Monthly Features
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Thousand Oaks is Burning: Non-Fiction by Angelo Antonio Jr.
It had been a while – three years, maybe – since the four of us were together here. Behind the wheel, I struggled with the simple math. Familiarity worked against me, closing time’s negotiable gaps. A sequence put me back in my seat: Chik-fil-a. ARCO. Total Wine. Driving was no longer driving. I saw things...
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Carrion: Fiction by Will Fricker
A drive thru taco sign floods an empty parking lot in a pool of astral moon. A jittery spectral presence after Motel 6 fever dreams, in crumpled chinos, you’ve worn that Black Flag T-shirt for two weeks straight. A Gatorade and a cigarette, furtively you watch headlights on the highway, horizon quivering geometric orbs of...
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Remember & Feel It: Poetry by John Valentine
Remember how you used to catch a fastball right in the sweet spot. That pure, whip-crack sound going home. Or maybe those small birds swept in the eye of a hurricane, riding sunshine and stillness in the carnage. Right place, right time. The absolute focal point, like nirvana, a first kiss,...
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Carrion: Fiction by Will Fricker
A drive thru taco sign floods an empty parking lot in a pool of astral moon. A jittery spectral presence after Motel 6 fever dreams, in crumpled chinos, you’ve worn that Black Flag T-shirt for two weeks straight. A Gatorade and a cigarette, furtively you watch headlights on the highway, horizon quivering geometric orbs of…
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Still Wondering: Non Fiction by Nils Blondon
I need to tell you about the time I found a body. That’s right, a human corpse, hidden neatly by trees and dying bushes on the embankment next to the tracks. It was twenty feet from a residential road, a stones-throw away from where children played street hockey, lying there between the flora where they…
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Remember & Feel It: Poetry by John Valentine
Remember how you used to catch a fastball right in the sweet spot. That pure, whip-crack sound going home. Or maybe those small birds swept in the eye of a hurricane, riding sunshine and stillness in the carnage. Right place, right time. The absolute focal point, like nirvana, a first kiss,…
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Moon eyes & fire smiles: Poetry by Sharon Tracey
Un Mundo —Ángeles Santos (1929); oil on canvas; 290 x 310 cm Tell me where they end, the stars that fire from the sun who chars the world makes corners for its turning— in a Spanish town there was an angel painting a child of nineteen, some say the Spanish Rimbaud— she held a…
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A promise for tomorrow: Fiction by Robert Joe Stout
“I was day dreaming, I wasn’t asleep.” Irais insisted. Antonio laughed, short bursts like hiccups. “Sí, pues. Eyes closed. Snoring—” “I don’t snore!” “I know bet—” A flash of light and triple explosions. Irais turned so quickly she lost her footing and grabbed Antonio’s jacket to keep from falling off the low wall. He pulled…
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At first sight: Poetry by RB Wilson
I saw you through the broken screen door beyond the porch light that flickered with moths and made your opal eyes dance behind fine rusted tulle scarred by careless men Was the music that played almost imperceptibly inside your head, or was it in mine? RB Wilson lives in the Imperial Valley. He…
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The Volcano and the Umbrella: Non Fiction by Marianna Marlowe
There must have been a noise, a rustle perhaps, a snapping of twigs underfoot. Something heard then but now forgotten compelled her to look to her side as they hiked up the path through the forest, she and her best friend and their young redheaded teacher. It was with a sense of surreality, of wrongness,…
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You Are Growing Up So Close Behind Me: Poetry by Heidi Turner
“I’ll get there when I get there,” and if I don’t? I wondered that while we sat by the water those years you still needed to look up to me, the graven image of myself I dreaded and remade until I learned who I was, from a distance: I watched you wander woods I planted,…
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Confidence & Fragility in Womanhood: Two Poems by Sarah Lyn Rogers
The Empress she needs a man who knows his anima who can say what he needs or nothing who can bow to the beast in her, mistress of blood, refuse, and rage who sees her like the pomegranate smooth, round, and rosy housing many jagged facets, tumbling into jewels in her belly as…
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Love Beets Flowers: Fiction by William Cass
Very rare: blue moon, bright Mars. Both rose just after sunset that late May evening. I stayed out in the backyard gazing up into the night sky until they were nearly straight overhead. So vivid, they appeared to tremble. Astronomers called their alignment “in opposition”. That seemed apropos; my ex-wife had moved out earlier that…
