Kumar Sen
An Inventory of What Did Not Become
Photo by Callum Royle (@callum_e_royle)
The Museum of Things That Almost Happened
The museum opens only when no one is looking. Inside, glass cases hold the delicate skeletons of moments that nearly existed: the apology that paused on your tongue and then turned into weather, the train you almost boarded, still circling the earth like a polite ghost, the hand you nearly held while fireworks coughed their brief red lungs into the sky. A bored attendant in a grey suit dusts the exhibits with a feather made from someone’s abandoned courage. He will tell you the collection grows every night. There is an entire wing devoted to lives that turned left instead of right—dentists who might have become astronauts, lovers who might have survived Thursday. Somewhere in the back, under a dim bulb that flickers like a tired heartbeat, is the largest artifact: a version of you that did not hesitate.
* * *
Instructions for Surviving Your Own Autopsy
First, remain very still while they begin your autopsy. The doctors appreciate cooperation. The fluorescent lights above you hum like tired hornets trapped inside a jar, and someone is explaining your ribs as if they are a poorly assembled bookshelf. This is the moment when you realize your life has been downgraded to evidence. A man with gentle hands lifts your heart and squints at it the way people inspect fruit at the market, disappointed but not surprised. You want to say that the bruises were mostly accidents: gravity, memory, that one winter when the sky kept falling in thin white apologies. Instead, you lie there politely while they measure the geography of your mistakes. They catalogue everything—the small rusted nails of regret, the stubborn coin of love still lodged in the throat. Outside the building, traffic moves like obedient blood through the city’s arteries. Somewhere a dog howls as if it recognizes you. When they finish, they will sew you back together with thread the color of ordinary days. This is the part no one tells you: the body rises afterward, slightly embarrassed, pockets full of silence, and walks home carrying its own report like a weather forecast that predicts rain forever but somehow still smells like summer.
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Kumar Sen is a mathematician from India pursuing his Master’s degree, who also writes, muses on culture, and collects small wonders. When not bending numbers, he is a musician, composer, amateur magician, and devoted bibliophile, always chasing the kind of strange magic that slips between pages, melodies, and midnight thoughts.
Kathy Nelson
Self Portrait with Ceilings
— after Diane Seuss
I’ve stared at the ceilings of many rooms, my childhood bedroom where shadows lurked beyond the nightlight’s reach, Aunt Winnie’s north room where her quilting frame swung faintly as wind thrashed the windows, the Sistine Chapel of course doesn’t everyone, that motel room where a stain bloomed into a cowboy hat or a butterfly I could never decide which, the roofs of several nylon tents—the Chisos or Wind River mountains—I watched condensation drops rain down one by one waited for sunrise, the bathroom where I soaked my cramps in the hottest water I could stand focusing on a single cracked tile overhead, the hospital room where my mother told me you won’t have to bother with me anymore won’t you be proud then tried to die and the code team yelled her name and pinched her wrists ankles hard and doctors ruled out stroke and still she did not wake up and that one fluorescent tube light flickered on and off on and off.
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Kathy Nelson is a James Dickey Prize winner, MFA graduate of the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, Nevada Arts Council grant recipient, and the author of The Ledger of Mistakes. Read her in About Place Journal, Atlanta Review, Five Points, New Ohio Review, Pedestal Magazine, Tar River Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Verse Daily.
Jenne Knight
Signs
Sometimes, the light flickered. Not always, but enough to unsettle. After all, you lived in a rental, and these things happen. You had just changed the battery in a smoke detector. There was some comfort in these chores, in the mundane, of living somewhere long enough to drain a battery or bulb. But your father had died. Some weeks went by. You still cried in the shower, in the car, so the flicker felt like a sign. You knew that your father believed in something you didn't. You didn't believe in signs. Hope is a funny thing, dangerous. You said you'd replace the bulb once it finally gave out, turned black. But it just kept shining. For weeks, flickering once in a while, never burning out. You kept turning on the switch, tempting it to show itself. You thought of your dad, in some world that wasn't yours. Maybe if you said the right words. Please. Abracadabra. Daddy. Alakazam. But the flickering stopped as suddenly as it began. So you left it alone, figured the bulb would eventually burn out. You returned to your life. Forgot. One year came and went. Then, two. The bulb still burns steady, its light pooling as if nothing had changed. You no longer cry in the shower or the car. You think maybe you imagined it all. That time in your life was all a blur. But your father is still gone. And you are forgetting the sound of his voice. You remind yourself that grief is heavy, hard to carry. You try standing at the mirror and say the words out loud, daring your father to return. You flip the switch and let it burn.
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Jenne Knight writes poetry and nonfiction. Her work appears in, or is forthcoming from, Poetry Northwest, The Rumpus, and The Common, among others. More information is available at jenneknight.com.
