BY ALICIA TURNER   “the dead / borrow so little from / the past / as if they were alive.” A Little White Shadow — Mary Ruefle   Shadow Work (on Checking my Dead Mother’s Horoscope) It’s a Tuesday morning. I am scrolling through an online obituary guestbook to relive my mother’s life. She’s immortalized on the top of the page — the photo a scanned copy of a Polaroid from a throwaway camera that I once begged her to develop. She’s wearing a solid white t-shirt — one that she changed out of just moments after the photo was taken, in fear of spilling something on it. I always rememb ..read more

By Aimée Keeble After Life When I die, I'm reunited with my parents for thousands of years. I look exactly like I did at twelve and my mom looks thirty-five which makes her happy. My dad is kind of a blur between thirty-seven and eighty. The cocker spaniel is back and so is the cat that ate my hamster. But he's outside because he was always outside. We have a great time, all four of us. There are always half-fizzy two liters of 7Up in the fridge and I wonder if there is any significance to this. We play board games a lot, especially Splat which I think disappeared from retail sometime in the ..read more

By Melissa Pleckham The Dark Lull Nothing’s ever completely dead. In the 1971 film Let’s Scare Jessica to Death — a film so slow, so subtle that one hesitates to call it a horror film, let alone a vampire film, although that’s exactly what it is — this line is uttered by the pale, red-haired woman whom the titular Jessica is surprised to find squatting in the farmhouse she’s recently acquired with her husband and friend. The trio have just crossed the fog-veiled Connecticut countryside in a black hearse with the word “LOVE” scrawled in crimson on its door; Jessica, fragile as fine china afte ..read more

BY MARIANA LOUIS Candy Corn Saturdays My mother had a name for those rare autumn days. The days when you’d shuffle into the car in the gray of morning, shivering in your fall jacket as the trees flickered by, getting progressively golder, browner, redder, as you flew down the Grand Central Parkway toward the eastern coast. The days when the sun slowly pushed through the celestial gauze and opened up in easy yellow ripples of early afternoon that made you tear off your jacket and cast it away onto the car floor. The days when your braid would come undone strand by strand as you cranked down t ..read more

BY ISA GUZMAN A Visit to El Cementerio Viejo for Titi Paula Before the trip, I drew the Ten of Swords. It was the first time going back to La Isla for close to ten years. The first time I would be there as a woman. The last time I was on the island, I was saying my goodbyes to Titi. It has been years, but it was too difficult to imagine the island without her. It wasn't possible to acknowledge it. In my mind, I could still envision her living her life at her house in Ceiba Sur. Feeding the stray chickens, or dogs, or people with whatever she had left in her small kitchen. There was no other ..read more

By Laura Andrea Peak Hurricane Season Fall eeks into the tropics during sunset. Six in the afternoon beats its way inside through the blades of the box fan on my bedroom window. It’s still too hot to rip apart childhood novels and high school textbooks in a newfound passion for collage. It will be until at least late November. The poetry will have to find itself, black out itself.  I don’t remember locking the bedroom door. A habit stuck in a cycle of breaking and reforming, a specter onto itself. It’s the only way to assure the stillness promised by autumn. Hurricane season is entering ..read more

By Ruth Nakamura A Child of Air A large part of me connects to earth. I am solid ground, cannot swim well, though I enjoy being in gentle shallow water. I am rounder, heavier, curvier. Give me bread, wheat-stalks of the earth, ground and transformed, fluffy, give me a few slices of buttered bread, French bread from the market, oven bread from the Pueblos, let me use it to mop up red chile ladled atop over-easy eggs as a meal, mini harvest, and I am happy.  But I am also a child of air. Give me the moon in a jar, an imaginative work of art or story, let me wallow, introverted, in creative ..read more

BY CATHERINE KYLE Trouble I dreamt I was a tree, deep in a forest. My roots were wound around a boulder covered with moss and needles I had shed. A voice in the dream said, “See—you’ve become so accustomed to this pain, you’ve grown yourself around it.”  Even then, my roots did not let the boulder go. Even then, they clung to it like a precious creature sheltered, a satchel held close to the chest. * I do not know how to speak about this. I do not know the word for watching someone beloved become, voluntarily and involuntarily, swallowed by a garment they put on. I do not know the cry to ..read more

By Nikki Reimer I Have The Cat Moving day brought an explosion of ladybugs. They were all over our belongings stacked on the front lawn, crawling on the desk, four and six and eight on each box. For any other insect I’d have called it an infestation, but the word didn’t match this saccharine state of things. Bright red spotted walking gumdrops blanketing the objects in the yard. Like in one of my childhood colouring books or the opening scene to a Disney film; an infestation of twee.   It’s a bright early October day. The air is crisp. The light slants through the air like through gl ..read more

BY MARIANA LEWIS Candy Corn Saturdays My mother had a name for those rare autumn days. The days when you’d shuffle into the car in the gray of morning, shivering in your fall jacket as the trees flickered by, getting progressively golder, browner, redder, as you flew down the Grand Central Parkway toward the eastern coast. The days when the sun slowly pushed through the celestial gauze and opened up in easy yellow ripples of early afternoon that made you tear off your jacket and cast it away onto the car floor. The days when your braid would come undone strand by strand as you cranked down t ..read more