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My friend has written a poem about a pair of deer—one with antlers, the other without. In the poem, they are in a cemetery filled with green grass and large trees. The antlered deer fixates on the poem’s speaker. He watches her with his whole body. And the antlers too: like antennae reading the air for threat. She is no threat. And, the speaker claims, the deer determines that.  My friend loves deer and wants a tattoo of one on her shoulder.   We are talking about deer and we are also talking about my ex. I say, “We own a house together.” She says she’s sorry for that. I say, “There were years where things were all right.” She nods. I say, “But anyway, a deer is just a deer. A nuisance, a pest really.”  She shakes her head sadly. She says my ex’s name. And then she says, “It wasn’t your fault.” I say, “I lived in Santa Cruz for a while. Maybe that’s why: so many deer there.” I’m thinking about the soft dewy eyes of them, and the velvety antlers too. Their small flicking tails, their precarious stick legs. My friend is also from California, a suburb in the east bay. And now, we’re both in Utah. The mountains here. The snow. The seasons. My ex, meanwhile, is in Albuquerque living with his mother. My friend says, “Really, you’re better off.” I try to remember the poem’s lines, but all I can do is think of the expression deer in the headlights . I say it over and over to myself. Out loud, I say, “Six years of my life.” She says, “We all have different paths to walk.” I hate this. And I wonder if, in this moment, I kind of hate her too. And her cemetery deer. And maybe all deer. Like rats. Like mosquitos. As a child, I hated no animal. I loved them all, deeply. Maybe all children do. When you’re young, you see possibility, not a tired old buck plodding above coffins.  I want to tell all this to my friend. To apologize for hating her and her deer.  She says, “In reality, they ran away from me, you know. The deer.”  She looks at me for a long time. Like I am the deer, and she is the headlights.  I imagine the deer fleeing her and her long looks. And I imagine them moving away from each other too. Each deer for themself. The buck with his impressive rack of antlers slinking off behind a cottonwood tree. And the doe—of course the doe—springing through spring grass between gravestones under the blue blue mountain sky.   Allison Field Bell is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Utah, and she holds an MFA in Creative Writing from New Mexico State University. Her debut poetry collection, ALL THAT BLUE, is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of two chapbooks, WITHOUT WOMAN OR BODY (Poetry, Finishing Line Press) and EDGE OF THE SEA (Creative Nonfiction, CutBank Books). Allison's prose appears or is forthcoming in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, SmokeLong Quarterly, River Teeth, DIAGRAM, The Gettysburg Review, The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, West Branch,  and elsewhere. Find her at allisonfieldbell.com

"Tell me about the proposal." I promise it’s important every Saturday morning,  we walked the neighborhood park. I forgot the names of trees he pointed out because of nature’s  eagerness to make me behold him.  Like in summer, the foliage   (emerald, celadon, jade)  rhymed with his eyes.  The thrumming of cicadas,  brown noise for his clarion tenor to pierce. In fall, he stretched and plucked leaves of grenadine  or ochre, unveiling his height, the span of solid shoulders. Even in winter’s bleakness,  the whiffs of pine conjured  his cologne, woody with  a trace of earthy musk. One day in April, the mist  dampening our jackets,  without warning, he mimed swimming freestyle, arms  pinwheeling through the air.  I stumbled—I missed the sidewalk, struck by how he endeavored to catalyze chaotic delight  in days I wished to regiment. I promise it’s all still important, and I can see why your parents sent you to your gay uncle for advice, but I’m sorry I can’t recall, did you ask who proposed, or how? Supplication   The sky’s lurid vermillion tells of faraway wildfires. The sun, a looming disc of magma,  bears down its hue, like that of a cloying blood orange syrup,  smothering all green  from the forest’s trees.   Let me believe that if everyday I sort my plastics, swap meat for legumes, turn off the tap while brushing my teeth, forego drives on Sunday afternoons,  cultivate my compost bin, insist  on fair trade coffee in reusable mugs, I will soon stop inhaling our planet’s immolation. Stephen K. Kim (he/him) is a queer Korean American writer and educator in New Jersey. He enjoys spending time with his husband and his cat. His poems appear in Ghost City Review, Neologism, Thimble,  and elsewhere. He is a Best of the Net nominee, a student and teacher at the Writers Studio, and a reader for Only Poems . He can be found online @skimperil

Say Phantom, why don’t you play that twinkly opening lick to “Growin’ Up'' on your Korg CX-3 while I tell the good people here at the A-Go-Go this story.  All this happened about six years ago. Or maybe ten years ago. Maybe even twenty. Hell, I don’t remember. Might’ve been yesterday, for all I know. I ain’t the type to stick pins into the cushion of time. What matters is, it happened. And because it happened, I get to stand up here on this stage and talk into this microphone—and you get to hang on to every word I’m about to say. So there we were—me, Phantom, and Miami. We’d just finished playing a field party somewhere off of Poor Farm Road, and we were driving home in my mom’s Oldsmobile Silhouette when all of a sudden we got us a flat tire. We pulled over to the shoulder, popped the trunk and moved all our gear out the back of the van only to discover that we didn’t have a spare. By then, it was pretty dark out there on Poor Farm Road—if you ever been around that way, you know the kind of dark I’m talking about.  Pitch dark.  Total dark.  Can’t-see-the-hand-reaching-for-your-throat-in-the-dark dark.  And of course, there wasn’t nobody else around for miles.  No houses, no cars, no streetlights. Just us, and the trees.  