KAREN E MOORE: Death Masks

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

She emerges from his room, the mask of her grief dissolved in a mascara-streaked snotscape, black rivulets of her heart leaving trails down her beautiful face.

My gaze flicks away from the sharp-edged rawness of her private loss. North America acknowledges Death with sideways glances. Muted voices.

It’s easier, no?

Karen is a writer, pianist, and composer based in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. Pivoting after a thirty-year teaching career, her studio-turned-writing-sanctuary continues to be a creative space for her art and her voice; she’s still weaving melodies, just with a different medium. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in So To Speak, Red Noise Collective, and been longlisted for the 2022, and 2023 International Amy MacRae Award For Memoir, GritLIT’s 2023 Short Story Contest, and The New Quarterly’s 2023 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. She has publications forthcoming in Slippery Elm, and Beyond Words.

B GARCIA: I Can’t Forget Baseball

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

I REMEMBER a mist-gray stoop, plywood propped against the fence. We played catch there, and the regular game. You taught me how.

Now I find your name in a different field. Hills, flowers, deer. A family reunites three plots away. The air is wet with their tears.

I miss you.

B. Garcia is a Creative Writing professor in the day time. At night, he moonlights as someone trying to figure out how to write in the first place.

MIKKI ARONOFF: Fool’s Gold

Adventure, Artistic, Submissions, , , , ,

My thoughts revolve like rings around Saturn, buzz like flies circling the sap of my brain, snag on his craggy face. When I unroll the treasure map, he’s the gold glowing from inside the pirate’s chest. Funny, you say, reading my tea leaves. That’s not how he feels about you.

Mikki Aronoff has been writing more and more, but less and less when she does it.

CHRISTOPHER GANNON: Pondering

Artistic, Submissions, , , ,

ACT 1:
A small pond in October.
Jimmy and I discover an old boat hidden in the overgrowth.

ACT 2:
Jimmy stands at the pond’s edge.
An elderly woman glides toward him through the fog.

ACT 3:
ME: Why can’t I see Jimmy anymore?
MOTHER: You’ll understand when you’re older.

Christopher is an Electroencephalographer from Buffalo, NY, with three published short plays: On Eating Bananas, A Conversation Over Harold, and Follow These Instructions.

MEG POKRASS: Cobb Salad

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

“You remind me of someone else,” she said, poking at the egg bits in her salad. It was happening more often now. A man would remind her of a different man who had reminded her of an even earlier man who reminded her of the only man she’d ever loved.

Meg Pokrass is the author of 8 flash fiction collections. Her latest collection, The First Law of Holes: New and Selected will be published with Dzanc Books. She lives in Inverness, Scotland.

JONATHAN KOSIK: Desert Blues in a Minor Key

Artistic, Submissions, Top Stories, , ,

My grandfather’s beer hisses.
My grandmother hisses back.
Front tire this morning hissed at the valve stem.
We’re driving to Hollywood.
Desert ravines and teepee trading posts dot the Arizona highway.
“Mongrels,” Grandfather says.
Patchy coyote skips into our lane.
The canyon colors swirl.
On our way to becoming stars.

Jonathan Kosik is a writer and photographer who lives outside Nashville. He enjoys his daughter’s laughter and his wife’s fashion sense.

NIKKI DAVISON: Adopting

Artistic, Submissions, Touching, , ,

I live with them now. I like them. They have red hair and freckles, lots of freckles, the kind that sit close and blur into each other. I dotted orange paint over my face to look just like them. They cried and hugged me tight, my freckles smudging into theirs.

Nikki Davison is a writer, book hoarder and guinea pig rescuer from north-east England.

DAVID LOWIS: Limited

Artistic, Submissions, , ,

The answers came in a dream: the meaning of life; the purpose of life; how it all began; why it all began.

He awoke with a start, nudged his wife awake.

“What is it? Darling, tell me.”

He wanted to tell. He was desperate to tell. But language failed him.

David Lowis is tall and writes mostly short stories.

SETH ROSENMAN: Ankle Bracelet

Artistic, Submissions, , , ,

“Bracelet’s OK?” Christopher’s probation officer asks.

“Yeah. Beeps in class when I need to charge it.”

“And having to stay in your lane?”

“Fine,” Cristopher says, unsure how to express that restricting his movement helps him see what he missed before. Unsure how to ask whether this is the point.

Seth Rosenman wrote this story.