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The first time we saw it, we were rowing under Barnes Bridge, cool shadows flooding our lungs with their mossy scent. Like the black swish of an eel, only larger. Eight blades dropped in the water at our cox’s command, “Hold it up!” Our voices splintered. “OMG is that a-“ “Porpoise?” “Dolphin?” “Here?” The waves softened as our breath rasped. Training for Henley Women’s in the midst of A-level exams was slaying us. A few feet away a black curve rose and breached. Water sluiced over its sides, the pale underside of its belly. Its wide tail smacked the river. “Whale,” we breathed as one, gripping the sides of our boat. Coach’s voice crackled on the cox box. She was on the launch, back with the second eight. “Girls, why have you stopped?” She said she’d call the government hotline and ordered us to finish our piece. Sunlight pierced the clouds, whitening the surface of the river. All morning we’d been struggling with the turns and dips of the blade, each slide and recovery. All week Coach had moved us around like chess pieces, looking for the combo that delivered the ultimate speed and power. Now we pulled in time, adrenalin firing our muscles. We found our rhythm and skimmed across the water, hearts buoyed by the sight of our whale. After, we rowed back to the club, stored the shell and hauled weary legs up the steps to the Boathouse mums. As we gulped down bowls of porridge, they said there’d been another sighting near Chiswick: a baby minke, stranded from its mother. We bristled at their downcast voices and shaking heads. We’d seen it; it was magnificent. It could survive on its own. It could swim to freedom. We survived Covid, survived months in our rooms, in our pyjamas, biding our time through family meals, family movies, family everything. Released back to the wild, we’d bolted back to school, to rowing, to parties, to life. The whale would make it too. They’d see. ## At Kew Bridge, we jogged along the river and scouted through gaps in the brush until we spotted a long dark shape sloshing its way westward. Cupping our hands, we shouted, “Turn around!” The baby minke flicked its tail but kept swimming with the tide toward Richmond Lock. Away from the ocean. Flipping flood tide. We knew all about its syrupy drag. We knew all about aching muscles and ripping fatigue. We also knew all about endurance, how Coach’s voice made us dig deep, how we’d learned to carry on past our limits. We shouted some more. For a moment the whale responded to our encouragement, swimming so close to the bank we saw its blowhole gape open and shut. “Yes!” we screamed. It submerged. We texted our mothers to say we wouldn’t be home, shrugging off their concerns about dinner, schedules, A-level revision. ## On the concrete ledge by Richmond Locks, people jostled, snapped photos, speculated in bright voices. Night fell. Rescue workers in full-body waterproofs and divers laid out strips of sunshine yellow tarp. We wrapped arms around each other in the chilly haze of streetlamps as they tried hour after hour to coax the baby minke onto the inflatable. The whale thrashed arcs of phosphorescent water, lit by searchlights and strobing blue lights. People began to leave as the baby minke’s protest diminished to a mere flick of its tail. They called it at two thirty. The last time we saw our whale, we stood with fingers entwined as they switched off the emergency vehicle lights, the searchlights, the diver’s headtorches. The river was one with the night, inky black and still. Cole Beauchamp (she/her) is a copywriter by day and fiction writer by night. She was shortlisted for the Bath Flash Fiction Award and has stories in trampset, Janus Literary, Ellipsis Zine, Sundial, Free Flash Fiction and Lost Balloon. She lives in London with her girlfriend, has two children and an exuberant Maltipoo. You can find her on Twitter at @nomad_sw18 and on Mastodon at @nomad_sw18@zirk.us

