Issue 16 / 2025

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COVER ART by Sarah Ellis

Contents

13TH ANNUAL CONTEST WINNERS
Pegah Ouji (flash fiction) — "Will It Be Enough?"
Emma Goldman-Sherman (poetry) — "Minotaur in the Backyard"

POETRY
Shelby Pinkham — "In My Wake, a Pile of Teeth: A Burning Haibun"
Natalie Louise Tombasco — "You Got That X-Factor"
Julie Marie Wade — "Stein Psalm"
Ava Chen — "OZONE JUNE"
Joshua Zeitler — "My gender is an open border."
BJ Soloy — "Cusk"
Jonathan Greenhause — "Pardon My French"
Dani Putney — "Portrait of a Burn"
Rebecca Hawkes — "Phasmatodeity"
Kate Wright — "Sometimes I Google "Jimmy Gulibon?""
Julia Liu — "Pasture Land"
Natalie Louise Tombasco — "Leggy Sonnet for Spinning Stories"
Le Wang — "like knocking on the wrong door" & "Abecedarian for Supermarket Fish"
Cady Favazzo — "To Everyone I Have Ever Loved, I Still Do" & "On a Particularly Bad Tuesday, I Remember"
Frances Klein — "Guide to Interpreting Dreams V"
HLR — "Tell my mother, I have too many of my father's tendencies"
Madison Lazenby — "Survivor as Love Poem"
Dina Folgia — "Apiary Bones"
Jill Mceldowney — "Good Neighbors"
Stefanie Kirby — "When I Retell the Catastrophe,"
Noah Anthony Mezzacappa — "Bloodhound"

FICTION
Robert P. Kaye — "The War to Protect Gravity"
Devan Murphy — "Chicken Wire"
JR Fenn — "The Happy Son"
Wendy BooydeGraaff — "Before and After in the Magazine"
Laressa Dickey — "European Beech"
Virginia Lee Wood — "A Village Near the River, South of That Mountain You Know"
Esther Fox — "We Learned from the Pájaritos"
Elijah Sparkman — ​"The Underwater Library"
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CREATIVE NON-FICTION
Hantian Zhang — "Constellations"
Isabella Garces — "Miss Adidas"
Lydia C. Buchanan — "La Mer, Ma Mére"
Merridawn Duckler — "On Waiting in the Emergency Room"

ART/COMICS
Alison Strub
Keagan Hardin
Taylor Baesman
Zoey Taylorson
Madison Gooch
Marlie Wright
Katie Moon
Samuel Davenport
Dimitra Rizou

BOOK REVIEWS
A History of Half-Birds by Caroline Harper New reviewed by Davis Mercer
a poem is a house by Linda Ravenswood reviewed by Natasha Dennerstein

Masthead

Editor in Chief | Kimberly Ann Southwick
Editorial Assistant | Emilia Stokes
Art & Design Editor / Layout & Design | meg willing 
Poetry Editors | Tyra Douyon
Assistant Poetry Editor | Audrey Gidman
Fiction Editor | Zach Yontz
Assistant Fiction Editor | Saul Lemerond
Creative Nonfiction Editor | LaTayna McQueen
Assistant Creative Nonfiction Editor | Jenny Robertson
Book Reviews Editor | Davis Mercer
Readers | Johnny Butoric, Christopher Heisserer, Laura Cartee, and Amanda Tolvaisa

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