So we’re staring into these deep, dark woods when all of a sudden we see this light shining off in the distance. And we thought to ourselves, Well, maybe somebody lives back there. We ought to go see if we can ask for some help.  Off we went, stumbling through the forest, covering ourselves in mud and twigs and God knows what else. Finally, right as we’re about to collapse from exhaustion, we come upon this little clearing. And there in the middle is this old gypsy lady, just sitting by a campfire.  Now, let me stop right there. You know we’re not supposed to say “gypsy” anymore, right? Oh yeah. I shit you not. Apparently, it’s a racial slur against the Romanian people, or something. The more you know, huh? But beyond that, here’s the real problem with the G-word: it puts a certain picture in your head, and it ain’t a pretty one. Because this lady wasn’t some withered old crone with a wart on her nose and a scarf wrapped around her head. She was a neat, compact little blonde, and well-built too, like a statue. In other words, she looked a lot like Stevie Nicks—she had that same G-word spirit, anyway. And she wasn’t exactly ugly, either. With her tight black jeans and her Stones shirt, she looked like she could’ve been in the crowd at the field party we’d just played. She had one of those faces that you could tell had been very pretty until things started happening to it—things she’d seen, things she’d done, they had all etched themselves across her brow, along her jaw, and around her mouth. She’d spent some time leaning headfirst into some hard-livin’, know what I mean?  Altogether, it wasn’t a bad way of looking.  We walked up real slow and careful, but Stevie Nicks must’ve heard us coming, because before we made it all the way to the campfire, she twisted around on her log and said, “You bums got a flat, huh?”  As you can probably guess, that made us a little nervous. Like, how’d she know we just blew a tire? The road had to be about a mile or two back in the other direction. Plus, the trees were so thick we couldn’t even see the Silhouette no more. We just looked at each other, not sure what to say.  Finally, we all said: “Yeah.” Just like that—all together, at the same time, like three robots about to blow their circuitry. This drew a laugh outta Stevie Nicks. I guess we were expecting a witchy-sounding cackle but it was more like a hiss from deep down in her throat, like the sound a lit cigarette might make, hitting the bottom of a wishing well. It made us realize, for the first time, that she maybe might’ve been a wild creature who actually lived in these woods, and not a human being just hanging out there.  Stevie Nicks got up off her log and took a step toward us. “Who sent you suckers anyway?” she demanded. The fire was throwing crazy shadows across her face, bending all her age lines into crazy zigzags. “What’s wrong, cat got your tongues? Okay, if you ain’t gonna talk, I will. You guys look like a bunch of bums.”  Well, I don’t have to tell you that comment was a little uncalled for. Anybody could tell we were a budget operation—we didn’t exactly look presentable. We’d just stumbled through a dark, muddy forest, for God’s sake. We could’ve done with a shower and a change of clothes and a good night's rest, is what I’m saying. But that was pretty much the story of our lives back then. All of a sudden Stevie Nicks picked up this stick that’d been lying next to her on the ground and waved it at Phantom and BAM! Now he was dressed head-to-toe in this flashy red suit.  She turned to Miami and waved her stick again. BOOM! Now Miami was wearing a shiny white suit.  Both him and Phantom were looking like a million bucks.  Then she turns to me.  Waves her magic stick.  Nothing happens.  She waves it again.  Still nothing.  She looks down at her stick and shrugs. “Sometimes it don’t work like it’s supposed to,” she told me. “Guess you’re just stuck being a bum.” Well, I ain’t about to take that  lying down. So I said, “Hey, Stevie Nicks! You ain’t gettin’ off that easy. C’mon! You owe me one.”  “Okay,” she said, “but I ain’t no mind-reader. Sometimes people gotta say what they want out loud. Go on, don’t be shy. Just tell ol’ Stevie Nicks and I’ll solve all your problems. You want me to fix your flat tire? You want a new transmission? You want your own Papa John’s franchise? You want to be a doctor, or maybe a lawyer? You want to be Emperor of the United States?” She had started buzzing around me like some kind of drunk hummingbird. “Your minivan’s a goner. How about a new car? A BMW? A Mustang? A big old gas-guzzling Hummer? Just say the word and I’ll wave my stick.” “Well,” I told her, “to be honest with you…not to pull any punches…”  I guess I must’ve thought I could speed things along by thinking out loud, but I kept trailing off.  “What I really had in mind was, uh…I think I would really dig…I think I could, uhh…I think I’d like…”  I was buying time, waiting for inspiration to strike. Phantom and Miami were standing off to the side in their shiny new suits, rolling their eyes - kinda like they’re doing right now. Pretty soon, even Stevie Nicks got this impatient look on her face, like all of a sudden there was somewhere important she needed to be. But there must’ve been some rule about granting your own wish, because otherwise she would have sprouted wings and flown off, and left me there talking to myself.  “I think I wanna be…I think I wanna be…I think I wanna be…”  And then it came to me in a flash.  “Hey, Stevie Nicks...I WANNA BE A ROCK N’ ROLL STAR!” Wouldn’t you know that right after I made my wish, that big old forest went silent as a graveyard. The wind died down, and all the leaves and branches got real still. Not a creature was stirring. Even the logs on the fire quit crackling.  Stevie Nicks took a step toward me and held up a long crooked finger that was white as bone.  “You sure that’s what you really want, sonny?” she asked me, waving that bent digit of hers in my face.  