Maggie Cregan is a playwright based in Cleveland, Ohio, whose work often features dark humor, difficult women, and themes of contemporary American life. Line Cooks like Baby Birds will run in the Santa Cruz Actors’ Theatre’s short play festival Eight 10s @ 8:00 in Jan–Feb 2026. Maggie’s full-length play The Station made its off-Broadway debut in the SheNYC…
The sun is gigantic over the horizon (just a moment ago, the shutting off of lights). She can’t tell if it is rising or setting. A hermit thrush is singing on the corner of her granny’s springhouse roof (that’s me, but she doesn’t know me yet). She puts her bare feet (where were the socks they insisted she put…
Cal didn’t know why he kept checking his phone. He was in the red. He knew that. Seventeen percent. He still had service for a little while. He would find a way to charge it. Soon. The percentage hadn’t changed in the last several minutes, and he told himself that was the last time he would check it. When he…
We’d explored the far reaches of the continent and survived. We had 2,000 miles between us and school, but I was certain my pal Wildman would get us home. I prayed to God, even though mixing travel and religion was a questionable practice. I’d rejected certain Biblical teachings, such as the Old Testament story of Isaac and Abraham. Why…
Drifting up to the bare light bulb overhead, Judy watches herself below on the concrete basement floor, her petite Peter Pan self with short blond hair and a nose that Jack describes as either “perky” or “pointed,” depending on his mood and hers. Peter Pan with crow’s feet. Is this truly her marriage, she wonders, her life? Pages drop from…
I watch Vin ride his windrower slowly through the green hayfield in the early evening. Three pronghorn stand in the long grass, chewing the harvest, but Vin doesn’t seem to mind. The animals, with their tan and white coats and inward-curved horns, belong to an ancient species and look like they’d be more at home on the Serengeti. Mammatus clouds…
Based in Ohio, USA, R. Jerome Michael teaches writing and writes about ethics and technology–the techne and the logos. Their writing mostly appears in peer-reviewed, academic journals. They write poetry too, though with questionable talents and little fanfare. Their poetry has appeared in Nocturne and SLAM.
This machine is a lippy huckleberry; get out your brain: He that adze his fleshy blade hacking a deep plane chops a field to the sore. Not a wager behind him, he that mad drafter swings untranslatable hooks through the cadmium, the age-dense ore. He, that unfinished, that closer on the track to the ancients turns up the masto-…
Abdulmueed Balogun Adewale is a black poet & pilgrim from the city of brown tenements. A Pushcart prize and BOTN Nominee. He was shortlisted for the 2024 Gerald Kraak Prize. His poems have been published in: Boudin, The Oakland Arts Review, The Mid-Atlantic Review, Progenitor Art and Literary Journal, Zaum Magazine, Ember, Brittle Paper, The Westchester Review, Soundings East Magazine,…
Calligraphy Lesson I press my elbows into the edge of the mahogany table. Grandpa spreads bleeding characters across the chapped paper— each stroke a tucked pocket. On afternoons like this, the sunlight warms the cold black ink. While we sit in the room, framed by photo albums and paperweights, Grandpa follows his shadow through a brush. The characters…