Jacqueline Hughes Simon

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Jacqueline Hughes Simon Jacqueline Hughes Simon’s writing has appeared in the Apricity Magazine, Cal Literature & Arts Magazine, The Cortland Review, El Portal, Flights, Ghost City Review, Mudlark, New South, Okay Donkey, The Rail, Tupelo Quarterly, Vagabond City, and others. Jacqueline received her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Saint Mary’s College of California. She is a volunteer and board member of an environmental education non-profit, where she works with and trains the donkeys. As to Wonder

Claire Scott

Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Claire Scott Claire Scott is an award-winning poet who has received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. Her work has appeared in the Atlanta Review, Bellevue Literary Review, New Ohio Review and Healing Muse among other journals. Claire is the author of Waiting to be Called and Until I Couldn’t. She is the co-author of Unfolding in Light: A Sisters’ Journey in Photography and Poetry. Anorexia

Conchology

Conchology by Rebekah Chan Dear Shell, I am writing to remember that time in your car, or perhaps mine. By chance, we drove the same beige Mazda6 Sedan before we became friends after high school. It was not a unique vehicle, but rather the kind that screamed my parents’ car during what felt like the beginning of our adult life. * My early 20s are filled with the scent of cigarettes masked in pine air freshener inside your Mazda, often parked outside the grocery store complex between my house and yours. It was exactly the kind of gray plaza you’d find on every corner in the greater Toronto suburbs we grew up in. We studied at different universities, but both still lived at home with our parents who were church friends. And when we parked beside each other in those sprawling suburban parking lots, it was a homecoming of sorts, a reunion of twin-flames.  In the winters, we’d have our usual Tim Horton’s parking lots to drink coffee inside your car while smoking and listening to Saves the Day and Biggie Smalls. It was too cold to smoke outside, so we’d open a tiny sliver in the window to blow smoke and ash outside. Small gusts of wind always managed to carry little white flecks of tobacco back inside. And this, this existence is how I saw our entire friendship: the two of us in a smoke-filled bubble talking about how fucked up we felt or how fucked up the world was while gazing out through salt-stained windows, and just the slightest crack to the outside world. We were always the sad girls, the only ones who noticed the small injustices of life. Like how we, the purehearted, never got what we wanted: the boy, a job, the grades, the recognition. Instead, we found shelter in each other. Me with a nose ring, you with a chin piercing. Both 5’2” and on the tanned side for Chinese girls. Both with the same ordinary beige car. Both with an unbearable frustration for a life beyond suburban parking lots. Looking back in my 40s I now see how we, or at least I, thought it was beautiful to be sad. You were truly a beautiful sad girl, one who cut herself when she felt too much or nothing at all. Those thick scars on your inner forearms, the ones that people gawked at, provoked me out of the mundanity. Living was to feel deeply. So deeply that it hurt. You were perhaps the most beautiful sad girl I’ve ever met, with distinctly chiseled cheek bones and downward-turned, deep eyes to counter my round, oval face with upward-turned, shallow-set eyes. And back then in my 20s, I also wanted to be a beautiful sad girl. * 1768 – Countries around the world were eager to study the 1769 transit of Venus. This happens when Venus (the second planet from the sun) passes between the sun and Earth (the third planet from the sun). From Earth, Venus appears as a small dot crossing the sun. The transit of Venus is a rare astronomical event that doesn’t happen for more than a century later. In 1769, the next transit would not occur until 1874. On his first voyage around the world, Captain James Cook was tasked to maneuverer the HMS Endeavour from Plymouth, Great Britain to Tahiti by June 1769 to observe this phenomenon. An affluent young biologist named Joseph Banks insisted on joining  Cook to help collect plant specimens along the way. It was an expedition of a lifetime and an opportunity to calculate the distance of the earth to the sun in hopes to better understand the magnitude of the entire solar system. * After university we both work in communications, but we eventually study, discover, and become what we truly want to be. I’m a writer, and you’re a photographer. With different tools, we both try and render our worlds. Me with a keyboard and you with a camera. We both observe and capture moments. I move to Asia for the man I will marry. You move downtown, and when we can, we travel all over Southeast Asia together. In Pai, Thailand, we rent scooters. We try riding separately at first, but we have to shout while trying to navigate the roads, so we return your scooter and keep mine. This way you can just sit behind me and speak directly into my ear while we zip across the Northern Thai highlands. Together, we glid up a tall hill towards a huge pink moon hanging in the horizon. The moon had never felt so close before. You think of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” your first dance song choice with S, your first love, if you ever got back together that is. “In this moment,” you say, “I feel like everything will be okay.” We continue down the long road of the hill in silence, leaving the glowing moon behind us. But then you ask me or maybe no one, “Why can’t this just last?” * April 1769 – Finding Tahiti was no simple task. Despite Polynesians inhabiting the island since 500 BC, it had only been documented by another English explorer a year before, and thus, the exact coordinates were known.  Cook crossed miles of open waters and storms to find an island only 20 miles wide. It took eight months to navigate the Endeavour to Tahiti with the only tools available: hourglasses, knotted ropes, a sextant, and an almanac to calculate the Endeavour’s position according to the stars. They reached Tahiti in April, two months before the transit of Venus, and eventually set up a small fort on the black sand beach at the end of Matavai Bay on the North Shore. From this makeshift observatory, they would study the skies and record Venus traversing across the sun.  * Dear Shell, I am writing to remember, that time in your beige car, or perhaps mine. * The word “mollusk” comes from the Latin