In Philadelphia, My Love We turned the streets of Philadelphia into fighting arenas when we’d drag our issues from jazz bars and take them outside, intoxicated. Some part of that we can blame on tequila sunrises but we both know most of that was a manifestation of things we mutually decided were better left unsaid, until we said them. Out loud, unnecessarily visceral, all the more uncomfortable what with the July heat. Passion, we blamed it on an unparalleled connection. You’ve never met anyone like me, I’ve always wanted to meet someone like you so when it was good, it was good but when it was bad … In some outlying part of my mind I still find this to be true. In that part, I still wish it was you. An Ode to Sin I wish I knew sooner that vindication could never present itself to people who’ve never sinned. I wish I knew sooner that whenever our tongues performed near perfect choreographies to an endless tango in our mouths; a memory their muscles never forgot and would shortly enact in a refined fashion, that it was bliss they were emanating. There was never anything wrong with falling asleep in your arms and having your face be the first thing I see the following day, I always thought we were sacred in an unholy way.

when we lived on the moon we danced to techno wearing spacesuits caught space rocks in tiny glass jars we laughed loudly in a dark sky there were no stars we learned to moon walk on the surface scattered small seeds in the moon dust we prayed for moon life in the moonshine the small seeds saved us A word from the author: I am based in Brighton, UK, and am studying part-time on a creative writing course. I have a passion for reading and enjoy writing short fiction and poetry. My absolute favourite novel is the mind-blowing Bunny by Mona Awad.

I fell asleep with my left hand resting on my phone, and when I woke up the phone had become part of me. My hand had grown around it, had integrated the beveled sides, and where I had once had a human left hand, now I had a rectangular patch of technology with small, stubby fingers protruding from the edges. This didn’t disturb me as much as you might think. Like anybody, I spend most of my time with a phone in my hand, absorbed. The absorption was literal and fleshly now, was all, rather than attention-based. I could feel notifications instead of hearing or seeing them. Spotify would play music immediately if a line from the song so much as ran through my head. All the world’s knowledge sat at the end of my arm; a neuron flickered and I could recite the history of the English crown, or the molecular formula for dopamine. Envy flashed on the faces of strangers around me; they had to fumble in their pockets or purses, while my hand lit up or went dark whenever I blinked. All things proceeded as they would have otherwise. One day, as I walked in my neighborhood, scrolling, I chanced to look up at the sky. The unfolding cataclysm became visible to me then, through my own eyes, not through the window in my flesh, and I had just a few moments to wonder at the work of our hands before my breath stopped. Katharine Coldiron is the author of Ceremonials and Junk Film. Find her at kcoldiron.com or on Twitter @ferrifrigida.

Bathe your body with excellent fatty foods so that you burn more quickly. Go soft in the joints and hard places. Your cremation technician can only burn so many bodies in a day so be sure to light up like a candle inside the oven. Be blue flame curling up towards the heavens. Refrain from excreting too many gases on your way out. Be flammable, but not too explosive. A steady flame for your cremation technician to lose themselves in, staring at the dancing heat until it dwindles. Be smoldering coals with chunks of the person you used to be. Do not fight against the dying of the flame. Your cremation technician has other bodies to burn. Ly Faulk has loved reading and writing for as long as they could read or write. They still believe in the power of the written word to change lives.

Silverfish twist through crevices in the Escomb church walls. Alive in the shadows. Centuries of insects slick with Saxon blood. They shimmer across our laps where Dad and I sit on wooden pew benches, alone in the dark, gazing up at the narrow chancel arch. A millennium of war and religion dusts my lips, my tongue. Chokes my throat. My father rises. Pierces the pious air with his fist, meaning, let’s go for a stroll. I take his arm. He straightens. Whistles for his childhood dog, Rosie, who leaps from a steamer trunk full of Dad’s memories. Good pup, I say, bending my head through the low doorway. Outside, the sky moves like a rat snake shedding its skin. My dead sister sits on a 12th-century tombstone etched with a skull and crossbones. She kicks her bare heels against the skull’s sooted eyes. I’m waiting, she says. On the far side of the cemetery, Dad spies a young rhino stuck in the Limpopo mud. The river slugs by, watching us with one greasy eye. Hurry, Dad says in Zulu, tossing me a jeep and seven strong men. It takes us hours and rope after rope, but we free the beast. Dad beams about the rhino for his remaining three months of breath. Though godless, you were always the smart one, he says, calling me by my sister’s name. Lisa Alletson was raised in South Africa and the UK, and now lives in Canada. Her stories and poems are published in New Ohio Review, Crab Creek Review, Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Bending Genres, Milk Candy Review, Typehouse Magazine, Emerge Journal. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, Best of the Net, and Best MicroFiction. Her debut chapbook, Good Mother Lizard, won the 2022 Headlight Review poetry contest. You can find her published work at www.lisaalletson.com.

