Sara Omer: “The Skeleton Café,” describes the everyday goings-on of an endearingly dreary café for the undead that feels very familiar. What was your inspiration for this poem? Eleanor Ball: My inspiration was my favorite coffee mug, which features a whimsical drawing of a few skeletons reading. These skeletons sport trendy sunglasses and jaunty berets, […]
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Five Stages of Shedding a Skin by Audrey Zhou (July 2024 Prose)
1. Denial The only reason anyone gets a new skin is to become someone else. Ming’s skin—the one she was born with, the only one she’s ever known—fits fine, mostly. It’s a little tight, as if stretched taut, but that’s just what happens eventually, everyone says. Growing pains. “Well,” Xuemei says, “I heard there’s this […]
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Clarity, Art, and Life by Joshua Fagan (July 2024 Essay)
The idea of art as a reflection of reality is a sensible one in theory that is questionable in execution. Aside from a few intentionally provocative statements made by aesthetes like Oscar Wilde, few writers or thinkers have asserted that art should not attempt to reflect reality. The most common characteristic of bad art is […]
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The Skeleton Cafe by Eleanor Ball (July 2024 Poetry)
Clicking teeth keep time in the skeleton cafe. Every table is lit by a yellow candle, which smells like embalmed women and cannot be blown out. The skeletons speak in the grating of bone against bone, skulls half-hidden behind muddy newspapers proclaiming tariffs on devil-made textiles and obituaries of the newly twice-dead. A skeleton rasps, […]
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Orions Belt Cover – July 2024
Enjoy the ethereal yearning of this cover for the July 2024 issue of Orion’s Belt, with the cover art brilliantly done by Jacelyn Yap. It is called “Out of Reach.”
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Orion’s Belt June 2024 Cover
Two moons shine on opposite sides of the starry indigo sky in an ethereal cover for this issue of Orion’s Belt.
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The Sail by Ian Li (June 2024 Poetry)
Far off the coast, the Great Sail stands in the ocean and stretches into the sky, where stars keep it company and the sun takes care not to knock it over. My mother teaches me to judge time from the Sail’s infinite shadow; my father recounts tales of royalty and explorers paying their respects— yet […]
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Oak for Her Bones, Alder for Her Limbs by Anne Leonard (June 2024 Story)
The other girls in the village had only to smile at a boy for their wombs to quicken, it seemed, but I conceived no children no matter how many lovers I took to my bed. At first this was a relief, but as I grew older it was a loneliness. So I decided to fashion […]
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The Necessity of Writing Place by Joshua Fagan (June Poetry 2024)
Writing is about ideas, but it is not only about ideas. Writing is about people, but it is not only about people. Above all, writing is about life, the vivid propulsion of sensations and experiences that overwhelm narrow and rigid beliefs and ideologies. Place, a sense of environment and history and context, is the tapestry […]
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Orion’s Belt Interview: Anne Leonard (July 2024)
Sara Omer: “Oak For Her Bones,” is a poignant tale touching on infertility struggles, self-discovery, and generational pain; however, even when tense, the prose is never bleak. What were your inspirations in carving out this story? Anne Leonard: This started from a writing prompt which I can no longer find, but the prompt led me to […]
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