Sam Aureli
The Babau
It was an unusual morning. Four brothers up before the sun, the air still blue with sleep. One of us—always the daring one—stood on a chair, reaching for the top of the tall dresser. The others whispered, leave it be, leave it be, as if saying it softly could keep the world intact. Father’s hunting rifle slept up there, hidden behind the cornice, gleaming like a secret. Why he hid it in a room of children, I never knew. Maybe he trusted fear more than sense. Maybe he wanted us to learn the weight of danger. The chair wobbled. Someone covered their mouth too late. It gave way—a short cry, then silence. We froze. Like prey. Waiting. Listening. Hoping the wild in the next room stayed asleep. Father had worked all night. He needed rest. But it was too late. The scream came first, the kind that split the air, then the thudding steps, the door flung open like judgment. He stood there in his tighty whities, belt in hand, eyes still drunk on exhaustion and fury. We scattered inside ourselves. I climbed to the top bunk the way I did everything then—small, quick, unnoticed—pulled the blanket over my head, pretended to dream. The rest you could hear in the pauses between strikes—the begging, the pleading, the human sound of fear rehearsed too many times. I waited for quiet, for the kind of silence that follows storms. When mom finally called us to breakfast, her voice was calm, as if calm could erase it. We sat at the table. The air thick with toast and something unspoken. I was the last to sit. My brothers watched me, hard and unblinking.
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Sam Aureli is a design and construction professional, originally from Italy, now calling the Boston area home. A first-generation college graduate, he has spent decades immersed in concrete and steel. Poetry is what truly feeds his soul these days. His work has appeared in The Atlanta Review, West Trade Review, Chestnut Review, and other literary journals.
Caroline Barnes
Witness
Can
We were on a highway. I don’t remember where we were going or coming from. It was dark outside and lights on the console warmed the cab, jazz played softly, jazz loved by someone I loved in the driver’s seat, after so many years on my own, when we saw something just ahead along the shoulder — a can moving on its own, the metal flashing in our headlights — and as we got closer we saw this can was over the head of an animal loping alongside us, a raccoon maybe, toward somewhere it couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, the way we all run blind sometimes, in silence, no markers to warn us we’re off course, and my loved one said there’s nothing we can do and I shook my head as I watched it in the sideview mirror growing smaller, the ringed tail up and waving.
* * *
Second Marriage
When he marries her, she becomes something new to me. She who is not much older than I am. She who could be a sister to me. A friend perhaps. He asks me, why won’t you call her mother? He has given her a pet name. The pet name makes her sound like a child. Aren’t I the favored child, visiting them in their new home on a break from college? I hear her ask him, why do you pay so much attention to her? She thinks I cannot hear her question. His answer makes her angry so she does what a desperate child might do — locks herself in the bathroom. Goes silent, and over time the silence becomes an alarm bell. Then the door pried open, blood on the vanity, blood in the sink. She has cut herself — not too deep but deep enough — so he drives us to his clinic where he stitches up her wrist wounds. She sits quietly, downcast, withdrawn. For the first time I see in her my mother just before she died – her silence, her stare, my father’s silence in return.
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Caroline Barnes has published in Rattle, Rhino, The Baltimore Review, Bellevue Literary Review, American Journal of Poetry, Comstock Review, Dappled Things, The Dodge, Cider Press Review, and (forthcoming) Sheila-Na-Gig. Her poem “I Paint the Heaven of My Sister” appears in Memento: an anthology of poems on grief (Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press, 2025).
Emily R. Daniel
Now My Father’s Gone Again, Gone Like a Lot of Men
I watched my first father die, forgetting in that moment the way his open mouth, spending the last of his breath, used to yell as if it was his only sound. I’d told him I loved him plenty by then, and I told him again once I realized he was already gone. I watched his body placed in a bag, zipper closed over his face, the whole thing lifted like oversized luggage in the Denver airport. Hospice nurses said some loved ones find this part painful, and they were not wrong. It was worse than manipulating his mottled hands to hold mine while we waited for another inhale. He and his body were gone, and my mouth hung like his, trying to breathe what he’d left behind. When my second father knew he was saying his final goodbyes, I told him I would see him in the morning, and it was the first and last time he held my hand. He said thank you for coming, as if he expected I might not. He meant thank you for being easy to part with, thank you for keeping a distance that made it impossible for us to know each other. We said I love you, and I briefly meant it. I loved him on the edge of death—surrendered, fightless, accepting that my mother would make her own decisions now. I loved him for giving her back to me. I loved that he’d be gone by morning.
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Emily R. Daniel's chapbook, Life Line, was selected as a winner of the 2020 Celery City Chapbook Prize. Her poems can be found in The Penn Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Porter House Review, and are forthcoming in The Massachusetts Review, among others. Emily is Poetry Editor for Third Coast Magazine.
Robert Sparrow-Downes
Ossuary
A box in the shed; the only thing at our new house. I didn’t think much about it at first. We were so busy cramming our lawn and garden tools there that I lost sight of it, forgot to take it down from its perch, that high shelf just out of reach. I left it for another day. That day came at a strange time. We’d been going through some things. Differences of opinion. Consequential decisions. Then you broke your wrist. A fall while walking the dog. I wasn’t as helpful as I should’ve been. I didn’t want to be after what had happened. That’s my fault. You decided to spend some time with your parents. How long, to be determined. I didn’t mind the space. In that time, yard work became habitual. It’s all I did. I’d taken time off work. I didn’t tell you this. Time seemed better spent mowing, pruning, trimming, weeding, seeding, watering. The gardens stayed barren. One of those days, I went into the shed to fetch some equipment. I can’t remember what. All so unimportant now. But there was the box, suddenly noticeable again. I stood on the lawnmower, stretched out my arm, pulled it down. A plain brown shoebox. Dusty, odorous. I took it outside, sat down on the back steps. Bones. Rabbit bones, I thought, though I wasn’t sure. I cried. I didn’t want to but had to. I carried the box over to the garden. I already had a shovel there. Tears soiled. I buried the bones next to the tiny shoots of lilies. I thought you should know this.
