content warning: sexual assault
My mouth is full of blood, like a poppy growing in my mouth, it tastes like the pennies I used to throw in wishing wells.
(fiction)
Author: Another Chicago Magazine
in soft squares, you try to neglect / your worries and shut down / the war-voices.
(poetry)
There is no such thing as old water, but when I answered, “I’m as old as water,” my son’s eyes grew wide. He says that because water cycles, it’s all super old. (fiction)
O, America, a horse like us would have been glue by now.
(nonfiction)
“People are not who they once were but actors in the great drama of life, informed by what they have seen on the screen,” writes Peter Valente.
(review)
How I loved sitting on a barstool listening to James choose his words to perfection and pronounce them in a way that was subtle and glowing, as if they were wrapped in beautiful paper.
(nonfiction)
it’s still spring in Rome, a perennial incitement to live. We meet in Piazza Cavour, me with my selfish FFP3 mask, Luisa with her altruistic blue cloth one.
(fiction)
they are the ones not allowed the roles except / maids and gardeners and gangsters and prisoners.
(poetry)
California has weathered him with sun and heat. Michigan has begun to change me, too. We’re two birds . . . both singing variations of the same song.
(fiction)
Each day the quick kick of the dream / empties another body / and the ghosts move through unkempt streets / named Lincoln and Delaware.
(poetry)
at recess the innocent school / children play and gambol in / pure non-denominational play
(poetry)
I dreamed the sun, very low, / painting me a mustache of sweat and coal. (poetry)
I see that the innocent face / beneath the long-brimmed, straw hat / does not seem to know it is raining.
(poetry)
I wondered aloud / if on those odds days / where I felt like a hunted squid / that what I was actually feeling / was Light Cerulean Blue.
(poetry)
All the other cool calm quite sensible terms had stable gigs in respectable stories.
(poetry)
I can ring you up for / what fits in the bag. The rest is your responsibility.
(poetry)
20th century monk / High Priest of Art / The Legendary Master— / in his bare immaculate altar of a studio / in the heart of New York City.
(poetry)
I know what it’s like to be had, to be misused and unused.
(drama)
Humanizing the effects of Chicago gun violence, editor Chris Green chose a form for his latest anthology that mirrors the way a semi-automatic weapon fires. Interviewed by Donald G. Evans.
I look to the nearby hill, past her and the highway, and watch it blacken. Its lines are clean and honest.
(fiction)
Ghosts stories/told around the campfire/predicted my future.
(poetry)
Perhaps they found another way. Perhaps they could stop. Perhaps they just go to church. What I wouldn’t give to possess their simple freedoms. (nonfiction)
Our government only practices against a sunset bleeding into the cradle of tactile landing.
(Poetry)
Merely archaeological, the images of strewn masks take on a symbolic meaning for America’s ambivalence towards public health.
(The Loop)
I pledge allegiance to no man, / let alone some fucking flag
(poetry)
There is a small Italian restaurant two blocks from my house in Inner N.E. Portland. It’s been there for decades.
(nonfiction)
content warning: discussion about suicide
Can’t lie to anyone here. Prophets—all of us. Could baptize any guy with your spit.
(Drama)
Eyes reflect the distortions / of a whitewashed mind.
(poetry)
The footbridge is missing a plank. / He has frayed the regard of everybody he knows.
(poetry)
Haranguing shots, agony, careening / blue lights stir fever in a dark bedroom.
(poetry)