I told her, “Lady, we ain’t got all night. Quit wasting both our time and work your magic.” So Stevie Nicks hoisted her stick up over her head, waved it around a couple times and… BOOM! Now here’s the thing: there’s levels to being a rock star. There’s the level where you’re really famous: selling out stadiums, hanging platinum records on the wall, and flying cross-country on a private jet. On that level, everybody knows your name, whether they listen to your product or not.  Then there’s the level where you’re just kinda famous. And within that level, there’s sub-levels.  The internationally-kinda-famous sub-level.  The nationally-kinda-famous sub-level.  But the sub-level where our little rock combo seems to have found itself is micro- regionally-kinda-famous.  This is the sub-level where maybe a few dozen people know us from the flyers we staple to telephone poles around town.  The sub-level where we still gotta hold down day jobs and schedule our jam sessions around childcare and errands and home improvement projects.  You’re probably thinking this is where I tell you that the moral of this story is if you’re ever stumbling through the woods off of Poor Farm Road and you come across a mysterious woman who looks like Stevie Nicks and she offers to grant your most fervid wish, make sure to be as specific as possible.  But not every story needs a moral, an epiphany, or hell, even an ending.  See, my wish came true that night, and it keeps coming true every single day. Look at me. I’m living the dream. So what if I’m not world-renowned? I could call up any dive bar, saloon, or honky tonk between St. Joe and Ste. Genevieve and they’d add our band to their schedule, no questions asked.  Phantom and Miami back there, they’re family men, with extra mouths they gotta feed, and extra responsibilities that need their attention. They got more important things to worry about than trying to squeeze their dad-bods into shiny suits they outgrew years ago. They pick up gigs when they can, and if they can’t, they always let me know when our three-piece needs to turn into a solo act.  But me, I got no wife, no kids, and no obligations other than showing up at downbeat time. I ain’t rich, but I’m sure as hell comfortable. A few years back, I moved into a trailer, right off Poor Farm Road. I love it out there—it’s a laid-back, low-rent way of living. And yeah, maybe my house ain’t much to look at, but long as I got a fridge full of cold beer and a closet full of white undershirts and broken-in blue jeans, that’s all I’ll ever need.  When I get bored, I head to the riverboat out in Boonville. The casino’s set me up with a nice little line of credit, as thanks for our standing engagement on the Bankfull Stage every third Thursday. Last week, I even had me a bit of windfall, so I went out and made a big purchase: I traded in my mom’s old Silhouette for a pre-owned GMC Savana, with forward collision alert, configurable seating, and an 8-cylinder flexible fuel engine.  But the real jackpot is the one I hit that night in the woods.  The famous fella, the rock star, keeps on writing songs, and I keep right on singing ’em. Lately, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that I’m even starting to look like him. I get stopped on the street for pictures, autographs. Maybe playing his tunes all these years rearranged my DNA some way or other.  Do you see a resemblance?  You think he’d hire me to make appearances at boring celebrity events in his place? You think if I put my mind to it, I could fool his wife, his kids, his band mates? Could I skip straight to stealing his identity? How long do you think it’d take before they brought me to justice? You think that even after I stole millions of bucks from him, he’d still like me enough to write a crime ballad about me? I want your honest opinion.  I could pull it off, couldn’t I?  Go ahead. Squeeze in tight around me. Get in a good, long look at this face. See all the magic tricks the years have played on it. Drink me in. I don’t mind the attention. We’re in just the right light. Don't be shy. Stare into me like I’m a dirty mirror. John Waddy Bullion’s writing has appeared in the McNeese Review, X-R-A-Y, the Texas Review, Hunger Mountain, Vol 1. Brooklyn, and elsewhere. His debut collection of short stories “This World Will Never Run Out of Strangers” is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press in November 2025. He lives in Fort Worth, Texas, with his family. Visit him online at johnwaddybullion.com .

Sunday(in a beautiful clouted world)   She* wore a cute hat for an hour or so, two tops foraged in the bankrupt biscuit tin then siphoned the bestial stench of odd socks. Grading them. Keep or kill.   felt the craving to have seven babies immediately   fed the finagled snake- he said he wanted and then he said he didn’t and so refused to give a name - cryogenic rodents-in-a-bag that thaw just in the nick of time googled the Latin term for fingering a sleeping ass in the morning. It was gone ignored a friend request on facebook that read- imagine me laying on some beach and eating mashed potatoes in this   suicidal by 8. Hat in a tree.     *Sophie     Topless Funeral   Flanked by blue hell and death left on a vacanted barstool altar, with shrimpflicted mad dog in hand and a grin. Oh that hootless grin.   Let us annunciate still life,babygirl.     sprinkles in the Age of Ordinary   you carried your circus with you agitating molecules,juggling hearts and crotches various turning souls on an upright spit.   hair of fairground pink,inked on vanilla they * skirt around you in awe and in orbit but on the brink of revolution you were entombed up the high street,Llantwit Major.   ‘A brilliant colourist’     *on Thursday July 24th 2025 the population on the planet was 8,235,688,200 and only one of them was you   KG is a poet and author based in Wales. The author of the best-selling 'Troubadour Tale" series of books on Bob Dylan, he has now embarked on a poetic journey. Published in Wales, Ireland, England, and now in the US, his first book, "Poetry For The Feeble Minded" was published to critical acclaim. His current WIP, "A Working Class Book Of Psalms," from which these poems are taken, is due to be published in 2026.

