Online Issues
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Never/Ever
by Laurel Doud and (posthumously) Gregory W. Martin
You died last year after a three-year battle with Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Six months ago your partner sent me your handwritten journal from 1973, her note reading: Greg put this in the box with his important papers. He wanted you to have it.
The journal was from the first months of our courtship.
I never knew such a thing existed.
In 1973, you were 26, newly divorced,
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The Squimbop Condition: An Interview with David Leo Rice on his Latest Novel
by Isabel Piazza Risi
In The Squimbop Condition, the newest novel from David Leo Rice, the New School alumnus crafts a surreal story of myth, madness, and an everlasting quest.
While first ideated as a series of interconnected short stories, The Squimbop Condition threads together years of writing into a complete fable-like narrative. The novel follows two brothers, Jim and Joe Squimbop, as they slip and slide through time, realities, and history. From Hollywood to Europe to Dodge City and all around the globe, the bizarre duo reshape reality in their endless mission to bring about the Golden Age in this sometimes-slapstick,
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“ZOUNDS!” a review, and an interview with Aleksander Zywicki
by Rebecca Endres
ZOUNDS! does not lallygag. From the moment the raw, clear-eyed book of poems opens, Aleksander Zywicki brings religion and torn flesh to the forefront of his imagery. Consider the transmutation in “The Sign of the Cross” from the first section:
my dead father has risen
his arm to hang
the wrenching Christ
above our dinner table
& my eyes like wounds
are always opened
In this childhood memory, the father figure, who looms over early memories and haunts his son from the grave for the rest of the book,
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Sands (With Lyrical Entr’actes)
art by Catherine McGuire
by Derek Jon Dickinson
(for S.K.S.)
Parched wind snapping my clothes, shadow billowing like a black sail, or empty net—its taunting vacancy, useless as seawater.
a rook or a bishop, chess-piece
of the desert
The Atacama plateau—desiccated, rain-shadowed. When our bus stopped at the Chilean border, the young officer dropped my passport in the sand and,
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Patriarchy Rhymes
photo by Yasser Alaa Mobarak
by Johnna Schmidt
J.M. Schmidt writes poetry, short fiction, and plays, and lives in the Washington D.C. area. Their work has appeared in the Beltway Quarterly Review, On the Issues, The Rush, the Little Patuxent Review, and is included in Dear Robot: An Anthology of Epistolary Science Fiction.They hold an MFA in fiction from University of Maryland, College Park.
Yasser Alaa Mobarak (b. 1993) is a multi-award-winning photographer represented by ZUMA Press from Alexandria,
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LIT 40, Summer 2025
Daring to plumb the source of elemental forces simmering below the surface of information / confusion, and illusion seems these days to be the work of Artists. Looking into what cannot be seen for the truth of existence and translating this into manifestation is the great work. Every day that we live and breathe we, all of us, are translators daring to art as intentional as an act of carrying water.
