Gabo Prize Winner
Three Poems translated from Ghost Planets
by Rosa Berbel, translated by Jane Stringham
Tidying Up
You left my floor littered with beautiful ideas.
No way to pick them up,
no way to erase the impure line
left by thinking on the floor.
Kneeling, I learn the ritual:
I scrub the beautiful stain
—the daring traces of thought
its circle of chalk—
spreading unceasingly
across the world.
[…]
Young Adult
Harem of Widows: A Soul of the Earth Story
by Isa Oshen
Sugar sits by the window, clutching the blanket, staring into the sky again. She’s barely moved since he took her baby. Sugar used to be sweet—annoyingly cheery, really—so much so, we’d roll our eyes at her, while secretly wishing we could share her lust for life. But now, she’s silent. Like nothing’s left but the empty carcass of the mother she’ll never get to be. […]
Diana Woods Prize Winner
Grandma Lake
by Brandon Hansen
Hunger might be the word for it. Maybe hunger made me pop open sticky drawers in the kitchen and poke my head into cupboards nearly glued shut by the dust of time. Hunger, maybe, is why I searched those empty places again and again as a child, though I knew full well there were only ever mouse droppings rolling on the wood, and two dried end pieces of bread, hard as tree bark, in the long drawer beneath the toaster.
[…]
Fiction
After the End
by B. B. Garin
Leth forgot the apocalypse again today.
When I come down, he’s already shuffling through the cupboards, looking for the coffee. I tell him we’re out. Never mind that it’s been forty years since either of us has had a cup. I offer to make tea, but he just laughs and says he’s not that desperate; he’ll stop on his way to work.
[…]
Poetry
To Live Another Life
by Mistee St. Clair
Live in a small apartment above a bakery and wake
to the buxom smell of yeasted dough, browned butter,
and sugar seeped from scones. Imagine the baker and barista
humming along to their opening shift playlist. Get that coffee
Lunch Special
Becoming: A Multimodal Exploration of Identity & Family with Cathy Linh Che
Interviewed by Valerie Nyberg
During AWP 2025, I had the opportunity to sit down with poet Cathy Linh Che. The last year has been a busy one with the debut of her video installation, Appocalips, a short documentary film We Were the Scenery, and the forthcoming publication of her second poetry book Becoming Ghost. […]
Flash Prose
November 2024, at the UPS Store on Bergen Street
by LJ Jensen
The trees should have withered months ago, but everything is too green. I walk the dog past a magnolia on our morning route and find one last leaf still attached to its branch. I tell the dog to growl at it, as if she can intimidate the leaf into a timely death. […]
Interview
Pushing the Boundaries On Hags, Slags, and Sluts: Poet Katie Beswick in Plumstead Pram Pushers
Interviewed by Scott LaMascus
Whether in serial bullying, the joshing of friendship, the post-trauma epithets that cut and remain tender in life, the names we call one another really matter […]. Katie Beswick’s new collection of poems explores these realities by going mano-a-mano with an old term of derision for women—taken from what is to be cast off from smelting of metals. […]
