CNF by Catherine Lutz

“Winter has had its way with the bush on which the berry hangs, denuding it of its leaves and stripping the fruit of any seeming life.”

Poetry by Jordan Trethewey

“Got tired of stepping barefoot / on their goddamn LEGO and wheeled toys / while fumbling toward a 1 a.m. piss.”

Flash Fiction by Lillian Giles

“Maybe I hadn’t summoned Mitt from the app—maybe I’d made him. Maybe I’d used Tim’s profile as a jumping off point, and then I’d stuffed jpegs with organs. Blown breath into text messages.”

Fiction by Hayden Taylor

“In the backyard, another hole paraded around, consuming plants and fallen acorns. It moved quickly toward the cat. Just as it was prancing around with vibrancy and intention, it was nothing in an instant.”

Poetry by Marty Shambles (Writer-in-Residence)

“…each ring is epiphany / forgotten, / like new years resolutions / and their inevitable decay.”

Fiction by Lucian Cubric

“The dog follows, keeping distance, eyes fixed on the shape clinging to his master’s back. He waits for it to release its grip before he attacks.”

Flash Fiction by Chelsea Cutler

“We buried his hand under the willow tree in his back yard. It was an intimate ceremony; Link hadn’t bothered inviting his parents.”

CNF by Andy Betz

“I am a band that does not exist.  With no musical ability, I wrote songs for the singers never to sing.  I am working to book performances that will never occu…a quartet of nothing named, ‘The Useless Sig Figs’”

Poetry by Olivia Rose

“…was mouth of a manmade monster. / was television rot. / was joke without reaction. / was attachment disorder.”

CNF by Tony B. Cardiff

“I detest Meursault. At times, I was relieved he was fictional. An arrogant, socially irresponsible man. Yet, as I read, I felt a morbid curiosity…I drifted between repulsion and kinship. As if he were a mirror of who I once was.”

Fiction by Carolyn Bennett

“She'd add the stub in her scrapbook as a souvenir. She almost skipped as she entered the exhibition, excited yet repulsed to be seeing her mom.”

Micro-fiction by Zia Musgrave

“And there we hang. I fall and I rise, but at least I never have to look away from her beautiful face.”

Poetry by Heather Truett

“I could / steal my own Bob’s Big Boy, but the fiberglass / of desire shredding my skin is aflame.”

Golden Shovel Poem by Jordan Trethewey (from the serialized chapbook There Is More)

“What if / there is a part of you / burdened to carry / an accumulation of your / discarded past?”

Fiction by Gerald Lynch

“Whatever, I am now paying the price in instant isolation and threatened anonymity. What can be done?…Upset over the absence of responses to my post, I turn to PornPlanet.”

Poetry by Steve Maitlen

“i’m jesus fucking christ; i’m the reason for the season…i’d certainly take my time coming back.”

Flash Fiction by McKenna Hutchinson

“Late-night baking isn’t just my stress relief anymore, it’s our ritual, a bond forged in sugar, butter, and the soft hum of an oven at three in the morning.”

Poetry by Allister Nelson (from the serialized chapbook Jethro’s Daughter)

“Yeshua stripped in the desert / was Caravaggio weaving light / out of shadow, lamb in sin.”

Fiction by Mike Richard

“Leaning, he reached into his bag; he groaned, but soon stood upright once again. He caught his reflection once more…‘I got you now, you son of a bitch.’”

Poetry by Erwin Ponce

“I walk through a forest of whispers. The fifteen mysteries. The Dalit. Voices fluttering like / leaves in a breeze. I think of the stillborn, her body tucked inside bamboo.”

Flash Fiction by Greg McKinney

“the leaf goes unnoticed. Its fading is out of step with the normal order and expectancy of things. It is trapped by the wind…That wind has been blowing since my earliest memories.”

CNF by Mohammad Tolouei

“Borges has a story in which a group of encyclopedists gather to write an encyclopedia of a fictional world—complete with its mountains, its seas, and its systems of weight. Then, little by little, that fictional world begins to take shape and come into existence.”

Poetry by James Callan

“Open up, old man. Let’s see your teeth. Let’s see your agate browns. Don’t make me beg on my knees among the clay. Smile for me, bygone brand of man. Don’t make me raise my dental pick or awl.”

Serialized Novel by Tom Stuckey (Writer-in-Residence)

“After months of gruelling discovery about Thomas, it was time for us to go on holiday…It lit my heart to know that I would be following this unknown Saint through landscapes…”

Fiction by Daniel Lukes

“They dumped the corpses in the middle of the pool—a beautiful curvy pool with no flat bottom, but scooped out of the Earth like pistachio ice cream—and set them aflame like a bonfire.”

Micro-fiction by Karen Walker

“The table became elbow to elbow to elbow, and, to make room, I was shoved to the back of the highest cupboard.”

Fiction by Swapan Samanta

“He was inside something cold. Metallic. Confined. A refrigerator. When he moved his neck, it creaked. Not bone against sinew—but something brittle. Cracked chocolate.”

CNF by G. M. Rowbotham

“Gay bars smell like poppers and loneliness. I can’t go in. Not because I’m afraid of who’s there—but because I’m afraid I’ll stay.”

