"the man knows that in forty years, he'll have to explain it to his grandchildren that there was this pandemic and no one really knew what it was, but it was highly contagious and some people barely felt anything, but others got really sick and lots of people died. Doctors didn't really understand it and, because it was a time when people travelled a lot, the disease spread, quick and deadly. The whole world came to an abrupt standstill. You had to keep your distance from people outside your cluster, or the virus--vulpine, hungry, blind--would take you in her claws. Back home, he and his brother moved their mother to a different nursing facility, where they thought she'd be safe, but she caught the virus there and died anyway. No goodbye. No funeral. It's shocking to think about it now, but people used to shake hands at meetings with perfect strangers. People used to have sex with random people they met at parties."
* * * * * *
Atlantic Unbound
One of the best and most intelligent magazines in America--"bound in 1857; unbound since 1993"--has a large and varied website featuring prose and poetry from the print magazine, archives, "web-only features," and a readers' forum, "Post & Reposte," that features, among other things, a place for people to post their own creative writing.
* * * * * *
The Banyan Review
A poetry journal with a rainbow of voices, & beautiful artworks to decorate the issue amongst them. C. Hiatt O'Connor's "Magnetism" one lyrical gem among many. Here is a sample:
though to come to sight now, born blind
by perception, might be too much to bear. Supposedly
we are animals of will, altogether desire, but
we may well be stalks of seaweed, salted and blithe.
The iron in our blood can’t escape the magnetism
of convention. We try, but always end up choking
on bread, or wine.
* * * * * *
boats against the current
There is a fine variety of poems in this journal. A touch of this, a touch of that. One really fine is:
The Illusion of Touch
Anna Saunders
On our last day together.
you tell me you don't feel a connection.
Before I leave, we walk in the woods.
Your mind is already elsewhere.
The river is about to burst its banks,
the rapids throw themselves off the rocks.
When we return to the car
you close out the weather.
I can still feel the wind on me, I claim.
You shake your head and say
what you think is touch
is merely only the friction of our electrons.
On the train back I marvel
at what magicians are our senses,
tossing down cards that the body will misread.
I think of how contact is really an illusion,
a metaphorical slight of no hands,
how our atoms repel
and the repulsion feels like touch.
* * * * * *
Chaotic Merge Magazine
Visually beautiful journal, funky fun for the eyes! And Alec Clayton's "Hitching to New York" is a sweet, sharp sketch of a time, & a soul trying to figure it out.
* * * * * *
Cutleaf Journal
A treat of an online literary journal! What caught me, though, end to end, was Noah Alvarez's melancholic fiction, "Uncle Tito." Excellent first published work! :)
* * * * * *
Dead Skunk Mag
Lots of treasures in this literary journal! Of especial note is "Hotels Across America" by Ernie Atkins. Sad, funny, sad. Here's a taste:
Let's review what we have learned.
Moose are not a parable.
Diner signs aren't symbols.
Every Western state is beautiful and perfect.
We bear no relation to the stars.
Many things we will forget.
* * * * * *
Digging Through the Fat: A Journal for Cultural Omnivores
Scroll through this lovely site. Many visual & textual riches. Make sure to read Stories No. 90: "A Phone Call from the Phone Booth Killer" by Feng Gooi. Super cool, super creepy! Here's a taste:
“I kill phone booths.” Her answer was also soft, softer than the air brushing over the curve of my ear, yet it boomed in my head.
* * * * * *
Evergreen Review
From 1957 to 1973, the Evergreen Review was a vital counterculture literary journal. After twenty-five years of dormancy, ER re-launched on the Web. Well worth visiting.
* * * * * *
Exile Sans Frontieres
This new journal is very well done, inspired, worth a linger. The brooding photography of Daniel Nemo, the lilting paintings of Sacha Rusanu Carden, the poetry that follows the journal's creed of "If the world's a house, art is the force that keeps it from collapsing on itself."
* * * * * *
Fatal Flaw
Current issue of this excellent journal features, among its many treasures, the loping sad reminiscences of Lisa Piazza, the charming indie magical realism of Upasana, the harsh visual dreams of M. Patrick Riggin, & the nocturnal sweats of Kate Kelleher.