Reclamation Of A Land Once Stolen Her dress flows. Silk of mulberry heavied by tears. Yampee-eyed, cracked lips in the yolk of day. She appears hollowed. She tells me its time to gather the pieces that ran astray, to wash this temple sullied by hands that grasp and bruise and take; to whip this body with redemption and sage. Her dress falls. Silk of mulberry gathered at her ankles. Hesitant eyes look upon strange land in the egg of day. She appears hopeful. I tell her its time to puzzle the pieces, caught and tamed to sanctify this body, still sacred still worthy, unchanged. I await her repossession. Only A Name Weary walls whisper a name in the haunting eye of night as cold winds rattle the remains of days, long gone, still etched across my cerebrum. I mourned my dead like a nation at war – indeed we must press on to any end, at any cost. I mourned my dead none at all for what good is it to wail and long. Still, as the night crawls, I have gained nothing at all but echoes of torment and our memories’ gall. Akleyiaha R is a twenty-one year old Trinidadian poet. She is an entrepreneur and student, and has been writing since the age of twelve. She marvels at self-expression through the art forms. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Dipity Literary Magazine and The Bibliopunk. Her debut book, 'The Skins I've Shed' is coming soon.

FOXFIRE 7 Mama said I was born in the bathtub. Came right out the drain when she was getting ready to wash. The creek was low, that day, so all the water was muddy. And I came out, and a mosquito bit her on the back of the neck. Mama says she still had her clothes on, when it happened, and I came out. Says I already knew how to swim. I don’t know anymore, so I just wade in lakes, knee deep, and think about lead pipes. Nothing’s quite so heavy… right out the drain, like nothing, like I was the water myself. Made the hounds bark. The Worst Things I’ve Done The walls of suburbia are tan bricks stacked over cinderblocks glued down in strokes of slated hammers, gluing me down in the red dirt and black tar. The greatest writers of our time were pretty much dead by the ’90s. Thomas Mann would be an interesting read if I didn’t know him so well. But I do; the worst things I’ve done all look like dying on a beach, lesions full of salt and sand, cysts of the heart—tan grains and tan skin and abrasive black water pool at my ankles, the bone’s out like it could poke through and show me something pure and white, clean and dry, but the only white I see is wet across my chest—shot out by a man old enough to know I’m young enough to know the worst things I’ve done have come, and will come over me again and again like waves, heavy like the ground. PERSPECTIVE / WATERFRONT To have said what I needed to say and been worse off for it. To push, deep in, and pull out bloody—to saw off my leg just to fill my mouth with something other than words. Ripping raw meat would never be enough to show the wound of saying it back and not hearing it the first time. Not that it hurt, just that it was messy. Daniel Miller (they/he) is a new poet from Virginia. They are a student at the University of Mary Washington and have been published in the University's student magazine, The Aubade. His work examines the queer experience from the point of views of a gay male and nonbinary intersection. They are 20 years old, an aspiring hiker, and a Robert Mapplethorpe apologist.

