Online Issues
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Riverside Boulevard
by Kenton K. Yee
art by Odilon Redon, 1882
A barkeep goes to her therapist, says:
I can’t sleep—hypnotize me. So you do and take her
to Central Park Zoo and fall crazy in love.
She cuts tail so you’re on your couch
rifling through web pages pricing colonoscopies.
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Growing Up with a Low Rent Robin Williams
By Simon A. Smith
photo by the author
You never told anyone the whole story about your dad. You let most people think he was little more than a kooky horndog or dirty sailor. It was better for both of you. He got to see himself as the comedian he always wanted to be, and you got to pretend you weren’t dying inside every time he told another unsettling joke. That way, your friends felt it was harmless to laugh at all his unsavory antics. Like when you were at the pizza joint downtown,
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Sand Wall
By Laura Schadler
art by Caspar David Friedrich, 1817
I.
The woman’s recurring dream found her online dating, tapping ineffectually through a glitchy and pixelated app. In each subsequent dream, she feared it had been too long to respond to a message from the previous night.
The woman had married at a strange in-between time when almost no one online dated.
In a second dream, a small panther prowled along with that sultry shoulder swivel, as if on its way to kill something. She often woke distraught.
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Parade
by Tad Tuleja
I do not often see the faces of the dead. But sometimes, in a lucid dream, they tug at my memory, reminding me of what I have gained and what I have lost. In the hour of the wolf one October morning, the chill just whisking down from Alberta to Texas, I am half awake in the darkness and watching a parade.
I am five or six years old and sitting on the curb, just near the spot where Livingston Avenue runs into George Street. The parades come down Livingston from the high school,
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Benign Madness
by Joyce Lee
You know the insanity has always been there, hidden within the stories, secreted from the norm.
It’s there when, as a child, you sit by the lake with your younger cousins, weaving stories of sun fairies and shadow gnomes that dance on the wind-kissed water. They giggle and ask for more, and it’s just a story to them, but you see defined essences latent in the alternating sparkles and shadows, skimming the skin of your reality even as they skitter across the surface of the water, a refined actuality that soothes and satisfies,
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Watch and Wait
image curtesy of Public Domain Review
by Lucy McBee
My name is Elizabeth Holmes.
But I’m not the one you’re thinking of.
I’m not a Stanford dropout.
I’ve never been on the cover of Fortune.
A former Secretary of State has never sided with me over his own grandson.
I can’t speak Mandarin.
I’ve only worn blood red lipstick once, to a Halloween party. I went as Elvira (and was mistaken for Morticia Addams, I suppose because I lacked the requisite cleavage),
