Online Issues
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Time Travel and Witches: an interview with TNS Creative Writing Professor Luis Jaramillo about his debut novel, “The Witches of El Paso”
by LIT Books Editor, Jonathan Kesh
Equal parts historical and fantastical, The Witches of El Paso is a spirited exploration of the many ways we try and often fail to control the world around us, and it’s the debut novel from New School professor (and former director of the Creative Writing Program) Luis Jaramillo.
The story begins as a classic family saga, but quickly grows stranger: in the present day, bustling lawyer Marta cares for her elderly great aunt Nena, all while the old woman insists both of them have La Vista,
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Poetry Rubric for Acceptance
image curtesy of the National Gallery of Art
by Laine Derr
Laine Derr holds an MFA from Northern Arizona University and has published interviews with Carl Phillips, Ross Gay, Ted Kooser, and Robert Pinsky. Work has appeared or is forthcoming from The Amistad, J Journal, Full Bleed + The Phillips Collection, ZYZZYVA, Portland Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere.
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Insection
Art by Bill Wolak
by Carrie Penrod
The dawn hasn’t yet started to break,
the light not yet illuminating
the insects beneath my skin
I wish to keepHidden.
The man lying next to me,
arm over my shifting lungs,
sleeps as the dead lay
quiet in their coffinsforgotten.
I want to gnaw off my torso,
to escape his sleeping form––
and yet I want to remain
pinned, kept blissfullyaway.
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Making a Name
Art by Mark Hurtubise
by Caleb Braun
I want to get started! I want to cut down the cedar
and make for myself an everlasting name.
Gilgamesh, Tablet II: Enkidu was sitting, 159-160For weeks now, scattered thunder, flooded plains,
dry soil shepherding the water still, above.Puddles, make-shift lakes: zeros without a figure.
What would they call me if this shoddy house collapsed
and I undone by summer storms?A scribbler in a rented room.
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Mid-Wife Night Mutation
image curtesy of the MET Museum
By Larissa Larson
He told me to close up
the windows, so I do. Notwanting it to be this simple
always: preparation of night.You must understand having
the window openespecially in summer, soaked
in a stale smell of wheatsweat, grass blades moon
dewed, deep throatspulsate amphibiotic
ambience, sweet insect shellsshutter sleek symphonies –
this vital vibrationof life,
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Artists Featured in LIT 38
Mark Hurtubise:
(on the cover) Beelzebub’s Sycophants, 2022, photograph
Last Judgement, 2023, photographMark Hurtubise published numerous works during the 1970s. Then family, graduate school, two college presidencies and a community foundation CEO. After four decades, he is creating again from the Pacific Northwest like a pregnant bird balancing on a twig. Recently, his offspring have appeared in several locales such as Tampa Review; North Dakota Quarterly; Bard College Center/Study of Hate, filmed interview;
