Literary Journal
The City Kathryn McCawley The City is a short graphic narrative exploring the life of a young woman in a desolate abandoned city. Having come to it in promise of paradise, the woman is now trapped in a decaying landmark where its few remaining residents aimlessly wander from place to place through a directionless subway system. This graphic narrative explores issues of social isolation, of contemporary urban life’s omnipresent impermanence, and of the haunting sense of aimlessness that we all …
Texas A&M University Press, 2020 Winner of the Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize Still Life with Timex submerges the reader into the mind of a grieving mother, whose distant son has fallen into a coma and inevitably passes. Elisabeth Murawski approaches this subject intensely, rarely straying from the intimate perspective of the mother. She focuses on how grief numbs a person and turns their world into something radically foreign. She pairs raw emotional despair with formal structure …
This interview took place on March 13, 2021. Randy James is the author of a debut chapbook, Shifters, published by Nomadic Press and is a recent graduate of the MFA Program in Writing at the University of San Francisco. His poetry has been published in Myriad, Westwind, Red Cedar Review, Palette, and Fem Newsmagazine. Randy has performed in venues across Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. His work is featured in Hayat Hyatt’s “Villanelle,” which has been archived by Collectif …
Paul Beatty is the author of two books of poetry and four novels, including The Sellout (2015), for which he became the first American author to win the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2016. He holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College. Since graduating MFA, Beatty has built a career in writing that has traversed genres of poetry, nonfiction, and fiction alike. Through unrivaled observation and understanding of both place and identity, the characters and worlds he builds are …
My lover from the future says I am dead in his time. My lover from the future also says the present me is of “lower energy density.” He shoots lasers in wind tunnels for a living: dissociates naturally occurring nitrogen, watches the atoms recombine in an artificial fluorescence, measures the movement under a high-speed camera. A contrived reunion of tiny things, I think. I …
The children are, at last, asleep. Like bright brass plates we’ve stamped them with new names: Peter, Rachel, Levi, Esther, Aaron, Ruth. Each day’s lesson is how to forget a bend of river, word for willow, your grandmother’s hands. We cut your hair. Release it easily as smoke. I promise sadness doesn’t last if you let it go. Learn this new word heaven, a better life that awaits you it is this one. Jory Mickelson is the author of WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, the inaugural winner of the …
