Once upon a time, I dreamt of sirens bruising the morning sky over coffee. There was no relief in the shadows of the buildings, sticky hot fingers reaching across the sea, crawling out of the waves to cast themselves heavy over the fishermen, the beach while I poured a second cup from the pan. The kitchen smelled of breakfast and…
In her hundred years of teaching fanged girls, Mina has seen the rules for turning change twice. When she was a teenager, girls only turned if a vampire bit them. They were mostly safe if they stayed home after dark and didn’t fraternize with men. The rules changed in the 1930s, when unmarried women turned overnight on their thirtieth birthday.…
The Journey There is but one road here in this desert, where mountains rise in the distance only to disappear. At night, when you stop for sleep, the stars fall all around you. What you have left behind, you cannot remember. What you are going toward, you may never reach, like the mountains or that star. But what does…
When I am overwhelmed with adult life, I think of childhood days home from school with a cold, cozy in bed. My mother moves the living room TV into my room, and I spend hours watching syndicated episodes of I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched and reading Sweet Valley High. My mother brings me snacks, presses her palm to…
We didn’t want to go to the mystery dinner theater, but we kind of always wanted to, and so none of us knew which of the others would be the one to offer it as an option. It was Asa, Jude, myself, and our friend Raoul, who was a total hipster. Paint the town; that’s what we had in…
We are the damaged ones making the art singing the songs acting the roles to distract you from self, time and mortality. You can find us at three a.m. on the public radio cleaving time planting hope meaning, joy and, perhaps, stamina. We wait your tables serve your coffee stock your shelves then work our quiet unhinged hours to create…
KJ Stewart (she/they) is a playwright/director based in Brooklyn, New York. KJ graduated from NYU Tisch in December of 2019 with a BFA in Drama. Their work as a playwright lives in the realm of horror comedy, with a keen interest in the experiences of queer youth in the age of the internet. Their full length play Cowgirl…
photo credit: Madeline Northway By Natalie Ferrigno Francesca Lia Block is the award-winning author of the beloved young adult series Dangerous Angels, which is set to be adapted for television. Block has written a vast bibliography of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry for all ages, across a wide spectrum of genres ranging from thriller to magical realism. Her newest novel, House…
Reviewed by Peter Mladinic Poems are written by human beings “alone in a room” with language. They come out of lived lives. The poems in Madrigals come out of Caroline Goodwin’s lived life—things she has touched and ground she has stood on, alone and with others. Sometimes, that ground is a floor in a room, other times a forest floor,…
Something that’s weird about me is that I have oven mitts for hands. Not actual oven mitts; that’s just what one of my old foster parents called them. He said it meant I was going to grow a lot in a few years. It never really mattered much to me, except for it looking kind of funny with the rest…