On the shortest day of the year, in a place abandoned by the Arctic sun, a goose-stepping squad of soldiers hold electric arc lamps behind two men who flicker in the harsh shadows as they walk towards the soft orange glow of buildings huddled in the distance ahead. ME’s movie star gangster face is enshrouded in a white Arctic fox fur coat. His kid-leather gloves are thrust deep into his pockets as his combat boots lurch through the snow that blankets the permafrost. One hand caresses the compact self-loading pistol that spoke to the angry crowd, stopping them from tearing him apart the day the wall and the Great Leader’s motherland empire came tumbling down. WE’s ice blue eyes gaze from under a towering high patrician forehead, flouting the wind atop a lanky bundle of jumbled grey rags that moves with royal stride. He’s as defiant to the bitter cold as to the assassins he taunted from intensive care after their botched attempt on his life. Now WE drolly asks, “Come to visit your jolly North Pole death chamber?” “I’ve come to offer you a choice.” ME’s monotone reply. “Such a rare gift!” WE ripostes too dramatically. ME’s knows WE’s dossier. Reckless sarcasm, spoofing, and slapstick. As a young skinny nerd, WE used humor not knuckles against his opponents. But ME knows spoofing and slapstick are only funny until violence slaps the smile off one’s face. “Let’s be clear. I don’t find you witty,” ME’s glance is hardened by experience. ME’s brother died of diphtheria, his father was disfigured, his grandmother was killed, his uncles disappeared, all in defense of the Great Leader’s motherland. ME’s grandfather cooked for the Great Leader, every night placing dinner on the sideboard, then quietly retiring so the Great Leader and his dinner guests could serve themselves and discuss the war. ME places a hand on WE’s shoulder as his lips widen into the smile of a victory assured before the engagement even starts. “And there’s no one else to entertain. I’ve come for a dialog, a discussion of the future. Fair enough?” “Sure, no objections. But -” WE remembers standing silently, hand on the shoulder of an immense cow his Grandmother had him fatten up on pork lard. He gestures to the marching marionettes on his flank, assault rifles slung over shoulders. “Appears this is more show trial than dialog. You’re the judge, and the judgment,” he sighs, “will involve violence.” “Violence is dialog by other means, and life’s not fair.” ME remembers victory, how the motherland became an empire, and upon the Great Leader’s death the paralysis of power that ran that empire into the ground. ME refused a role in that antic comedy, patiently watching the first flailing moments of a short-lived democracy until ME could choke it to death with his own hands.   “If you want to discuss anything but the future of the motherland you say you care for so much for, I yield. Otherwise, may I begin?” A shit eating grin, WE nods in assent. “Right is simply a question between equals. For the rest –” “Yes, yes. The strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must. And how’s that turning out?” WE checks his rising emotions, sniffs back the mucus filling the furrow of his upper lip, “What about fairness? What about right and wrong? Certainly in great danger you’ve as much interest in them as anyone. Your actions have consequences, and a slip on your part,” WE’s cadence slows, “Will bring on the heaviest vengeance.” “I’ll take that risk” Me’s voice trails off as his mind wanders elsewhere. WE wanders as well, to a time where the rustling grass steppes were spread under an endless sky. Where a low cinderblock factory was sheltered by a copse of trees. The doors atop the concrete shipping dock were slid open to let in the warm air. WE’s Grandfather, in knee-high black leather boots, pants rolled up over top, black suspenders covered in sawdust, waved directions to a truck backing up as he asked WE, “Are you Ukrainian or Russian?” WE complained. “That’s like asking who I love more, you or Grandma.” WE’s eyes return to the tundra.  “And how, pray tell, could it be as good for me to live as for you to rule?” A dozen pairs of black boots crunch through sharp snow. A soldier’s lamp sags a bit. ME turns, hood falling to his shoulders as his eyes scour every inch of the soldier’s body. The man hurriedly raises the lamp to its proper height. ME lifts his hood back into position, impatiently picks at the loose end of a seam. “I’m here in my interest. My offer’s in your interest as well. I gain by not destroying you, you gain by not suffering the worst.” But WE’s already suffered the worst when he watched the endless sky become pitch black. Heard the screaming sirens that cut short a paradise as it disappeared  into a radioactive cloud. The soldiers in flimsy rubber suits and ancient gas masks lined up to run one after another into the maw of a nuclear reactor run amok while WE’s family was herded onto their furniture trucks and driven into the heart of the motherland. This was the moment WE came to understand that all politics is personal. “You can’t simply let things be? The little cat and mouse games we play out with one another that entertain everyone. The mouse is certainly no threat to the cat?” WE always look for common ground. Always the World Fellow Scholar sitting on green lawns amidst ivy-covered buildings studying political science and world affairs with elite youth from around the world. Always reasoning with rationality, understanding, and dialogue. The air they breathe. “So naive.” Snorts ME, who lives in a different culture, underwater, where people have a banal hatred for those with lungs instead of gills. “That would only demonstrate weakness.” ME always flooded the zone with lies, meddling, counterfeiting, and spying. ME cribbed pages of his Ph.D. thesis from textbooks as easily as he hid genocidal terrorists in safe houses. ME loves his mook of a son WE, but is horrified by how different they are and so is unable to stop from hurting him. WE knows his words are falling flat, that he’s flunking the test, and so WE takes a different tack. “Won’t my death simply encourage others to rise up against you before you get it in your head to kill them as well?” “People, washed and cleansed in propaganda, are sheep following their shepherd. But I concede, a few can be fickle and must be more actively ‘reminded’ of what’s in store for disloyalty.” ME’s gait becomes jaunty as he recounts the rebellious general’s plane rigged to “inexplicably” drop mid-flight  from the sky. The renegade helicopter pilot found “mysteriously” riddled with bullets and covered in tire tracks across a lonely road on some sunny coast. The wind never dies. WE watches as it carves crenellations in snow and can’t help but tease ME a bit. “Well then, if you work so hard to rebuild the motherland empire, wouldn’t I be a coward not to try everything that can be tried to return us to republic?” ME sharply shoves hands in pockets as he stops for a moment, considering in silence, then says, “You’d have to kill me.” ME smiles. “Because I’m annihilating