ISSUES | spring 2026

The Cost of Living    The rise in cost of living throughout much of the world is a current concern for good reasons, though the value of money in the United…    read more

Mae West delighted in making myths about her life and career. She told several versions of what inspired her to write Sex, the Broadway play that made her famous after she toiled for decades as a minor performer in vaudeville. The core of the story went like this: one evening on the Manhattan waterfront, she saw a young woman with frizzy bottle-blond hair, rumpled clothes, and an expensive plumed hat “entertaining” two sailors.

Flight    Jim left his wife late that spring and drove to my mother’s house. He arrived in the afternoon, his yellow Volkswagen Beetle spilling over with his prized record collection,…    read more

Anything to Declare?  Only that I woke up today with the urge to commit violence, political violence, the vain but not wholly ahistorical thought it might fix something, obviously not myself but…    read more

Safe Haven for Monsters  Deep beneath the waters of Lake Champlain is a graveyard of shipwrecks, accessible only to scuba divers zealous enough to brave the cold temperatures and low visibility.…    read more

Stillness in Motion   Haruki tore ahead, weaving through picnic blankets and clusters of tourists angling their phones skyward.  “Wait, Haruki!” I stumbled after him, past a woman adjusting her kimono…    read more

Love Poem for Anaximander of Miletus  I whisper into your ear you are an invisible god this thing you do asleep is the world these words from your frozen mouth…    read more

Cicada     It was Shizuka’s narrow bedroom window, plastic blinds obscuring the murky night outside, that led me to say that what I remembered most from our school days ten years ago…    read more

When Picture Rolls Adjust Horizontal Hold  One block west of the legendary Chelsea Hotel, the Allerton Annex had none of its charm. The façade of the five-story building was painted a melancholy gray, the doors darker still. Inside the dingy lobby, dusty bulbs cast a yellow glow on peeling wallpaper. A small office was visible through a window where an uninterested old…    read more

Instructions Withheld from a Nursing School Syllabus  Start training your bladder now. Never get caught with your pants around your ankles when a patient is crumping. Learn your ABCs: airway,…    read more

Blood  A few days after the blood drive, Lewis received his donor card in the mail and learned his blood type was O.   “I’m type A,” Cecelia said, looking over his shoulder.   “Of course you are,” Lewis thought of saying, but instead smiled flatly and said nothing.  Later, after Cecelia’d gone to bed, and unable to sleep himself, he decided to look up their daughter’s blood type. A parent should know these things. He found her birth certificate easily—Cecelia was nothing if not organized; there was a file labeled ‘Matilde’ in the cabinet—and saw it was B.  Lewis blanched. He recalled the genetic prediction charts in Biology 101—they had a…    read more

Solving for Death   I turn away when the nurse jabs my husband with a needle to draw his blood. She refers to him as my father. All she sees is a bald eighty-year-old with congestive heart failure and blood cancer.…    read more

Modigliani: The Pure Bohemian  “Bohemia has nothing and lives from what it has. Hope is its religion, faith in itself its code, charity is all it has for a budget.”  –Balzac   Rosalie,…    read more

“A Supposed Person”: Self, Identity, and the Confessional Question in Three Recent Collections of Poetry      The Sweating Sickness by Rebecca Lehmann. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2025, 96 pp., $20.00 (paperback)  Brutal Companion by Ruben Quesada. Barrow Street, 2024, 94 pp., $18.00 (paperback)  My Heresies by Alina…    read more