Death had narrowed his search of potential candidates down to two soldiers, both with high kill counts. Qualified applicants were always military men assigned to the line. Death had been a knight u...
New Poetry by Stephen Massimilla: “Wounded”
WOUNDED —to Laura Bleating thing without wool Thunder without sound Ghost of wooded peaks, of constricted arterial waters There is a dog inside the heart, voice bursting Intermin...
New Poetry by Kevin Honold: “A Brief History of the Spanish Conquest”
A Brief History of the Spanish Conquest Tell me again of that fabulous kingdom where a single ear of corn is more than two strong young men can carry, where cotton grows untended, in ...
New Poetry from Gail Nielsen: “Something Like Nightfall”
SOMETHING LIKE NIGHTFALL something, like night falls slow, as if nothing in the world has ever moved but distant hope descending, still ablaze days soften to wonder what else leaves silhouet...
New Nonfiction from Ulf Pike: “Tone Deaf”
With a slightly youthful blurring of reality, sandhill cranes resemble pterodactyls in flight. Each year when they return to the valleys and high plains of southern Montana, their warm bugles trill...
Interview with Tom Keating, Author of ‘Yesterday’s Soldier’
Andria Williams for The Wrath-Bearing Tree: I was honored to read Tom Keating’s memoir, ‘Yesterday’s Soldier,’ an excellently written and sensitive account of his time as a ...
New Review from Brian Castner: Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Bomber Mafia”
Why did Malcolm Gladwell write a World War II book? The bombing campaign over Europe and Japan is hardly his typical beat: Cliff-noting TED talks for the MBA crowd. Where’s the investment edge here...
New Poetry by Doris Ferleger: “Praying at the Temple of Forgiveness,” “Internal Wind,” Driving Down Old Eros Highway,” and “Summer Says”
Praying at the Temple of Forgiveness for Zea Joy, in memoriam Last Monday you threw yourself, your body, dressed in red chemise, in front of a train. It was your insatiable hunger for a mor...
New Poetry by Mary Ann Dimand: “Earth Appreciation” and “Lusting, Stinting”
New poetry by Mary Ann Dimand: “Earth Appreciation” and “Lusting, Stinting”
...
New Fiction from J.G.P. MacAdam: “A Sleeping Peace”
Author’s note: I arrived at this story after reading an article in Rolling Stone called ‘Highway to Hell: A Trip Down Afghanistan’s Deadliest Road’ and I thought, what if wh...
New Poetry by Ricardo Moran: “ABBA-1975” and “On the Street”
ABBA-1975 Abba’s lyrics, like water shot from La Bufadora, mingle with volcanic steam from metallic pots of corn. And the scrape on my knee from chasing the seagulls bleeds, but does not hurt. On t...
New Nonfiction from Rob Bokkon: “The Last of the Gonzo Boys: P.J. O’Rourke, War, and the Evolution of a Political Mind”
“We hear the Iraqi army is systematically blowing up buildings in downtown Kuwait City. If the architecture in Kuwait resembles the architecture in Saudi Arabia, the Iraqi army will have done one g...
New Fiction from Steve Kiernan: “War Ensemble”
Holding Dick Cheney’s shotgun is not exactly how I thought I’d be spending my time when I joined the Marines. It was summer of ’06 and the meatgrinder of Iraq was going full-tilt. President Bush h...
New Fiction from Jillian Danback-McGhan: “Allied”
I met the Lieutenant at a diplomatic reception at our embassy. Carrying papers which issued weaponry to his nation’s military, I passed them to my contact – a pock-marked General whose eyes glitter...
New Poetry by Michael Carson: “Politics”
Politics Every 20 years or so boys dress up And kill each other for fun. It’s the way of the wrack of the world The wind of our imagination and our love. To blame our costumes for our beauty Is lik...
New Nonfiction: “Underground” by Mark Hummel
In my childhood, television was a great unifier, for there existed a limited choice of three television networks, discounting PBS. But even if we were watching the same programming, television had ...
New Poetry by Kevin Norwood: “Rabbits in Autumn”
RABBITS IN AUTUMN Who will find our bones in a thousand years, bleached and brittle under the unyielding sun, scattered in dried grasses by feral dogs or vultures? Who will hold such curiosities, n...
