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Fiction
Who Were You, Mariam?
Mariam sat up straight, legs folded under her, and continued to fiddle with the armchair’s fraying upholstery. I waited silently as she took a second to master her tears. The marquee from the neighboring hotel provided the...
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...
Poetry
Love & Vigilance
Author’s Note: To be the spouse or partner of a war veteran can truly be an exercise in vigilance. We become aware of the significance of particular dates, of images. We might notice goosebumps raised on the arms of our beloved from what might seem...
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...
Translations
The Killing Centipedes
By Hesham Eldeeb O Lord, take away immortality,but leave this cold apple cellar.Take the souls and all your playthings, but spare our lives,neither Adam’s, nor Eve’s, nor your son’s,but my son’s life.This damp cave in the...
A Love That Never . . .
It had rained all night. But the morning was sunny and gorgeous. The dappled sunlight formed chiaroscuro patterns that appear only in summer. Early birds were chirping, and the air felt clean and fresh. I was on the train,...
Nonfiction
An Architecture of Endurance
Author’s Note: This is a first-person eyewitness account; some names and identifying details have been changed or combined to protect privacy. Events are presented as remembered; timelines are condensed for clarity. ~ We woke into three acts: the shock of the convoy and the burning...
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...
Reviews
The Venus of Odesa
The Venus of Odesa: New and Selected PoemsBy Askold MelnyczukMadHat Press, 2025. 139 pp. ~ On the cover of Askold Melnyczuk’s The Venus of Odesa: New and Selected Poems, a young blond woman looks at...
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...