Gabriella R. Tallmadge In your last letter, you said you’re living at Kajaki Dam, where the Helmand River is a muscular sash. Mostly, you see sandbags in the windows and watch the thin shoulders of...
Gabriella R. Tallmadge Come some blood, some gristle. Let myself be unfurled, red tongue rolled out, wine-thick, a wave. Speak myself into existence. Open wide the cage inside me, survey my boning,...
dawn lonsinger Winner, 2014 Greg Grummer Poetry Award paperSay what you will about the car-choked streets, how no one can walk on the sidewalks because they are covered with cheap goods, but all I...
Steph Kilen Winner, 2014 Fiction Award Must be a little over a year now I’ve been in the basement. Just me and the Swede, or whatever he is, I’m just assuming. He doesn’t talk. He can hear, but...
Leslie Marie Aguilar paper Lord, forgive me. I’ve done it again. I killed my father. You see, this time it was a helicopter blade. It just came down & around his head. There wasn’t much...
Michael Lee In the desert, the heat itself is a thief and steals rain from the body. The stone, red as a bloodshot eye. The dawn opens like a hinge. A single raven bows from a fence post again and...
Jade Benoit I burned the wedding flowers & they became sea urchins. A tomboy gone electric with dishes pecked in tiny loose spines thrown out to the wolves. Something feels Daddy T says...
Julie Marie Wade I could never be casual about sharks or sex. It isn’t in me—the one-night stand, or the one-day scuba expedition in Nassau. I read that humans floating near the ocean’s...
Brandon Amico The tree grew through and around my chest. I was here; bones taking on rain, taking on sap and dirt and today, an axe. Yesterday and all days before, a spooling yarn of night—today,...
Michelle Lin My mother wanted me to swallow spoons whole for a wind chime in my chest. God, I hated them. Those immovable mountains, electrified. Their terrible shine. Hard bit. Metal tongue. ...
