Issue 22
Latest Reviews
Featured Interview
Newest Essay

Frequencies

Tara Barr is a lifelong art lover and a working mom in Washington, DC. She recently decided to make painting a high priority in her life after setting it aside for over a decade to focus on her family and her career in technology.

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Lucy & Matilda

Kyle Lung

Beneath the redwoods and past the dumpsters, children scream like they’re playing or being sawed in half. I scratch Matilda’s head, she loves that, she hums.

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Chapter Two: Battle at Diamond Head

Eddie P. Gomez

We took a flight from San Francisco to Oahu on a balmy morning in early October, risking a small window of opportunity. In Honolulu, high rises poked at the sky in the distance as the taxi raced away from the airport.

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Vocation

Megin Jimenez

I needed secrets as a child. I endowed plastic trinkets with totemic significance I vowed not to reveal. The loss of them would be disastrous.

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Bewilderment

Megin Jimenez

They will total
the money I’ve spent
digital receipts
money I’ve wasted
money over time
as the sum of my life

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188 Teeth

Margherita Arco

Just as we were finishing breakfast downstairs, a loud bang resonated through the clapboard house; our father had let the door of the master bedroom fall to a close, announcing his advance on the breakfast table.

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Rivercrest

Melanie Figg

Her younger self was at the wheel. Way before
the turnoff she knows something is not right.
No houses in peripheral vision, the road like a movie reel, unraveling.

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On a Scale of One to Ten

Leanne Grabel

We talked about joy. It was my eighth session with Dr. Misaka, a small woman with beautiful shoes the color of cognac. Kaiser had referred me out-of-network for ten sessions with a psychiatrist.

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Actaeon

Cástulo Aceves
Translated by Michael Langdon

1.
The young man studies the computer monitor as his right hand moves beneath his desk. His name is Arturo, and he is a second-semester business major. He lives alone in a building of foreign students.

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Blast Cap

Andrea Abi-Karam

PART I

ribs pop off/out
fast
NOT like prison
bars raising more like
that fast flash of
blue light when a
fuse blew @ LGA

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Starbirth, Explained

Alan Chazaro

The process in which a cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapses to form a new star. This can only happen in a gaseous nebulae but who really knows WTF a gaseous nebulae is? In middle school, I’d wanted a Terrell Owens 49ers jersey.

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A Pipe with Holes Called “Zurna”

Berna Durmaz
Translated by Dayla Rogers

Jemafer set the zurna’s wet mouthpiece against the iron headboard and lay down to give his soul easy passage out his throat. He waited. As he lay there, he didn’t bother shooing away the things rushing through his mind and from his tongue.

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McCartney’s Autograph

Jonathan Jones

Visiting Hours
I’m waiting where the holes in the ruins and the pavements overflow. These songs just seem to slow things down. A letter like a straight look through the mirror you give me to follow.

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Vigil for Revision

Erin Slaughter

I wish I was the grieved body of a hare

body that sweetbox of dirt I do not believe in

I would like to be memorialized as sheets of topaz
melting in the weeds in front of you

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To Be or Not To

Xurxo Borrazás
Translated by Jacob Rogers

“So, Xisto’s boy fixed up the house?”
She had announced herself by banging on the door with an open fist, and those were her first words, open-fisted. At noon, I was a ghost: I hadn’t washed up or eaten, my head was throbbing, I was hunched over, the light hurt my eyes, and my breath stank.

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[So you try to remake a life]

Renée Ashley

[So you try to remake a life] after what you’ve been told:
Not one word signified. A word is a sound is a sign
denoting nothing. Would you want more of that same?
You’d say lonely if it had meaning. You’d say done.

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The Neighbor in Apartment 102

Cidinha da Silva
Translated by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia

“Girl, all that glitters sure ain’t gold. What does anyone see in that songamonga, anyway?” one woman remarks to her neighbor, as they sit out, sunbathing in front of the condo. Their neighbor walks across the yard carrying several grocery bags stuffed with lettuce.

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Rock Star: A Murder Mystery

Marream Krollos

Oh, yeah, I would say he was good. He was really good, it’s a shame what happened. I guess it was like, because of how he wants to know the details of your body, or how he wanted to know all kinds of shit about you.

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Bind yourself to us with your impossible voice, your voice! sole soother of this vile despair.

—Arthur Rimbaud, “Phrases

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