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...
New Nonfiction by John Darcy: “Hypothermia”
The email takes me to a link that takes me to an article displaying two mugshots. The mugshots take me back to winter. It was a southern snow day, at least five inches of accumulation and more flak...
New Poetry from Alison Hicks: “I Took A Walk With A Friend” and “Untitled”
I TOOK A WALK WITH A FRIEND Instead of starting a poem I told her about my son’s first semesterAs long as he’s home & happy &a...
New Fiction from Adam Straus: “ANA Checkpoint”
Sergeant Reiss insisted on giving a full patrol order every time we left the wire. I thought it was overkill, but I didn’t mind as much as some of the other guys. Haggerty especially was alw...
New Poetry from Amalie Flynn: “Married”
For twenty years I have been marriedto a morning. Of blue sky that stretchesand pulls across me like water filling upa suburban swimming pool. The pit thatformed a hole. The bodies falling dow...
New Flash Fiction from Mary Doyle: “Triple X”
It’s zero-three hundred and I’m yanked out of a sleep so deep I wake thrashing and fighting like a marlin at the end of a hook. It takes me a minute to figure out why. Then the sounds of raw, unres...
“The ‘Office Space’ of War Novels”: Susanne Aspley Interviews Brett Allen, Author of ‘Kilroy Was Here’
I first heard about Brett Allen’s debut novel, ’Kilroy Was Here’, by tweet from Matt Gallagher (@MattGallagher0), author of Empire City, Youngblood, and Kaboom. (Matt always has good reading recomm...
New Nonfiction from Philip Alcabes: “Peppina”
1. A Child A neglected box in the back of my closet contains a contain a collection of items from my father’s apartment, I find. In the midst of a stack of curling black-and-white photo prints ther...
New Flash Fiction from Elise Ochoa: “Desert Crossing”
If you’ve never seen a desert, I mean, a real desert, you’d think the sand looks like murky brown water rippling in the wind. Sometimes I would tell myself that, as I traversed the barr...
New Flash Fiction from Drew Pham: “On Their Lips, the Name of God”
This is the memory that stays with him as his blood abandons the body and life fades—this, the one comfort that will carry him into the next life. Dawran had waited beneath a mulberry tree in May o...
New Flash Fiction from Mason Boyles: “Parched”
The hermit lived in the water tower with an alligator, both of them long-gone paler than moon. Their eyes gemmed the same pink in front of a flashlight. The hermit’s skin was scaly with scabs...
Larry Abbott on Warrior Songs, Vol. Three: “The Last Thing We Ever Do: Vietnam Veterans Speak Truth”
Warrior Songs is a series of albums created under the direction of Iraq War veteran Jason Moon, profiled here in Wrath-Bearing Tree (October 2020). With the release of Warrior Songs’ third CD...
New Poetry from Gladys Justin Carr: Numbers
that night we forgot for a whilethe broken country where we livedin hearts discontent walking backwardinto unicorns, rainbows, butterfliesgrazing beauty until blood oaths shatteredand you left, the...
New Nonfiction by David Chrisinger: “Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing about Trauma”
The following is an excerpt from David Chrisinger’s new book, Stories Are What Save Us: A Survivor’s Guide to Writing About Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, July 2021). In this s...
New Review from Matthew Komatsu: Adin Dobkin’s ‘Sprinting Through No-Man’s Land’
I cannot separate my early memories of war from those of cycling. I’d just begun to cycle competitively — as a lieutenant and duathlete stationed in San Antonio — when I deployed to Afghanistan in ...
Nonfiction from Jennifer Orth-Veillon: “From Death Threats to a French Dandy, Afghan Contractors Abandoned by the U.S. Struggle to Find Asylum Abroad”
LYON, France—When the Taliban shoved him out of the sedan with the butts of their Kalashnikovs, Medhi could barely walk. For eight hours, they had blindfolded him, kept his hands tied behind his ba...
New Interview of Author Hassan Blasim, by Peter Molin
Hassan Blasim’s 2014 short-story collection The Corpse Exhibition captured American readers with its harrowing portrait of an Iraq wrecked by authoritarian rule, oppressive Islamic custom, American...
New Fiction from Mike McLaughlin: “What Could They Take from Him?”
After four months of not getting shot, not stepping on a mine, not taking a fragment to the neck or through the eye, Pat Dolan didn’t think about his remaining time in country. At the firebase, men...
New Poetry from Barbara Tramonte: “Tailored To Fit In”
Somebody sewed me with a stringOn the biasI was gatheredAnd about to pop This has been a pattern all my life They hemmed me in with notionsEach stitch bringing meTo a false whole (I longed to slit ...
New Nonfiction from Kristina Usaite: “Against a Cruel Society, I Came Out to Myself”
When I was losing myself, the only thing that saved me was immigrating to America. Only then, with great effort and sacrifice, I was able to come out to myself and do what we all have to do f...
New Poetry from Alita Pirkopf: “Roadkill,” “Sounds of the Past,” “Spring,” and “Unhealthy”
ROADKILL I bring you blood in buckets,a heart that I hear, a palsied hand.It has been eight, tenyears, my issue.The same as twenty years agowhen your father feltabout me as you do now.I felt the wo...
New Nonfiction from James Warren Boyd: “The Ecstasy of Sister Bernadette”
In seventh grade my Catholic elementary school received a new principal, Sister Bernadette, who strode onto the blacktop that first day like Darth Vader walking down the ramp of an Imperial shuttle...