* * * * * *
HASH Journal
This is an impressive journal, covers a lot of ground, by topic matter, by writing style. Some work is quite intimate and personal whether review, poetry, fiction. Some of it reaches far, ambitiously, and some land squarely. Powerfully. Ron Tobey’s poem “Ode: Red Twilight” is an especially moving piece. One stanza reads:
father field dresses his kill
slitting the doe skin up the midline
cutting out genitals entrails stomach intestines bladder heart lungs
organs not to be consumed he leaves in the woods
crows vulture turkeys racoons red foxes
will eat it within several hours
he clips skin and scent glands off legs
to prevent their chemicals from corrupting meat
a false folk tale according to
Field and Stream
still when hung from the floor joists
above the cellar concrete floor by front legs
enough blood drips from the carcass
to excite our dog
who licks the blackening pools off the floor
getting in father’s way as he flays the deer’s fur coat
he points out the bullet hole in the neck
“we will get two pairs of deer skin gloves”
I and his dog accompany him in his pickup
to the Littleton tannery a day later
the hide stiff from the freezing cold
an assistant at the office tags it
throws it onto a large pile of similar cloaks
getting buried under a snow squall
our nostrils recoil
stench from huge softening water vats
and ammonia alum tanning vats
a seamstress comes into the office
as we leave to pick up finished hides
* * * * * *
Hyacinth Review
This is a visually rich journal, crafted for enjoying in the online environment. "Letters From Home," by Mason Martinez, is its current show-stopping fiction piece. Here is a nice passage from it:
"She could feel the matchbox in her pocket. This letter was heavier than the postcard her father had sent. It had the same thickness of the magazines in the office. It would burn slowly enough for her to admire the flames. She could take twigs, toilet paper, and the cardboard pizza box from a couple of nights ago and create an altar of wasted things. His letter at the very heart of it. But even so, Spencer stood, BJ memberships and PayPal pre-approvals and her father's letter in hand, wondering. Spencer locked herself in her room when he left. She didn't say goodbye, safe travels, see you in hell. None of it. He didn't either. She felt his presence behind the door. Imagined his calloused hands hovering over the locked doorknob."
* * * * * *
Kissing Dynamite: A Journal of Poetry
This fine journal features a wide range of poets, whose work is accompanied by a featured visual artist named Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad & her color-wild landscapes.
Three poets notably stand out:
Miceala Morano:nat raum::
my instinct is still to throw
stones for practice, for the day
i need to kiss someone back harder
than my lips would let me
Ecem Yucel:
We bent our harsh reality with a story that filled ten, hardcovered, thick journals and agendas, amounting to three long novels in total, starring you and me and the members of The Beatles when they were around our age: Paul McCartney as my love interest, John Lennon as yours.
* * * * * *
Liminal Transit Review
LTR is a "literary journal that publishes work related to themes such as (but not limited to) diaspora, immigration, displacement, borders, and decolonization." The writing in this journal is superlative. One example is "Roots" by Rhiya Pau.
* * * * * *
Midway Journal
Ephemera, fiction, nonfiction, poetry. Of especial note is the evocative, sentimental fiction "The Promise of Cicadas," by Kip Knott:
"Andy was ten years old the first time he heard the trees ablaze with cicadas. He thought it was the trees themselves burning with invisible flames. He ran inside his family's double-wide and told his father to get some water to put out the fire in the maple he liked to climb. His father, slumped in the recliner watching a ball game, just shook his head and laughed, "It's the damn cicadas, you dummy. There's no fire. Now leave me be. Go on back outside."
* * * * * *Quibble
This journal seems full of young writers, striving for meaning & beauty in their lives, & for the lives around them. Nice instance of this is "Searching For Something Forgotten" by Farzeen Rahman:
"Mind unfocused wandering about through the three-dimensional space; time, purpose, opportunities, love, memories, possibilities, desperate in search of all that has long been forgotten and all that doesn't exist. The secrets that the trees hold, with their gigantic snake-like roots slithering in and out of the ground. The damp earth and fallen leaves enwrap me in a calm lingering smell, leaving me hanging and unresolved."
* * * * * *
Studio Eight
This site hosts many forums for writers to post their work for response by a very supportive community. This is one of my favorite places to post my poetry.
* * * * * *
Tangled Locks Journal
Still fairly new journal's current issue features a half-dozen writers--fiction, poetry--non-fiction. All show good promise, but the standout for me is "I Know a Wall When I See One"
(nonfiction) by Melissa Mulvihill, a meditation on grief & death which hits hard & deep, with a soft, empathetic hand. Here is one breath-stopping passage:
"I pull things toward me; I push things out. Some things I hope for and some things get lodged in my chest, caught in my heart. I slip away and find this light because I don't know what else to do and I wonder why the recesses of old life are always the darkest parts or if it's just a trick of the light. Maybe the darkest parts of life just flow into the deepest recesses of our world and then if people's hearts and minds just can't reach in there, or just don't, it all settles that way like a heavy, old silt."