The Pie & The Executive
by Anthony Tomkins
This morning the moon was still there in the sky. A limpet on cyan nothing. Its violet lathered the air and backlit an executive eating a chicken pie in the passenger seat of a Volvo XC70. Mushrooms, gravy, poultry offcut. Savoury vapour grasped their innards and wrought their stomach. They longed for a jam, a balm of stewed stone fruits in a tactile dough that could be set into delightful curlicues. Make berry punctuation, stud sentences with perceptible seeds, they thought. But they were tethered to stewed onion, the stench of an allium coagulating in cornflour and gnarled meat.
Outside a desert, oscillating and disturbed. Soup nervous on an induction hob. The executive could not go here, could not click the doors of their car to go into this unstilled flux of coyotes and numbers. Sickened by the goo in their pie, they watched the sands spewing up airline neckerchief silks and marsupial wanderers.
Unable to cross into this whirling ashen steppe, the executive stared at the radio and thought of seas with opal fish, granite and urchin pockets. Eyes open, they craved a saline tide clear enough to wash the paprika sand and russet movement away.
Undone
by Jane C. Miller
I could have almost reached out
and touched the hotel sign shaped
like a penis. Could have contracted
leprosy from an armadillo, picked up
a hitchhiking tick, my glasses dropped
in a rest-stop toilet. Could have stood barefoot
on tumbled rock in a cold stream’s flow,
walked into picture frames filled with ghosts.
A Snow Day Ends in Tragedy
by Eliot S. Ku
That winter, in our one-bedroom house with a portion of the roof sagging from the weight of the snow, surrounded on all sides by fields covered in blinding white, broken occasionally by the skeleton of a tree, my miracle doll gave birth to a litter of baby dolls, all smaller, cuter versions of herself, and Mother told me that we couldn’t keep them because we barely had enough money to keep the space heaters running, not to mention I wasn’t up for the responsibility of taking care of a whole litter of dolls, so Mother made me help her drown them one by one in the bathtub, and the last I saw of them they were floating face down in the water like it was their destiny to only have a few hours of life on this earth as Mother shuffled me out and closed the bathroom door, my miracle doll clutched to my chest, wet with our shared tears, which were cold and semi-permanent as little icicles since the heaters never worked that well against the single-paned windows, and later on in the day, the dolls were gone, the bathtub
drained and empty.
Alex Mepham (they/them) is guest editor for issue 7. They are a PhD student investigating how background noise impacts speech understanding. Alex writes and translates poetry and short prose, with work appearing in Magma, Dreich, Berlin Lit, Ink Sweat & Tears, and Modern Poetry in Translation among others. Alex is the current Poetry Editor for Queerlings and a Poetry Reader for Kitchen Table Quarterly. Alex lives in York, UK, and can be found at amepham.carrd.co.
Anthony Tomkins is a PhD researcher at the University of York, working on addiction narratives. He writes about the hills, flats and plains of his Brecon Beacons home and other equally magical things. He is an enthusiastically average runner and cook and his poetry can be read in Dreich, The Alchemy Spoon, Amethyst Review and others
Jane C. Miller’s poetry has appeared in Colorado Review, RHINO, Apple Valley Review and UCity Review. A winner of the Naugatuck River Review narrative poetry contest and a two-time recipient of a state fellowship, Miller is co-author of the poetry collection, Walking the Sunken Boards (Pond Road Press, 2019) and co-editor of the online poetry journal, ൪uartet (www.quartetjournal.com). Her debut collection, Canticle for Remnant Days, is forthcoming in 2024.
Eliot S. Ku is a physician who lives in New Mexico with his wife and two children. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Raven Review, Maudlin House, Meow Meow Pow Pow Lit, and Whiskey Tit.