface level. The machine won’t ache for a better life, for fulfillment. The best android won’t long to be human. Continue reading
Poetry by Kelly Jones
I loved birds before “put a bird on it” was a thing. Birds are delicate, and I have never been that word. Continue reading
Poetry by Brianna Albers
we run for reassurance of what is
found and all thoughts vanish, our hands cupped
the night yellow and spilling in our quiet coming
Continue reading
Poetry by Jamison Crabtree
it was spring & thin sheets fenced
each body from the other bodies
i tried listening, put my ear to the cold, once
but i fell through
Continue reading
Fiction by Dominica Phetteplace
You too can be good at math if you spend your days bashing your head against it and your nights wondering why it doesn’t love you back. Continue reading
Poetry by Lucy Wainger
We lost our boys to outer space and so we’ve buried them at sea.
The next boy who doesn’t come back is gonna have his memory thrown into the ocean too, and the one after him, and after him, and him. And I mean it’s only logical.
Continue reading
The James Franco Review 