your followers. I’ve betrayed the ‘beautiful republic’ that arose from the fallen empire, befouled its honor with unspeakable crimes. As a republican it’s your mission to rescue the motherland from me! You’re the only man in the world capable of the task. The past demands you kill me. The future demands that you kill me. History demands you kill me, and history is our element, our god.” ME turns and looks up with eyes of coal at the much taller WE. “One strong man could throttle me. One cook could poison me. And why hasn't that happened yet? Because no word has yet been spoken to break my spell.” “But to submit is to give up on hope.” ME stops dead in his tracks. Face contorted in a fit of rage. Lifting both hands from his pockets, ME flaps them together to the tempo of his words. “Hope, danger's comforter, may only be indulged with abundant resources for its nature is extravagant! The weak who bet on hope see its true colors only when they are RUINED!” ME catches his breath. “And aren’t you much like me if, knowing all this, you still lead the sheep, blinded by hope, to the slaughterhouse?” “I can hope for as much of God’s fortune as you since we fight a just cause,” WE says petulantly, “what we lack in resources can be made up for by your enemies, who are much more numerous, rich, and powerful than you.” “God.” ME spits, black glove sliding across a puffy white chin. “God I believe, people I know, by the laws of their nature rule wherever they can. As for my enemies,” ME wags a black leather finger at WE. “When it comes things outside their interests, well, what’s expedient is just.” ME says dismissively. “Just look their wavering over supporting you and your cause. Their fears that I am completely mad and that if pushed too far I’ll resort to the weapons which would destroy us all.” ME scoffs. “Not a really good bet as allies.” ME spits and the material explodes into ice before it hits the ground.  “The truth of it all is that they cannot support you without courting danger. And that they court as little as possible.” “Not supporting us comes with the great danger that you will act upon them as well.” WE’s bravado melts into peevishness. ME looks at WE as his disappointing son. “I’m struck by the fact that you’ve mentioned nothing in which people might trust and be saved by. Your strongest arguments depend upon hope and the future. Your actual resources are scanty. So,” ME’s tone warms. “I’m gonna help you out. Make you an offer. Join me. Pay tribute, become my ally and designated successor. When I die, continue reforging our empire.” WE’s clearly surprised. “Why wouldn’t I simply accept your offer, bide my time, and once you’re gone, turn your empire once again into a republic?” ME laughs a bit over-dramatically. “Beside me you’ll lead the wars against our enemies, live on mega-yachts and in golden palaces, become rich in the spoils of war, besotted in hedonism, and corrupted by my future. Consider your dossier. You’ve bent to circumstance and exigency before.” ME pauses for a moment. “You’ve marched alongside far-right ultranationalists on the grounds that every element of the opposition is needed in the fight against me. When I waged war, you called for the deportation of all our enemies, referring to them as ‘rodents.’ When you ran for office, you railed against undocumented immigrants. You’re a brilliant screwup of a leader whose chaotic lifestyle makes your rare moments of heroism, the byproduct of selfishness, stand out even more. Nothing’s special to you, not even yourself!” ME’s eyes run over WE’s face. “Don’t think it dishonorable to bend once again and submit.” WE replies quietly. “Not much of a choice really, Devil’s bargain or death.” The wind gusts increase. The trees groan and crackle as they twist this way and that. Branches fly off, spin through the air, then skate across the snow into the dark distance. Snow devils rise tightly on spinning spirals of wind. ME says in a fatherly manner, “If there is one thing we both know, it’s that those who do not yield to their equals, keep terms with their superiors, and are moderate towards their inferiors, on the whole succeed best. Take a moment and consider.” ME signals the soldiers to halt as WE walks out of the harsh white light toward the orange glow in the distance, hands shoved hard in his pockets as he almost disappears into the darkness, then turns and walks back into the light, standing before ME with an awkward ironic smile pasted across his face. “The honesty of my beliefs, my naiveté. A strength and a weakness.” WE sighs. “You know I live what I believe. In that we’re the same.” ME offers an accepting nod. “There’s one more important thing I believe in. Loving others like I love myself.” ME bursts of laughter. “Oh, this is too much fun. Love. That tangled mess of deep affections, intense feelings. It has no place here.” WE looks at ME piteously. “You misunderstand. One loves others as much as one’s self – because it’s in one’s self-interest to have them love you. A future built on the self-interest of Love is much more certain than one built on the fear that you’ve staked everything upon, trusted most in, and someday will be most completely deceived by.” WE kneels before ME. “I’ll be missing from all photos,” WE says, gently placing his hand on ME’s forearm. The two men begin to chuckle.  “Yes, the passing of the greatest president no one ever had,” ME says as WE guides the pistol out of ME’s pocket and the chuckles become shaking laughter.  WE places the barrel of the gun in the gentle hollow right between his prominent brows and nose. “We’re creating a new shared experience that equals the greats of our motherland literature.” The two men sound like hyenas, laughing so hard they can barely keep the pistol positioned properly. ME, grinning ear to ear says, “Yes, a genre so saturated with cliches that it’s impossible not to write them.” ME continues in whining parody. “If I got a dollar for every ‘We didn’t get to say goodbye,’ I’d be the richest man in the world.” The two men fall to the snow, clutching their sides in fetal positions, laughing so hard they cannot breathe. Slowly they both roll to their knees and look at each other with broad smiles. WE says, between gasping breaths, “What’s it gonna be, fear or love?” Arms crossed about his chest, gripping sides still hurting from laughter, ME staggers to his feet and feels the steely cold of the pistol penetrate the leather of his glove, finding its way into his skin. WE wonders over finality. Will the slight click of the hammer be unleashed? Rob Rosen spent the better part of a life as a technologist and applied AI mathematician with a front row seat to the technology revolutions of our time -- and the resulting social convulsions. He’s written a dozen short stories that have appeared in Cold Lake Anthology, Dark Horses, Metaworker Literary Magazine, Syncopation Literary Journal, Roi Faineaint Press (Watchers of the Sky), Mania Magazine, Interwoven, and is currently working on his first novel, a story of our times as told from twenty-five hundred years ago.