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Robert Sparrow-Downes graduated with a PhD in English Literature from York University, and he currently teaches at the post-secondary level. His debut novel, Lilac Chaser, is scheduled to be published in the spring of 2027.
Robin Michel
Oliver Plays "The Skye Boat Song" for His Father
Photo by Callum Royle (@callum_e_royle)
for Carl
You and your drowsy husband fill your coffee cups and sit next to one another on the sofa, a makeshift church pew, and peer through the screen to attend your friend’s live-streamed funeral as if peeking between a breach of stones in an ancient church wall or like an orphaned child looking in at someone else’s Christmas dinner. But this is no figgy pudding. It is the celebration of a life too shortly lived. You hear music—small drums, fiddles and pipes playing traditional folk tunes—you watch the English mourners (limited to ten) take their scattered seats. You scan his family members to locate his wife—his widow—and son sitting on the second pew because the front pew is empty and serves as a protective barrier for the speakers who will pay tribute: his mother, his brother, his wife, his son. His brother who looks so much like him cannot console their mother, and she cannot console her ten-year-old grandson. You watch. You turn away. You squeeze your husband’s hand. When it is time for Oliver to play the cello, you wonder where the flute-thin boy gets the strength to raise his trembly bow and bring it across the strings. Built of notes, will the poor boy’s song boat carry his father “over the sea to skye”? How can he leave his beloved, green England? His family members file past his coffin in socially distanced intervals. You watch his parents embrace and shore one another up. After the mourners leave, the streaming continues. A black-gloved young woman with blonde hair falling like a veil wipes down the rows in silence. Church bells peal in the empty sky.
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Robin Michel is the author of Beneath a Strawberry Night Sky (Raven & Wren Press) and Things Will Be Better in Bountiful (Comstock Review). Her poetry appears in Boudin, Gordon Square Review, The MacGuffin, Prime Number, Wordpeace, and elsewhere. She lives, writes, and resists in San Francisco.
Sean Bradley
Grandfather Died
Grandfather died before the ambulance arrived. It’s a fact that as he lay where he fell on the thin carpet that runs along the narrow hallway, while the clock tick-tocked and the apple pie in the oven started to scorch, he asked Grandmother to wait. So she went downstairs to turn off the oven. He saw his opportunity and took it. For years he’d prayed his fear to the good saints asking for a peaceful, easy death. What he did not know, or maybe care to see is that death can never be easy. Just try asking Grandmother to bake one of her apple pies.
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Sean Bradley is a former mathematics professor now working in spiritual care at a retirement center for Catholic women religious.
Jia Yi Ling
The Temple
On my nineteenth birthday, my mother brought me to the temple for worship. Told me it was the way of my grandparents and my grandparents’ grandparents and so it would be the way for us too. I watched as she hauled containers of porcelain cups, oranges, and baijiu into the trunk of the car, ignoring when I told her it wasn’t good to have unnecessary burdens straining her back. Why don’t we go to the temple by the food court like all our neighbours, I asked, it’s closer. That’s not even a legitimate temple, she said, both hands slapping the steering wheel. That’s the problem with believers these days, they start thinking that the Gods should come to us. My mother sped down the highway until gray buildings turned green and lush. Eventually, a statue carved out of gold emerged before me. The Goddess of Mercy. My mother handed me a cup. Baiju overflowed it to the rims. She took a stack of incense, closed her eyes, bowing to the deity three times. This is how you pray, she said. Which really meant this is how you ask for a good life, which really meant this is how to be pure. She placed a new stack of incense into my hands to do the same. But the tip of the incense hardened and fell as I bent my head, burning the back of my hand. I handed her back the wick. If you prayed correctly, she sighed, it wouldn’t have hurt you. I watched as she offered the oranges on the foot of the dais and emptied the cups of wine into the nearby soil. I think we should try the temple closer to the city, I said. God, she said, what will become of you?
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Jia Yi Ling lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, and studies Political Science. In her free time, she enjoys photography and working on her endless poetry drafts.
Christine H. Chen
In the Backyard of My House Where Ah Ma Never Came to Visit
It’s winter in Boston and the sky is gunmetal gray. Crouched in the blinding snow-wrapped garden, I rub tired fingers in the hollow of my aching chest. I wait for a sign that tells me not all is dead in the dead of winter. There’s no cardinal fluttering in the balsam fir, no screeching blue jays, no squirrel bounding off, but icy whiteness searing my eyes, and nothing, nothing to extinguish the burning pain in my heart. I wonder if Ah Ma saw lights flashing in her mind as she expelled her last breath in her cold bed. Here in this spot dug with my frozen fingers I lay her ashes to rest, still waiting, waiting for a sign.
