Issue 43

Fair Verona

July 17, 2026 /

art by Virgil Suárez

by Olivia Pierce Graham

  

 

this place looks like a house
       built to eradicate your memories
   into cobwebs wrecked with the breath
	     that I once felt
   when I shivered as if covered
       under the tatters of a blanket
where we were uncertain and
   potent and new and
        I was horrified
              human underneath you
          in an unfamiliar house





you’d live in with someone else
until they disintegrated
             from your gentle mouth
tearing at me
with a thousand spiders fighting
beside your bedroom wall
where I stained your pillow bloody and 
you refused to close your eyes
thinking about my body 
weighted down
and waking up alone

Olivia Pierce Graham holds an MFA in Poetry from The New School where she was a recipient of the Paul Violi Poetry Prize.

Issue 43, Poetry

Autobiography

July 17, 2026 /
```
art by Beth Kephart
```
by Maggie Greaves

“One of the things that was funny about being in America was that so little of my past came up.”
––Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography

I fell out of my mother with the cord around my neck.
My childhood disasters were vague and intimate.
I snuggled them in the dark.

By my thirties,
I’m able to slice vegetables precisely while the children tug at my feet and scream.

This is something I’ve only seen mothers do in other countries.
read more
Fiction, Issue 43

Forever Carnival

July 17, 2026 /
```
art by Kale Hensley
```
by Lianne Neiger

I used to bug my best friend Ezra with a ton of would-you-rather scenarios. He was usually game. The kid could pull an essay answer out of his ass to the craziest hypotheticals. Then there was my favorite one to ask: would you rather be the one leaving or the one being left behind? That one stumped him. I get it now. I thought I had an answer once, but being dead makes that shit kind of hazy.

What doesn’t being dead make hazy,
read more
Fiction, Issue 43

Ghosted

July 17, 2026 /
```
art by Abbie Doll
```
by Sue Allen

A pair of jewel-green macaws raced above Sara and David’s heads as they began their hike. The first of the hanging bridges, puentes colgantes, swayed like a giant hammock strung across the gorge below. Sara shaded her eyes and watched the birds vanish into the treetops.

“They mate for life,” Sara said.

David had already stepped onto the bridge, now wobbling beneath him as he reached for his phone. Sara took a deep breath and placed one foot on the planks.
read more
Issue 43, Translation

Wakashu or

July 17, 2026 /
```
art by Jakob Schöning
```
by Tara Meister
Tranlasted from the Austrian German by Lara Waas

The injured fawn at one of the neighboring farms. It had been lying in the field and the farmer hadn’t seen it, had run over it with the mower and severed one of its legs. They put the fawn in a box in the narrow space between stove and door. We were allowed to feed it for a while. When I asked the adults what would happen to it, they grew quiet.
read more
Issue 43, Nonfiction

Tom Selleck in His Underwear

July 16, 2026 /
```
art by Geraldine Stevenson
```
by Mary Cate Stevenson

My grandmother was a painter. Even though we lived just a few streets over for most of my childhood, I didn’t know her well. When we visited her house, a one-story ranch in a modest Houston neighborhood, the grownups sat in the kitchen and I was told to run along. She was of the “children should be seen and not heard” generation but seemed to prefer to not see us, either. Her black eyes looked capable of casting curses. Her house even smelled inhospitable,
read more