I stood behind a soaring stone pillar, summoning the courage to walk down the aisle I trod three days ago towards my father’s ashes, a box draped with a white cloth at the altar. “Jerusalem” started, yet again. My grandfather tucked my hand under his arm, and we soldiered on.
Alison Moore has spent much of her career in marketing. Now she’s writing fiction for fun. Her work can be found in Edible Boston and 50-Word Stories.
Let this war end, I pray, loosing Hellfire missiles on hospitals. Now is a time for healing, I say, posting selfies from the rubble. To question who bulldozed your home, and why I manufacture bulldozers, is unnecessarily divisive. Why can’t we coexist? Me, here. You, there. No, not there. Elsewhere.
Nadia Djamila is a writer from Washington, D.C. Her work has appeared in Sonora Review, ARTWIFE, and GomerBlog.
My sister says revolution has broken out back home.
Automobile horns honk, as if in congratulations.
I think of Cossacks’ whips. Tatiana shielding me. Pleading with factory owners for kopecks and mercy.
Time to plant new seeds. Smash tundra.
We embrace. Imagine our growth, roots rising into a new sky.
Yash Seyedbagheri is a graduate of Colorado State University’s MFA fiction program. His stories, “Soon,” “How To Be A Good Episcopalian,” “Tales From A Communion Line,” and “Community Time,” have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. His work has been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and Ariel Chart, among others.
Yarden, I think of you, in that gunshot moment when you learned that the body in the coffin was not your wife’s.
Did you allow a bright bullet of hope to pierce your darkness, even though you knew that it was aimed, with ruthless precision, at your thrice shattered heart?
Joanna Norland dedicates this story to the Bibas family — Yarden, Shiri, Ariel (age 4) and Kfir (9 months), all abducted from the Nir Oz Kibbutz on October 7, 2023, and held in Gaza. Only Yarden returned to Israel alive, February 1, 2025. Hamas claimed to return the bodies of Yarden’s wife, Shiri, and children on February 20, 2024, but DNA testing revealed that the woman’s body was not Shiri’s. Her fate remained unknown until her body was returned by Hamas on the evening of February 21, 2025, and identified by Israeli officials.
Hello, moon.
Don’t be sad, okay.
I just am going to the village shop with my father.
We won’t be late.
We’ll come, just now.
We are here.
Okay, if you want to.
You can walk with us around the village.
The war has ended.
Atiq Balai Wazir is a poet hailing from Waziristan, yes, the one famous for terrorism. He is doing his Masters in Anthropology from Quaid e Azam University, Islamabad, and is father to Hudail Sasha.
The father cut the umbilical cord even as the lights flickered. The newborn looked determined to survive. There was some perfunctory crying, but she calmed down as soon as she latched on to her mother’s breast.
“I will keep you safe,” her mother whispered.
Outside, the bombs had devoured everything.
Jahnavi Gogoi’s poetry has been published in Indian Review, Coffee and Conversations, RIC journal, Café Haiku, Presence, Five Fleas, Haiku Girl Summer, tsuri-doro, Enchanted Garden Haiku journal, Zen Peacemakers, Fresh Out: An Arts and Poetry Collective, The Daily Verse by The Wise Owl, Haiku Corner by The Japan Society, Shadow Pond Journal, The Leaf Journal, haikuNetra among others. She lives in a quaint town in Ontario, Canada with her family and occasionally tries her hand at fiction and essays.
We celebrated the four main religions here: Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity. Regularly we sang, danced, cooked. Painted. Learned truths about our history through fearless journalists, families’ testimonies, the war heroes the government erased from textbooks. Nobody hesitated joining the Monsoon Revolution, arms drenched and outstretched as bullets sped toward us.
Third-person bio: Sami Matin is a writer from Bangladesh. She holds degrees in English and Creative Writing from the University of Michigan and the University of Arizona. Their literary work is forthcoming or published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart Pulp, and the Wingless Dreamer.
What bothered Friedman most were the bird droppings. Washing them away from around the hotel pool, he gazed at the sea, mesmerized by his urge to take a plunge. However, the roof had been fenced off for safety, which struck him as ironic since the war had begun in earnest.
Nelly Shulman is writing in Berlin.
The Memorial Day Parade passes, brass blaring, drums pounding, ending at the town cenotaph with a flyover finale, in missing man formation. Among the names engraved in polished granite is my wife’s first love, downed in Vietnam.
She thinks of him, takes hold of my arm;
doesn’t know I know.
Ron Scully wrote this story.
Gunfire rang out. Cedric swore he could hear the scream of the butterflies. A fellow soldier took a bullet in the thigh. Coins tinkled from his pocket. They took cover, fighting off the attack and spending the night in the bush. The sun shone through thick haze the next morning.
Keith Hood is a former janitor and window cleaner. He retired from a job as a field technician for a Michigan electric utility after 32 years avoiding electrocution. Keith Hood’s writing has appeared in Blue Mesa Review, Your Impossible Voice, one sentence poems, Five Minutes One Hundred Words, and The Forge Literary Magazine.