New Poetry from Jesse Frewerd: “Symphony”
Ballistic medleys project ambition, while dancing tones find their pitch. There is unexpected buoyancy in our youth. March, advance, train, drill, prepare, disseminate. It’s the 4am ensemble, time ...
New Fiction from David P. Ervin: “Currents”
Grant crouched on the sandstone and leaned on his fishing pole. The sun warmed his shoulders as he stared through the clear, green water of the Sand Fork River. Shadows of particles on the water’s ...
New Review: Mike Carson on Kevin Honold’s “The Rock Cycle: Essays”
Kevin Honold’s new essay collection, The Rock Cycle, begins in the Arabian Desert. It is 1991. U.S. forces have just invaded Kuwait to push Saddam Hussein’s armies back into Iraq. Honold’s unit is ...
New Poetry from Ron Riekki: “my”
my brain was left back in the war, the burialof civilian-normality, how my amygdalakicks out the ladders in my head, fallingdecade...
New Fiction from Logan Hoffman-Smith: “Hunger”
There were sixteen of us before the storm hit: truants and runaways and young offenders, girls in insulated yellow snowsuits, left to the dark Montana cold. We marched like ants across the tree lin...
New Poetry from Hannah Jane Weber: “My Childhood Smelled Like,” “Surprise Dawn”
MY CHILDHOOD SMELLED LIKE cabbage, salted tomatoes, and cracklings.the flume of dust I awakened when my fingers untangled the shag carpet’s red mane. crayons I melted against the wood stove, our te...
New Nonfiction by James Wells: “Signs”
June 27, 2008 I count between my mother’s breaths: one-thousand one, one-thousand two. Thirty minutes ago, her breaths were one second apart, and an hour ago, they were less than half a secon...
New Nonfiction from John Vrolyk: “Black Bracelets”
In 2011, two years before I show up to Officer Candidate School, the Marine Corps changes its uniform order to allow black memorial bracelets in uniform. ‘Acknowledging the close personal nat...
New Fiction from David Blome: “Bodies”
On a bright December morning, the lieutenant told me the news. An insurgent group in Latifiyah had executed about twenty Iraqi Shiites. Their unburied bodies were still rotting in the desert. We ha...
New Review from Adrian Bonenberger: Brian Castner’s “‘Stampede’: Disaster and Gold Fever in the Klondike”
My earliest exposure to the literature of 19th century Alaska came in the form of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. An adventure to match the dreams of idealistic youth, Call of the Wild carried me a...
New Poetry from Kevin Honold: “Elegy for the Emperor Frederick II”
i.view from Emigrant, Death Valley The snowy Amargosas kneel beside the salt flats stained with the blue shadows of clouds and the fading paths of walking rain. The bitter dust comes back to life. ...
New Poetry from Alise Versella: “Parallels,” “Red-Breasted Sparrows,” “I Wonder If History’s Men Knew They Would Be Great,” “A Fierce Sense of Resolve”
PARALLELS The birds with convictionTap out their lyrics in the snowAnd their chatter descends upon the mountainsLook how the flowers still struggle to growLike lungs filling with airThe soft despai...
New Review from Michael Carson: “Cherry” by Nico Walker
Early on in Nico Walker’s Cherry, the narrator, working a dead-end shoe store job to pay for drugs while his parents pay for his college, says that he has a well cultivated sense of shame. This is ...
New Film Review from Larry Abbott: “This is Not a War Story”
Timothy Reyes (Danny Ramirez), a young Marine Lance Corporal veteran, spends his days riding subway trains throughout New York City. As he travels he pops more and more pills, surrounded by u...
New Review from Adrian Bonenberger: “‘The Hardest Place’: Wes Morgan’s Post-Mortem on Americans in Afghanistan’s Pech Valley”
If I were to write a morality tale about America’s counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan—something in line with Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene or John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, I’d ma...
New Fiction from Susan Taylor Chehak: “With a Whimper”
This isn’t the first time that man has visited this cemetery, and he supposes it isn’t going to be the last. As a child he was one of the pack of kids from the neighboring sprawl of houses who came...
New Fiction from Gregory Johnsen: “Odds Are”
1. Heads Years later, long after the bodies had been pieced back together, after they’d been bagged and buried, after the lawyers got involved and Code Pink rallied, after the stacks of cash and th...
New Poetry from Tyler Vaughn Hayes: “They even pipe it into the bookstore,” “His first time: flight by ropes,” “The edict,” “Rappel annuel”
They even pipe it into the bookstore It’s never quite silent, though there’s no lowing, not from God nor his glutted blind bovine. Only the thudding of shuffling ungues on stereos hemmed, hidden in...
New Nonfiction from J. Malcolm Garcia: “The Forced Disappearance of Sombath Somphone”
Ng Shui Meng speaks of her husband Sombath Somphone in the present tense, with a firm matter-of-fact tone about his disappearance, a way, I presume, for her to maintain control in a situation where...
New Photo Essay by Arin Yoon: “Standing Up for Change”
My first encounter with Joana Scholtz was as I ran after her (and her husband, Rik Jackson) as they were exiting campaign headquarters and about to enter their car. I was on assignment photographin...
A Tale of Two Coups
Forty years ago, I was living in Madrid working on a grant from the Thomas J. Watson Foundation to learn how Spanish theater had changed since Francisco Franco’s death. While there I was detained t...
New Fiction from Kyle Seibel: “Lovebirds”
So Senior Reyes, the new night shift sup. I see him and the new airman walking around the hangar bay. Just talking. Honestly, I thought they were working and I’ve got my binder with me so I come up...