Small Repairs It starts with hairline cracks— the chip in the cup’s rim you tilt your mouth around, the hinge on the door catching the frame just slightly wrong. The floorboards bow near the heater, softening under years of leaks nobody quite fixed. The window hums in a way you only hear in winter, a high, lonely frequency no one bothers to tune out. You think these things will hold, patched with good-enough glue, pressed down with passing hands. You think they will go on— this table, this wall, this life you built up like scaffolding over something hollow and shifting. But the cracks are not waiting. They are working. Each tilt, each sigh of wood, each tremor too small to notice, is a little refusal, a little undoing. And then the whole thing gives— without ceremony, without so much as a crack you can name— and you are left standing there, hands still full of tools, facing the fact that you were never repairing anything. You were only making a slower kind of breaking. Lifting Stones We carried them one by one, from the broken wall to the fence line, each stone quickening against the skin, a rough persistence we mistook for something like purpose. The dirt warmed through the soles of our boots, the sun, thick as syrup, filled our sleeves. We worked mostly in silence, only the clink and scrape of stone marking the hours as they sloughed past. Once, when I faltered, you steadied a rock against my chest— and for a second, I mistook the press of your hand for something that would stay. But everything we lifted was already slipping from itself— grit loosening at the seams, the wall shrugging off its own shape, the ground easing its grip. Even the good work bends to loss. Even the hand that steadies must open again, must let go, so that kindness, too, becomes another thing we bury. At Forty-Nine You begin reading the obituaries, at first just to make sure it’s not someone you know. Then, after a while, you read them for practice. You learn to carry grocery bags differently, closer to the body, as if protecting something that doesn’t heal as fast as it used to. You stand longer in doorways, forgetting why you meant to leave the room, forgetting what exactly was so urgent. It’s not regret that takes you by the collar— it’s the small rearrangements: the hair thinning at the temples, the running shoes that seem smug in the closet, the future no longer feeling like an arrow, but more like a road that narrows into fields. You tell yourself it’s fine. Everyone gets here, if they’re lucky. And anyway, there are still good chairs, decent coffee, a few songs you haven’t worn out yet. But some part of you knows— without bitterness, without even surprise— that you are no longer becoming anything. You are what will be left behind. What Time Does The tree that leaned against the back fence all those summers when we were young, the one we were told would have to come down someday, has grown taller, broader, its limbs weaving a high green roof that shades the porch now where nobody sits. The cracked sidewalk where we chalked our names still runs downhill, but it’s buckled and heaved, a slow shrugging off of everything we thought could be kept in place. I passed our old school last week— a different name on the sign, new windows, new doors— the only thing left of what we knew was the worn outline of a hopscotch board, half-swallowed by the asphalt. Time is kind and not so kind. It lets some things soften at the edges, the way anger wears itself out like a shouted word in an empty room. But it also sharpens small disappointments, the slights you thought you’d let go, the hurts you buried under bigger hurts. It lets the tree keep growing long after the house begins to sag. It forgives what you meant to say, but not what you said. It forgets your promises but remembers your failures with a patience you never deserved. And in the end, it leaves you here— looking out across what you thought you built, seeing what grew without you, what stayed behind, what outlived your best intentions. In Passing Where I am, something else is not. Where I move, the space neglects me. I leave no mark worth speaking of. The fields settle behind me as if I were never there. You must accept this fate, you must not cling to simply anything that floats. The sky bends no different for me. The trees turn without sorrow. The names I once answered to slip through the gaps in the air. I am less a presence than a fold, a soft rearrangement of distance. A leaf turns, a door swings, nothing stops to remember why. Jeffery Allen Tobin is a political scientist and researcher based in South Florida. A Pushcart nominee, Jeffery has been writing for more than 30 years. His latest poetry collection "Scars & Fresh Paint" was published in 2024 with Kelsay Books, and his poetry, prose, and essays have been featured in many journals, magazines, and websites.

no love fiercer than coyotes no joy louder i heard their warbling in the night as i lay in bed inviting the internet  i found the buck the next morning  as I was checking my fences already half a skeleton somebody really wanted his meat this big eight pointer who took the shot and bled his way to my land leaving himself to me who wished him no harm and to the coyotes who are always hungry a hunter who kills deer to feed coyotes is surplus to requirements and his soul is just an idea blackberry canes and poison ivy were even then full overgrowing  for all the deer left in the wood so i placed his skull in the arm of a tree and prayed to saint placebo and saint corolla and felt much safer for it never a sunrise in this dark dingle where the wind seldom reaches  the old earthen tank  that never did hold water w v sutra is the author of skeuomorphia , recently released by White Donkey Publishing. His poetics seek at all times to destabilize and undermine received praxis in the hope of achieving a novel manifestation.

“The numbers are in, sir.”   “Oh yes?”   “They are not looking good.”   “Oh no, hmmm?”   He has a dummy, inside which a fungus grows to imitate human organs. An amazing approximation. It has no thought. It can be trained.   “No. They’re not looking good at all.”   Outside their cells, the employees watch. They cannot decide if this is the best solution. A bit unsanitary. Yet it has made the workplace more humane, that’s undeniable.   They taught the dummy to err. To rebel gently. When it was too compliant the boss simply stored it in the closet. A threshold was discovered. The right amount of challenge. Plus, the incompetence makes it more palatable for the employees.   “Why the 18th-century aesthetic? Why the Renaissance? The Roman?”   “That’s what he wanted. I dunno. Some sort of fantasy.”   Our job is to give the boss pieces of paper on which we write numbers. We read the number off gauges, through which flows a steady stream of pressure. So long as the numbers go up, he is happy. And, luckily, numbers can always get bigger.   He likes big numbers.   But sometimes, they just don’t get bigger. Sometimes, they get smaller.   Hence, the dummy. Árón Ó Maolagáin is a writer and visual artist from Colorado and based in New York City. He studied English and Visual Art at the Metropolitan State University of Denver. After completing his undergraduate degree, he earned an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Before focusing on fiction, Ó Maolagáin published writings on art theory and criticism. This theoretical background informs his prose. Artists of the uncanny, such as Hieronymus Bosch, inspire Ó Maolagáin’s imagery and themes.

