Nonfiction

by Tyler Dempsey...If I cared about linear progress, I would’ve never gotten picked up by a plane hitchhiking. Had I taken my friend’s offer to drive me from Anchorage to Denali in early-May of 2017, after arriving in the 49th State from a winter in Missoula, MT, I wouldn’t remember a single damn thing of that trip today.

by Abhinav...That was the day childhood ended. Time no longer a yard but a funnel tilted downhill and revenge suddenly a possibility, not just desire. I knew I could do it. She saw it in my eyes. She knew I could do it.

by M.M. Kaufman...There is as likely a chance as not that under those giant wipe-o-matic’s you side-step into another reality. Maybe in this one you love yourself. At least in the reality that brought you here, you showed up for yourself. That’s a start.

by Sacha Bissonnette...My girlfriend and I were buying birdseed for the feeder on the back porch, because sometimes, the yellow finches, the little ones, get so close you can wrap your hands so gently around them. And they’re precious like glass but soft and also warm.

by Lisobel Tang...My mother hates dogs. A city child in the sixties, she often stayed with her aunt in a rural village south of Shanghai. The dogs there, she assures me, reveal the true nature of the species

by Angela Townsend Ryoji Iwata I can’t give up on humanity, because when I drive by Taco Bell at ten p.m. on a Wednesday, the chalupa line wraps around the building twice. People in friendship bracelets and people in button-down shirts and people in a state of grace are making mischief. People are here because they are hungry and people are here because other people make the food and people are here because visiting hours just ended at the hospital. People arrive in Priuses a

Road Ahead/Unsplash Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Nevada poet and essayist Dani Putney takes documentary poetics to a new level in Mix-Mix (Baobab Press, 2025). By documentary, I mean a certain relation to historical reality, which is not to say this is historical poetry. It is vivid poetry — lyrical, cynical, ironic, touching, sexy. Because the poet approaches history with all senses and emotions aflame, with heart beating beneath the inquiry, letting itself be known, the result

by Jeanne-Marie Fleming Shamblen Studios Scott pops a wheelie in the schoolyard. And another. We watch until Marky rides up, ridiculous, on a tricycle. We circle Marky and cheer. I like them — the boys, their jerky moves. Even Sal, who speaks Italian, and broke all of our pencils. In the classroom, he holds air till he’s purple. Girls smack his cheeks to pop the air out. Frank makes cartoon flipbooks at his desk and sells them. It’s like watching television. I want one. My fr

Jeswin Thomas Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Tolu Oloruntoba’s new poetry collection, Unravel (McClelland & Stewart), offers something strangely mesmerizing — a deconstructed mind tethered to what it haunts. It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a groundbreaking work. Oloruntoba, a trampset contributor, describes himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He practiced medicine i

by Ulrik Andersen WrongTog/Unsplash On the rare moments Ola sat still, you’d catch how handsome he was. His eyes would slip closed long enough for you to take in his long brown eyelashes that would curtsy down his cheeks, pointing daintily to his high-cut cheekbones, the straight crest of his nose and the bright blush of his lips, too red for a boy’s. In those moments Ola looked peaceful. Serene even. But then, a twitch would bubble up from below the surface, tugging a corner

by Peter DeMarco Marco Furioso The smell of waste filled the hospital room because his mother’s kidneys had failed after a year-long battle with leukemia and chemotherapy, common vocabulary at the dinner table, those dreaded words with the harsh ‘k’ sound signifying something deadly, but now at barbeques there were condolences for his father and more disturbing words, like arsenic and carcinogens, as neighbors waved cigarettes and talked of pesticides farmers once used in the

by Claudia Monpere Jeton Bajrami In a cottage in the woods lived a man and not even the green-eyed princess could cheer him. Not even his two children who lived nearby with his wife could cheer him. The ruby rhododendrons and azaleas, the sugar pines, the grandfatherly oaks, the bamboo fountain that trickled in his yard while he stared at the stars: no. The Wife Where is the wife in all this? Did she crank events in motion like Mousetrap, that game he loved as a child, gear t

by Rebecca Tiger Alan Calvert Frogs have delicate bones protected by a fragile vertebra. We dissect them in biology class because when you cut horizontally down the front, you can see their whole insides easily. They resemble humans enough, with a heart, and other organs, so this early exercise in examining a creature’s insides is meant to allow us to see it all easily and perhaps to incite our imaginations about the inner workings of other creatures. Other things. When I was

by Chad Sullivan abhijeet gourav I traded my soul for a cigarette. I have a written receipt of the transaction: Here you go motherfucker, one soul, it reads. It’s signed and dated, with a witness’s initials — D.W. I was twenty. We were in the kitchenette of D.W.’s seventh-floor apartment. There were bare white walls and freezer waffles on the counter. Jibiddy, the first alcoholic I knew, stood by, red-faced, laughing. Everyone was laughing. I was laughing. * * * Topher took g

by Andrea Lewis Arpit Rastogi “…but this is a sea that patiently recreates for us scenes from the past, breathing new life into them…” — Fernand Braudel Memory and the Mediterranean 1. Where do you come from? I come from Lansdale, Pennsylvania, where I was born during a thunderstorm on a July night while my father was in Tripoli, Libya, at a U.S. Air Force base called Wheelus. I always loved the word Tripoli — derived from the Greek and Italian for three cities — and felt, fr

by Daniel Addercouth Annie Spratt I’m standing in my parents’ living room by the hospital bed the council lent us, waiting for my father to finish his lunch. Except lunch is too big a word for what he’s having: half a bowl of tomato soup that I warmed in the microwave. He used to polish off a whole can plus a handful of oatcakes, even after he retired from the farm and was no longer so active. My father sits propped up in bed with multiple pillows. The front of his pyjama top

by Jill McCabe Johnson Simon Ray The doe lies where grass gives way to gravel and gravel gives way to road. A spot of fur on the side of her ribcage and another near her shoulder splays like a cowlick or bullseye. The half-inch opening of her mouth reveals a row of tiny incisors along her lower jaw and a gap where at least two teeth are missing. Both ears fan open, no longer twitching to track sounds. Inside her right ear what at first appears to be a tiny brown mouse turns o

by Charlotte Amelia Poe Yehor Litsov A thousand little entropies leading to the big and final entropy, and each time we are growing further and further away from something we once had and will never have again, our bodies becoming more and more like ghosts that ache and bleed and will inevitably fail us when the time comes, and oh, the time will come. Casting light on the fields at night, when even the moon is too shy to come out and play, green reflections from rabbit eyes a

Zdeněk Macháček Sensitive Creatures by Kirsten Reneau; Belle Point Press, 2024 Reviewed by L Mari Harris trampset published Kirsten Reneau’s opening essay “What I Remember” because we recognized a voice that needed to be heard. Now, she has presented us with the gift of a full-length essay collection, entitled Sensitive Creatures, published by Belle Point Press. Sensitive Creatures contains twenty-one essays, each effortlessly weaving together the human world and the natural

by Jacqueline Goyette Leonardo Yip I’m sorry for this morning, for the fact that I was still in bed when we heard from you, your voice was tinny and small and fearful and we were still asleep. The car crash. 4 am. You driving home on the long road from Urbisaglia to pick up your luggage, to meet us in Macerata. We still had the drive to Rome ahead of us and then a flight to New York City and then, finally, Indianapolis. Then came that phone call. Your father sent us photos of