Picture of Us

Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth It was my birthday, and we stood—you, beautiful, youthful; me, spectacled,unable for the life of me to comb my hair correctly—in the lobbyof a hibachi steak house. After, I remember we were all over each otherin the cramped cabin of my truck, in a field, on the deck of your pool.I don’t remember you crying, though maybe you wanted to. And I wasn’t helping, being myself. We’d weather a few more months’ worthof disasters together: I took and used what you gave and after, always remorse.Rinse, repeat. It’s funny now, sort of—nothing we could make last, at least.I keep the picture as a bookmark in Auden’s Collected Poems, placed nowfacing “Lullaby,” so it’s like the two of us are reading poems together— lay your sleeping head, my love, human on my faithless arm—Auden knewwhat affection costs us in headache, heartache; ours no different, so it’s fittingto leave us there, in his care. We do look happy, standing by the lobby couches,against each other bright in the camera flash, under lights,my class-ringed finger gripping your shoulder, yours my waist. The other day I saw you engaged, saw the picture of the two of youcloser than us, faces touching, smiles honest. He looks nice, and you, happy.But between us: what we said, how we suffered, it’s all still there,though better as memory (we’d have been very unhappy together);better like this: posed always in affection, in the dark of leftover words. Poetry Home Art by Ellen June Wright

Nonfiction_V17-0

Nonfiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Misunderstandings by Emily Hall Non-Fiction Volume 17.0 Conchology by Rebekah Chan Non-Fiction Volume 17.0 The Crash by Ashley Espinoza Non-Fiction Volume 17.0 Carrying Instructions by jane putnam perry Non-Fiction Volume 16.2 I Waited For My Turn and it Almost Killed Me by Maureen Pendras Non-Fiction Volume 16.2 Take Care by Nicole Morris Non-Fiction Volume 16.2 Something So Simple by Wendy Fontaine Non-Fiction Volume 16.1 Yellowfin by Abby McCord Non-Fiction Volume 16.1 Fears, Explained by Kayla Jessop Non-Fiction Volume 16.1

Fiction_V17-0

Fiction Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories #ratgirlsummer by Melissa Rudick Fiction Volume 17.0 Lil’ Gullivers by Kye Roper Fiction Volume 17.0 Soil and Water by Angela Townsend Fiction Volume 17.0 Cloudbursts by Scott Dorsch Fiction Volume 16.2 On The Other Side of the Wall by Andrea Bianchi Fiction Volume 16.2 In Eternal by Lauren O’Donoghue Fiction Volume 16.1 Message In a Romance Novel by Anuradha Kumar Fiction Volume 16.1

Poetry_V17-0

Poetry Menu Current Volume Archive About Us Submit Categories Polishing byEric Reid Poem Volume 17.0 Falling by Ashley Mae Hoiland Poem Volume 17.0 Granite Basin by Sofia Fall Poem Volume 17.0 The Body Center byCindy Milwe Poem Volume 17.0 Droughtgrief byAngela Williamson Poem Volume 17.0 I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl by Jacklin Farley Poem Volume 17.0 Transfiguration by James Engelhardt Poem Volume 17.0 Picture of Us by Joshua Kulseth Poem Volume 17.0 But, like when did you know? by.Neal Allen Shipley Poem Volume 17.0 How to Lament on Tuesday at a Coffee Shop at 16:23 PSTbyJarred Mercer Poem Volume 17.0 Missing You byDante Novario Poem Volume 17.0 Impermanence by Rebecca O’Bern Poem Volume 17.0 Contusion by Emma Galloway Stephens Poem Volume 17.0 Triptych: At the Message Therapy Clinic byJessica Poli Poem Volume 17.0 A Peach Tree by E.G. Reilly Poem Volume 17.0 Girlhood Sonnet by Sophia Ivey Poem Volume 16.2 when i say my father is homesless, i mean: by Harley Chapmen Poem Volume 16.2 Gub Dog by Addy Gravatte Poem Volume 16.2 Šljivovica by Celeste Colarič-Gonzales Poem Volume 16.2 Heart by Theo LeGro Poem Volume 16.2 The More We Go The More We Don’t Know a Thing by Briel Felton Poem Volume 16.1 Away We Go by Claire Wahmanholm Poem Volume 16.1 Dew on the Sea by Claire Wahmanholm Poem Volume 16.1 The Cabinda Spouses by Landa Wo Poem Volume 16.1 And After, No One Lowered Their Flag by Matthew Williams Poem Volume 16.1 Afterbirth (fiction) by Rachel Stempel Poem Volume 16.1 Biological Speculation by Briel Felton Poem Volume 16.1 I Licked a Leaf by Ron Antonucci Poem Volume 16.1 i bleed for the first time on a toilet in Versailles by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) Poem Volume 16.1 Nothing is more sad than a waning moon by Sirka Elspass (translated by Anne-Sophie Balzer) Poem Volume 16.1 I have two DNAs one belongs to my old by Roman Iorga Poem Volume 16.1