* * *
Truite au bleu
— after Dorothea Tanning’s La Truite au bleu (Poached Trout), 1952
Have I ever told you how stunning you were? You arrived on a bed of butter lettuce and broccoli, your tail curved around a juicy baked tomato and a lemon wedge, your indigo blue body perched on a China platter as if still meandering from the river towards me, your plump lips half-parted. You stared at me with your pearly white eyes, untamed. How did such a beautiful thing of nature appear on my table? My knife and fork trembled in my hands. My breath, wispy, my head filled with smoke, and I hung between life and dream.
My stomach grumbled. I licked my parched lips, thinking of the taste of your sweet flesh on my tongue, the aftertaste of wanting more of you. I shuddered at the thought of you being plunged to death in boiling water, then showered with red wine vinegar, turning scales to sparkle blue, your audience mesmerized. I cast down my eyes in shame and guilt. I stabbed the tomato; bloody juice spattered the lemon wedge. I chewed lettuce and broccoli, asked for a potato to fill my belly. A fly buzzed around your head. I warded it off with a flick of my fingers. I stole you away, the white tablecloth your shroud, and I buried you deep in my memory, still as limpid as the Vésubie River where you used to thrive, where I’m standing now, watching the water rushing, uncaged and wild.
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Christine H. Chen was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Madagascar before settling in Boston, where she worked as a research chemist. Her fiction has appeared in CRAFT, SmokeLong Quarterly, Time and Space Magazine, and anthologized in Best Microfiction, Best Small Fictions, and other collections and journals. Read more at christinehchen.com.
Jordyn Damato
White Space
— after Naomi Shihab Nye
I think there is something on my head. I’m afraid to reach up there and check. It feels heavy and surrounding, like how the hills must feel when the sun is nearly set, or a child wearing a big hat for the first time, or a parent wearing their child as a sort of hat, resting on their shoulders, tiny palms dancing on skull. Though I am no parent, and certainly no sun. I know there is something missing in me, around me, the same way I know I have gained something new. It is not a fair trade. There is a poem I read once and never understood. It is called “I Still Have Everything You Gave Me” and it is only seven lines. I understand it now. I wish I didn’t, but I do. Maybe those lines are on my head. Maybe I moved into the white space. Maybe that’s all there is now. Do you hear me when I say that I am afraid?
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Jordyn Damato is a writer and lover from Michigan. She is currently an MFA Fiction Candidate at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio where she is the Fiction Editor for OxMag. Her work appears in Okay Donkey, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Bullshit Lit, fifth wheel press, trampset, and elsewhere.
John Amen
Nano
for Amy Winehouse
The needle danced on the jukebox. Cranes appeared in the backyard. Racecars revved in the cul de sac. This was the kind of carnival that everyone in the Lower Burrows envied. How could a girl with that voice end up fetal on her bathroom floor? — burn marks streaking her skin like a metal rash. There were few days in the light, really. Even jazz, with its mighty sails, foundered in the bay, never cut the open sea. Melody was her diving bell was her shark cage was her weight belt. She held her breath, the same hand that offered her the sword now slapping her on the forehead. How could anyone be expected to see death amidst that bounty? A chainsaw roared in the next room, a snake slithered down her throat. Later, she crawled to the shore, burying her feet in warm sand. The greatest song ever written crested in her rib cage, disappeared. Those mythic piers, her mother used to write about them, burned in the distance, flames ripping the sky.
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John Amen was the recipient of the 2021 Jack Grapes Poetry Prize and the 2024 Susan Laughter Myers Fellowship. His work has appeared recently in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Daily, American Literary Review, and Tupelo Quarterly. His latest collection, Dark Souvenirs, was released by NYQ Books in 2024.
Gerri Brightwell
Boulevard du Temple, Paris, 1838
Daguerre with his apparatus must have stood at a high window and tilted the whole thing down towards the street. Ten minutes with his pocket-watch warm in his hand, ten minutes for the plate to catch it all: the carriages rumbling between the trees, the overloaded wagons, the costermongers with their carts, the dog trailing a nursemaid with a crying child in her arms.
In the chemical stench of his darkroom, the ghost of the street reappears. Who’d he have told of his astonishment? The street is deserted except for the trees growing from their pooled shadows and, where the road turns, a solitary man with his foot up on a box, standing perfectly still while his boot is polished.
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Gerri Brightwell's fourth novel, Turnback Ridge (Torrey House Press), was a finalist for the 2022 Foreword Indies Award (adult thriller and suspense). Her short work has appeared in many venues, including The Best American Mystery Stories 2017, Alaska Quarterly Review, Raritan: A Quarterly Review, and Copper Nickel.
