Grief. Reminiscence. Trauma. Watermelons. The Spring issue collection is bound together by complex and varied approaches to human emotion and how we react to change in our lives. Breakups, the deaths of loved ones, new homes, and pasts we cannot leave behind. Each of our authors tackles one of these topics through their own unique lens, offering gripping narratives and meaningful writing that invite readers to immerse themselves in the words on the pages beyond.
FICTION
Jacqueline Chou’s “An Ode to Jammie Evans” delivers a poignant memoir of 1970s childhood poverty, racial taunts, and the redemptive kindness of a classmate scapegoated for a stolen quarter pile. It circles back decades later to a taqueria reunion, where quiet decency confronts lingering guilt. The story becomes a belated hymn of gratitude and guilt, charting how adult self-knowledge is forged in the long aftershock of a single misdirected punishment and a long-overdue apology.
Marcus Delmont’s “Three Days” is a quiet, short piece about compassion and humanity in the face of difference. Throughout the titular “three days,” it demonstrates how understanding and common ground can be forged despite cultural and linguistic differences. An important, timeless narrative that will remain relevant for years to come.
Meryl Franzos’s “Hair of the Dog” is a moving story of a woman’s traumatic experience from the past resurfacing to haunt her in the present. Through the thematic complexity of the narrative, Franzos establishes a character who struggles between her inner sense of morality and her personal obligation to exact justice.
A marriage between narrative and execution that reveals why grammatical choices are just as important as the story itself, Erin Gaura’s “Bed Linens” demonstrates how overwriting can, in the right context, become a tool for enriching a story’s themes. The syntax is beautifully overdetailed and hyperfixated on the unimportant, relatably reflecting how one’s mind becomes overstimulated in the emotional aftermath of a breakup.
In Kevin MacAlan’s “Wish You Were Here,” filial grief curdles into denial as a son, unable to face his father’s death, fabricates a West Indies cricket odyssey through forged postcards and torn-away stamps. The narrative patiently dismantles his fantasy, revealing how language, paperwork, and office protocol conspire to force him back into the difficult work of mourning and rejoining the world of the living.
Scott Macmann’s “A Child’s Christmas in Ohio” is a tale of friendship, adventure, and the sobering reality of negligent parenting told through the lens of child innocence. With “Gracie,” the author focuses on the intricacies of adult relationships as a married couple struggles with the tragedy of their beloved cat’s imminent demise. Through both of his works, Macmann manages to create a relatable yet heartbreaking narrative with a profound emotional effect on the reader.
In “The People’s Choice,” John Picard demonstrates his unique narrative versatility. His ability to showcase the gut-wrenching realities of a veteran struggling with PTSD alongside the falsities of a reality star’s glamorous life produces a compelling dynamic of nightmare-fueled existence and compassion from unexpected places.
An absurdist take on coping mechanisms, anticonsumerism, and science versus nature debates, Anthony Schneck’s “Flavor Profile” is told through one person’s quest to prove that watermelons have subtly changed their taste. With such a wide range of themes, it is a story that asks for attentive close reading and will, doubtless, provide each consumer with a unique literary “flavor profile” of their own.
Set on a Cambridgeshire building site in 1988, Thomas Wright’s “Anglo-Irish,” probes generational rifts among Irish immigrants and racism through a teen skivvy’s summer with his uncle Stephen’s crew, before university beckons. It meditates on cultural identity forged in cement dust, passive-smoking, and the grandmother’s rosary beads across emigrant lines.
NONFICTION
Mark D. Crimmins’s “Glimpses of Gangnam” is an exercise in stream of consciousness, born from sitting in a busy, ostensibly uneventful café in Seoul’s most conspicuous district, sipping drinks, eating cake, and thinking on the page. Stories emerge from moments, small, occasionally inconsequential happenings that, when paused, seen, and perhaps elevated with some thrills or chills, open up space for reflection and give shape to meaning.
As a real American author, fascinated by words and their poetics, James B. Nicola finds reason on gender gaps through the Romance Languages. In his “The Gentle Revolution,” he shares his remarks with generosity, proving how language, when closely observed, can signal respect and arouse parity and progress.
Ann Perrins’s “Asparagus, a Gift for Audrey” is that delightful read one wants for company on a Sunday afternoon by a sun-bathed bay window. With a nostalgic smile, the writer meets the reader halfway through the streets of a quiet British village. There, in a past time with details only a fresh memory can deliver, we enjoy the evidence of a bond between two women, whom culture might have kept apart but shared love has brought together.
Pete Warzel’s “Damage” springs from a near-disastrous car incident in his neighborhood. With remarkable attention to the emotions at stake, Pete maps a first-hand experience with words apt for recreating the scene as if it were happening now. The story not only renders one’s unraveling thoughts during danger but tackles the implications of our actions and their lasting imprint on those in near proximity.
POETRY
In this issue’s poetry, compression becomes revelation. The lyric voice distills grief, endurance, irony, and private reckoning into concentrated moments that linger long after the page is turned.
Collin Garrity’s poems confront the modern landscape with wry intelligence and moral unease. In works such as “Leafblower” and “Hospital Poem,” the everyday object becomes an instrument of existential inquiry; lawns, tools, and clinical spaces expose the quiet absurdities and fragilities of contemporary life.
Olivia Soule’s “The Deep End of the Pool” moves through mythic invocation and personal vulnerability with incantatory repetition. Her language circles loss and inheritance, invoking Poseidon and Midas while remaining grounded in bodily experience and grief.
Ann Marie Gamble offers poems that are at once intimate and philosophically alert. In “Just Asking” and “Trying,” she balances tenderness with clarity, confronting aging, inevitability, and filial love without sentimentality.
Ty Cronkhite’s work demonstrates formal versatility and tonal control. In “Ode to the Ellipses,” punctuation becomes metaphor, a meditation on absence, implication, and the unfinished thought. In “Sonnet Regarding Buttons,” he adopts a traditional form to explore emotional volatility with wit and structural precision, reminding us that classical architecture can still contain modern anxiety.
Together, these poets demonstrate that brevity need not diminish depth. Their work inhabits the charged space between thought and feeling, where language—pared down and sharpened—becomes both witness and measure of what it means to endure.