PUFFED UP From wax, Leonardo formed a doughy mass, and when it softened, he shaped it into delicate animals filled with air. He blew into them until they flew into the air. When the air was exhausted, they crashed to the ground. He cleaned the intestines of a sheep so they could be held in the hollow of his hand. He attached them to a blacksmith’s bellows and blew them up until they filled with air and grew transparent, expanding into the room, until everyone watching had to crowd into a corner. For a peculiar lizard caught by a wine grower of Belvedere, and given to him as a curiosity, Leonardo made wings from skin pulled off from other lizards, which he filled with mercury. They quivered and trembled when the lizard moved. He then made for it eyes, a beard, and horns. He tamed it and kept it in a box and terrified his friends with it. IN TANDEM When we moved into our apartment, we painted over the ugly wallpaper in the master bathroom, first with primer, then with white, oil-based paint in an eggshell finish. Using artists’ oil pigments we mixed a Caribbean aquamarine and thinned it with oil glaze. With a ribbed cotton cloth, we ragged the luminous glaze in gentle swirls over the white walls, suggesting the depths of the ocean. My husband created a stencil in mylar of Hokusai’s famous tidal wave rearing its head like a stallion, tossing white flecks of spray like the locks of a horse’s mane. Master of Exakto knives and mathematic intervals, my husband sized the stencil so its repeating pattern fit the wall’s dimensions, and he cut it flawlessly. He invented, and I implemented, balancing on the bathroom counter to apply the stencil to the walls. The waves, in dazzling white and black and dark cobalt, contrasted with the aquamarine. To add to the illusion, we made miniature models of Caribbean fish in paper maché— black drum and red snapper, triggerfish and porgy, grunt and angelfish, seahorse with a curved tail— which we painted realistically and strung using dental floss from hooks in the ceiling, suspended below Hokusai’s waves in the bathroom’s watery element. We didn’t know then about Hokusai and his daughter, how he recognized her talents in childhood and fostered them. She worked alongside him in the studio. It is said that some of the works attributed to him were made by her. In a time and place where women were confined to the domestic sphere, did Katsushita Oi’s obscurity trouble her? Her modesty and her sex were impediments to her renown, so perhaps she was content to add to his. MEDITATION AT NORTH BEACH PARK, BURLINGTON Thickly wooded Juniper Island rises from the lake within swimming distance from shore. The sloping peaks of the Adirondacks, misty blue and far off in the distance, belong to heaven and not to earth. From the beach I watch a storm gather from the mountains, then sweep over the lake. Whitecaps form on the surface. It is like the sea, and it is not like the sea. Rain falls in large drops propelled by a breeze, and a canopy on aluminum poles topples on the beach, somersaulting erratically. Under a shelter, students and faculty gather at an impromptu party celebrating recent graduates. I eat strawberry-rhubarb pie and think of the mountains, eons old. When they were formed, fault lines pushed yellow dolostone above the dark shale, the older stone above the younger. Now I am older, I want to impart history. Shivering children in wet bathing suits wrap themselves in towels. Sometimes the young listen politely and sometimes impatiently, propelled towards lives that haven’t happened yet. I feel my hold on life growing tenuous, like those islands farther off— the Four Brothers—like steppingstones appearing to float in the blue without moving at all.

Imprinted It’s something about time the torturous divine this image of tiny lizards scurrying ancient stone walls with which I remained this morning upon waking something about time and the forgotten dead and cemeteries in Italy and Portugal and Spain it’s something about toppled sandcastles children at play ghostly schoolyards it’s something about wearied fishermen docking battered boats it’s about the ebb and the flow and thin crust pizza dough it’s about so much and so little and the haunted house down by the pier it’s about sad grandma underwear and sickened beige curtains and slivers of late afternoon light. Heartache Hearing the flub flub of my heart during an echocardiogram I’m reminded of Albert a boy in my 2nd grade class Japanese I believe who was teased by yours truly for picking up a penny in the schoolyard one day well let me tell you Albert gave it to me good that day he began screaming and crying and telling me about how each penny went toward making a dollar and about how each dollar meant food and shelter he really told me off good and proper that sunny day in the 2nd grade I think I even apologized I felt so bad. Edward Anki's poetry has appeared in Rejection Letters, Cacti Fur, The Feathertale Review, (parenthetical), Qwerty, The Chaffin Journal, and others. A chapbook of his poetry, Remote Life, was published by BareBackPress (2014). His first full-length poetry collection, Screw Factory, was released in 2022 by Anxiety Press. A former stand-up comic, bartender, and agonized telemarketer, Edward is currently engaged in part-time studies to become a psychotherapist.

