We’re thrilled to present a compilation of artwork from K. Johnson Bowles.
She showed me the hole in her thigh where she’d gouged out some of her flesh to feed her dying father. I made a fist inside the hole. Her blood filmed over it, sheltering it like a seed, hilting it beside her hip. She slept on a junior twin mattress in a hallway where the only source of light were the silver fillings of her teeth, her thighbone exposed.
I’m standing in a crowd four-deep peering at the first exhibit in the International UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico. On the wall, an enlarged headline from the Roswell Daily Record reads, “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer.”
Have you ever exercised an injury intentionally or on purpose?
1.
I took his mouth / in mine / what I call mouth / what I begged / take / what I said / consume /
my hands / crowbars / crowding / his system / an intruder / i begged / pry / and deemed mine /
and dead weight / and threadbare / and wild goose chase / and what a goner / I was
Our current issue features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and artwork from: Darius Atefat-Peckham, K. Johnson Bowles, K-Ming Chang, Jack Christian, Krysta Lee Frost, Olivia Muenz, Corey Van Landingham, Becky Hagenston, and many more.
In her recent collection of prose titled World of Wonders, Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the world’s most extraordinary forms of life whose striking characteristics often mirror and complement human experience. In a series of short essays, Nezhukumatathil introduces a range of enchanting species that have proved important in her own life. The book begins in Nezhukumatathil’s […]
“I thought/ surely I will die, so much of me/ outside of me and still more/ leaving,” Leila Chatti confesses in the title poem of her shimmering debut collection. Afflicted in her twenties by a uterine tumor that caused her to bleed without stopping – to flood, as physicians described it – Deluge dissects her […]