Robert John Miller
When I Heard the Pulitzer Prize Winner
The Pulitzer Prize winner makes a point to note that being nominated is not, especially, an honor, that anyone can be nominated, that there are thousands of annual nominations. To make sure everyone knows he is special, that he is a special person who knows the right kind of people and he meets them the right kind of way, the Pulitzer Prize winner makes a point to note that he happened to have known someone on the Pulitzer Prize selection committee. The Pulitzer Prize winner notes the pool of finalists as if to say, Look who I beat. The Pulitzer Prize winner’s students learn they are special, too, for knowing the Pulitzer Prize winner, but they are deficient, because they have not won a Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer Prize winner teaches like this: He reads your work to you, he stops when he gets bored, and he generously volunteers how you went wrong. The Pulitzer Prize winner is the only one allowed to talk, because only the Pulitzer Prize winner has won a Pulitzer Prize. The Pulitzer Prize winner wants you to know how generous he is. Mostly, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s students learn they do not have Pulitzer Prize-winning thoughts, that they do not yearn enough for a Pulitzer Prize. Mostly, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s students stop writing.
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Robert John Miller's work is new, or forthcoming, in Bending Genres, The Bulb Region, Scaffold, and elsewhere, and is online at robertjohnmiller.com.
Anja Lazar
About the Restoration
of Nike of Samothrace
Photo by Shonagon
She wintered through centuries deep in the Samothracean soil, nested amongst the roots of old olive trees, until one day the excavators unearthed her skilfully defined marble torso, broken and divine. In May 1863, the French consul neatly packed the blocks of Nike’s body into tight coffin-like boxes and shipped them to Paris for an inspection by the curator at Louvre. Some parts he handled quickly, like her legs, covered with chiton; others he touched and retouched, like her breasts and her stomach, so that they looked almost translucent. Piece by piece he assembled a body—her body. Though some essential parts were missing: the head, arms and feet; the crux, he thought, were her wings, refusing to conform to her flightless figure. It was the third French man who resolved this affair, using the grey blocks of her battleship’s nose as an anchor, sunk to affirm her fragmented form atop of Daru staircase. Or, as these men liked to phrase it: she was erected—the wind leaving her sails as she weathers through time in the eye of the light that still warms the stump of her neck like a pedestal made for a bird—perhaps the crow whose morning cry calls on her before she must go tend the crowds.
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Anja Lazar (she/her) lives in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, and has previously published poetry in Expanded Field. Her writing ponders the human condition, the importance of courage, and the search for compassion.
Michelle Bitting
When They Feared I Might Be a Child Prodigy, They Sent Me Away to the Convent School
~Beryl, Channel Islands, 1890
The stage is a box I live to fill. Mama understands this. She sings inside one herself, making money slinging marvelous arias from London to Gaie Paree. Still, she and Papa stuffed my knickers, boots, and buckles into a suitcase and fastened the strap. I felt myself shoved inside the airless cave of it (I might as well have been) sent like that to the convent school across the sea on a tiny island far from England. So I’d forget the box of wonders we call the theater with its lights and props and scenery that make what’s dead on paper come to life. The nuns at the school make me sit in another kind of box made of wood where I confess my sins, though Mama always says I am the purest innocent cheekiest soul she’s ever encountered. What am I supposed to say? To the shadow shape on the other side of the mahogany curtain with holes punched through? Where dimmed light flickers when the beast we never see shifts back and forth in his cassock, clearing his throat through clouds of whiskey and cigarette-tinged breathing? I’ve sensed that smell on stagehands back home. But they were fun and believed in another kind of godly magic. Here, we’re eternally damp and it reeks of mildew and soiled drawers. I make up secrets to keep the shadow man pleased while my right eye tracks termites trawling the box’s rotting wood, their lucent wings folded, on hold for future flight. Their assiduous little mouths eating away at the seams.
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Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Individual Master Artist Project grantee and is the author of seven poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles, winner of the Wilder Prize. She won the 2025 Banyan Review Poetry Prize. Bitting is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.
Bill Miller
Soundproof
A young child in her classroom struggles because words made of abstract symbols and numbers made of abstract symbols do not travel the predictable paths in her mind, that other kids interpret as easily as riding downhill on bicycles while she pedals in first gear, slowly, uphill, wondering at her own slowness amidst such speed. Outside, she sees twenty shades of green in the grassy playing fields that other children tear up blindly. She sees infinity in the blueness of the sky. Right now she is sitting in a soundproof room, headphones on, in darkness, being analyzed for her deficiencies.
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Bill Miller lives in Massachusetts. He has lived and worked in many places and writes about endurance, doubt, and what remains when explanation runs out.
Lou Storey
Saturday Shopping
Costco is huge. It swallows us up, two old men in one gulp. I hate shopping, so pretending to be lost in a jungle livens things up. The people pushing carts are wild creatures. “Stop doing that,” Steve says. I told him about what I do here, big mistake, so now when he sees me looking wide-eyed he knows I see monkeys, giraffes and elephants. “Read the list,” he says, hoping to snap me back to normal. My job is to push the cart; it keeps me anchored. Big places scare me. Driving scares me. Everything scares me. Things I imagine can be controlled. In 1963 Dad woke me up. “We’re going on an adventure in Lady," he says. Lady is his canoe. I’m ten, and this is the first time he’s even wanted to include me. We drive forever in the car, get to a wide place off the road near the Delaware river. “Get in.” I do. He shoves me off. I wait to see how he’s going to get into the canoe, but instead I just drift beyond view. I hear the car tires spit gravel away. I can’t swim. Two days on the water, which tastes terrible, eventually floats to Washington’s Crossing Bridge. The canoe parks itself into a gully. I find an officer in a small booth and use the phone to call dad. “Come get me.” He sounds surprised. The aisles of Costco are like long valleys with mountains of consumer dreams piled high up to a cloudless ceiling so high I imagine I am seeing birds. “Those are real birds,” Steve says. He knows me like a book. Our cart piles up higher and higher. I force myself to look at the people. Moms in curlers, Dads with tattoos. Small, medium, large, extra large. The occasional singles. I wonder, do people know we are a gay couple? Do they go to a church that wants to kill us? “Stop thinking that,” Steve says, “just push the cart, we are almost done” and then I wonder, is he even real?
