Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Fall 2026 - Signal
Put the horizon back on its hinges.
Provoke a fiddler crab into a porcelain-clawed
war for control of the moon. Light inches
toward lighter fluid. Resist the urge to prod
the miles of cattle fence that grow tiny red hands.
Don’t pattern the salt flats with tire tracks.
You aren’t in a position to make demands
of the desert. Look: a blue-lidded man reacts
to his own fossil walking out of his life.
Don’t look: stingrays swimming up and down
the flooded highway. A lizard midwife
with no source tale is waiting to drown
you. Cut your breaks. When you run out of air,
the desert will drive you almost anywhere.
Fiction • Summer 2026
Not like THAT, she says.
Lean forward.
Scrunch your knees.
Tuck your head.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Poetry • Fall 2026 - Signal
sojubottle vase, dead
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
Notes
February 14, 2026
E. E. Cummings - “[up into the silence the green]”
Honestly, if you have time to read this blurb, you have time to read the poem. Read the poem. —Anika Hatzius
Spring 2026 - Fear
So much the rather thou, Celestial Light,
Shine inward, and the mind through all her powers
Irradiate; there plant eyes; all mist from thence
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal sight.
— John Milton, Paradise Lost
Notes
I did nothing but wait for a week in mid-June, in a town on the last train stop out of Milan. It occurs to me now, no longer entrenched in that wait, that I was simply paralysed by this barrier between what we so desperately imagine life to be and who we are.
From the Archives
Fiction • Winter 2023
I
It was offensive, how healthy Aoife was. She had broad shoulders and strong, well-shaped legs. She wore short skirts with thin-strapped sandals and when she strode across the street in those dumb little shoes, he couldn’t believe they didn’t end up crushed to pieces under her sexy pink feet.
Poetry • Winter 2019 - Double
“They ate their own children.”
—Yang Jisheng, on The Great Famine
In an hour it will be summer
A time to admire wild things
But all our sparrows are shot
Left in heaps of rotting trash
So in the dark where no one is
Awake I dig their bones back
Let you slurp on chicken stew
Pretend I still remember truth
As I skin these bodies one after
Another In the morning I say
They are visiting your mother
Gifting us silence And dinner
Is now gray water rice a long
Minute of constant lies saying
Words that will be thrown out
Set on fire hoping a few stray
Feathers fall on my skin keep
Me warm and safe as the soil
Burns then maybe I will grab
Hold you tight succumb to the
Terrible But I taught you how
To run away when the smoke
Grows closer To always look
Up Write down what I forgot.
Poetry • Winter 2017 - Cell
Tell me are you dark?
Is it dark in the box?
Show me. Do you
always have pride
in your work?
You have taught
me well. Life
is a flying pig and
you are a closet.
I live in the sky today
and refuse to look
down on my guy.
Why did you hate
your father? Why
did you turn me
into him? I live inside
shapes for days, electric
cables and clouds
give me what I need.
I’m for the man
who drives the hammer.
The ones left out
in cold, at work,
spirited, unchurched.
Poetry • Winter 2018 - Noise
Talking feels canceled when I stand alone
in the forest. Mother, your thinness is a letter
to my worry. I watch you work in the garden.
I confuse solitude with loneliness.
My hair is also grey kisses at sundown.
A doe strafes the ridgeline, until lost
in the thicket, only snapping brush.
God undressed in an arbor of madness;
I am his mannequin’s shadow.
My eyes empty the last clip of daylight
into the forest, and quietly
the rain on leaves leaves leaves clean.
A son’s no thing but a map to likeness.
You have tried to make me yours—
I think of the bones you broke to bring me here.
I promise, I am trying to love the world.
Say it is not impossible. Place
your flowers on the sill inside me.
Poetry • Winter 2019 - Double
He hugged her until
her ribcage exploded
he held on until
her hand fell from her
wrist in this
scenario to fall means you never
get up & the thing is
there really is no other
scenario
Fiction • Winter 2017 - Cell
Their navels pop out, poking like thumb-tips against the ribbing of their tank tops. A soft skirt, a pair of track pants, tiny shorts, waistband cupping the circumference of the belly’s bottom rim. No maternity jeans—this heat! A sundress, anything with cinched elastic, breeze. Flip-flops with flattened rubber soles. The flapping accentuates their widened gaits.
2026