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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.

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.

Atalanta

Madeleine Walters

Last night a faceless goddess

Visited me in a dream

Another appeared beside her

Beautiful and awful

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,

Helene (of Sparta)

Madeleine Walters

I wake to a clammy palm covering my mouth

Paris’ eyes are feverish,

Possessive and possessed

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.

Oracle of Delphi

Madeleine Walters

To be a prophetess of old

Marble shrines, 

Gilded with whispers of praise

Bangles on arms

ouroboros

Sherisse Alheli Pendleton

there was never anything until 

suddenly there was, and

it turns out it had all

been here all along

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

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.

Potassium-Based Chemical Retransformation

Megan Warner

Yesterday you were slow

Down crosswalk sign

Yellow and curved like an 

Apostrophe, comma, slow

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.

For Once

Madison Thomas

The room was uncomfortably hot today, or maybe it was the thick cotton of Mildred’s stuffy old dress.

The Memory of a Man Named Hank

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.

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.

The Real Reason Why Mermaids Don't Have Legs

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.

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