Issue #31
Swamp Thing Works through the Third Skandha by Jack B. Bedell

My first week living in this swamp I had a hard time admitting I was what I was. The growth formula, the fire, all the violence and loss—these things caused me to be the thing I am, and what was left of the scientist in me made me want to find an antidote of some kind to fix the problem I had become.

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Snapshots from our Family Trip to Arizona by Courtney Clute

I’m in a sweaty, swaying Dodge Caravan coasting down I-10, squished between Jill and Jacob in the backseat, their elbows jabbed sharp into my gut. My father’s hot dog fingers reach across the middle console, tight around my mother’s cookie dough roll thin thigh.

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Somewhere, Somewhere by Giselle Gerbrecht

Somewhere a young wife is taking a photograph of the full moon through her husband’s telescope. Somewhere across the border, that husband is struggling to purchase ecstasy, his English-to-French dictionary wrinkling in his grasp.

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Clearly Defined Clouds by Jude Higgins

We had pasta for lunch. Linguini with lemon and curls of courgette. I made it because it was your favorite and I picked a bunch of rust-red chrysanthemums from my garden and placed them on the table.

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The Contortionist by Imogen Rae

After every show, when the crowds shuffle home with the stage lights still winking in their eyes and buttery popcorn kernels refusing to digest in their stomachs, you crawl into your trailer, the one where the freaks sleep.

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Belmont Station and it’s 2 a.m. by Max Steiner

Belmont station and it’s 2 a.m. and the father’s stranded out here somewhere in who the hell knows on his way back home, when it should have been a straight shot but has somehow taken him a good two hours to just end up getting lost like the sad-eyed dogs you’ll see tied up side of the highway sometimes and plus he’s starving, so bad it feels like pennies in his guts.

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Salt by Cecilia Wright

Though it is ill-advised, she looks back. How can she not? She looks back and sees the place of her life and her inside of it. Her and her brother rescuing the worms after rain. Moon shining in her dark wet hair, head leaning out the window, smelling the rosemary, smiling, saying goodnight.

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The Bronze Medal by Vincent James Perrone

She wants to meet the pig—snout down, paraded through the town square of sodden earth and
stump dimples, now trailed by serpentine line of freshly showered farmer with tomato noses and
breath prematurely soured from all that auctioneer talk.

Carry On by Lucinda Kempe

Once there was a man who loved his donkey, but his donkey didn’t love him back. The donkey loved an eggshell, but the eggshell didn’t love it back.

After by Claudia Monpere

and after and after and nothing changes, just the names of the children. This one drew birds wearing hats. That one had an orange juice popsicle for an imaginary friend.

Gallows Pole by Kathy Hoyle

In the dead of summer, while the whiptails hide in sagebrush shadows, and everything blisters in the amber heat and there ain’t nothin but buzzards hummin for miles around, a hanged man dances on a gallows pole.

Pet Shop Boys by Tim Craig

Dayne’s on-off-off-on stepdad, Kel, says stay away from that new pet shop.