It was in the news. On a bright summer day in Helmand Province, Lance Corporal Wickie did his duty and killed an insurgent. A suicide bomber drove a truck loaded with explosives into the berm of Ou...
Shining Light on the Darkness: An Interview with Patrick Hicks
Andria Williams: Patrick, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me. I’ve just finished reading “Into the Tunnel,” the first chapter of your new novel, Eclipse. I was struck as always b...
“All. art. is. political:” An interview with Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales
Our two featured poems for the month are selections from Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales’s anthology, Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando. Here, WBT editor Andria Williams interviews t...
New Poetry from Nicole Oquendo and James A.H. White
The following poems are reprinted with permission from the anthology Pulse/Pulso: In Remembrance of Orlando (Damaged Goods Press 2018), edited by Roy G. Guzmán and Miguel M. Morales. to be b...
New Poetry from D.F. Brown
So, Who Wants to Walk Slack? Because we have no home in language We keep memories there As if the past were true And grinning in a grainy b/w Teenagers posing johnwayned Twisted into facts Jungle-w...
Fiction from Sara Nović: After the Attack
Well, nothing at first, not right after. In those initial moments panic is still optional. At the grocery store, the one across from your building on Frederick Douglass, or farther up on Ft. Washin...
New Essay: How does Politics affect Writing, and Vice Versa?
I recently attended the 15th International Conference on the Short Story in Lisbon, where I met many interesting writers, read from my own work, and participated in a panel that discussed the quest...
New Fiction from Ulf Pike: “Welcome Home, Brother”
My arm burned red resting out the window in the summer sun as I drove east out of the mountains. I passed through the shade of centuries-deep bluffs carved by the Yellowstone River, then curved sou...
New Movie Review: In “The Interpreters,” Home Is No Place At All
“The Interpreters,” a new documentary film by directors Sofian Khan and Andres Caballero, is a raw, emotionally vigorous, and, only too often, devastating look into the lives of Iraqi and Afghan in...
New Memoir: Call Me American by Abdi Nor Iftin
CALL ME AMERICAN / Abdi Nor Iftin Excerpted from Chapter Five: Arabic to English By December of 1992, the world could no longer sit back and watch the starvation in Somalia. Humanitarian aid had be...
Interview with Matt Young, Author of Eat the Apple
Matt Young is a writer, teacher, and veteran. He holds an MA in Creative Writing from Miami University and is the recipient of fellowships from Words After War and The Carey Institute...
New Fiction: Excerpt from Hilary Plum’s Strawberry Fields
An excerpt from the novel Strawberry Fields. Alice, a reporter, and the detective Modigliani are both working on the case of five murdered veterans of the Iraq War (including Kareem, named below). ...
New Poetry from Janaya Martin
More Than Twice She said you better hush before he comes back in here like she knew who she was talking to but didn’t She was me and he was the mistake you made more than twice but he gave yo...
Memoir by Sari Fordham: “House Arrest in Thirteen Parts”
Part I: The House, circa 1977 The house in Uganda was red brick with a metal roof, a rusted water tank, and a screened-in verandah that had once been painted green. My mother spent most of her day ...
New Fiction from Ulf Pike: Son of God
I. Esses The warmth of his voice makes us wary of his intentions. He bears our sin of greenness like a precious burden, our softness like a direct order from God to transform us in his image. A hel...
Go Home and Dig It: A Review of Will Mackin’s Bring Out The Dog
“Crossing the River with No Name,” the eighth story in Will Mackin’s debut collection, Bring Out the Dog, describes the movement of a SEAL team “to intercept” Taliban coming out the Pakistan Mounta...
New Poem from Jacob Siegel: The Old Gods
The Old Gods (No. 9, 2003) I. The towers bloomed up in the dark Like nails scrolling from dead fingers While around them a languid curtain fell In drifts of violet gas that settled on the roofs All...