There’s a fire somewhere over the ridgeline and the river hasn’t frozen like it usually does this time of year and the line at Fred and Willow’s Sundries and Forevers is backed up all the way to Molly, doll 33 of 250 ever made. They still inventory everything by hand, going in and out. Ethan’s buying a necklace, Item #75468. He’s already late to dinner. It will be obvious he’s forgotten the anniversary and just stopped at the antique store on the way there (he left his house on the east side of town at exactly their reservation time) to try and get a gift. Old things seem more thoughtful than new ones. If you pluck something old out of forgottenness, it shows you have cared enough to return, to revisit, to revitalize that thing and say: there is still value here. As if to say: There is something others missed that only I can see, and I have seen it, and I would like to try again. To bring the past back to the present. If Claire dumps Ethan tonight it will not be the first time. At the front of the line, something prompts the clerk to make a call on a landline phone the color of a dirty old wallet. “I know what she’s saying,” the clerk says. “But that doesn’t make it true.” There was the time with the dog grieving process where he had been unhelpful (her word) and the thing with the car and the time Claire said Ethan was responsible for Jackie the Lizard’s untimely death (who is responsible for knowing everything that will or will not kill a lizard?) and the time on the park bench in the morning and the issue over how to pack the car for the trip (that was actually about the fact that they still hadn’t moved in together, then or now) and the summer they both had busy jobs and surely some other time Ethan’s forgotten. “Well then what percentage? Because tell you what I know it isn’t thirty-five off like she says. And it’s nothing in the system,” the clerk says. Ethan jams the necklace into his jacket pocket. It is a metal locket painted red like lips, split in the middle with a stiff hinge so you have to pry the two halves apart like you’re taking foil-wrapped chocolate from a dog’s mouth. The paint is chipped and uneven. It’s been redone a few times. The inside is just regular silver. You can see a deformed version of yourself if you squint hard enough from far enough away. It should be filled with little silver teeth instead, Ethan thinks, and then he makes eye contact with the camera above the door and reflexively puts his hand up in front of his face and keeps walking, stops walking, reconsiders, drops his hand from his face and looks as normal as possible. His face reddens when he pushes through the door and hits the air outside. It is cold, and he realizes that putting his hand up is a little bit of an admission of guilt. He could have just walked out. He decides not to text Claire to let her know he will be late. He will show up with a smile as if he is on time. Maybe they’ll both be able to just pretend. When Ethan gets to Sugarsteak’s (the best dinner steak on the east side of the midtown rivulet!), he sits dark in the car and plans what to say. The neon is already on and everything is tinged red and white. Should he pretend to have gotten the reservation time wrong? Wouldn’t work, he made the reservation and told her what time. Apologize? Maybe he’ll lead with the gift. I waited in line for an hour, he’ll say. A thing that could have been true under different circumstances. Maybe say nothing. Order a big, mid-priced bottle of wine and fold that into the gift. Dinner, drink, necklace, silence. I just couldn’t come until everything was perfect, he’d say. Tell her about the ankle-deep rejected outfits on his bedroom floor. That he just couldn’t show up until he looked like he deserved to be eating with someone like her. He is wearing a denim jacket and puddle-stained sneakers. Maybe he’ll run home, change, come back. It makes him even later. But the story would work. Ethan wonders if Claire is worried about him. Maybe he’s dead in a ditch, she’s thinking. Driving too fast to come and find her. Love-addled into a telephone pole or a roadside calvary. But when he checks his phone, there is nothing but fire and wind notifications. If you’re worried someone’s dead, you would probably text, at least. The fire is on the ridgeline now, the sky smoked in half like a child’s hand-drawn landscape split lengthwise by a forest of triangles. When the host tells him that actually no, he’s not late, no one ever showed up for that particular reservation at all and the table’s already given away and they won’t have a single table free for at least twenty minutes though, of course, he’s welcome to wait at the bar, Ethan drives away without argument. The foothills fixed in the middle of his windshield forever in front of him. Spare clouds hang like nets in the sky above. On the radio, they are talking about the fire, which is still hovering on the ridge, as if it will decide on its own whether to sweep down toward the plain and the town, as if it makes the decision on its own and is just waiting for more information. As if the wind and the dry conditions and the Industrial Revolution and every preceding event that brought it to the ridgeline in the first place have not already decided whether it will throw itself over or not. Instead, smoldering, eating itself to keep burning at all. Someone must have camped in the wrong place, they are saying. Or tossed a lit cigarette carelessly. Or fireworks. Or some dumb party idea, or maybe lightning, though it is true that it is nearly never just lightning. There is almost always blame to give out, and now there is a commercial break for renter’s insurance. Ethan’s phone flashes in the cupholder and he takes his eyes off the road. It is just another warning about the fire. They are not evacuating, yet. Go about your normal business. He feels the wheel wiggle as he drifts between lanes, but he is alone on the road and so there are no consequences. He thinks of what he would say to Claire on the phone. Nothing important reveals itself to him. At the most important of moments, he knows, he will find the right thing to say. He dials Claire’s number and listens to it ring until he reaches her voicemail. “Hi, it’s Ethan. I’m calling because I wanted to just say that we did have dinner plans tonight and the waiter said, well, I was there and you weren’t and I just thought that was odd. You know, I put some thought, and I don’t know what all this is about but. My parents used to wash my mouth with soap when I would say anything wrong and I think we should think about that more. Like, I was trained to really think everything through so I don’t know why all of a sudden I need the right thing to say at all times with no notice. One time, I actually remember, it was a bunch of times, and sometimes they wouldn’t have a bar of soap because everyone used body wash and so it would be a Dixie cup and liquid soap like dish soap and I would have to rinse until I could just drink water from the cup. Which of course, if you tried to do that today? Boy! I say all that to say, of course, I would want to hear from you and that’s about it. Have a nice night.” When he gets home, everything is quiet. He guides the door shut and hangs the necklace on the doorknob, where it is so small and silver where the paint has rubbed away that it is forgotten for many days. The fire quits just on the ridgeline and everyone in town, later, will talk about how bad it could have been. But it wasn’t. That night, not even Ethan’s neighbors hear him come in. Sam Milligan (he / him) writes when he isn't playing pickup basketball or fishing his cat out the kitchen sink. He lives in Washington, D.C., where he is getting progressively worse at parallel parking. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Rejection Letters, Malarkey Books, Many Nice Donkeys, MidLvl Mag, and elsewhere. He is @sawmilligan on Twitter.