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Lou Storey has published in The New Yorker, New York Times, Blue Mountain Literary Review, and others. He’s a 2024 finalist Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, a Flannery O’Connor Peacock Guild member, and a featured artist in the documentary film, The Creative Imperative. His novel, The Big Bad Blockbusters, will be published in 2026 by Legacy Book Press.
Michelle Geoga
Consideration
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Michelle Geoga
United States of America born 1963
This is the Way 2022
Harbert, Michigan, United States of America
Mixed media on paper: acrylic, silkscreen, ink
30 x 22
Layers
We walk down Grand toward Mercer, past construction workers at Greene, standing around, joking over a pit of endless depths at the corner. I take a moment to peer down into the layer after layer, stone and tile and timber, New York’s archeology plunging far below the sidewalks. The workmen joke and laugh in spite of working on a holiday. I’m happy too, trailing behind my daughter and granddaughter, watching them walk hand-in-hand, after breakfast out. The light glides between the SoHo buildings, falls on my daughter’s long fair curls and my granddaughter’s shiny straight hair. I see them older then, have a vision, an archeology in reverse, my daughter at my age, my granddaughter a willowy teenager taller than my daughter, as she is to me now, and in that zoom forward brought about by the light and tilt of my daughter’s shoulder, I see how it is.
* * *
Invisible
We walk on the road instead of the woods on account of the mud after the sudden thaw and Dagwood keeps turning around and looking behind us over and over again and I turn around a few times too, but there is nobody behind us, but then again maybe there is, maybe since I’ve been thinking about all my dead folk and especially all the dead dogs, my friend’s and then my own, maybe they’re following us and Dagwood can see them. We have no idea of the magical perceptions of dogs, given the ones we know they have, like knowing when you’re sad or the cut on your knee is infected or when you’ve been trucking with strange dogs away from home. These are clerestory thoughts, running through my head, entering through tiny windows and they light things up indirectly on cloudy days like these and you can’t tell where the light is coming from. These thoughts follow me, too, so maybe it’s not dead people at all. Maybe the road ahead is littered with sparky, sharp things that pop into our heads in cloudy light, trying to say something.
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Michelle Geoga is a writer and artist living in Southwest Michigan. She makes things with words and paint. She has an MFA in words and a BFA in paint from the School of the Art Institute. See more of her words and art at michellegeoga.com.
Albert Hwang
a cappella
In a cab in Kaohsiung, the driver heard my dad’s accent and switched from Mandarin to Taigi. He asked about us. Mother, Taiwan, America, home, funeral — I watched as my dad tried to traverse an old country. The driver said something about a song and began to sing. A cappella. Just his voice, lonely in the air. And the moped horns. When he finished, my dad said buē-phái which I'd never heard him say before. It means "pretty good." Dad told me the driver wrote that song himself. He didn't understand all the lyrics (his tongue was old in the old country). But it was about love and distance, and it was sad. A cappella. We think this means without instruments. Actually it means, "in the style of a chapel." Taigi has always had this sound to me. Echoing and warm, muffled and distant, sacred.
-U-
Albert Hwang is a Taiwanese American poet from Illinois. His work explores the loss and recovery of language in the Asian American experience. He is a 2004 James B. Reston Gold Key Award winner (Scholastic Arts & Writing), and his poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Inscape, Longmeadow Literary, and other journals.
Scott Burau
Provincetown, minus
You came for summer and stayed for subtraction. June peeled itself down to March like layers of old paint under a heat gun, and what's left is the color of bone, salt-scoured, the color of a question you forgot you asked. The blizzard dropped seventeen inches and darkness came at four, which is a joke the sun tells every day and you're the only one left to hear it. The radio tower whispered to you, not in a romantic way, but in the way a mouth wants teeth. You gave it your voice because the solitude made you generous and stupid and brave in ways that only make sense when the town empties itself like pockets turned inside out. Painting is what happens when your hands get tired of being passengers. They know about prussian blue and the particular gray of 4pm in February now. They know how to make a line that shivers. The solitude wasn't quiet. It was the loudest thing you ever lived inside, had a voice like frozen harbor water, dark and constant. Winter loneliness is clean. It has good posture. It shows up on time. You're still here, which means the afternoon light is yours now. The darkness too. Provincetown in winter is a church for people who don't believe in churches. You kneel anyway. You put your mouth against the microphone. You dip your brush. You count the hours of darkness like rosary beads, each one a small yes, each one a light going out so another light can see.
-U-
Scott Burau is a writer and artist living between Provincetown, Massachusetts, and Key West, Florida. His work is forthcoming in Full Mood and fourteen poems.
