A Lasting Literary Journal

Prose

Next Steps

Her hand shaking, Alex peered into the mirror to tweeze off the last of her glued-on eyelashes. Maddening how one lash stood straight up, refusing to be plucked off.

By Patricia Pasick · September 2026

Poems

Three Odes for Franci

Packing and preparing for my upcoming trip, / I consider who it is I most want to see / when my phone buzzes: it’s Franci.

By Catherine Kauffmann · September 2026

Poems

Amputation

The sky absconds with the cedar, / the owners having deemed it more / nuisance than asset.

By Michael Esparza · September 2026

Essays

Playing Fast and Loose: The Memoirs of Georges Simenon

To paraphrase Gore Vidal: autobiographies are histories that require doublechecking the facts; memoirs are accounts of how authors remember their lives.

By Kat Meads · August 2026

Poems

Stubborn Fire

My town—my home, / as I think of it, / is cut glass. / It reveals its inner beauty / the longer you look.

By Martin Fisher · August 2026

Prose

Althea

Nigh on 92 years of age, and only recently having concluded my tenure as a volunteer working with seniors, I have somewhat regrettably been forced to acknowledge my advanced age

By Catherine Dean · August 2026

Prose

Thornton Strawberries

Pop floats above the Pacific Ocean, drawing chalk lines on the saltwater, organizing the Santa Monica Bay into discrete parts. Water, here. Sand, there.

By Kerry Franich · August 2026

Poems

Two Poems: The Great Work, August

You were a funny way to breathe / The insect buzz, all eyebrows knit / And lying to the bed of blades / Screaming your knees green.

By Sophie Sardari · August 2026

Prose

Twenty-Five Metres

Every Saturday that winter, Donna Marsh paid thirteen pounds fifty so that her daughter could fail to swim a length of Alderlea pool.

By Ashley Mangtani · August 2026

Poems

Crossings

taking the old gimcrack stairs to the cellar / I swim down / to the burning river / and emerge, dripping / on a dank stoop.

By Elliott May · August 2026

Poems

animal planet

new mammal upgrade. endorphins! i moan / until april. starve myself into last year's jeans. / absorb the backyard sun like a blade

By Taha Ahmar Qadeer · August 2026

Poems

Buried and Forgotten Gods

There is a river in my hometown / that they buried before I was born. / Before my parents were born.

By Mike R. Christie · July 2026

Prose

Tristis

He hates croissants. The thing shatters when he bites it. Bread is supposed to hold. That is the entire job of bread.

By Griffin Paschall · July 2026

Essays

The Finished Article: Auden by Ackroyd

W. H. Auden spent thirty years editing himself, and the editing did not stop at the poems. Peter Ackroyd has written the book Auden hoped would be impossible.

By J.M.C. Kane · July 2026

Prose

The Gospel According to Four Sisters

The bathroom smelled faintly of lemon pledge and of roses trying their best to out-scent the cleaning polish. Four women occupied the space between the sinks and the mirrors at this moment.

By Matthew Johnson · July 2026

Prose

The Fox Prince

It was mid-May, still spring by the calendar, but by the weather, nearly high summer. Under a glaring afternoon sun, the low khaki hills surrounding the bay cut a sharp outline against the cloudless blue sky.

By Peter Newall · July 2026

Poems

The Limbo of the Unbaptized

When our friends fall off / our radar, disappear, / they go perhaps to some limbo / like unbaptized children.

By John Peter Beck · July 2026

Poems

For Galen

Egg whites, clear as glass, / honey, honey, and its tortoise trickle. / This poultice of potential / pour on linen wraps to shell

By Dylan Rogers · July 2026

Prose

Ostranenie

The man named Bennett spoke as if the world and everything in it were roped together and being dragged in one direction only.

By Drew Martin · July 2026

Essays

The Courtyard

The cobblestones of the aqueduct, eroded by thousands of years of footsteps, were no match for Rosa's sturdy Italian-leather block heel.

By Laura Larkins · July 2026

Poems

A Pantoum for Ishmael

Abraham did as he was told, / finding God in what / he was not. Your only son / on an altar, knife to his throat,

By Johanna Hall · July 2026

Prose

St. Cuthbert's Spyglass

It had been their youthful destination, on summer afternoons, when the cathedral by the weir took them into its cool shadows for Evensong.

By James Roderick Burns · July 2026

Poems

The Fate of the Seafarer's Son

Fine mist that crown his greying head / as wrapped in shred of sail he goes, / by drying trail that salt his stead / from harbour's yawn at evening's close --

By Kataryna Zharkovna · June 2026

Prose

Kings

Willets swarm off my left in strange formation; a dark scythe that drifts against a diming sky.

By Anthony Joseph Morrone · June 2026

Poems

Duty

There are fewer true demands, / non-negotiable responsibilities, / made of you than you might suspect.

By Luke Shuffield · June 2026

Prose

The Gate with Two Hasps

Carlo Russo and the Professor stood each his side of the fence, which divided them no longer vertically, but in a flat band of redwood planks.

By Michael Thériault · June 2026

Prose

The Crook of the City's Elbow

By the time they found the house, David's fingers had gone numb around the neck of the wine bottle.

By Brandon McNeice · June 2026

Prose

The Necessary Hate

Margot was alone in the part of the pool set aside for laps, cutting her way through the water with crisp, firm, precise strokes, her deltoids straining, her back muscles rippling.

