Poetry by Devon Fulford

Women: You dont get married for instagram. Youdont get married to spend money. You dont get married to annoy your ex.‍ ‍You dont get married for fun, or freedom. ‍ ‍‍

Fiction by Grace Raidan

“Some nights, I watch the cat back from inside my apartment, staring at its unblinking yellow eyes. When the night gets so dark that I can’t see the outline of the cat anymore, I begin to think about the skin on my knuckles, the lines of my palms.”

Digital Art by Gary Cummisnskey

Poetry by Natalie Nee

“Five bottles of almost-empty hot sauce, an oil-stained to-go box of empanadas, a gifted psilocybin chocolate bar I’m saving for a rainy day…”

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

“At the end of the day we all just wanted to be loved, it was that simple and that extreme at the same time.”

Micro-fiction by Patrick Johnston

“Daisy Bennet dropped her house keys in the 7-11. In a panic she accidentally kicked them under the shelving. They would play no further part in this story.“

Poetry by Colin McGuire

“You are the Ultimate Warrior / and I am the Undertaker / thudding / like boulders above the living room / while Mum and Dad watch Casualty.”

Poetry by Ron Arbuckle

“Being hit by a train / gracefully / takes decades / Make your life choices / with its inevitability / in awareness”

Micro CNF by Sara Caskey

““Like a little deer.” There is nothing I like better than being bloodied, crawling beneath the couch, .waiting for some skinning knife to shave my legs.”

Fiction by Shaharzad Warkentin

“A blinding light disrupts the dark. At first, I think I am staring into the moonlit sky, but as I sit up my fingers find the worn velour of our familiar couch beneath me. The brightness dulls, taking the shape of a rectangle. The television is still waiting for an answer to its Socratic question….”

Poetry by John Repp

“Slumped tear-soaked / in a red brocade armchair that smelled of stale farts, I’d shut / my eyes & hum “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” till Dr. Burl / gently coaxed me back to the mundane muck of the present…”

CNF by Melody Wordworker

“After more than a month of tasting sawdust, seeing grey, and sleeping 12+ hours a day, I decided, once again, to call the psychiatric crisis line.”

Poetry by Lachlan Brooks

“Monstrous byproduct of sculpture, / and strange contortionist / Caught in the slow pose of / an emerging form, of entelechy / That reveals a great courtship with / nature and a messy divorce.”

Poetry by Peter Donnelley

“There are two gates of Sleep, / one made of horn, the other of gleaming ivory. / The dreams that pass through the gates of horn are true, / sent by the shades to rise up to the open air. / The ivory shining, perfect, brilliant, / sends false dreams up to the sky above.”

Fiction by Jensen Young

“The alien invasion came on March 6th, 3134, when pinball machines still outnumbered humanity two to one.”

Micro CNF by Natalie Marino

“By the 1980s quilt-making had become a multi-million dollar business. There are now a lot more people interested in making quilts than those interested in purchasing them. Places like the Iowa Quilt Museum promote appreciation for the history of quilts, before automation took over ingenuity.”

Flash Fiction by Holly Woodward

“And just like that, Rent-a-Bitch burst onto the market. Sick of subservience, men hired women who descended like furies to upend the gloom.”

Poetry by Bart Edelman

“Don’t care to be judged / By this act alone. / Could have committed worse. / Yet that’s not the point, is it? / If this goes on much longer, / I’ll turn myself in.”

Fiction by Joanne Merriam

“…let some drunk smash your face against a dashboard leaving you horribly disfigured and you too will discover that you can do anything, and nobody will say a word.”

Poetry by Ryan Di Francesco

“I Remember When I Saw / folded skeletons of the flat city / on piles of saffron / carved out / of cement…”

Poetry by Mike McHone

“they found him on the floor of his apartment / so much blood around him the cops thought / he’d been killed, when a burst ulcer did him in.”

Fiction by Holly Baldwin

“Helena looked down and realized she was indeed holding a whip, bloodied and ancient as herself. She dropped it in the umbrella stand.”

CNF by Gail Andromeda Vanhart

“In the typical five man band structure, The Heart is the glue that holds everyone together. Everyone’s best friend, the healer, the emotional support. These are all inaccurate terms to describe my brother…”

by Michael Templeton (from column Wander Lines)

“if we come to see that poetry is something that is created in the streets, that poetry is something that connects our inner life to the world around us in ways that are immediate and extremely real to us, poetry can be understood in ways that are far more useful.”

by Glenn Wallis

“A blood-red lake of sky appears in the opening where black rain clouds part. Claret red. Oozing, spurting, pulsing, like magma from an erupting volcano. Its sheer aliveness frightens him…Older kids say, with a mix of hysteria and awe, ‘This is the return of Jesus.’”

Column by Michael Templeton (from Wander Lines)

“We were compelled to speed up in order to produce for others. Slowness offers the space for us to create ourselves for ourselves.“

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

“in the waters, abyssal womb, once there was darkness, and Trickster lit a fire upon the Deep. maybe god figured in, maybe She didn’t.”

by Hugh Blanton

“A reader may get the idea that Gerstler loves to write about women behaving badly (there's even a Mae West sonnet in here), but she says what she's really writing about is women behaving boldly.”

by David Estrinel (feature)

“[Ripped Backsides] not only fulfilled its promise to deliver a dopamine-laced travel log/urban anthropologist shadow diary but also an erudite commentary on societal decay and disconnection that rings true today, as much as it did decades ago, if not more.”

Column by Michael Templeton (from Wander Lines)

“We were compelled to speed up in order to produce for others. Slowness offers the space for us to create ourselves for ourselves.“

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.”

Article by Michael Templeton (from column Wander Lines)

“I think the fact that young people are looking at each other online and describing what they see as aesthetic involves something more profound than trendy kid stuff.”