Conchology-old

Conchology by Rebekah Chan Dear Shell, I am writing to remember that time in your car, or perhaps mine. By chance, we drove the same beige Mazda6 Sedan before we became friends after high school. It was not a unique vehicle, but rather the kind that screamed my parents’ car during what felt like the beginning of our adult life.   * My early 20s are filled with the scent of cigarettes masked in pine air freshener inside your Mazda, often parked outside the grocery store complex between my house and yours. It was exactly the kind of gray plaza you’d find on every corner in the greater Toronto suburbs we grew up in. We studied at different universities, but both still lived at home with our parents who were church friends. And when we parked beside each other in those sprawling suburban parking lots, it was a homecoming of sorts, a reunion of twin-flames.  In the winters, we’d have our usual Tim Horton’s parking lots to drink coffee inside your car while smoking and listening to Saves the Day and Biggie Smalls. It was too cold to smoke outside, so we’d open a tiny sliver in the window to blow smoke and ash outside. Small gusts of wind always managed to carry little white flecks of tobacco back inside. And this, this existence is how I saw our entire friendship: the two of us in a smoke-filled bubble talking about how fucked up we felt or how fucked up the world was while gazing out through salt-stained windows, and just the slightest crack to the outside world. We were always the sad girls, the only ones who noticed the small injustices of life. Like how we, the purehearted, never got what we wanted: the boy, a job, the grades, the recognition. Instead, we found shelter in each other. Me with a nose ring, you with a chin piercing. Both 5’2” and on the tanned side for Chinese girls. Both with the same ordinary beige car. Both with an unbearable frustration for a life beyond suburban parking lots. Looking back in my 40s I now see how we, or at least I, thought it was beautiful to be sad. You were truly a beautiful sad girl, one who cut herself when she felt too much or nothing at all. Those thick scars on your inner forearms, the ones that people gawked at, provoked me out of the mundanity. Living was to feel deeply. So deeply that it hurt. You were perhaps the most beautiful sad girl I’ve ever met, with distinctly chiseled cheek bones and downward-turned, deep eyes to counter my round, oval face with upward-turned, shallow-set eyes. And back then in my 20s, I also wanted to be a beautiful sad girl. * 1768 – Countries around the world were eager to study the 1769 transit of Venus. This happens when Venus (the second planet from the sun) passes between the sun and Earth (the third planet from the sun). From Earth, Venus appears as a small dot crossing the sun. The transit of Venus is a rare astronomical event that doesn’t happen for more than a century later. In 1769, the next transit would not occur until 1874. On his first voyage around the world, Captain James Cook was tasked to maneuverer the HMS Endeavour from Plymouth, Great Britain to Tahiti by June 1769 to observe this phenomenon. An affluent young biologist named Joseph Banks insisted on joining  Cook to help collect plant specimens along the way. It was an expedition of a lifetime and an opportunity to calculate the distance of the earth to the sun in hopes to better understand the magnitude of the entire solar system.    * After university we both work in communications, but we eventually study, discover, and become what we truly want to be. I’m a writer, and you’re a photographer. With different tools, we both try and render our worlds. Me with a keyboard and you with a camera. We both observe and capture moments. I move to Asia for the man I will marry. You move downtown, and when we can, we travel all over Southeast Asia together. In Pai, Thailand, we rent scooters. We try riding separately at first, but we have to shout while trying to navigate the roads, so we return your scooter and keep mine. This way you can just sit behind me and speak directly into my ear while we zip across the Northern Thai highlands. Together, we glid up a tall hill towards a huge pink moon hanging in the horizon. The moon had never felt so close before. You think of Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon,” your first dance song choice with S, your first love, if you ever got back together that is. “In this moment,” you say, “I feel like everything will be okay.”   We continue down the long road of the hill in silence, leaving the glowing moon behind us. But then you ask me or maybe no one, “Why can’t this just last?”   * April 1769 – Finding Tahiti was no simple task. Despite Polynesians inhabiting the island since 500 BC, it had only been documented by another English explorer a year before, and thus, the exact coordinates were known.  Cook crossed miles of open waters and storms to find an island only 20 miles wide. It took eight months to navigate the Endeavour to Tahiti with the only tools available: hourglasses, knotted ropes, a sextant, and an almanac to calculate the Endeavour’s position according to the stars. They reached Tahiti in April, two months before the transit of Venus, and eventually set up a small fort on the black sand beach at the end of Matavai Bay on the North Shore. From this makeshift observatory, they would study the skies and record Venus traversing across the sun.    * Dear Shell, I am writing to remember, that time in your beige car, or perhaps mine. * The word “mollusk”

