They said the house was built too close to the sea—that every tide tried to take it back. From the lane, it looked half-forgotten: roof bowed, shutters blind, its lone chimney still breathing salt into the air. When I arrived, the front gate was already open, as though it had been expecting me. The brass sign beside it read THE…
The Coachella Review
In silver, a flash: fish flesh, crystal blue. Scalpel. Tool gleam in blue glove, blue gown angel. A wolf in water, chest collapsing. The rind of a stomach pressed to glass, leering in. Sliced mouths on the hips, a cheshire lump removed from a woman at the body’s corner. A window in the long room’s milky skin. A glance taken…
By Betty Fall Critically acclaimed author, award-winning filmmaker, professor of English and literature, Zen Buddhist priest—Ruth Ozeki’s extensive portfolio is as impressive as it is varied. Ozeki has built a literary career exploring all facets of how people connect, especially through reading and writing, and her stories have resonated with audiences across the globe. Despite already having such an accomplished…
I. The Job There was the sound. It’s always mistaken for something else—a backfiring car, Roman candles. When I hear gunfire, I think of those countries on television: crowds packing a two-tone bazaar, shawled women, kids waving at the camera. Somewhere, a machine gun rattles. A bomb goes off. No one flinches. But here in America, we want to hear…
Cloud shadow hangs low on brindled hills. The chill breeze clears a musty mind. Doors slam, birds trill, air conditioners buzz, the wind hums this daily choir. This town was not named in irony. A New River rises every rain. An editor, writer, and poet, Charles Grosel lives in Arizona. He has published stories in Western Humanities Review, Water-Stone, and…
It began with the drapes. One day, while dusting the living room, Suzanne Spencer noticed a small thread escaping from the weave of the fabric. She pulled at it until it broke free. Instead of rolling it up between her thumb and finger, she took the thread, lifted it to her mouth, and swallowed it. Then, she continued the dusting,…
Kylee Kyte (she/they) is a poet, playwright, and social worker based in San Diego who believes that creative expression is instrumental to mental health and social justice. Kylee’s work has previously won the “Outstanding Creative and Performing Arts Award” at San Diego State University. You can see more of her work @thekytewrytes on Instagram.
When my grandmother died, no one asked the house what it wanted. They asked about the bangles, about the land behind the well, about the teakwood trunk that smelled of camphor and mothballs. But the house— with its flaking pistachio paint and the hairline crack that ran from window to ceiling like a held breath— refused to divide. Every afternoon,…
A grocery store forty-five minutes west of Chicago seemed as good a spot as any to find a talent scout. I’d heard of kids getting discovered at shopping malls or even in the street, so why not me, and why not here? Even talent scouts had to shop for food. Any one of these people inspecting the bananas in the…
Sierra Hitchcock is a former dancer who traded her pointe shoes for a pen, continuing her love of the performing arts as a playwright and librettist. Her full-length plays include Ruckus Forum and Edgar Allan Poltergeist. With her father, Sierra has written the comedy, Way South of Eden, an original adaptation of A Christmas Carol (Weston Theater Company), as well as the book and additional lyrics…
Arthur M. Jolly (he/him) has the typical writer background–starting out as a stuntman, snake-wrangler and special effects artist, then quitting the film industry to become a helicopter pilot: instructing for the US Army at at Fort Rucker, and later flying Las Vegas tourists into the Grand Canyon. He now writes instead, recognized by the Academy with a Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting. Features…
His lungs were filled with air motes and twice the size of pulchritude. The gong of the cathedral’s bell nor the recitations of catechisms could save him, as a dole can save a drifter marooned in an icy updraft. I swear his eyes were all pupils, two chthonic magnets, and as he approached I awaited the darkening. The squall of…
On page one, a scratch of coastline where the ocean rehearses its apologies. On page two, the swamp’s green choir, all throat, all patience, all hunger held behind the lily pads. On page three, a man selling boiled peanuts from a cooler with a cracked latch. He smiles at you as if he knows what you buried under the seat.…
Jane Fonda says addicts don’t get married to people who pay attention, but I don’t think Mike and I were addicts. Anyway, not that I noticed right away. Sure, he’d be drinking pepper vodka by noon on Tuesday, and there was nothing I didn’t owe. Were we self-deluded? We had our strategies of denial and avoidance, like everyone else. I…
Kayo Chang Black is a Taiwanese Canadian writer who explores hybrid identities, global citizenship, and the intersection of cultures. Her librarian and writing careers brought her to the U.A.E., Bahrain, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, and the U.S. She is currently based in Taichung, Taiwan, where she is working on her collection of essays while being mom to a six-month-old baby.…
Step 1: Listen to your older brother when he hands you a joint and tells you not to smoke it alone. Find two friends to smoke it with in the woods behind the high school before the ninth-grade dance. When you get to the end of the joint, eat the roach. Twenty minutes later, when you freak out in the…
You are dying. You have known you are dying for some time now. You have known, really, since before the test you took at the free clinic came back positive. Even the times before, when it came back negative, somehow you knew it would get you eventually. The dramatic irony was just too much to resist. This was always going…
Lee Chabin is an emerging playwright and fiction writer who explores themes of identity, community, and intolerance and is committed to developing compelling, authentic narratives for the stage. He is a mediator and lawyer who has been published in the New York State Bar Association Journal and is a two-time winner of the Parenting Media Association Award for the Separation…
John had always imagined his daughter would one day turn out just like him. He was wrong. In fact, June was nothing like her mother Maggie, either. It was as if she’d been dropped off by a stork, a stork working for Jesus. Of all their dissimilarities, her love of Jesus was the weirdest. They’d never gone to church as…
By Shannon Glass When it comes to writing, TJ Martinson is always trying something new. His first two novels, The Reign of the Kingfisher and Her New Eyes, explore first the superhero myth and then speculative fiction delving into the body-identity connection. With his latest work, Blood River Witch, Martinson takes inspiration from his current home in Kentucky to craft…
It keeps me limping in these clayey, foot- tamped cuts, working my way through lilting shoots and thorny boughs that look like stanzas. Bare- foot, I feel warm sensations in the deep ruts left by long-gone waggoneers, whose cold words cling, frost-like, to the echoes of my heels. My throat swells shut from allergens I’ve kicked up—my lozenges are almost…
Alina Zollfrank dreams trilingually in the Pacific Northwest. Her work has won the DIAJ Award and been nominated repeatedly for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. Her creative nonfiction and poetry have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The MacGuffin, Salt Hill, Burningword, Gyroscope Review, Bicoastal Review, Stonecoast Review, and Sunlight Press. Alina is a haphazard but passionate…
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…