by Lance Larsen Brick and breviary, cobble and keepsake. All day I tried to belong to that encircled city but nothing would have me. The walls that kept tourists in kept wonder out, luscious Tuscan light used up by breakfast. How could I give myself to 72 medieval towers when 58 had been knocked down?… [Read More]

by Chen Poyu translated from Taiwanese Mandarin by Nicholas Wong Let me tell you how machines have crept into our lives—see that thing by the window? Clinging to the white wall like a flying squirrel making a futile leap towards the bodhi tree behind the wall. That is a clock, yes, but not the most… [Read More]

by Stephen Gibson  —Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, Fl. Degas’s Little Dancer survived the Franco-Prussian War where the starving ate rats, even wallpaper’s wheat glue (they called them “gutter rabbits,” watching at sewers); the wealthy had “antelope with truffles” on one menu as enterprising Parisians became dog and cat butchers and stole pets (which… [Read More]

by Abbie Kiefer I spent six years in the South repeating myself: I surely belonged back in Maine, where winters are hard and finding a job is hard and even beaches, instead of sand, are rough juts of rock— granite knifing through the earth. Where my people, unrockable, have abided for generations. Finding satisfaction in… [Read More]

Editor’s Note: How do we continue to love one another amidst a hate-filled world? How do we find solace amidst devastating heartache? How can we open ourselves to moments of wonder in our daily lives? These are some of the urgent and necessary questions that the poems, short stories, and essays in this Winter 2025… [Read More]

Purchase our new issue! Editor’s Note: Dear Reader, When we put out the call for work that explored “Heat,” we invited writers to approach heat as a state within and beyond temperature, flavor, intensity, and touch, to consider heat literally, figuratively, or somewhere in between. We sought work that complicated and confounded us, work that… [Read More]

by Lauren Aliza Green The table had been cleared, the bottle of vintage port emptied, the Los Angeles sun long set, when Steve, who until now had remained little more than a spectator to our conversation, breached his monastic stillness to ask, “Have you two ever considered swinging?”  Nate and I were seated across from… [Read More]

by Jackie Sabbagh It was a dark windy night in Manhattan and I was staring from across the street at the blue-green basalt frontispiece of the Museum of Sex where I had agreed to meet a man named Scott before our first date, whom I had met on a sugar-daddy website after he messaged asking… [Read More]

by Sofie Riley Since he’d arrived an hour ago, the house had grown crowded with bodies running warm, the air filling up with colored light and the gaseous weight of a hundred bong rips. In the living room, an eschatology student mumblerapped over an EDM beat through speakers that had the gain turned up twice… [Read More]