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Nonfiction

Riverboat Soothsaying

The guest bedroom is the only room in our home my mom doesn’t cover with wallpaper when she marries. Assuming this door will almost always stay closed, she sees no need. She leaves the walls the same color—a pale olive—that was chosen by her in-laws when they moved here themselves early in their marriage, believing as she does that none of her own family will ever spend much time here. No one who wanders into this space, as she imagines, will want to stay for long inside this room whose windows …

Nonfiction

How to Build a Volcano

MATERIALS LIST: Pizza box. 20oz plastic bottle. Chicken wire. Newspaper. Flour. Water. Paint. TOOLS: Box Cutter. Serrated knife. Wire Cutters. Gloves. Staple Gun. Super glue. Mixing bowl. Paint brushes. Measuring Cup. ▲ It’s difficult for you to pinpoint when it started. This barking up the wrong tree. Free, yet overwhelmed with whatever marker you’ve used at that time to define a life, and a place, and a job, and a class, and a relationship, or the time that passed since its end, and …

Poetry

Aria

Knotted willows eye a ladybug soliloquizing atop fence post ledges, Juliet balconies, lamented by recurrent doves, unperturbed as the branches make room for the noose. Nola Iwasaki currently lives and writes in Oregon and is an MFA candidate at Oregon State University. Featured Artwork: Faded Youth from the Urban Allegory series TJ Norris is an award-winning multidisciplinary artist based in Fort Worth, TX. He studied at Massachusetts College of Art and NSCAD (Halifax). His work …

Poetry

Absent

Mornings fade: lonely mist across a silent yard, one small pair of shoes remaining: soft as a summer’s night, but empty; they rest on the sill, a bright day beyond. I am thinking of the scent of soap on new skin, am remembering how I held you close, before I gave you away. Frances Koziar has published poetry in over 30 different literary magazines, including Vallum and Acta Victoriana. She is a young (disabled) retiree and a social justice advocate, and she lives in Kingston, Ontario, …

Nonfiction

Pressing

My mother’s iron was heavy, with a speckled cord and stubby plug. In the cellar, she and I pressed  my father’s shirts. He worked a desk job he’d never dreamed of growing up in a South End tenement, working a machine in a nearby raincoat factory and letting it all proceed from there. His Aunt Sadie, who cleaned rich peoples’ houses, spoke to a priest who got him off the line.  His life, and my mother’s and mine, proceeded from there.  His desk job was the kind people from his …

Poetry

Self-Portrait with Window & Balloons

I’m music stand and mud, littered with the plastic lips of a late-night celebration. I’m walking down a bowling alley, ready to strike, gently. I’ve stopped at a gas station to fill the well with helium, squeaking, Please don’t let anyone I love die before their time. A guy on a bike with a boombox rides by, arms out like a kite. Confetti stains the shelves where toilet paper used to be. I check my phone again, in the middle of foraging for bubble wrap. What’s happening in …