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Fiction
Please Use Stairs in Case of Emergency
In the Market Cross Shopping Center, down the car-park stairwell, three young men shared a joint. Emilio Evans passed the spliff to Heboru Newman, sitting on the step below him. “Do you think Bertie Ahern molests kids?” Rex...
A Song for the End of Everything
Art by Glenn ShawFive-and-a-half weeks before Toshihide Nakagawa dies, his son Yusaku takes him to see a rerun of the film Rocky at the Paradise Repertory Theatre in Burakuricho, Wakayama, a theater known for its continuous...
Flash! Four Works of Micro-Fiction
Editor’s Note: While most of the stories we receive and publish are between one thousand and five thousand words, today’s online feature presents four flash stories ranging from 844 to just 266 words. Inhabiting the rich...
Poetry
Homeopathic Remedies for War Fever
Author’s Note: I was born in February in 1941, with the winter tremors of war already in my bones and therefore part of my personal and national inheritance. "Homeopathic Remedies for War Fever" seeks to address the ongoing malady that is war. It...
Pinky Swear
Author’s Note: In the late 60s, when I was a teenager, we were all anti-war—the war in Vietnam. The guys had to register for the draft as soon as they turned eighteen. The you of this poem opted to join the Navy, although it was a six-year tour of...
Found familial photograph
Author’s Note: My poem comes from an ekphrastic workshop hosted by the writer and artist Jay McCoy. As inspiration, he offered up a cull of photographs with fuzzy origins. This one called out to me with its distance and contrast: the angled...
Małopolska Mosaic
Kraków, Lesser Poland (Małopolska), Poland | Photo: Alexander Zvir Author’s Note: This poem sprang out of the experience of crossing the border from Ukraine to Poland, seven months after the 2022 Russian invasion began, and while living in Poland,...
Translations
I Am a Woman Who Loves Life
Taliban fighters crowd onto military vehicles, white flags raised high as they move through the street. Photo: Ziaullah Ibrahimkhil I am a woman who loves life and the act of living. Why? Perhaps because death has always...
Luminous Fragments: Two Poems by Giuseppe Ungaretti
Don't Shout Anymore Stop killing the dead,Don’t shout anymore, don’t shoutIf you still want to hear them,If you hope not to perish. They have an inaudible whisper,They don’t make noise anymoreThan that of the growing of...
Nonfiction
No Band of Brothers
The sudden ring of the phone in the darkest part of the night jars me. This is probably not good. “Hey, Corporal. Oops—Lieutenant, how are they hanging?” a very boozy, familiar voice from my past says, slurring his words. I served with him in 1967 in the Vietnam War. First when I was an...
“Without Hope, Yet I Hope”: The Journeys of Svitlana Petrovska
Photo of Svitlana in Berlin by Morris Weiss Author's Note: The core of this article was based on interviews with Svitlana Petrovskaya, a ninety-year-old Ukrainian woman currently living in Berlin. We had access to her collection of personal letters and memorabilia, including publications...
I Remember Buddy
James Kirschke (middle) with fellow lieutenants Roger Pullis (left) and Jim Anderson (right).Chu Lai, Vietnam, 1966. When Buddy Spivey was wheeled into my room on the twelfth deck of the Sick Officers Quarters at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital in 1967, all I could see through the open...
Pádraic Ó Conaire’s Enduring Art of Conflict Narration
Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882-1928), a pioneering Modernist author with a bilingual mind and comic wit(photo courtesy Galway City Museum, Ireland)It is a foggy day in March 1916, and British Resident Magistrate Robert Sparrow can’t quite believe why he’s been pulled from Londonderry to oversee...
Reviews
The Misfit
By Abby E. MurrayRecovery CommandsEx Ophidia Press (2025), 95 pp There is a familiar predicament that many of us can recognize at once: We’re in an environment, not of our making, with which we’re...
Bertolt Brecht’s Collaborators
Artistic Collaboration, Exile, and Brecht: A New Intellectual History, 1900-1950by Katherine Hollander (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025) To say Bertolt Brecht had an eventful life would be an...