September 7, 2016 | Interview
Exploring Remains: An Interview with Lucy K. Shaw
Elle Nash
I was retroactively making a story out of a time in my life when I was interested in writing, wanted to ‘be a writer’, but didn’t necessarily have the skills or direction to actually pull it off.
September 5, 2016 | Fiction
Dead Squirrel
Ben L. Ziegler
On the job site one morning they found a dead squirrel. There was no indication of what had killed it.
Interview with Sara Majka
Michael Deagler
But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong
Autocorrecting The Lyric I
Elizabeth Powell
I understand this. This is what made me psychic. This is what makes images arrive on the doorstep with a bindle over the shoulder made of red bandana. Each man is the last man.
Eight Scenes from the Life of a Professional Raven
Tom McAllister
When my team scores a touchdown, I have a few seconds in the spotlight to do my dance, to captivate the crowd. I pretend in front of my flock that I don’t enjoy it but I do. I am more vain than I let on
Five Poems
Kylan Rice
I’d’ve led him by the wrist. Still but blinding four pm/ back home blazed against the glass.
An Interview With Christopher Boucher
Adam Novy
Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.
Three Poems
Sayuri Ayers
Under haze of junior-prom fog machines,
my cells pulsed with
non-senescence
The City of Subdued Excitement Endures Mercury in Retrograde
Kat Finch
Your hand had never fully formed, a shadow made of lint & oil. Decades pass, divination is still predicated on how long a candle lasts, how long tea sits in a cup. Coffee? I never touch the stuff.
THE ADDERALL DIARIES
Sean Kilpatrick
Acting isn’t enough anymore. They should have to hurt themselves.
Formerly Dante's
Kate Jayroe
Mama Vincenzo’s Ristorante Italiano is located in hell
On Failing: Rocky Versus Rambo
Carmen Schober
I have a thing for droopy-eyed men.
Pin the Tail on the Predator
Stevie Edwards
here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers
Hugs, Handshakes, Goodbyes
Ashton Politanoff
Bill and Mary were leaving because Mary felt old, when a woman’s hand fell on his shoulder.
Cloudburst
Jaya Wagle
I won’t apologize for trying to forget the days I spent with you, riding pillion on your Honda, inhaling Bombay’s foggy polluted streets, sitting on rickety wooden benches of hole-in-the-wall Indo-Chinese joints, slurping Szechwan noodles and sipping Tom Yum soup, strolling on Juhu’s wet sandy beaches, letting the ocean wash our feet.
Solicitations
Benjamin Woodard
Two weeks after the scientist’s freak exposure, a man in black arrived at his front step. It was the weekend, and the man in black brought with him a gift: a jumble of neon material he removed from
An Interview with Amie Barrodale
Michael Deagler
The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.
B(Earth)day
Matthew Schmidt
I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.
I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,
you have so many hills.
Wow and Flutter #4: Be Thankful for What You Got
Tyler Koshakow
I make him coffee, I make hot chocolate for his kids, and sometimes I buy his weed.