Issue 58: Summer 2022

Fiction
A woman with long dark hair and a dark coat standing on a busy street and smiling at the camera.

The Earthquakes are Coming

“The earthquakes are coming,” Grandmother whispered.

Goldfish Boots

Haydon’s boots complained ever since he injured his leg.

Uncle Samir

The first time I remember meeting my uncle Samir, or Samir Mamoo as I always called him, was in January of 1991, just after Operation Desert Storm began.
Poetry

“A Psalm of David," “Commonwealth," and “The Paper Bridge"

When I, who/ is perishing,/ complain, You/ reply, You can/ perish. True.

mouse

On June 13,

excerpts from tabula rasa

To Love Each Other in Arabic

Love Letters to Lost Souls

Essays

Scenes I Thought I Would Never See Again

I was five or so, standing in a line with my mother for rationed butter and sugar on a sizzling hot summer day.
Interviews

"I want to encounter (and create) work that is telling us how to move through where we are, showing us, provoking us in a way that takes us somewhere new—somewhere more productive, more inhabitable."

“I want a way out, I want to build a new world, I want a roadmap”: An Interview with Sina Queyras

I first encountered Sina Queyras some years ago, through their brilliant poetry collections Lemon Hound and My Ariel, and their equally praised blog, Lemon Hound—which featured contemporary conversations and insightful literary criticism that is still referred to today.
Reviews

Liberating Journeys: An Omnibus Review of Book*Hug Press

Brewer plunges into Suture with a film scene from Eva’s feminist undergrad thesis projected onto a police station wall.

Movement backward in our persistence forward: healing in Conyer Clayton’s But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves

Conyer Clayton’s second full-length, But the sun, and the ships, and the fish, and the waves, is a collection of surrealist, dream-like prose poems.