By Paul Colby · June 2026

Poems

The Diagnosis; How to Die

A Wyeth-like impression: snow along / the road begins to mount, / a doctor's frail voice goes silent.

By Jason Barry · June 2026

Prose

Sagittarius

One doesn't have to be a Zeus to recognize the engulfing and implacable doom associated with meeting up with a Ganymede or Narcissus or Chrysippus or, as in my case, a comparable Sagittarius adolescent.

By Thomas Penn Johnson · June 2026

Poems

I never learnt

the colours of a hyacinth, / nor those of the building it grew under. / It slithered through the hairs of my dreams, / wrecking the gardens, and the carnage of sunken weeds.

By Syeda Errah Bint Fawad · June 2026

Essays

Fragments of Summer

It's as if I cannot bear to write as I live, that I need to drink it all in and ferment it like wine, the distillation happening somewhere inside my heart before I can pour it out with my hands.

By Piper McKeever · May 2026

Poems

Two Poems: Fade, Brushed In

what do you look for in the old photograph? perfection of yellowed sky / must have been November / could have been quiet there

By Katie Rosenblatt · May 2026

Poems

Commerce

Late morning in winter, and I have one of our old mentor's masterful books in hand. Sirens rupture the silence on Tremont St, but I work to stay within and between the lines.

By Matthew Porto · May 2026

Poems

The Story of Wombs

Mine grew while I was growing in someone else's. Miraculous that two fleshy ducts developed, fused, bloomed into one mysterious cavity I'll never see, a place within me able to weave beings.

By Cheryl Dyer · May 2026

Poems

Canto

Why should I leave my escapades to the dead, scattered on the porch of a silent cathedral, before receding to the horizon where the sky folds itself into my dream?

By Tobias Irikura · May 2026

Prose

Formula

Timothy stopped by his bedroom, where he took his phone from the charger, and produced his inbox. Still nothing from Sieglinde.

By David Barry · May 2026

Prose

The Evil One (Plus One)

If only you had seen the light, dear reader… How beautiful it was, in moment and in memory, how brilliant-burning each barrier of the crimson-glass light!

By Saoirse Bertram · April 2026

Poems

Carousels

You rode the prancer without the reins: I trailed you on a gelding.

By Frank William Finney · April 2026

Essays

Notes on Punctuation

Every mark of punctuation is, in a sense, a little death—a halt, a breath withheld, a pause at the edge of meaning before the plunge.

By David Capps · April 2026

Poems

ovate

I feel betrayed to learn that the periwinkle, ever-present staple of my young New England shores, is invasive, arriving from Europe likely in the Gulf of St. Lawrence nearly two hundred years ago.

By George W. Shuster, Jr. · April 2026

Poems

Arachne

I know the spider in the fire pit, / There, scrambling along the circle of steel, / Will be past my tracking gaze soon, the heat / Will have its way with it before its will

By D. Eric Parkison · April 2026

Prose

Demiurge

In the Winter and Spring Trimesters of my freshman year at Saint Joseph's School for Boys, I looked out the window of my room in Morse Hall every night expecting to see a mushroom cloud.

By Daniel Sipes · April 2026

Poems

Spiritus Sanctus

Cleanse this soul with the holy froth of undulant seas; the balm of astral dust

By John Muro · April 2026

Prose

Margaret's Song

The first time I met Margaret, she was ankle deep in a pile of fertilizer. Those aren't coming off you, I thought to myself. I wanted to say it out loud but was too afraid to speak.

By Lauren Sklarz · March 2026

Prose

Trap

The house is tense and dark. She doesn’t look me in the eye anymore.

By Marc Cozza · March 2026

Poems

April Fool

April cruelty uncommon/ Thy fetching glance invites my hand/ As if to turn the floor with thee

By Steve Bucher · March 2026

Poems

Ash Wednesday, after T.S. Eliot

I cannot repent for all of this. The river rising to bury the mountain, the newborn wailing unheard in the desert.

By Erika Takacs · March 2026

Prose

Window on the Boulevard

Fee Calder hadn't seen the woman in the modern house across the street for months. Fee initially watched the house because she didn't like it.

By Claire Bezdek Gochal · March 2026

Poems

Ash Wednesday

Ashes on the subway, silent fraternity of the believing, the warmongers are building up their reserves, sending the tankers and the carriers into place.

By Nora Rawn · March 2026

Poems

Salotto

Look at your hand now, and intuit the difference between here an what stood straight to your right within a single glance.

By Anton Ivanov · March 2026

Prose

Clay Arthur

When the earth eats you up as it is liable to in these parts you never really stop dying. You get swallowed up by God and you’ll just keep on dying over and over as the mud and the bugs reclaim you and make you theirs.

By Cecilia O'Mara · March 2026

Poems

If Love Was a Gentle Thing

I remember what you said by the pecan tree: there ain't nobody here but us Gods.

By Kitty Saint-Remy · March 2026

Essays

(They Long To Be) Close To You

The horror, sincerity, and dissociative miasma of 20th century womanhood writ in Todd Haynes' Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story.

By Audrey Robinovitz · March 2026

Prose

The Old Dispensation

There was a Birth, certainly. We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death, but had thought they were different; this Birth was Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

By Naomi Leigh · February 2026