Selkie The women at the docks say she ate the man who stole her skin, mashed his bones between aragonite teeth. His vocal cords she added to her lyre, an instrument made from the debris of sunken ships. Such a woman I wished to know, so I went looking for her at the beach head, close to the caves where it was rumored she dwelt. I waited until twilight, sun cresting over the shoreline, my hands pink and raw from the cold. She emerged from the wave foam that crashed against the cave mouth, dressed in black-green gown, threads stitched with thick sea-grass taken from the ocean floor. Virescent jewels were sewn into her salty hair, and she regarded me curiously with pebble dark eyes. I stayed with her that night, and the night after, told her of the man who killed my sister. She smiled, her mouth a dark maw of seabed and fishbone, kissed me softly on my bleeding lips. All will be righted, little one , her voice that of an ocean god, men forget often the retribution of the sea . Banshee   I will tell you what a haunting is. It is a girl, dead and buried, put to the ground. She is  face up, she is face down, she is naked, is dressed in someone’s clothes. She is pale, she is dark, she has auburn curls or corn silk tresses.  Her mouth is open, her mouth is sewn shut.  Her fingers are bloody, clean, callused,  and her skin holds every secret and knows nothing. Her body is folklore, her body is a forest, her body is in the ground. The maggots have eaten her now. She is eternal, she is nothing. She is dirt. She is a memory.  She is regret. Ashling Meehan-Fanning is a poet based in Wisconsin whose work often includes themes of magic, ancestry, and the American Midwest. She spends a lot of time thinking about ghosts and trees.

It hovers in the sky like a baby killer whale. I avoid day light because at night it’s harder to make out, but it’s still unmistakable. Starless and shiny, an obsidian square. It calls to me as I traipse down the main strip of El Poblado, the street burning with salsa and motorcycles. Overhead, the black window creeps after me and I duck into a steak restaurant.  A half-naked woman dangles from the ceiling on a hula-hoop. I ask the waitress to be seated in the back, far from my stalker. Techno pounds my ears and basketball plays on televisions—lots of tourists. I devour liquor and ribs, hoping for a reprieve. No luck. The black window opens on the restaurant wall. I voyaged to Medellin to escape the nights back home in Orlando where it lives on my ceiling—calling for me to climb up through it and vanquish the surging anxiety in my muscles. I engulf my face in my pillow. Looking up, it demands me to let go, grant it to crucify every throbbing image. Once I cross through, there’ll be no more good days but no bads ones equally. I left the country to evade the window, but it followed me to Colombia. It follows me everywhere. Shutting my eyes, it unlocks inside me, floats in my blood. I traverse past neon lights and drug dealers. Rain drizzles onto my leather jacket. It’s rainy season in Medellin. Long mirrors line the walls of the elevator in my hotel. Idling at my reflection, the mirrors turn black. The window found me. A depiction of me shunned by friends appears, which morphs into one of me in a prison cell. An inmate shoves his heel into my mouth. It transmutes again. I’m in a hospital bed, breathing into a mask. The elevator opens and I bolt to my room. Inside, I sit on the balcony, the black window back in the sky. I would go to bed, but I worry the black window is me. Brett Pribble’s work has appeared in Aquifer: The Florida Review Online, decomP, Stirring: A Literary Collection, Saw Palm, The Molotov Cocktail, Five on the Fifth, Maudlin House, Bending Genres, Bright Flash Literary Review , and other places. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Ghost Parachute.  Follow him on Instagram/X/Bluesky @brettpribble.

You’re eight and at a Pick-Your-Own farm in Southern Ontario, the sun pressing down the part in your hair until it feels like one long blister. Your father is trying to explain he’s there with his whole family, you’re there to pick berries, and the college guy whose summer job this is gives him that funny look. That look you’re familiar with whenever anyone hears your parents’ thick Polish accent. Like there’s something funny, something strange going on. In a few years, you will hate this look, but for now you hear your father’s “stav-birry” and you step in, the smooth way you have been stepping in since you were six. The voice of the family. “We three would like to pick strawberries, please. How much for three pints?” The college guy’s face turns to you, a sun moving, and the wrinkle between his brows smooths out. His swagger comes back and he snaps his gum as he tells you three bucks.  And so you get to picking, your mother telling you to eat as much as you can in the field, because no one can see, because the prices are high, because this is part of the deal. She is wearing a kerchief around her head in a way she thinks glamorous women in Canada do, the way she wears a fur coat and heels in winter, because she has learned the rituals of this strange land through movies and has brought those images in a battered leather suitcase across twenty years and an ocean. The fruit bursts hot in your mouth and the flies buzz dizzy around you. The smell of dirt and mud here, stains on your fingers. You can’t say if you like strawberries. You can’t say whether this is the way you want to spend an idle June afternoon. Your parents are focused on placing each berry in plastic tubs. You watch the way red flesh disappears between their lips. Next week you will go to Niagara Falls. The week after you will get a small barbecue and grill pale hot dogs in the front yard. Your parents are always learning to be Canadian but even now you see that they get the fractions wrong, like stubborn rows of numbers in class that slide and shift before your eyes. Subtracting Polish words and clothes and foods does not equal Canadian, does not equal new. There is yet another formula you don’t know. In other rows, you see other families. The little girls aren’t wearing a straw hat (strav hat) and sundresses like you. Jeans and bucket hats. Your mother does not seem to notice this. But you notice the easy confidence of overalls and words, the way the little boy two rows over pops three berries into his mouth at the same time, picks his nose, and sticks his tongue at you. In the distance, the college guy is wiping his face with a towel and leaning down to someone with long hair and a bathing suit.  You have a dim memory of the fields at your grandmother’s house. Fields of green cabbage, fields of tobacco plants taller than you. There, you picked because it was what the family did. What would your grandmother think of the idea of paying to pick fruit, eating it furtively? You think you wouldn’t like the answer. Is this what being Canadian means—having enough money to pay for something that families have been doing for years just to survive? Sitting outside in the hot sun? You look down the long rows. Plant after plant in perfect lines, like rows of numbers. The salt of your sweat stings the insides of your eyes. The berries are red and sweet and you will never eat them all.   Agata Antonow is a writer living and working in Canada. Her work has been featured in the Mile End Poets' Festival, Our Times, The Gravity of the Thing, Defenestration, Eunoia Review, and the FOLD (Festival of Literary Diversity) program, among other places.