New Essay by Patrick Mondaca: The Hideous Hypocrisy of Himmelstoss
“At the head of the column trots the fat sergeant-major. It is queer that almost all of the regular sergeant-majors are fat. Himmelstoss follows him, thirsting for vengeance. His boots gleam in the...
Fighting Like a Girl Means Not Being a Pussy: Mary Doyle Interviews Kelly Kennedy
It’s never easy to voice suspicions that your boss is out to get you. No matter how you describe it, the accusation sounds crazy. By the time you’re ready to put your instincts into words, you’ve a...
New Fiction by John M. McNamara: “The Mayor of West Callahan Creek”
A bare bulb in a hooded fixture illuminated the sign. Fog obscured the wooden placard, and as Joseph neared it, the black lettering seemed to recede into the white plywood. It read: WEST CALLAHAN C...
New Poetry from JD Duff
Night Flash You’ve been having nightmares again. The cruel shaking of a body resisting slumber. Hands twitching, chest jerking to beats of unknown song, playing over and over like memories you sold...
New Poetry from Yuan Changming
[anagrammed variations of the american dream] A ram cairned me In a crammed era [where] Cameramen raid A dire cameraman [or] Arid cameramen [Becoming] A creamed airman [or] A carmine dream A mince...
New Essay: Axe by M.C. Armstrong
I met a woman on my way to Iraq. Just before I stepped onto the midnight plane to Baghdad, she asked me what should have been a simple question: “Who do you work for?” Her name was Moni Basu. She ...
Interview With Will Mackin, Author of Bring Out the Dog
Guest Interviewer Peter Molin of Time Now interviews U.S. Navy veteran Will Mackin. Mackin’s work has appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Tin House, and The New York Times Magazine. His story “Ka...
New Fiction: The Lost Troop by Will Mackin
We had a dry spell in Logar. It was December and the weather was dog shit, so a degree of slowness was expected. But this went beyond slowness. It was like peace had broken out and nobody’d told us...
New Poetry by Sherrie Fernandez-Williams
she be like, damn she be all tired. she be like a flattened house shoe she be full of compunction she be remembering what was said. she be told what she deserves. she be believing everybody. she be...
New Poetry by Liam Corley
A VETERAN OBSERVES THE REPUBLIC AND REMEMBERS GINSBERG America, I’ve given you all, and now I’m less than one percent. America, fourteen-point-six-seven-five years of service I c...
New Memoir by Krystal A. Sital: SECRETS WE KEPT
We are of Trinidad—my grandmother, my mother, and I. Our island is located in the Lesser Antilles of paradise, a dot on the map that is often forgotten. It like ah drop ah oil, some say, as doh som...
New Poetry by Lynn Houston
You Leave for Afghanistan If I’m writing this, it means I can’t sleep and that the rain outside my window drops blindly in the dark. The crops need it, the cashier told me earlier, ringing me up fo...
An Interview with Krystal A. Sital, Author of SECRETS WE KEPT
In her debut memoir, Krystal A. Sital paints a vivid picture of life in Trinidad, which to any tourist’s eyes must seem like something of a paradise. Blue-green waters, intersected by rapid streams...
New Fiction by Helen Benedict: WOLF SEASON
STORM The wolves are restless this morning. Pacing the woods, huffing and murmuring. It’s not that they’re hungry; Rin fed them each four squirrels. No, it’s a clenching in the sky like a gathering...
An Interview with Helen Benedict, Author of WOLF SEASON
Helen Benedict is the author of seven novels, five books of nonfiction, and a play. Her most recent novel, WOLF SEASON, is this month’s fiction selection on The Wrath-Bearing Tree. WOLF SEASO...
Blood Money: C.E. Morgan’s ‘The Sport of Kings’
On May 17, 1875, under blue skies and wearing the flapping green-and-orange silks of his legendary employer J.P. McGrath, a diminutive, tough, whip-thin African-American jockey named Oliver Lewis, ...
