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Fiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Rhett Milner Fiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Rhett Milner

Cairn

Don didn’t care if it would storm. They were here to fish, he and his son, and they needed a break in their luck. Yesterday was merciless, snags and empty stringers. The other fishermen, however, caught more Walleye than they bothered to count.

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Nonfiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Jen Dodge Nonfiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Jen Dodge

Tide Pools

"Draw me a mermaid, Mommy." “Okay,” I answer my two-year old daughter. She watches me outline the figure in pencil on pink construction paper. The mermaid turns out to be feminine, unashamed of her bare breasts, and ready to swim in a dangerous ocean. I envy her.

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Fiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh Fiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Suzi Ehtesham-Zadeh

Aab

This is not Minoo’s first visit to the Caspian seashore. She has been here one other time, when she was a child of nine or ten. During that trip, she went with her mother to the women’s part of the beach, and they went into the sea together.

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Nonfiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Catherine Temma Davidson Nonfiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Catherine Temma Davidson

Chaucer’s Wives Come Knocking

What did she have to be so boisterous about, I thought, furiously. She was fat and out of control, and it was easy to make fun of her. I wrote a mocking modern tale about a loud-mouthed woman in Los Angeles who sold real estate, like my mother did at the time. I got a good grade, and I proudly shared it with her. God forgive me.

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Poetry, Vol. 3 No. 2 Christina Hauck Poetry, Vol. 3 No. 2 Christina Hauck

Sweet

I cut my hair short as a boy’s and lounged / by the river with other naked women, / all of us laughing and talking with hands
and with mouths, wading in and out of the water, // shining.

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Poetry, Vol. 3 No. 2 Baani Minhas Poetry, Vol. 3 No. 2 Baani Minhas

She Replants

The family tree is gnarled and warped. Witch’s bony / knuckles and fingers sprouting from a dark corner of the earth. / It hangs like a curse and blights the lonely apple that grows, / hiding. A thin branch reluctantly bows to its weight.

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Fiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Stevie doCarmo Fiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Stevie doCarmo

Halcyon

They slept in knit caps in the farmhouse. Sweaters and long johns and anything flannel. Saw their breaths when they got up February mornings, even with radiators gurgling and clanging. They didn’t care.

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Poetry, Vol. 3 No. 2 Kristyn Snedden Poetry, Vol. 3 No. 2 Kristyn Snedden

Parietal Operculum

Someone said your skin / is like velvet, which produced only a worn out / glimmer in the region, but when I touched // you I was myself full of ocean nettles, scalpels / and scythe, yellow and deep rose, forest green.

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Nonfiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Kim Bradley Nonfiction, Vol. 3 No. 2 Kim Bradley

Holy Door

It was late August, not a tree or lick of shade to be seen; the sapping heat pulsed like a demon. We made our way in a straight line toward the recreation room, a dreary concrete block building, as if we, too, were prisoners.

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