New Poetry by Joddy Murray: “Aphrodite Urania,” “Chronos After Castrating His Father,” “Grandpa Uranus, Rainmaker,” and “Uranus’ Genital Blood”
Aphrodite Urania From a womb of foam I came to be a woman, heavenly gestated from Father, who also brought weather, seasons. He is a castrate and timeless, the bluest of planets. As a warrio...
New Poetry by Emily Hyland: “Rehab Day 1,” “Rehab Day 4,” “Rehab Day 9,” “Rehab Day 11,” and “Rehab Day 19”
REHAB DAY 1 He hadn’t told me, hadn’t stopped drinking drank beer in the hallway near recycling where people bring garbage and broken-down boxes he guzzled, and I was here on the other side ...
New Nonfiction from J.G.P. MacAdam: “Was His Name Mohammed Hassan?”
I don’t want to keep going back there. I’m damn near forty years old; too broke and tubby to deploy anymore. It’s my kid’s birthday next week. I should be thinking about balloons, wrapping paper, l...
New Fiction from Amar Benchikha: “Flight”
CONTENT WARNING: A hate crime against an Arab-American is committed in the story. Being an Arab-American myself, the hate crime is loosely based on something that occurred to me back in 2004 when I...
New Poetry by Maggie Harrison: “Clutch and Bless”
my heart is a raspberry juicy yet taut fragile temporal eat it now before it degrades and leaves a tasteless piece of itself smeared on the basket. my raspberry heart lives in the moment but...
New Nonfiction from Karl Meade: “Knee-Capped”
We all live in a kind of delirium: as if we have control of our lives, while we know damn well something is coming. We don’t know if it’s coming from the inside or the outside—a disease or a rogue ...
New Poetry by Carol Graser: “Parkinson’s Triolet” and “Summer Isolation”
THE WIDENING FAULT / image by Amalie Flynn Parkinson’s Triolet I cup the base of your skull, catch precious cells spilling out like salt that seasons your limbs, your unholy lurches I cup th...
New Fiction from Jim Speese: “The Darkness”
Sometimes these things happen. You wake from a deep sleep, whether a short afternoon nap or a long night’s slumber, and you’re disoriented. You forget things. Sometimes you shower and dress for wor...
New Poetry by Betsy Martin: “About What You Have,” “Female Figure in Photos,” and “To Missoula”
GRASSES QUIVER BEFORE / image by Amalie Flynn ABOUT WHAT YOU HAVE In my dream Dad, age one hundred twelve, has his first cell phone— big and square, with a rotary dial. With a proud index fi...
New Nonfiction from Jon Imparato: “You Had Me at Afghanistan”
“I was lying in a burned‐out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky. There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting hig...
Book Review: Lauren Hough’s ‘Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing’ and Sari Fordham’s ‘Wait for God to Notice’
“I was like an inept spy pretending to be American based on movies I’d watched and books I’d read.” — Lauren Hough, ‘Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing’ “In 1984, we would arrive in Texas, and w...
New Fiction from J. Malcolm Garcia: “Love Engagement”
Noor and his wife Damsa moved to Paris when the Russians invaded Afghanistan in 1979. Twenty-two years later, after the collapse of the Taliban, they returned to Kabul and rented a house with a lar...
New Nonfiction from M.C. Armstrong: “J.F.K. Revisited: Through the Looking-Glass”
I write this review of Oliver Stone’s new film during the most bizarre month in America since the January of the Capitol riots and the de-platforming of Donald Trump, a president who promised to re...
Interview with Navy Veteran and Artist Skip Rohde, by Larry Abbott
Skip Rohde was an officer in the Navy for twenty-two years, with four submarine deployments and service in Desert Shield, Desert Storm, and Bosnian peace-keeping operations in 1996. After retiremen...
New Poetry by Suzanne O’Connell: “Airport Luggage Carousel” and “Shipwreck”
Airport Luggage Carousel A battered cardboard boxholes punched in the sidetied with frayed ropelid popping upplastered with masking tape, wrinkled.One lone orphangoing round and round the luggage c...
New Poetry by Saramanda Swigart: “Reckoning” and “The Small I”
RECKONING don’t worry about mei am not well but you’ve worried enoughmy prosperity has a body count— this shielded fleshconspicuous & allowed to bebalks at being back- ground— this mouth taught...
Book Review: David Ervin on Jerad Alexander’s ‘VOLUNTEERS: GROWING UP IN THE FOREVER WAR’
As the United States marks the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the Global War on Terror as well as an ugly end to the conflict’s iteration in Afghanistan, it is a time for reflection. The...