Joy Yin
Aubade with Endless Road Trip
Every time we do this, we brush hands with another life almost-lived. The highway smearing past us — hundreds of miles, compressed into a mirage of a black Honda chasing an impossible horizon. Inside, our bodies are jammed into each other, elbows harpooning ribs. Outside, the world is in its own trance of fluid motion, sliding by without friction. Strip malls thin into farmland, farmland burns into red dust. The sky hovers just ahead of us, refusing to be surpassed. My forehead against the cold glass, the frost stitching itself to the shape of everything I cannot have. No matter how far we drive, the distance remains constant. To the hand I will never find. To the mouth I will never enter.
-U-
Joy Yin is a poet. Her works are published, or forthcoming, in Pen&Quill, Apprentice Writer, BRAWL Lit, Milk Candy Review, and more. Joy is also the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Lacuna Vox, a youth literary magazine. She hopes her words can inspire you to create something new.
Hillary Lightstone
Lights Out
In the moment after your car leaves the road and before you hit the large tree that’s suddenly in front of you, you think not of your wife, soon to be woken by a ringing phone that she’ll assume is you, calling to apologize for the things you said. You don’t think about your daughter, either, and certainly not about the faceless man somewhere who will one day become her stepfather. As time elongates, a dark corridor with nothing at its end, you are age six, climbing the jungle gym at recess. Your body propels itself upward; your hand is in the air, already reaching for the next metal bar when you see the bee upon it. It’s not the pain of the sting you remember most clearly but the certainty of knowing that it would happen, that it was too late to stop your hand from coming down on the bee. For obvious reasons, this is relevant to your present circumstances. But now you are also the bee, looking up at a hand on its downward trajectory, obscuring the sun. Is there time for anger, fear, regret? Or does a bee think only of self-preservation? It had its stinger, of course, and did what it could to save itself. You didn’t even put your seatbelt on, you realize, as you find yourself soaring forward into buzzing blackness.
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Hillary Lightstone lives in Boston with one human, two cats, and too many houseplants. She was once described with devastating accuracy as "hardheaded but enthusiastic” in an email accidentally forwarded to her.
Kathleen McGookey
Ode to My Daughter Giving an Elephant a Bath
Right now in Thailand, in Chiang Mai, ankle deep in a muddy river, Lucy scrubs the elephant’s head with a wood brush, its trunk an elegant wet curl near her leg. Her friend Anna scoops up river water with a basket, like the mama elephant might. Slick and dark, half kneeling, the elephant’s as tall as their chins. He’s just a baby, eight years old, boi Boone whose small tusks are the length of their hands. Whose funny brown fuzz on his head feels like peach fuzz, if the peach weighed two thousand pounds. Whose wrinkled knees look a hundred years old. Whose eyelashes, she texts, are LONG! She sends a series of pictures so I can imagine the ride on the elephant’s back to the river, boi Boone opening his mouth to eat bananas from her hand, the wet smell of elephant. His ears are small but still as big as rhubarb leaves, bigger than the biggest lily pads I’ve ever seen, and he keeps flapping them during his bath, Lucy says, to show that he’s happy, a massive happiness, a happiness so vast it reaches across three thousand miles.
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Kathleen McGookey's latest books are Cloud Reports (Celery City Chapbooks) and Paper Sky (Press 53). Her work has appeared recently in Anacapa Review, Dunes Review, Epoch, flash glass, New World Writing Quarterly, and Florida Review.
Elle Estérre
River Refuge
We sat in a half moon — three girls with thighs stained in the grey, silty sand — absorbing the hot pressure of the August sky. Our bare skin was stripped of shame. Our souls, which hopelessly fingered the knotted grass of homegrown harm — tears of our parents, salivating screams, liquorous sanctum — put down their mess, and braided anew the smells of clay and cottonwood, the softness of freshwater, and the mush of slick logs drifting downstream. The breezes, carried the sound of our voices as we sang the setting sun to sleep. It was as if, up through the silt, reached the nursing palms of Mother; and remembering our ginger reign, we honored her in harmony. As crickets hummed under the blue rug of twilight each evening, we tiptoed across the cool sand and meandered back between the trees. When we sheltered our summer at the river, I could touch peace, I could sew a song.
-U-
Elle Estérre is a multidisciplinary artist and poet. She has six years of experience in communications roles, and over a decade of experience as a poetry hobbyist. Elle is inspired by the natural world, rejuvenation, absurdity, death and our anthropic relationship to life and to one another.
Ian Willey
The Waters Subside
As the water rises, E and Y make addition after addition to their home, building it upward. They have no idea how tall their house has become, but it must be a tower by now. They don’t mind the work; there’s no time to become bored, never any need to rearrange furniture. Then, suddenly, the water begins to subside. Now they can see how high they are, and their work changes to dismantling their house, one addition at a time. As their tower collapses, they move backwards in time. This was their home when they said goodbye to their son at the airport. This was their home when they received the diagnosis. This was their home when a baby slept between them. At last, they reach the bottom; a window looks out upon a tidy lawn and a sleepy street. This was their first home, back in the stormy days. There are still bits of china on the floor, macroplastics, the odd shark tooth. Then they notice the door. Opening it, they find a flight of stairs leading down. Neither remembers having a basement. They look at each other, strangers again. From down the stairs comes a sound like the sighing of the sea.
