Orion's Belt

The howling air blows snow into your footprints, four-toed, leading from my door. Everything you touched tonight is cold again. Every time, I plan to be prepared. Night to day; the sleeping side of a cycle; no great pain. Every time, I’m screaming along with the wind. We do not know where you are, the […]

Stare into the eclipse of a distant world and read our wonderfully strange August 2023 issue! (Art by me, Joshua Fagan.)

It has taken an eon for the universe to settle on a name for the new universe it has spawned. A beautiful little thing: positive curvature, and, yes, judging by the fault lines along which its supersymmetry breaks, ekpyrotic too. A magnificent future ahead of it, then, the endless succession of death and rebirth. Time […]

Disposing of the idea that protagonists must be virtuous and good is far easier and simpler than contemplating what they should be instead. Discussing what genuine moral complexity in fiction even is resembles the old Buddhist tale of the blind men and the elephant, wherein the men each touch different parts of the creature and […]

Soar to the snowy, strange mountaintops this July and enjoy our ethereal, mesmerizing cover art, made by yours truly, Joshua Fagan. 

DREAM The obsessions of the father seep into the son. Juldeh was six years old when I first told him about monarch butterflies. By thirteen, he’d read all the literature available on them in our dome at the end of the world. By fifteen, he’d shared the same dreams as me; to bring the insects […]

the moon has been chasing her ever since she recognized the face of divinity reflected on the window of her car seeing the echo of sanctity among the surface of the sky dark and deep, she laid to rest flourishing under its gleam now, the moon washes her skin in stars and mutters to her […]

A story does not automatically become magical because it occurs in a magical setting. The modern media climate revels in stories of magic, from superhero stories to overt high fantasy, yet despite their repeated emphasis on magic, many of these stories fail to feel magical. They ultimately present a world too much like our own […]

Noah Codega: I find that “Walking in the Starry World” can be read with equal validity as an account of supernatural events or a journey through a dream. Do dreams and dream consciousness hold a particular interest for you? John Johnson: About 20% of my published poems are literal transcripts from my dreams. I think […]

Noah Codega: I’m always interested in the very first beginnings of a story in the writer’s mind—can you talk a little about what inspired this piece? Lia Swope Mitchell: This piece is very loosely inspired by James Baldwin’s Old Greek Stories, which includes the story of Prometheus. I first ran across this version of the […]