Belletrist

a bowl lowers down twinkling with popcorn balls, lacquer candy apples, Bazooka gum wrapped in comics, neon-yellow smiley stickers or the motherlode: full-sized Clark bars

Poetry Karen Schubert

Perennialism

“Put everything on it,” I said. “I want the greenest lawn in all the world. I want people to look at it and think Helen lives here.”

Fiction Rebecca Pyle

December 2019 – Pushcart Nominations

History From the Print

“Relax,” the tech urges. “This will take about an hour. You won’t feel much, maybe a slight buzzing sensation. The procedure is perfectly harmless, but it may temporarily stir up some memories.”

Fiction Ann Cwiklinski

Anonymous Letter Written to a Boston Newspaper by a Lowell Factory Girl From the Print

The speed was raised just as we could bear it, and often, almost always, at our request, because with the increase of speed our pay increased.

Poetry Deborah Woodard

The Mineral Pools at Oxley From the Print

Hardly the “glow mantling” promised. In every respect, the most disgusting pool imaginable.

Fiction Rachel Karyo

December 2019 – Pushcart Nominations

Your Dad Dies / I Google Atom Bombs From the Print

Today, girls and boys soak sugar sacks in gasoline, light and glide them up over the wall, hoping to land their kite bombs in their enemy’s future
grain fields.

Poetry Christopher C. Crew

The Survival Book From the Print

The honeycomb is perfect for learning math. “Exact hexagons,” it says. I like that word. It’s a word my mother would have liked, too—she was a word person.

Fiction Hege Jakobsen Lepri

Graveyard Shift From the Print

Nanveet was certain the new girl had been drinking a couple of Cokes every morning and throwing the cans into the wooded patch behind the service station. Who drinks Coke at seven thirty in the morning, he thought. How can a person do that?

Fiction Victoria Forester

September 2019

Great Little Death Wish Thing

We wish, just a bit, for the curve in the mountain highway

Poetry Arlene Naganawa

Shame

I lived beyond life and the sick, beyond ruin, hung from charred trees. I felt the ghost of otherworldliness.

Fiction Mike Itaya

Summer at the Range

we get sunburned. we get tan. we read book after book

Poetry Alyssa Devlin

July 2019

The Minotaur Visits His Mother

I’m in the maze again,
playing what I thought was a
game

Poetry Nicole Yackley

My Son is Trying to Forget Himself

I have loved him all his life,
dedicated myself to the act itself

Poetry Cynthia Neely

The Second Coming

The only thing missing was Jesus himself—not the one in the tabernacle, but the actual guy, who they all said was coming back and would be one of us; maybe even me, Jimmy would sometimes think.

Fiction Rick Krizman

June 2019 – from Bellezine

Honey Rivas Smokes Cigarillos

Honey Rivas smokes cigarillos delicate
burning olive branches

living in her bruised hands dying
in her angry lungs

Poetry Bailey Tomlinson

Seaweed

endless gulping glugging bubbling tug
swallows the ocean into its maw

Poetry Robert Krause

Wrinkles

I’m afraid of the fleetingness of my skin’s elasticity.
Every day begins with a dollop of sunscreen

Poetry Nola Peshkin

April 2019

Last Day of the Viaduct / Linda Waterfall Is Dead

have you ever fallen asleep on it
                  can you even imagine no ulterior
have you been declared unsafe
                  only music and love
have you planned to drive around it
                  singing a cadenza

Poetry Molly Tenenbaum

Probabilities

the empty road ahead—
no gas stations, no rest stops,
not even a phone booth to call for help.

Poetry Leah Browning

Ars Longa

Even with cancer the dog
has to be fed and the trash
has to be bundled

Poetry Carmine Giordano

March 2019

The Rural Chronicles : Junctures

But I keep looking for the core world, a deeper place, that bright bell of sun. We’re not Presbyterian school girls, after all; we’re in the middle of a wake-up call.

Non-Fiction Chila Woychik

Ubh

I’m struck dumb suddenly by this egg, this enormity.
This immense incomprehensible oval and its lovely silence.

Poetry J.G. Russell

Basil Leaves

this is our home she says, skin and bones built up with love
we put basil on everything

Poetry Samantha Moore

February 2019

The Burial

My husband says he wants to be buried by the sea, like Neruda, so when his eyes can’t see the ocean anymore, his body would still be close to it.

Fiction Mehr-Afarin Kohan

Waiting for Rescue

Drifting here on the far side of the moon and sun, she feels strangely at peace. Trigger does, too, in the falling rain and the question of goodbye.

Fiction Stephanie Dickinson

January

I will be home soon in bed. I will wake up in six hours. I’ll be home in nine minutes.

Poetry Brittany Ackerman

December 2018 – Pushcart Nominations

Pirate Town From the Print

In a few minutes, predictably, the air brakes gave an angry hiss and the ton upon ton of steel strained to stop the momentum of its own barreling progress. The train finally came to a stop in the open desert.

Fiction Devin J. Ayers

12:59:51:06 From the Print

Looking back, I can only remember the nickname given to the luger at those 2010 Winter Olympic Games in British Columbia: “BAM-BAM!,” they cheered. He was a favorite for gold. I can’t recall which country he was representing, just his…

Non-Fiction Gina B. LaLonde

You Prefer Hearing Poems Read Aloud to Poems on the Page From the Print

I’m trying to explain my poems.
Sonnets equal boxes, into which
we place the cat, a gun, & all our problems.

Poetry Amy Schrader

December 2018 – Pushcart Nominations

You Should Be Dancing From the Print

The ground seemed so much farther away than usual. The soles slid on the carpet. She felt like a little girl in her mother’s high heels. She did not feel sexy.

Fiction Steph Kilen

End From the Print

Always late, and always your sleeves carefully folded. A cat knows the sunny spot.

Poetry Miho Kinnas

Drinking Dead Birds From the Print

Before I had my son, I thought I was too careless to be a mother. I had a bird for eight years that I’d gotten from a flea market as a gift. His cage was cleaned when my parents told me to clean it, his water bowl goopy and pink.

Non-Fiction McKenzie Zalopany

July 2018