The Official Literary Journal of University of Southern Maine's Stonecoast MFA
POETRY By Summer Hardinge tomorrow we will meet the horses/ after they have run the fields cantered around us /nudged / this is not a war poem/ we use soft ropes/ drape shoulders and withers/ coax them in/ they will not halter for this/ is not a…
POETRY By Russell Karrick Perched in the branches of the avocado tree, the chickens are almost asleep. My son lifts his head from my chest and points to them. Each day I carry him through the yard at dusk and we hunt for seasonal treasures. Tonight, he spies amanita muscaria…
POETRY By Kelly Gray Most of the people in the restaurant have cancer. The waitresses have been hired to float their soft palms across scalps as they walk down aisles pouring soup with too much butter because it is too late to care about anybody’s heart. Better to…
POETRY By Jessica Goodfellow To write about suffering you need a dictionary. You don’t have one, but you have the internet which is, maybe, better for suffering. Accidentally, you look up suffrutescent instead. You read: partially or slightly woody; subshrubby. Subshrubby; you are delighted. You…
POETRY By Benjamin Faro We, brothers, were but boom-swings born of unnamed storms—eighty-eight knot gales that tested Mother’s savvy. Born at the peak of twenty-nine ‑foot swells, we left her concussed and rudderless, unsteering in our unsaid suddenness, pummeled by the fetch and wind shear. Shaken by…
POETRY By Benjamin Faro On a finger of continent between golden, earth ‑laden waters, where sunset is brighter even than L.A. and the Huang Hue never stops arriving, I turn west to reject the mouth as a place of expulsion. Why is it called a river mouth if a mouth…
FICTION By Laura Leigh Morris “I guess we should talk about Leander.” She’s cute in a ruddy cheeked, outdoorsman sort of way. Not the type of woman I picture with my husband. I stab at the salad with my fork, wave at her to dig…
POETRY By Sarah Dickenson Snyder Postmarked in Santa Fe: the sky is electric blue with quiet clouds banked against the endless mountains. From the West Coast: an ocean is an ocean, water swelling forever. Maybe she travels for a new language. She knows how to pronounce the past…
POETRY By Terence Degnan dear Palindrome, fuck// dear Parkinson’s,// Dianne is in the hospital again// we are sitting on her dog, Sam// before she was taken away she walked over and gifted me one of those grippers my old man used to keep on his…
POETRY By Charles Byrne even pre-prepandemic, we were bubbled: Netflix- & Amazon sealed: pixelated miniscule-screen freeze-frames: air encircled in plastic air bubbles with a tiny black box at the bottom: discrete behaviorist levers to parcel out the dopamine drip: our secure little bubbles: gossip is…