ISSUES | fall 2025

Under the Influence  Much of this issue concerns altered states of consciousness caused by illness, personal struggles, and drugs. In written world history, the dominant mood-altering drug has been alcohol.…    read more

New Skin for the Old Ceremony     It wasn’t supposed to go this way. He wasn’t supposed to be balanced on the bumper of a U-Haul, clinging to its rusted handles, praying that the…    read more

Hopenot  For workshop that night, one of Walter Hannick’s students submitted a story in which a creative writing instructor named Walter Hopenot committed suicide. Or possibly just died. There was some ambiguity in the last paragraphs about what…    read more

At the Ruins of Miami Beach  1. The surprise, in retrospect, is not the city’s vanishing but its ever-having-been, the unlikely dredging-up from salt muck and blade-sharp undergrowth of something with…    read more

Wegener and I    Over the course of six months, after five decades of unremarkable health, I was diagnosed in rapid succession with whooping cough, pulmonary E. coli, and a rare autoimmune disorder formerly named for a Nazi. The Nazi, Friedrich Wegener, had characterized…    read more

Dede  4:15 p.m.—Cannonball, Mission Beach. Rush hour all along 8 West and Mission Bay Drive. Growly pickups with tattooed Mex guys. BMWs with white bros in wraparound shades. Not to mention all the…    read more

November 2024 Shhh, even the moon sometimes betrays us. We tried. We woke each day to a sliver of light that widened & warmed us as the day swelled &…    read more

Believe Me  She was a miracle in a tall brown bottle. She cured consumption, pneumonia, bronchitis, coughs, colds, asthma, pleurisy, malaria, alcoholism, low fevers, and stomach troubles. Invaluable for overworked, worried men and fagged-out, nervous women,…    read more

Notes on Rowing   The little engine that—     The can-do spirit of America   —could    The plot of every ugly duckling/Cinderella/longshot/ragtag/no-chances sports-team movie. Ending in triumph.  No one ever talks about the would-be athlete who…    read more

King of the Jungle  It was dark still when Harry woke. He’d slept badly because of the rains—a heavy storm with lightning and thunderclap so loud it had rattled the windows. Tatu, the three-legged mongrel,…    read more

Copper Falls Far down valley the pale red fireweed blooms. Tamaracks bend in the saddle of Buckskin, the bracken keeps touching my hand. Glaciers, avalanche shoots in the alder, deadfall building the blueberry…    read more

Guise Bay  The tide is out. It’s windy. My brain is fuzz. Two ravens are eating something dead that washed up overnight a few yards away from my tent. Or rather, it looks…    read more

Marlene Dietrich: Image Maker   I dress for the image. Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men. If I dressed for myself, I wouldn’t be bothered at all. Clothes bore…    read more

How to Nest an Anthology: Four Short Story Collections from 2024    Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil by Ananda Lima. Tor, 2024, 192 pp., $24.99 (hardcover).  Horse Show by Jess Bowers. Santa Fe Writers Project, 2024, 156 pp., $15.00 (paperback).   Good Night, Sleep Tight by Brian…    read more

Behind the Bacchanal: The Loneliness of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec    I will always be a thoroughbred hitched up to a rubbish cart.  –Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec  During his early years in…    read more