The Crash

The Crash by Ashley Espinoza Inspired by Aftermath by Elane Johnson After my car slid on the ice and another car hit me. After you had said you weren’t sure you wanted to be a father. After I googled if my seven-week-old fetus could die during a low impact car accident. After I searched and searched every website for an answer. After I found out that, while pregnant, I shouldn’t go on roller coasters or horseback rides, and I shouldn’t be in a car accident either, but no websites would tell me an answer for a 15 mph car crash. After I called to ask if you had made your decision. After I learned the due date was September first. After you didn’t answer the phone, but you did answer the text– you said you hated to say it, but you couldn’t do it. After you never called ever again. After the hospital staff asked if I was sure there wasn’t a name I could put under the father section of the birth certificate. After I cried because my daughter does not have a father. After no one held me. After no one but me held my daughter when she cried in the middle of the night. After I saw you once and hid from you. After I saw your truck as I drove down the highway. After I still look for your truck even though I know you no longer drive that one. After I looked you up on Facebook. After I still look you up and stalk every post looking for an answer. After I am still single six years later and I see you on Bumble looking for something casual. After I cried for years and years and years over you. After I stopped wondering if you would ever care for my daughter. After I drove down your street to see if you still lived there, even though I would have no way of knowing that answer. After I stopped wondering if you would call and change your mind. After my daughter is all grown and probably looks like you. After she asks me to caress her arms in the same way you used to. After she looks right at me and says, “Anyway I don’t even want a dad.” Home Nonfiction Home Art by Dominick Williams

I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl

I’ve Lived So Long as a Dream Girl by Jacklin Farley I’ve forgotten what it’s liketo be real. Betweenmeals, I pinch up belly fat, chubbybunny marshmallow bitessandwiched by my suspiciousfingertips. I then attempt to conjuremetabolism like a monsoon of ChinaSlim Tea and sugar-freeHaribo gummy bears throughmy blood. So it goesfor those of us past the acceptable agefor playing Bloody Maryand comparing thigh gapsat sleepovers. As I get older, I realizeit takes velocity to existin organic form, especiallymine. One minute, my lovelanguage is sophisticated curve, peachslice drippingsweet with juice. The next, it’s an aspirin tabletdropped into a liter-sized Pepsibottle with the cap screwedshut, transparent jugularbulging with carbonated excess seekingevaporative exodus in the snack aisleof your local Walgreens. It’s on the daysI feel the emptiestthat I want to explodethe most, feel like I am runningthrough a Reese’s peanut buttercup fieldencased by green Jell-Osalad, that I want someone to unbucklemy ankle straps and call me”kitten” despite the factI haven’t been teacup-sized since I was fourteen, despitemy repressedscheming to eventually fit my fatass back into Paris Hilton’s handbag. But ifI can’t have hipdips, whipped creamon my titties, or armpit jiggle ready to embrace the lipsof a saxophoneplayer, do I even wantthis life? I must be eating more to have such energyto philosophize,to embrace living like a back alleyduct tape Brazilian: throbbingand shameless, fleshyand blushed down to the bonein places no one else can see. It’s painful, butat least I can feelmore than nerve damagein my hands, the urge to hold my coffeecup in a compactor-tightgrip to register even a Celsiusof warmth. Call it my own methodfor moderation, aftermathof disorder. Call it crèmebrûléeing the wound after it curdles. As longas you sing, paradoxof my digestive tract. For I know one dayI will cease to be cute. For all I know, todayis that daypouring into my palmsover my belt line, spilled pitcherof milkshake, too much lovein my handles. The world can tell meI am too oldto be silly or fat. It won’t stop mefrom molting, coming backin a different skin. For I thinkI am rather too young to be dead. Poetry Home Art by Winslow Schmelling