Keep Wonder Alive and Kicking
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by Neil Weiner I lie on my back staring at the ceiling, the names circling like military rotor blades that won’t shut off. Apache.Black Hawk.Kiowa.Chinook.Iroquois.Cayuse.Sioux.Shawnee.Choctaw.Cheyenne.Lakota. Each one lands heavier than the last. They call them machines, but I hear nations. Histories. People who bled, who prayed, who endured. Now their names are […]
by Felicia Tsao an imperial reminder of revolutions to come and the ones that landed at their feet my mother once told me a story / way back when national flags flew proudly majestic dragons twirled in the sky slick with dew as fine rain settled / she said there was a time when generals […]
by Maysam Kandej and Bill Tope Maysam was a writer from Iran. For three months, he had dreamed of this trip. He had met an American writer, Mr. Robert Hawley, online. They emailed about books and writing. One day, Mr. Hawley kindly invited Maysam to visit him in America. Now, Maysam was […]
by Lynsey France they say recovery is trying twice when blood dries, gnats swarming the only sentence that’s safe to return to I am still waking from my last death because you will not forget her what was it she said when she prayed with her wings instead of her hands […]
by Mark Smeltzer A wounded girl sneaks through the algorithm. A bullet burrows under the root of her ponytail, Copper tic swelling at the base of her skull. A blue glove bears her arm to give or take fluids. She faces, stony, away on a rare hospital bed. Is she sedated, stunned or […]
by Foster Trecost It was my first day. Awkward introductions. Handshakes held a second too long. Then parked in a cubicle. The computer insisted on my attention, but the desk drawers won that battle. I pulled open the top. Empty, except for a few paperclips. Nothing in the next. The bottom bin, […]
by Maria Fitzgerald Comic book review of The Problem With Plastic by Maria Fitzgerald Author’s note: The Problem with Plastic by Judith Enck and Adam Mahoney was published by The New Press in 2025. The environmental justice aspect of plastic pollution is central to this book. This 9-page, 33-panel comic book review visualizes […]
by Emma Williquette EXHIBIT A: GREAT-GRANDMA ON DAD’S MOM’S SIDE. Indianapolis, Indiana. Sometime in 2007. I only remember the day in photographic bursts now at twenty-one. Mom was putting my hair half-up in a little ribbon as she always did. After that, I was in someone’s arms going somewhere. Suddenly I […]
by Jeffrey Zable Of course we’re all in different stages of dying, but it seems that those who are closest to it are mostly the ones talking about it. Yesterday, at a group that I belong to, this woman— who was there with her husband— said at one point, “I don’t know what […]
by Randall Amster I awaken every day knowing that one thing will be different—one item out of place, one song lyric changed, one person here or not, one event remembered differently by others, one part of myself altered in a way that only I would notice. I’ve named this experience temporal arrhythmia […]
