To celebrate the release of Issue 4 and our Blurred Genre contest winners (to be announced soon!), we are hosting a reading over Zoom on May 11 at 6:30 pm PST. *** See full details below and RSVP at this link! …
Interview with Victoria Chang
Q: In some of Dear Memory’s sections, there are quotations by other writers that your writing responds to. What’s your process for collecting these ideas or quotes? A: Honestly, I am disorganized. Sometimes I'd just open random books around me and see something and it might spur something in my mind or I would slot it into the text I was working on. I'd like to say that I take notes in a notebook and it's organized, but there's actually a randomness about the quotes (and my life!). Q: How …
Riverboat Soothsaying
The guest bedroom is the only room in our home my mom doesn’t cover with wallpaper when she marries. Assuming this door will almost always stay closed, she sees no need. She leaves the walls the same color—a pale olive—that was chosen by her in-laws when they moved here themselves early in their marriage, believing as she does that none of her own family will ever spend much time here. No one who wanders into this space, as she imagines, will want to stay for long inside this room whose windows …
How to Build a Volcano
MATERIALS LIST: Pizza box. 20oz plastic bottle. Chicken wire. Newspaper. Flour. Water. Paint. TOOLS: Box Cutter. Serrated knife. Wire Cutters. Gloves. Staple Gun. Super glue. Mixing bowl. Paint brushes. Measuring Cup. ▲ It’s difficult for you to pinpoint when it started. This barking up the wrong tree. Free, yet overwhelmed with whatever marker you’ve used at that time to define a life, and a place, and a job, and a class, and a relationship, or the time that passed since its end, and …
Aria
Knotted willows eye a ladybug soliloquizing atop fence post ledges, Juliet balconies, lamented by recurrent doves, unperturbed as the branches make room for the noose. Nola Iwasaki currently lives and writes in Oregon and is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University. Featured Artwork: Faded Youth from the Urban Allegory series TJ Norris is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Fort Worth, TX. He studied at Massachusetts College of Art and NSCAD (Halifax). His work …
Absent
Mornings fade: lonely mist across a silent yard, one small pair of shoes remaining: soft as a summer’s night, but empty; they rest on the sill, a bright day beyond. I am thinking of the scent of soap on new skin, am remembering how I held you close, before I gave you away. Frances Koziar has published poetry in over 30 different literary magazines, including Vallum and Acta Victoriana. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, …