Fuck, he's left the milk out, I can see it behind his head. And this meeting is due to last an hour, and I want to tell him, I cannot stop thinking about the milk, but he's just started talking about budgets, and we aren’t doing well this year, and we need some new ideas, and was that a condensation drop rolling down the carton? And I wonder how could this have happened? And should I say anything in the chat? Like “sorry to interrupt but I think you may have left your milk out?” But everyone is nodding, they are talking about popping a poll up to discuss things further, they are recommending a new Trello board, can they not see the milk? And I was meant to be taking notes for the meeting, but what the fuck how can I ignore this? And I think about how my grandma probably had a few pints of milk in her fridge, she never knew she’d never finish them, I don’t know what we did with them. But now people are waving and he’s saying “there you go, you’ve got 30 minutes back”, But he asks me to stay on the call so we can catch up, And he asks me how I thought it went, And I tell him about the milk, And he laughs “oh don't worry, there's nothing left in there anyway”. Leia is a poet from London. She has a BA from the University of East Anglia in English Literature and Creative Writing. Leia is the founder and a head editor of Full House Literary Magazine. Her debut collection, Tear and Share, was released with Broken Sleep Books in August 2021, and encourages an interactive tear-out aspect. She is a previous winner of a Streetcake experimental writing prize. Her other work can be found at and in Babel Tower Notice Board, Re-side, and Streetcake. Her latest collection is due to be released with Stanchion in 2024.