Issue 1
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By Najla Elmachtoub This piece has been selected by our editors to be nominated for the 2026 Pushcart Prize. “Bokra1, I will visit my brother in America,” you tell me, more like a fact than a desire. Every exhale of your cigarette affirms this belief and kisses my nose with our family scent: farm-soil-sweat and tobacco. You’re talking about
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By Buddy Ray Deering The crickets could barely be heard above the knight’s ragged breathing. She thought her heart rate should have slowed by now, but dying does funny things to a person. ‘I’m not dead yet,’ she reminded herself for the hundredth time in as many minutes, her voice little more than a whisper.
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By Sandra Beth Levy I love flowers, especially as they roll open, surprise at each angle and iteration. But from you afar,always choose a phone callover a bouquet, the gift of your voice is more velvet.Always choose a home visit to sharefamily dinner over connectionat large lavish events, abundance is in the contagion of our
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By Sarah Yao My mother’s receipts overflow like the clogged toilet in our bathroom a week ago, before my father frantically ran to Lowe’s to buy a plunger. They fall out of her purse like the thin toilet paper from our school bathroom when she pulls out her wallet, scrambling to find her credit card,
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By Paul Hostovsky I used to think spring was the sexiest seasonbut now I think it’s fallwith all its burning smellsand the musculatureof the impatient trees with theirred pants down around their kneesalready—and all this talk of peakfoliage, which reminds me of the talkof orgasms, which are both the point andso beside the point. I
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By Phiroozeh Petigara Just as I get on the trail, my foot begins to hurt, sharp pinpoints of pain with every step. I stop, breathe, seethe. There are no benches for me to rest on. I walk and stop, walk and stop, until finally a clearing catches my eye, a beam of sun spotlighting the
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By Mahailey Oliver Mahailey Oliver (she/her, Pisces 𖤓 | Capricorn ⏾ | Pisces ↑) holds an MA in English from Stephen F. Austin State University. Her work has recently appeared in The Raven Review, Spark to Flame, and Blue Daisies Journal. For a full list of her publications, peruse her author website: https://sites.google.com/view/mahaileyoliver
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By Jess Áine Barry “When the time is right,Fruit hangs low and ripe,Reap now what you have sown,Harvest what you have grown.” Apollonia crawled through the scrub, singing a verse from the Harvest Song softly under her breath. She remembered the last time she’d sung it. Her lips next to the brown belly of her
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By Sarah Olive Full moon, cloudless skya child’s eye peering throughcardboard telescope Sarah Olive (she/her) is a writer from Kentucky. She earned her MFA from Western Kentucky University in 2023. In a past life, she served as editorial assistant for The Hunger journal and as a reader for Autofocus Lit. She can be found walking
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By Rachel Allen The avatar looked like a Moon Jellyfish suspended in midair. Pulsing. His silk shirt billowed, a parachute, illuminated by moonlight. Chad scrutinized the setting. Was moonlight too indulgent? And a full moon? Granted, from Player Two’s point of view, it was a visually compelling tableau. The innate beauty in violence is all
A Curious Moon 