POETRY By Sheila Black The rattler your husband impaled by bring­ing down his shovel, the body split in two, those twitch­ing parts. Frost killed the but­ter­fly weed and the orange tree. The prickly pear sprawled into slime, the wood splin­tered into apart­ment houses for ants and…

GENRE FICTION By Alan Cliffe Part One: Church­go­ing Men, 1945 Antoinette Timrod Tony didn’t seem like the other white guys at the El Dorado. I mean,  not just the obvious thing of being younger than his dad and uncles. He’d been over­seas for a few years, including…

What do you write? I write poetry and graphic novel scripts. Although I don’t stick to a spe­cif­ic genre for my poetry, if I had to pick one, it’d most likely be pop fiction or fiction-based poetry. That is, poetry that tells a story either as…

POETRY By Jessica Cohn A woman could forget herself, staring at pome­gran­ate in the produce section. Juicy red arils, peddled in see-through cups. It’s invol­un­tary. The mouth makes room for a sweet bite of seeds. A woman could remem­ber when pome­gran­ate was hard to come by, a strange…

What do you write? My non-fiction and aut­ofic­tion (short stories) explore the prac­ti­cal fan­tasies of daily life: the per­sonas we create online, fam­i­lies inter­act­ing with demen­tia, and the con­stant­ly mor­ph­ing fan­ta­sia that is the Amer­i­can Dream.    Is there an author or artist who has most profoundly…

POETRY By Lucia Cherciu Temp­ta­tion: I find sandals for me when looking for gifts. Con­fu­sion: I buy two dresses for me when shop­ping for canning jars. Some claim gold has healing prop­er­ties; right, money helps. I research claims about the ben­e­fits of silver. Kissing of icons, silver chalice, silver…

POETRY By Sheila Black The year I spent a month in Denver vis­it­ing my daugh­ter in the eating dis­or­der hos­pi­tal the closest com­pan­ions were the geese who flocked the con­crete islands between the too-wide roads.   Some nights it was only fairy tales I understood:…

POETRY By Eric Abal­a­jon “I used to hang out just outside           the fence of Pearson Inter­na­tion­al, on week­ends with friends,         and bring binoc­u­lars. It became         a bad hobby imme­di­ate­ly after 9–11.”      …

What do you write? Fiction and screen­plays. Is there an author or artist who has most pro­found­ly influ­enced your work? I think my most lasting influ­ence has been R.L. Stein. There’s one Fear Street book where a guy is swim­ming in the ocean and the killer tries to…

DRAMATIC WORK   By KJ Stewart A play­ground. Recess. FOUGLAS (pro­nounced like“Douglas”) kicking wood chips around. CLEMENTINE under a slide pre­tend­ing to be a cat. FOUGLAS throws a wood chip at her. CLEMENTINE: That hurts. FOUGLAS: It’s because I like you. I found a Mouth in the Woods.…