Issue Eighteen, November 2024

It's hard to write in times like these. Hard to speak. But there is something inexplicable in the written word, something ineffable. Fiction and poetry are the canvases on which we paint our hopes and dread. In systems that would silence us, writers scream with the scribbling of pens, the soft clacking of keyboards. "Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists," Toni Morrison once wrote. "The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power." The act of writing is an act of power, the key on the kite string calling down the lightning. It is a lever long enough, a fulcrum strong enough, that we might yet move the world with it. It is a power that can transform us.

Issue Seventeen, September 2024

In this issue, you will find a slew of stories, a plethora of poems, and a host of heartbreaking, hopeful, honest content. (You are instructed to please pronounce the h.) Find the god that lurks in polluted waters in "The God Who Never Sleeps Dwells Under an Inky Sea" by A. W. Prihandita, and weep over the ghosts that you may never find again in "The Coral Tombs" by Eric Raglin. Cure your heartbreak in "Bleeding Hearts" by Suzan Palumbo, and discover your father in unexpected places in "Giant Killer Shark" by Timothy Mudie. In "The Poison You Leave" by Krystle Yanagihara, settler colonialism marks the land, but we have the tools (and righteous monsters) to clear it all away, and in "A Good Catch" by Stacie Turner, make a promise to the sea that will be hard to keep.

Issue Sixteen, July 2024

I once read that people facing parole hearings have a much better chance of release if their hearing is early in the morning. This is because, by the afternoon, the parole board has decision fatigue—the parts of their brains responsible for hearing testimony and weighing evidence are literally exhausted, and so they just start saying no to everyone. This is, in fact, a terrible reality that incarcerated people face in this country, and it's only one of the very many aspects of the carceral system that has to fundamentally change.

Issue Fifteen, May 2024

These poems and fictions, like my life at the moment, are about change. Resisting it. Surrendering to it. Massaging it and its outcomes.

One is about getting revenge for other versions of you because you couldn't get revenge for yourself. One is about the specter of grief and the art of letting go. One is about listening to the world we found amid the buzz of the world we've made. One is about becoming an alien and falling in/out/in love. One is about the powers of love, admiration, and becoming. One is about being taken and choosing to stay. One is about the travaux a woman survives and who she's meant to be afterward. One is a force of nature and/or a woman scorned. One is sci-fi synesthesia. One is about the journey, what you lose to embark and what you find along the way.

Issue Fourteen, March 2024

Spring has come to the Northern Hemisphere, and that means the birds are singing, the plants are blooming, and there's more great fiction and poetry to read! Spring is a time of renewal, a time of opening back up after the claustrophobia of winter, but it's not all sunshine and puppy dogs. A spectre is haunting us, like Marx and Engels said, but instead of communism, it's the deep and abiding dread of the climate crisis knocking on our doors. The March issue therefore is a special one, what we call our DRY ISSUE, and it's full of stories and poems meant to evoke a vision of a changing planet, a clarion call of catastrophe and hope. Here are the sins of our past and the bright songs of a painful and glorious future.