THE WORDS ON THE INTERNET SAID MICHAEL HERR HAS DIED
Where were you when Michael Herr died in 2016? What were you doing? Did you listen to the opening voiceover of Apocalypse Now? Martin Sheen’s main character said “all I could think of was getting b...
New Poetry By Abby Murray
13 WAYS TO APPROACH A THREE-HEADED DOG I. Those who tell you to carry raw meat have never met me. Bones are better, they last longer, but if there’s no bones to be had bring peanut butter. I...
New Poetry by J.E. McCollough
Kintsugi The breaks on my soul Are only ever repaired Slowly. Old pieces Of the broken bowl, Fixed Back into their usual places With silver. With gold. Molten laces gleaming Across my chest, Across...
New Fiction: Excerpt from Taylor Brown’s The Gods of Howl Mountain
There was the stone pagoda, three-tiered, built on a small hill over a stream that shone like pebbled glass. The platoon had dammed a pool in the stream. They crouched in their skivvies, soaping an...
An Interview with Taylor Brown, Author of Gods of Howl Mountain
The Wrath-Bearing Tree (Andria Williams): Taylor Brown is the author of a collection of short stories, In the Season of Blood and Gold, and three novels: Fallen Land, hailed by Booklist as “a...
New Memoir: Solitaire by Lauren Hough (Part II)
Part II of II I should’ve been more concerned when someone fingered the words “Die Dike” into the dust on my rental car. I should’ve told someone. I was a twenty-three year old Combat ...
New Poetry by Lisa Stice
Headstrong I’m sorry catches in the throat and bruises in that wavering hesitation like a rock falling back to earth. See how it curves under the skin, twists and cuts as it hugs the ...
New Poetry by Amalie Flynn
POLLINATE When I dream about the words They fall from the sky. Dropped From planes that hover and the Words are dropping and dropping. In clusters. And again and. Again. How the words are dropping....
Lady Bird’s Pain
There’s an odd narrative thread in Greta Gerwig’s 2017 Lady Bird. The titular hero lives out her senior year of high school against the backdrop of the Iraq War. Characters watch the war’s escalati...
Interview with Jay Baron Nicorvo
Jay Baron Nicorvo’s novel, The Standard Grand (St. Martin’s Press), was picked for IndieBound’s Indie Next List, Library Journal‘s Spring 2017 Debut Novels Great First Acts,...
New Poetry by J. Scott Price
Captain Who? That gut-black October night, a security patrol set out: a platoon of Afghans and two of us. They, cloaked in toughness; we, in mountains of gear, humped an unseen base plate of...
New Fiction: Excerpt from Jay Baron Nicorvo’s The Standard Grand
The veterans of the Standard had been back from their wars for some time, trying to figure out how to live lives in the face of newfound civilian freedoms. No one barking orders but their girlfrien...
Disrespecting the Troops
Sitting in front of my computer one evening, scrolling idly through Facebook items, a long post catches my eye. As a novelist, I’m sympathetic to fellow writers who can’t fit their thoughts into ti...
New Memoir: Solitaire by Lauren Hough (Part I)
Part I of II My first time at the closest gay bar to Shaw Air Force Base, the bouncer asked me if I had a membership. I wasn’t expecting that question. But South Carolina blue laws on...
New Poetry by Aaron Wallace
Blackhawk Truck 2 is hit, and they’re calling for the medic, and I’m out of my truck kneeling next to the driver – I could hold his organs in my hands. At the top of Stanley Road Tim the Chip Man s...
New Fiction: “Plink, Rack” by Steven Kiernan
There are many moving parts in a gun. There’s the trigger, which most people mistakenly believe is what fires the whole thing. This is understandable. The trigger is elegant and shapely and romanti...
Not For Sale: Private Farmland in Post-Soviet Ukraine
For those Americans who think about Ukraine at all, it is no secret that the country has faced two wars since 2014. The first, most conspicuous war, exists in Ukraine’s South and East, against Russ...