A dog-eared rag of duct tape flaps on our plane’s wing outside my window as we take off; my cell signal falling away with the earth, leaving behind the guy who doesn’t want to meet my parents yet. My sister’s last text, flying with me: Until you become a parent, you really can’t understand what real love is. A thirty-day AA chip rattles in the pocket of my winter coat against a tube of lipstick in time with the engine. An electric whine audible over noise-canceling headphones; an indecipherable Marvel movie on my phone. The cookies the flight attendant hands over instead of a hot meal. Santa hats and a beverage cart strung with Christmas lights. They take credit cards, including the Visa gift card from my aunt. Somewhere on the ground, my sister and her new baby are in a bedroom with the words New Beginnings  in gold cursive over the crib. Somewhere else on the ground, my parents are making up my old bedroom for me to stay with them for a week and yesterday someone stole my car battery and slashed my tires just for good measure so I took an Uber to the airport. I don’t want to spend eight bucks for Wifi to text my sponsor. My phone’s screen hurts my eyes in the dark; outside my window the duct tape waves like a lover on a train platform and I know the most dangerous words for an alcoholic are ‘I’ve been thinking.’ Ordering Jack and Coke feels like hugging a friend waiting at baggage claim. My I’ll go everywhere with you drink. I hold out my card to pay. The stewardess waves me off: ‘ Merry Christmas .’ She says the words the way you’d say, ‘screw it.’ My movie gets a little better. Outside my window the duct tape on the wing does the mashed potato in the jetstream. I do a little math problem, about my three-hour flight; the size of the airplane Jack bottles; how much time I’ll need to get squared away when we land. I press the service light again and chew the ice in my little plastic cup. The same stewardess only she’s ditched the Santa hat. When I order another she’s ready with her card reader before I get the words out. Outside my window I see a creature at the tip of the wing. Small, like a piece of garbage clinging to the leading edge. It hangs there on claws a little like a sloth. The duct tape, closer to my window, does a king cobra twirl and grows a little longer. I order a double that tastes like ‘ Fairytale of New York ’ on a jukebox while the creature outside struggles against the wind. The person next to me is watching HBO and I shoulder-surf the plot because he’s got subtitles on. The air outside must be cold; the creature has brown-black fur like a mink coat that whips in the wind like palm trees in a hurricane. A little square mouth loaded with teeth bared to the gale. One fish-hooked claw works at the wing, striking it the way a carpenter hits a stubborn nail. The engine gives a little whinny; a square piece of aluminum no bigger than a playing card flies off behind us and the creatures hugs the wing with one claw dug into the hole left behind. A different flight attendant this time; he doesn’t have the beverage cart or anything but I flag him down all the same and this time I hold up the cash I have on hand, including five for a tip. This time it’s me who says  Merry Christmas  and he gives me a thumbs up; our special bond among the world-weary and cool.  The creature outside my window works on another hole; one claw dug in securely in the guts of the wing, the other claw chipping away at the wing closer to the cabin. Big headlight eyes – a little like an owl– and a slit nose to keep out the chill. The eyes narrow while the creature works, and this time when the claw connects just right, ping , the whole cabin reverberates. A section of metal skin tears away, the size of a bath towel this time, and flies out into nothingness like the prayer at the end of a meeting. The flight attendant hands me three bottles this time along with the can of Coke. ‘We’ve got to end service ,’ he says. ‘ Turbulence ,’ shrugging, the way someone might say ‘traffic.’ My lips feel dry and I go for my lipstick. My hand fishes around in my pocket a little too clumsy. It works if you work it . Outside the plane, the creature finds the duct tape and goes to town pulling the strip clear from the plane. The adhesive clings to the creature’s fur and our eyes make contact as it rips the last of the tape free. There’s so much you can find in the bottom of a glass; there’s so much you can tell from a pinched, hairless face on the wrong side of a pressurized cabin. I want to tear the wings off this airplane , the creature is thinking. I purse my lips, nodding. I know, buddy. I’m going to shred this metal bird, no matter the cold, no matter how much I get cut up in the process. I think about the plastic bag covering my car’s broken window back home; about giving up my 30-day chip and washing coffee cups when I go back to meetings. The creature gives one hard pull at the open wound beneath the duct tape. This time a section of wire comes loose. Inside the cabin, every surface rattles like the hands of an old drunk and the captain’s voice comes over the loudspeaker. The creature’s face, when it looks back at me: I won’t survive the crash . I raise my little plastic cup in a salute. None of us will . A.D. Schweiss has worked as a prosecutor in California for 14 years, mostly handling crimes of intimate partner violence. He lives in Northern California with his troublesome kids, his troublesome wife, and a well-behaved dog.