by Trey Burnette Making mortgage payments, paying off credit card and student loan debt, and season tickets to the opera are excellent reasons for becoming an accomplice to your revolting non-boyfriend/boyfriend’s murders. At least they are for Charlie from Leitchfield. And even though his sort of love interest, Jignesh, is “a pompous sea monster from the depths of the Indian…
Girding Up The coat still fit. The arms, the chest, all of it in brown corduroy. And his wool stocking hat. Also out of vogue, that he’d thought he lost, he now pulls over his ears.…
All men will resemble one another in the way they use their feet. But no one can tell what any given man will do with his hands. . . . The hand is the direct connect with man’s soul. . . . When a free spirit exists, it aches to materialize in some form of work, and for this, the…
Thin, light-etched yellowish-orange lines where her eyelids met. Red Rothko squares stamped her eyelids. Bright white light framed Chuck’s goggled face the moment before Jen opened her eyes. She breathed in smoke, ash, particles, and dirt. It hurts to breathe: searing pain. It was May 25, the start of a new year. The blanket wrapped around her quickly became too…
The rain has come to ionize the alien frontier, calling out storms over a smeared earth. We sit in varying stages of anesthesia staring at the long sky, the secondhand measured in lives. We disciple new religions with the sun and the moon. We abandon them as they dismay. We survey the rim of heaven with our elastic eyes. Rivers…
Emma Cort (she/her) is a 20-year-old actor, writer, and director from Center Valley, Pennsylvania. She is a current student at NYU Tisch School of the Arts pursuing a BFA in drama. Emma serves as the education director for The Virtual Theatre Co, a nonprofit theatre organization geared towards increasing inclusivity, diversity, and accessibility in the arts. This is Emma’s…
Before enlightenment chop wood carry water. After enlightenment chop wood carry water. ~ Zen Kōan My father’s mother churned the deep litter with her bare hands. Her gnarled knuckles pounded the earth or shooed away clay pebbles as she expertly swooshed gnats with a puff of air out the side of her mouth. Her humming of hymns haltered…
Which reminded me of those middle school dances when we would slow dance to “Under the Bridge” the end-of-the-dance song, the finale the last chance to be close to your crush or watch your crush dancing with someone else under taped up streamers or maybe balloons for Valentine’s Day that turned from blood-red to bruise-purple in the swaying darkness. Or…
My hips are tectonic plates shifting. A heart-shaped bone. In the seams: a spiral vine roots, Fibonacci unravels into feral cliff road. serpentine spine carved from stone I’m strong like the weed is stubborn. Not beautiful but alive. Bent back to an approximation of flower. Reaching. Still. The most scenic roads curve madly, a sweeping dare. Don’t think, drive, don’t…
Fin A small mountain rises from the swell beyond the bow. Grey-black, sleek sheet metal, ready to be scrapped for parts. The hammerhead is hauled onto the deck. A silver hook of fear, pulsing, panicked, twisting like an exposed muscle. Pinned down, she is shorn of her angles, pared to a slender carcass, eel, submarine, then tossed overboard like…