art by the author

by Helen Hofling

I subscribed to all the lifestyle magazines for advice on how to live. They have many useful tips, like wearing shearling to cultivate a Nordic sense of warmth, and contentment. I can’t afford shearling, but I fill up my browser tabs with aspirations. The magazines reveal secret regimens for a lustrous shell. They diagram which postures will help me stay happy and which postures will help me grow thin. They tell me the right kind of tealeaves to buy. They tell me how to read them. 

art by the author

by Cait McCann

Speech is a powerful lord, who with the finest and most invisible body achieves the most divine works: it can stop fear and banish grief and create joy and nurture pity.

-Gorgias, Encomium of Helen

Ekphrastic I

Where do I get off, comparing myself to her like that? My forehead is tied to my toes. When I make my body concave it is only an attempt to ease tension between two.

art by JJ Cromer

by Isabel Hoin

We Continue Holding  
 
We bled many years ago and continue to bleed the deepest  red, 
our hips tender. We prayed to you, in that first moment  of 
womanhood— oh, that joyous moment— but you stayed still, a 
face of marble, never answering the calls we sent for comfort.  
 
Red, our hips tender. We prayed to you, in that first moment  
without our mothers. It is absence we search for in language, a 
face of marble, never answering the calls we sent for comfort.

photo by Charles March III

by Yutong Li

Far in the northern darkness there is a fish called Kun, which transforms into a bird called Peng. Riding the whirlwind, it soars ninety thousand li into the sky.

— Zhuangzi, “Free and Easy Wandering” (adapted)

Initial Condition

There is a Peng, riding the whirlwind ninety thousand li into the sky. It flies so high that both the blue heavens above and the earth below are obscured by clouds, making it impossible to distinguish where the sky ends and earth begins.

image curtesy of the Public Domain Review

by Josie Braaten

Rain wasn’t in the forecast for my tenth birthday. I spent the morning walking from room to room—telling myself that by the next window, it would have stopped. It was a Saturday. A lucky day for a birthday. After lunch, I walked the dog.

We walked through the downpour that, magically, refused to stop. I ducked my head between the macrame gray glass of it & pushed down the dog’s. I steered us around puddles, brushed water off mailbox tops,

photo curtesy of the author

by Alex Farber

Monkeys

John Swartt wanted to be a monkey. He checked out every book in the library—every species, every jungle, every fruit they ate. His obsession grew intense. At school, he’d leap onto desks, grab his armpits, screech like a monkey, and spit bile backwash on anyone nearby. At recess, he climbed to the top of the swings and hung upside down for nearly an hour, like it was nothing. Everyone was scared of him.
One day during reading class,