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You are here: Home / Issue 4
Featured Artwork: Acid by Gerburg Garmann

Issue 4

Eruptions

As we prepare to re-enter the world—cautiously, exuberantly—we find ourselves contending with dangerously full internal backlogs. What forms do all those things, culminating inside of us, take? There is no single answer; eruption is a transitional state.

Issue 4 has found its form through our writers, poets, and artists, who question and examine what it means to be a human in today’s world. Are we brand new people? Have we calcified our bad habits, or buried ourselves more deeply in our toxic relationships? Have we been thrust into a new phase of existence that forces us to re-examine how we’ve chosen to live until now? Do we want to devour everything in our path, even those we love most?

With this issue, we hope to give space to those outbursts, and to celebrate the hope that conception can follow destruction.

Poetry / Nancy Lynée Woo

Self Portrait with Window and Balloons

I’m music stand and mud,

littered with the plastic lips

of a late-night celebration.

Read the poem →
Fiction / Wendy Chirikos

The First Time I Hear Jane Speak

Jane carrying her tray of corned beef hash into the dining hall. Jane with two small glasses of milk. Jane sitting at the far end of the table next to Rosalind, Francis, Gerdie and Viola. Jane not saying a word.

Read the story →
Nonfiction / Beth Cleary

Pressing

My mother’s iron was heavy, with a speckled cord and stubby plug. In the cellar, she and I pressed my father’s shirts. He worked a desk job he’d never dreamed of growing up in a South End tenement, working a machine in a nearby raincoat factory and letting it all proceed from there.

Read the essay →
Poetry / David M. Alper

A Tuneful Volcanic Arc and a Quiet Sylvanshine

whitening the water

till everything began to glow

a scattering of pearls

and pieces of beauty

Read the poem →
Fiction / Francine Witte

Speaking Harry

When Harry says hello, he means for now. He means let’s see how the evening goes. He means he might or might not have something else come up and he will have to leave. 

Read the story →
Poetry / Courtney Bambrick

Chicken

How awful, I say in tweet and reply. How terrible. Disgusting!

Enraging. Why? What a monster. How awful. My heart.

Round face, single tear emoji. What is even

happening? Who are we? I heart the posts

Read the poem →
Fiction / Zoe Raine

When My Girlfriend's Head Becomes an Orange in the Middle of the Night

I wonder who it’s for? I’ve always hated oranges. I used to watch my aunt peel them over her speckled brown ash tray, the Virginia Slims slowly buried in citrus.

Read the story →
Nonfiction / Klae Bainter

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.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Nola Iwasaki

Aria

Knotted willows eye

a ladybug soliloquizing

atop fence post ledges,

Read the poem →
Poetry / Eugene O’Hare

SLEEP

bring me sleep in builders’ buckets

used for wet cement-

pour it over my bed, my back.

Read the poem →
Fiction / Danielle Shorr

Sunday Routine

The first time you fuck is on a Saturday night turned Sunday morning. After his face finally re-emerges from the back of your thighs, he asks, am I going to catch something from this?

Read the story →
Poetry / Raechel Segal

Like Lewis and Clark

Like Lewis and Clark,

I learned it’s okay

To be gay

When you’re stuck on a boat.

Read the poem →
Interview / Caroline Read

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.

Read the interview →
Poetry / Frances Koziar

Absent

Mornings fade: lonely

mist across a silent yard,

one small pair of shoes

Read the poem →
Nonfiction / Melissa Wiley

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.

Read the essay →
Poetry / Marilyn McCabe

Measure of a Life

Let's say I throw the pebble and the pebble

is you

gray and irregular slightly more jagged

at one end than the other

Read the poem →
Fiction / Andrew R. Touhy

Touchdown

Behind the basement stairs was a box of swaddling blankets I know we tossed last summer. I threw them out.

I sit on them now cradling my foot like a broken child.

Read the story →
Poetry / Elane Kim

Bildungsroman

Desires, according to Calvino, are already

memories. This is a way of saying that

language is a fist of snakes, that it is too late

Read the poem →

Featured visual artwork in order of appearance:  Flight by Nazrene Alsiro, Lost in Translation by Alec Ward, Anonymous Was a Woman by Elinora Lord, Acid by Gerburg Garmann, Man Windows by Guilherme Bergamini, Delicate Armour by Elizabeth Wing, Abstract Portrait by Hanna Marie Dean Wright, Volcano Fig. 1 by Daoud Naouri, Faded Youth by TJ Norris, Ghost Trees at Chang’s Restaurant by Barbara Candiotti, Rediscovery by Nicola Brayan, Entangled Navigation by Quinn Valentine, Scrape by Leslie Lindsay, Koi #9 by G.J. Mintz, Rooftop Dancing by Sherry Shahan, Peeking Out by Edward Michael Supranowicz, and Miami Docks by Timothy F. Phillips.



Issue 4

Tanya Žilinskas | Editor-in-Chief

Megan Bounds | Production Editor

 

Matthew Hose | Nonfiction Editor

Nicholas Neyhouse | Poetry Editor

Jesse Herwitz | Fiction Editor

Anna Deh | Fiction Editor

Benjamin Briggs | Fiction Editor

 

KC Crawford | Assistant Nonfiction Editor

Jess Reincke | Assistant Nonfiction Editor

T.S. Leonard | Assistant Poetry Editor

Hikari Miya | Assistant Poetry Editor

Neal Andreu Tayco | Assistant Poetry Editor

Sarah Kruse | Assistant Poetry Editor

Gretchen Lehtonen Hopkins | Assistant Fiction Editor

Readers: Helen Fahnestock, Lilia Farrell, Lisa Freese, Madi Giovina, Lu Huang, Robert Perea, Srishti Rathour, Bryce Sears, Saranya Subramanian, Siok-Hian Tay-Kelley, Grant Young, and Hantian Zhang

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