They said it was the coolest fight ever, my cousins did. A little older than me and boys to boot, their fathers had kept them out late at the fisherman’s pub the night before. We ate dinner there every night on those annual surf-fishing trips. As my cousins told me the story of how a fight started over a game…
Lindsay Rockwell opens the shared landscape of poetry, healing and the sacred. She’s recently published, or forthcoming in Guernica, Plume, Poetry Northwest, Tupelo Quarterly, Poet Lore, SWWIM, among others. Her collection, GHOST FIRES, was published by Main Street Rag, April 2023. Her manuscript, A Woman and Her Gods was a finalist with Lit Fox Books and a semi-finalist for the…
we do not join the navy we are the navy that sails through cities, that docks on your sidewalks with ragged boots and jackets for masts and bedrolls for gunwales our noses are prows our behinds are poop decks our smells are dead salmon what you shun and escape and leave for rats to ravage no address necessary when you’re…
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.