by Marco Etheridge The sailing ketch Siren’s Call rides her anchor chain in a remote cove off the Sea of Cortez. Warm water laps her wooden hull. Jack Darris, the skipper, first mate, and cabin boy, laps lukewarm whiskey. He watches the last rays of sunlight dip below the ragged Baja horizon while pondering the merits of another whiskey. He does not think long. Jack fishes the last ice fragments from the cooler beside his deck chair. Splashes whiskey into the glass. Most of the ice …
by Ben Reed Roger and I were at the beach when the fog came in. We had just finished eating. Everyone on the sand stopped what they were doing to marvel at the density and opacity of the fog, and how quickly the white mist rolled toward us over the water. And then all at once, we were in motion. Roger and I packed up our things. Mothers snapped at older …
by Sam Moe (Content warnings: Mentions of blood, sexual violence, emotional abuse, mentions of food/disordered eating) TemperatureA small burning fire at the center of your core. Nights spent sobbing in the walk-in freezers. Chilly wine-key, blue frost growing on boxes of wine glasses. Beer stashed behind buckets of sauce. Sticky blue tape, peeling from heat. Burns on the backs of your hands. The man who requested you sauté his clam chowder until its temperature peeled the flesh off the …
by Dana Stamps II “When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them.” —Anne Leibovitz Objects, subjects, the brazen anonymous porn star, whose audacious nudity is not faked. I wonder what brought her to pagination, and no clutter of tattoos, no butt inked—classy, probably the poor kind—and I wonder how she is coping with her life after the shoot, …
by Christopher R. Vaugha and it remains scrawled on her cheeks in red, as if having scratched her there. Giggles, I have a plum beard! I ask, Will you have to shave? She shivers her head twice, We’d never do that, that is so silly! In this house, there’s no word for cleanse, or pit, or blade. We only sense things, the words for them are birds concealed and chafing against branches. Fruit perishes twice—first stem-snapped, again when …
by Paul Vermeersch In the end, the Reverse Wolf enters another body. Firstit coalesces in the compost of leaf litter, from mossesand fruiting bodies, from masses of fungal filaments knitting subterranean threads, flowing now into its wolf form. The coat of the Reverse Wolf sprouts outside its body and grows inward, piercing its hide like five million fine needles. The Reverse Wolf regurgitates little girls wearing red outerwear and sees them safely home where it is killed and …