Online Issues
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The Backbone of the World
By Cecily Winter
art "El Salto de Rolando" by Juan José Clemente
IN THE BEGINNING loomed the gray above our heads sometimes obscured by mists of rain and snow, while across the ice steppe lapped cold saltwater from which we speared fish small and large
FOR SURVIVAL we wore leathern skins and fish scales strung with sinew even in our snowdomes where we huddled close and moaned the wind music of this land
WHEN WITHERING DEATH ASSAILED US we sharpened long bones to capture an ice floe and launched it bearing the corpse,
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Playing Baseball with a Pocket Knife
By Christopher Citro
photo by Allen on Pexels
Raised by retired parents I have that, why bother I'll sit picnic tabled and watch the clouds go by. The battle, that position worked out, I see through it all. I tear packets, toss the seeds across the open ground. The sky can do the rest. This boy burying plastic Chewbaccas between beechnut roots, my boy. Sit beside me, not too close. Here's how you open the knife, straighten the short blade, pull the other to an angle, balance it between your legs and with a forefinger's soft tip,
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Consumption
photo by Joshua Coleman on Unsplash
by Philip Anderson
1.
She was determined not to feel one way or another about Dan or his birthday, so Rebecca flirted with a gay guy at the international art book fair in Berlin. She was there as the representative of Moorland Books, a small press based out of Oakland that she and a friend had founded years earlier at San Francisco Art Institute.
“What did you do at SFAI?” he asked. “What’s your medium?” His name was Bunny. He was a photographer, had gone to RISD,
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World Made Flesh, and Some Nights, It Gets So Dark
by Brent Canle
art: "Solaris" by Juan José Clemente
World Made Flesh
We woke this morning to find that the world was made of flesh. Skin covered everything. Freckles stained the sidewalk. Cars weave between pores in the road. The skyscraper’s windows were the milky membrane of blind eyes.
In the buildings, at work, we entered veins and all day rushed around into different orifices having meetings, completing tasks, meeting deadlines. The streets below us pulsed as buses exhaled into the coming night air.
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Museum of Falls
By Helen Laser
art by Helen Laser
Whoever thought to call autumn “crisp” deserves the Nobel Prize.
Imagine winning an award for a single word.
Imagine committing such an act of occult evocation that your body flies to Sweden
where there are umbels of apples
shrouded in blonde maple leaves
sequestered by hollow gourds:
their seeds rattling inside like a birthday party for a balloon child. -
Personal History of the Cherry Bomb
by Bart Plantenga
photo: collection of the author
You and I cannot believe our eyes anymore. Observe: A man on a glimmering stretch of walk in a tight, shiny suit, the kind start-up guys wear, was jimmying the lock on my bike with what could have been a hunting knife.
“HEY!” Startled, he pivoted and dashed off. I gave chase because I’d been reassured by characters seen in crime dramas that chase scenes usually end with their man in cuffs.
He was young, so it surprised me to be gaining on him so quickly.