New Poetry by Ben Weakley: “In Some Distant Country” and “How Will You Answer”
In Some Distant Country We have seen this before, in booksand on the screen, like dust plumes risingin some distant country. Except,some distant country is Michigan –armed patriots (terrorists)in t...
New Fiction from Hadeel Salameh: “Everything Will Be Okay”
1. Her Friend the Israeli (Eli) Mais got a phone call from her parents in the occupied territories of the West Bank. I don’t know what they told her yet; she’s been too shaken to tell me. All she t...
New Nonfiction from Bettina Rolyn: “Adjustment Disorder”
For thirteen years, I stored my boxes of army documents and medical records in various basements, closets, and attics, mostly not my own as I had fled the land for foreign adventures, eventually se...
New Fiction from John Milas: “Burning the Dragon”
Stautner wasn’t my friend anymore. He didn’t get promoted with the rest of us on the first of the month. Now a fire burned between us. Stautner was a shitbag. Everyone knew it. He was a shitbag and...
New Poetry by Naomi Ruth Lowinsky: “In And Out Of Time,” “In The Wake Of Our Lady Of The Double-Edged Axe The Notorious RBG,” “Prepping For Apocalypse,” “Sideswiped,” and “The Queen Of Souls”
IN AND OUT OF TIME In the fire-eaten landin the smoke-drenched airPUT CHARACTI dream PUT CHARACTCrystal Lake PUT CHARACTsquare raft afloatPUT CHARACTat the center I in my clo...
New Fiction from Jon Imparato: “You Had Me at Afghanistan”
“I was lying in a burned‐out basement with the full moon in my eyes. I was hoping for replacement when the sun burst through the sky. There was a band playing in my head and I felt like getting hig...
New Poetry by D.W. McLachlan: “Tanana River” and “The Heaviness of Age”
Tanana River We followed your Hilux along the riparian zone,a green snake blooming through the desert brown,when you met in secret like lovers, and the way youhugged each other in greeting showed a...
New Interview from Larry Abbott: Suzanne Rancourt on Poetry, Myth, Nature, Indigenous Life
Suzanne Rancourt’s new book of poems, Old Stones, New Roads (2021) builds on the work of her two previous books (Billboard in the Clouds, 2014, and murmurs at the gate, 2019). She dedicates t...
New Fiction from Damion Meyer: “Reverse Process”
Five days ago at morning PT, Nate wasn’t in formation. Everyone assumed he was at sick call, and we did our workout without him. But when he didn’t show up for first formation after breakfast, tens...
New Review from Amalie Flynn: Jan Harris’ “Isolation in a Time of Crisis”
The poems in Jan Harris’ Isolating One’s Priorities in a Time of Crisis are about the apocalypse. Or after. What happens after. &After the apocalypse happens. After the world cracks like...
New Fiction from Moe Hashemi: “Javid”
We buried Javid on a gloomy Friday morning in late December, shortly before Ali was gassed on the battlefront. All the guys from the eleventh grade attended the funeral, most of the teachers too. L...
New Poetry by Tony Marconi: “Song of the Roadway Door”
…three hundred miles,PUT CHahead the road more visiblePUT CHas the land dissolves in the pink light PUT CHARAPUT CHARAPUT CHof almost dawn you sit beside m...
New Nonfiction from J. Malcolm Garcia: “Alabama Village”
(Editor’s Note: Some names have been changed for privacy.) The three white, rectangular buildings of Light of the Village ministry stand bright as a smile in the clammy humidity of a late Sun...
New Review from M.C. Armstrong: Diane Lefer’s ‘Out of Place’
I can’t stop thinking about Dawit Tesfaye, an FBI agent in Diane Lefer’s excellent new novel, Out of Place. Shortly after 9/11 and the launch of the Global War on Terror, Tesfaye, along with his pa...
New Nonfiction from Rob Bokkon: “Betrayal at Blair Mountain”
There were 10,000 of them. Boys fresh back from the war in France, middle-aged guys who fought in Cuba with TR, and old men who’d only ever handled a rifle to shoot squirrels and rabbits. They were...
New Poetry by Sam Cherubin: “Don’t About Not,” “Mermaid Tavern,” and “Emerald Inula”
Don’t About Not If I can’t or think do it like I’m doing now a beach &nb...