Issue #28
Your Brother’s Medium by Gail Anderson

Encaustic: hot wax tinted with pigment, and each week as you step through the door of his studio, breathing bees, balancing your basket of cleaning things and trying not to see the dark stain on the wooden floor, you understand a little more.

read more
Scars by Suzanne Hicks

We were never young like the other neighborhood kids. We were old like we had our own house key and knew how to boil noodles that we ate for dinner.

read more
Boilermaker by JW Goll

Butchie and I drive north on Water Street, heading into a sunrise that warns us to keep on our toes, this could be the day it all goes to hell.

read more
Clearance by Jeff Young

She cleared out dead people’s houses, kept something from every house – a spoon or a postcard maybe, once a Bay City Rollers badge, another time a glass swan — binned the rest of the menagerie.

read more
A List by Curtis Smith

I sat down to make a list of the reasons we no longer sleep together—but there’s no list, just the one thing neither of us want to talk about.

read more
Growing Through Grief by Angeline Schellenberg

When Leanna’s mother dies, her father takes up gardening. Purple loosestrife and puncture vines sprout from between his lips: winding up her mother’s tomato plants, covering Leanna’s window, clogging the neighbours’ eaves, injuring cattle and choking wetlands, blocking out the sun.

read more

Morse Code by Elizabeth Cabrera

The old man fell asleep in his car, his nostrils pressed softly against the steering wheel, but the car kept going, because the old man’s foot was not asleep, was still pressing down hard, and later they would say, it’s not really his fault, he’s such an old man.

Fulfilling by Fiona McKay

Kate is not ‘imagining it’. There are small tufts of pale fluff on her neck, and no, it’s not ‘just a tissue in the washing machine’ as John suggests. There’s nothing drifting off his shirts, nothing clinging to Ella’s favourite black top, Josh’s Minecraft t-shirts. It’s more solid than tissue, just on her clothes. And only she can see it.

The Storyteller of Aleppo by Donna Obeid

In the barren cold camp, you wear a dusty cape and top hat, wave my cane as if it were a wand and tell me your dream-stories, one after the next, your words spun and tossed like tethers into the air.

Bog Iron by Shane Larkin

We make stops on the way to our bog plot to look at the little skeletons. Dad tells me about them. Curlews and skylarks in dancing poses. Tiny skulls.

Get Your Authentic Stardust Here by JP Relph

The night the sky cracked, I was sprawled on the hood of my car beside that good-for-nothing boy, naming constellations, ignoring his fingers on my neck.