2020 Edition
Poetry
Let Us
Editor's Choice
Madeline Peck
Let us shed our skins and dance
with our jittery bones and pumping organs
beneath the light of God’s false eye.
Atalanta
Madeleine Walters
Last night a faceless goddess
Visited me in a dream
Another appeared beside her
Beautiful and awful
Helene (of Sparta)
Madeleine Walters
I wake to a clammy palm covering my mouth
Paris’ eyes are feverish,
Possessive and possessed
Oracle of Delphi
Madeleine Walters
To be a prophetess of old
Marble shrines,
Gilded with whispers of praise
Bangles on arms
Picnic Parenting
Megan Warner
I wear a potato salad smile, yellow
Kind of squishy but soft like a
“my mom makes it better” – don’t you know?
Still disappointing, but a quiet type
Potassium-Based Chemical Retransformation
Megan Warner
Yesterday you were slow
Down crosswalk sign
Yellow and curved like an
Apostrophe, comma, slow
A Chiral Desert Experience
Claire Leticia Chesnut
The sun pours down like honey, soaking into scaly lizards.
Coyotes thrive on untouched land and homegrown bird gizzards.
Gas Planet Brain
Andrea Call
My breath is blood.
My blood is air.
There’s a busy frantic dying thing shackled to the inside surface of my skull,
Henrietta Mara and the Socks Her Father Brought Her
Madeline Peck
Henrietta Mara walked to the edge of the lake.
Henrietta unlaced her shoes and tossed them onto the moon-drunk sand.
ouroboros
Sherisse Alheli Pendleton
there was never anything until
suddenly there was, and
it turns out it had all
been here all along
Playing Guns
Beau Barton
We played guns in the backyard,
taking cover in the suburban rubble
of rusted water heaters, broken
bicycles, and empty cattle trailers.
Rotten Filling
Beau Barton
her skin sparkles
below her 1920s pearls
her long tassel skirt
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Firearm
Hannah Lindsay Shepherd
I.
Among twenty high school classrooms,
The only moving thing
Was the trigger of the firearm.
Fiction
Warm Cold Cereal
Editor's Choice
Beau Barton
Sherry Stills sat alone at her table, poking the ice in her glass, ignoring the vibration of her phone, and scanning the bar for someone she could follow to a hotel bedroom.
The Memory of a Man Named Hank
For Once
Madison Thomas
The room was uncomfortably hot today, or maybe it was the thick cotton of Mildred’s stuffy old dress.
Andrew Leavitt
It was a clear autumn’s evening when the old man first crept into the bedroom where Hank and his wife Debby slept.
Creative Nonfiction
The Trail of Mental Illness
Editor's Choice
Amber Celelaith Tawen Rossi
It’s a cool July morning and I was supposed to be at work three hours ago, but I called out. I can’t go in.
The Real Reason Why Mermaids Don't Have Legs
Hair Dye Is Not Permanent
Lyndsey Kay Nelson
The first thing to remember when dyeing your own hair is that dyeing your hair isn’t permanent.
Hannah M Duncan
There is freedom in the tide that pushes and pulls against damp sand. The briny breeze dances with the foam lapping at the shore.