-U-
Ian Willey is an Ohioan teaching and writing in Kagawa, Japan. His writing has been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net prizes as well as the Best Microfiction anthology.
David Henson
You Became a Cloud
One day your hair was frizzy. At least that’s what you said. I guess, back then, I wasn’t paying attention. The first thing I noticed was that your pupils and irises seemed to blend. You said you’d wondered why I looked blurry. I said your eyes were beautiful as always, but I wondered what was happening behind them. Weekends freed us. Sometimes we’d dance in the kitchen as we waited three minutes. We’d pretend there were judges. One Sunday, when we performed a lift to impress them, I suggested you have an extra helping. You said you’d try, but your appetite was changing. You expressed a craving for morning dew. I joked about eating grass, but you didn’t smile. At least I don’t think you did. I could no longer see the outline of your lips. You loved to prepare soup. Not to eat, but to watch the steam. You were taller than me. You’d never been before. I saw your feet weren’t touching the floor. When you said you couldn’t hide it any longer, your voice was faint and moist. Your edges became wispy, imagined. My touch sank in. Yours enveloped. That evening I walked through you. You didn’t say a word. I don’t know if you couldn't or didn’t want to. The next morning when I awoke, you were touching all limits of the room. Feeling my way, I opened the window, watched you drift out, and stared at the cloud shaped like you. Until it wasn’t.
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David Henson and his wife reside in Illinois, USA. His work has been selected for Best Microfictions 2025, has been nominated for multiple Pushcart prizes, and has appeared in various journals. His X handle is @annalou8. His website is writings217.wordpress.com.
Kelly Murashige
The Celestial Sea
I know two boys and love them both, though I can’t be with them. One lives for water. Slips through my fingers. I keep trying to hold on. The deeper I dive, the less I breathe; I swim on anyhow. The other loves space, starry-eyed. His feet don’t touch the ground. When we speak, our dialogue is vast and nebulous. I worry if I drift too close, I’ll lose myself in him.
I stand between them, terrestrial. One day, I will be gone. Dust in the sky. Soot in the sea. Then they’ll have all of me.
-U-
Kelly Murashige was born and raised in Hawaiʻi, and is the author of the award-winning YA novel, The Lost Souls of Benzaiten, as well as The Yomigaeri Tunnel, which received a star from Publishers Weekly. Her work has been nominated for Best Small Fictions.
John Bradley
Antitoxin Incantation
The sky appearing gray-gone-blue, blue-gone-gray. The turtle’s heart at the bottom of the river, the river flowing through each passageway in the turtle’s heart. The mouth surrounding the trees and the clouds, trees and the clouds leaking out of the eyes. The right hand washing the left, the left dirtying the right. The sparrow spinning out a song that lodges in the twenty-eight bones of the foot, each of the twenty-eight bones now part-sparrow, part-thorn. The spine asking for its birth certificate and passport, the spine’s roots sinking further into the soil below the parking lot. The man in the garage sleeping standing up, the woman in the wheat field sleeping on a quilt hovering above the wavering wheat. Breathing ruptured air, air breathing fire, fire breathing water, water breathing earth, earth breathing air. The angel strolling by with a crate of onions on their head, the onions reeling with the sway of the angel. The left hand washing the right, the right dirtying the left. The revolver made of baked clay firing, on a sunny morning, a rainy afternoon, baked clay bullets, the bullets recalling the taste of bread still warm from the oven. You, sitting in a chair, standing above a chair, lying under a chair, listening to the sound of blood swirling through flesh, repeating a clutch of words that keep dissolving and undissolving: Air breathing fire, fire breathing water, water breathing earth, earth breathing air.
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John Bradley's most recent book is As Blood Is the Fruit of the Heart: A Book of Spells (Dos Madres Press, 2025). His chapbook, Planetary Sway: Aphorisms for the Everyday Emergency, is forthcoming from Bottlecap Press.
Unbroken is a quarterly online journal that seeks to showcase prose poems and poetic prose, both from established and emerging voices. We desire to give the block, the paragraph, the unlineated prose, a new place to play.
Unbroken is edited by Ken Chau, Dale Wisely, Katherine DiBella Seluja, Tom Fugalli, and Tina Carlson.
Roo Black is founding editor emeritus. Our car (new and used) price researcher is Dr. Boyd Razor, Ph.D., and he concluded they "cost a whole lot of dang money, y'all". Our Ambidextrous Bloodhound Press art gallery curator is Chen Kau, who specializes in art gallery exhibition labels. His current favourite songs are Beck's "Lonesome Tears" and "Lost Cause" from Sea Change (2002). He is currently reading 33 1/3: My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (2007) by Mike McGonigal, Romulus, My Father (1998) by Raimon Gaita, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) by George Orwell.
Our thanks to the contributors to this issue and all who submitted their work.
Michelle Geoga
United States of America born 1963
Which Horizon 2025-26
Harbert, Michigan, United States of America
Mixed media on paper: acrylic, mounted on panel
30 x 22