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 Coachella Review
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…
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…
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…
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.
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…