Flash Fiction by Holly Redell-Witte

“As soon as she turned away, the mirror laughed a little but without sound.”

Poetry by Landscape Destruction Company (LDC)

“grand avenue tent cities / sequestered life on stolen land”

Poetry by Brooke N. Plummer

“the last book I skimmed through / before break was a collection / of recipes from I Love Lucy.”

Flash Fiction by Khushi Bajaj

“‘There is clearly something wrong with her,’ he had declared to his wife, and so Sonam had wrapped Binny in a shawl and taken her to the well where girls could be exchanged. She brought back Tinny instead, and Raphael loved her innocent sleeping face.”

CNF by Ari Cordovero

“The cabbage on the cutting board. My grandmother’s knife. My father’s son. Every room where men startled at the sound of a girl wanting something.”

Poetry by Patricia Powers

“I saw a news story once about a dog eating its owner’s face. / She was drugged up on medicine and slept through it until she woke up and / realized something was wrong.”

Micro-fiction by Té V. Smith

“She told stories, and he listened with cautious attention. While she was speaking, a tune passed through him. Not a song exactly—a rise and fall, a shaping of breath.”

CNF by Uma Jagwani

“My body has a shelf where all the memories of my dead aunt are stored.”

Poetry by Clayre Benzadón

“…moving my mouth around, / up and down, over the tip / of your dagger, I’d kept swinging / as versatile as a persistent / (penile)  pendulum.“

digital art by h. lee messina

Fiction by Tif Robinette

“Her mother knelt her at the altar of the cabbage soup diet as a young girl, a penitential broth of vegetables and powdered onion mix that left her perpetually dizzy and prone to fainting spells punctuated by thunderous sulphuric farts..”

Micro-CNF by Chel Campbell

“…it delivers us to our haunted spot, a campsite where, some forty years ago, teens were murdered by two brothers with shotguns. Point blank.”

Poetry by Hayley Shucker

“I gave away / or lost / soul mates and sanity.”

Fiction by Jesse Lifton

““If you do not duel me to restore the honor you have besmirched, I will shoot you dead.”

CNF by Billie J Daniel

“My girlfriend thinks when I drink, I’m chasing a memory, a certain feeling from my childhood that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Poetry by Carol Shillibeer

“It’s bad enough when she’s a huge-assed bird, but in her human form—it can get kind of awkward.”

Flash Fiction by Delphine Gauthier-Georgakopoulos

“Margaret had never been smart and—being acutely aware of it—was insecure, hence her choosing a random topic that was of no interest to anyone.”

digital art by a. morgan mckendry

Poetry by Allister Nelson (from the serialized chapbook Jethro’s Daughter)

“Yeshua stripped in the desert / was Caravaggio weaving light / out of shadow, lamb in sin.”

Book Review by David Estringel

“At their core, despite the sense of loss and chaos and alienation one perceives through their reading, Cvencek’s poems convey an optimism (if not in glimpses and glimmers) that promise the reader a hopeful release from his or her own demons.”

from Wander Lines by Michael Templeton (column)

““Now that AI is taking hold of the general intellect and the human capacity to think and create, the homogenization of all life will be complete. All will be a form of mediocrity and there will be no one around who is capable of recognizing mediocrity as mediocrity.”

by Timothy Petkovic (book review)

“The Emperor of Gladness is so overwhelming in its brilliance, so full-bodied and ambitious, you have to submit to it. Bloody hell. Shit, he’s good. Piss off, any critics. All hail Ocean Vuong.”

by Christie Chapman (book review)

“In this pressure-cooker world, where so many seem to be chasing after the top dogs, the glitz and clout, the Big Five, the “template for success”—Take It Personally, in its unbothered originality, is refreshing. “A+.”

from Wander Lines by Michael Templeton (column)

“The world in which we live is so deeply sick, so inherently insane, that what appears to be normal or sane is the real insanity. Only a sick, insane person could exist in a world of such monstrous cruelty.“

by Eric Vanderwall (book review)

“The Sugar Kremlin presents another fine entry in the catalogue of Sorokin’s works available in English. Although The Sugar Kremlin is a sequel in a loose sense, it is not a bad entry point for readers new to Sorokin, and Joshua Cohen’s interview with the author…is especially illuminating.”

by David Estringel (interview)

“I am now in phase where I’m slowing down and trying to craft things that are a little more challenging for me.”

from The Comfortable Apocalypse by Robert Dean (column)

“I wish some hooded dudes would come down on horses, ready to fuck everything up. I’m down for that. We could use the break from continual genocide, class war, and a stagnant economy lurching toward depression.”

from Wander Lines by Michael Templeton

“The city and its pedestrians are now that mass of empty souls who form what the Invisible Committee describe as living in the grip of a specific kind of mood of distance, a mood best named in the Nietzschean term of the Stimmung, a void mood of the void soul.”

from “Beneath and Beyond the Art…” by David Estringel (column)

“I love painting about sex and trauma. These are subjects that every human being can relate to. I’m not afraid to explore them. Sex has brought a lot of joy, while trauma has brought sadness. The combination of the two makes for powerful, meaningful artwork.”