1 This was not the Tinseltown Los Angeles of the world’s imagination. I looked around at my cohorts at orientation for this language proofreading gig for the LA County Board of Elections. They were clad in baggy clothes from Costco, were balding or had drugstore hair dye jobs, sported clompy scuffed shoes or spike heels too fancy for a…
Mississippian John Horváth has published poetry internationally since the 1960s in Parenthesis, The Write Launch, Streetlight, Quagmire Magazine, Burningword Literary Journal (Best of 2018), and Brave Voices (Zimbabwe). After Vanderbilt and Florida State universities, following a bad parachute drop in Iraq leaving him 100% disabled with the VA, “Doc” Horváth taught at historically Black colleges. To promote contemporary…
Matthew Moore is a poet and playwright originally from New England. Their work has been produced at the Toronto Fringe Festival, the Queens Short Theater Festival, Durango Arts, and Two Oceans Theater. Their play “Portugal” was published in the Coachella Review, and went on to receive First Place at the Fresh Fruit Festival.
The cobbles under my wheels make my old bike bounce as I ride along, its loose bell jangling ever so quietly, the noise echoing through the stillness of the Oud-West. I have a little headlight that gains more power the faster I pedal, and I like to keep it bright-bright-bright. I am heading home from work, away from the…
It’s the dignity of pigeons, their imperious head tilts, surveilling their domain. No one understands that. They don’t have the same impediments. Imagine subway tunnels if you were eight inches long and had wings. An American Tail was right about the crown on the Statue of Liberty. Only pigeons could do that. Imagine having the scope of the city…
When I hugged my family goodbye, said I love them, stood aside—me on one side, all five of them on the other side—my youngest sister crying, my dad saying, “Go, go!” and I walked into the airport, the icy hands of alone cuffed me. Even the metal chair by the departure gate, on which I sat, felt cold to…
Poetry by Rebecca Pyle appears in The Hiram Poetry Review (forthcoming), The Penn Review, Anacapa Review, Flying Island Journal, The Honest Ulsterman, Eclectica, and in many other journals and reviews. She is also a writer of fiction and essays; her fiction has been nominated for both the Best of the Net anthology and the Pushcart Prize, and an…
“I am the world’s greatest magician bank robber. Watch as I fly through these bars on my magic smoke cape. Mumbo Jumbo!” Owen muttered to himself as he hung upside down on the monkey bars in the school’s playground before homeroom. It was a cold November morning, and every word Owen said transformed itself into a tiny cotton candy cloud. …
Peter Munro is a former fisheries scientist who worked in the Bering Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Aleutian Islands, and Seattle. Munro has recently earned a poetry MFA at the University of Washington. Munro’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in such journals as Poetry, the Beloit Poetry Journal, The Iowa Review, Barrow Street, The Birmingham…
5 Weeks Cassie sunk into the shadows of the pharmacy’s exterior wall. Just thirty minutes after sundown and Brookings was already shrouded in an obscuring darkness. She’d thought that by her second year living there, she would have adjusted to this less than likeable detail of life in South Dakota, but no. Spotlighted under the fluorescent glow of the streetlight,…