by Brent Ameneyro She made the best red rice and frijoles.After the table was cleared,it was filled again with tamales—peel back the huskfind something steaming, damp,what some might call flesh-toned. After the table was cleared,something else appearedfrom the kitchen, and so it went like this all day.After the flan went cold,Mayté turned into a Crested […]
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by Linda Petrucelli It is difficult to begin new things when you are nearly seventy. The ridiculous condition of your bones (the titanium implants) discourages adventure. Incidental mental lapses create doubt about the reliability of your synaptic connections. For every septuagenarian who takes up Taekwondo or learns to speak Portuguese, there are hundreds more like […]
by Brent Ameneyro I walk past the half-finished cinderblock buildingthe not yet blooming Jacarandasand the police lights turning the laundromat bluein search of a floweror a church that could make me feellike the child licking tamarindotalking to himself I watch two volcanoes at sunseton the left a woman sleeps or dies of grief she glows every […]
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The Art of Boiling Water
by Rose Strode Water is easy to drink. Too easy, considering it’s not easy to find. Once found, one must consider its source. Water’s powerful, shaping the landscape through which it flows, yet also vulnerable, retaining in itself particles of all the places it’s been. The first time I considered water, I was twenty-seven. The […]
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What Gone Looks Like
by Leah Claire Kaminski Crazy Snail and Backseat Driver by Igor Kasev I eat my first mushrooms in traffic with my sister on Seven Mile Bridge. I’m a small notch in the metal spine of cars cooking over the hot sea. Over the old bridge running next to us like a mouth missing teeth, a […]
Don’t worry, I promised my mother,I’ll finish the room. She lay in the hospice bed,her chest spongy with cancer.She had me get the scrapof paper from her purse, her notes:the carpet, the table, the wicker, the paint.I stroked her skeletal hand.Then day turned its face away. Weeks later, I bought the paint, made the time.But […]
by Christina Perez Brubaker Hanna hadn’t planned on taking the rabbits. It was one of those things that just sort of happened. An impulse her husband, Matthew, if he were still alive might’ve slapped her cheek for because according to him, nothing ever just-sort-of-happened. In a way, he’d be right. She’d been thinking about it […]
by Stephen Dean Ingram Eastern Kansas, 1974 “Ouch!” His forearm grazes the inside of the oven as he pulls out the baking sheet. On the sheet are ten hard brown disks. Nothing like the golden-topped flaky biscuits he remembers. He puts the baking sheet on top of the stove and watches them. They look like […]
by Michael Sheriff The submission period for this issue began with a necessary structural change at Gulf Stream Magazine: We added a no-fee submission option for BIPOC writers and artists. Removing the barrier of cost for people who have been systematically oppressed created an opportunity for our staff and future as a literary magazine. Through […]
by Ji A Ines Lee All the girls in Symor village reduced at least once a year. Some reduced on their faces, others on their arms, and the braver ones on their legs. They came to school with white scars running down sunken cheeks, bones visible beneath their diaphanous skin that bloomed with purples and […]
by Daniel Edward Moore Daniel Edward Moore’s poems are forthcoming in Lullwater Review, The Meadow, Muddy River Poetry Review, The Chaffin Journal, The Chiron Review, Adelaide Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, The Bitter Oleander and Armstrong Literary Review. He is the author of Boys (Duck Lake Books) and Waxing the Dents (Brick Road Poetry […]
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At the Edge of Water
by Sayuri Ayers Behind my house, Alum Creek swells with the March rains. Parting the bare branches of overgrown pawpaws, I walk to the edge of the bank. A birch leans into the water, its stripped branches stark as bared bone. Below the steep drop, the creek swirls. Its current bears Columbus, Ohio’s debris: crumpled […]
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Thai Trojan
by Ploi Pirapokin During the summer, after my first year of graduate school, I borrowed my father’s Royal Bangkok Sports Club card to pay for two papaya shakes. My friend and I gulped them down as the waiter held the brown card up—eyes darting between the tiny headshot of my wrinkled father and my oops-expression—then […]
by Wendy Thompson Taiwo Bury erase revitalize gut Burn the effigy sell the bones strip the copper pipes keep the edgy street art Who was it who once said, “Only the rich have shrines”? Old family homes purchased by preservation societies Grounds maintained by garden clubs But what about the homes of southern Black migrants? […]
by Grace Q. Song When you are finished, you may retrieve your memory and belongings. In this poem the girl 1. ______ her uncle, asks how do I love a body of law and who is the 2. ______ now. Two desks across, the boy sits three 3. ______ short of lunch. I am the […]
by Erin Rose Coffin Erin Rose Coffin holds a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from North Carolina State University. Her work has appeared in Raleigh Review, Arcturus, Angel City Review, and Punch Drunk Press. She is currently a writer-in-residence at Goodyear Arts, and she lives in Charlotte, North Carolina with her partner and her […]
by Helen Sinoradzki Terrence lifts my binoculars to his face. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to be seeing,” he says. “They’re ducks, right?” “Not just ducks,” I say. “Wood ducks. Sweep the binoculars left. See how the one on the end is different from the other five?” “Kinda.” He hands me the binoculars and […]
by Edith Magak Aketch Nyar Sewe died a virgin. Mayoooo! That was very bad, badder than the matter that she had died. We were just crying a little that she had died, because to die after all, was the way of the world. But when we scooped soil from the ground and showered it over […]
by Horacio Sierra For José Arreola, a welder who died on October 12, 2019, while constructing a hotel in New Orleans’s Central Business District. Down in New Orleans we take pride. That’s right. We take it. From the French, from the Spanish, from the British, from these great United States. Or from you. We’ll gladly […]
by Tifara Brown I used to walk around my house with a sheet on my head, pretending to be Mary from the Bible. My soft curls matted on my head suddenly dragged the ground as I stepped around our moldy double-wide trailer into the role of the Madonna, the mother of God. I believed Mary […]
by Dani Putney You walked in with a vodkacream soda, a concoctionyou gave me to sip.What do you think?as if you didn’t expect meto say it was strange yetappealing, as if my thoughtwasn’t manufactured to bea gear in your cerebral machinery.Tell me, old man, that we’re not the same. Maybe then I could believeI […]
by Jonathan B. Aibel Every summer Saturday my fatherworshipped, walked the roaring mower with its choir of bladesaway and back. As my brothers and I each in turn grew strongenough to yank the recoil, we were inducted into the mysteriesof prime and throttle, spilling gasoline, the sweet benzene smellmixing with newly manned sweat while […]
by Saba Keramati Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of University of Michigan and UC Davis, her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and appears or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Vagabond City Lit, and other publications. Kathryn […]
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Here
by Nada Samih-Rotondo While CNN broadcast the Iraqi army’s invasion of Kuwait City to the world, I was trying to tune into my morning cartoons. That morning in August, I struggled to find a working station on our newly defective television for my cartoons. My mother received a long distance phone call from her younger […]
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Princess Hair Match
by Amelia Badri The nineties were princess-tastic! From Lady Diana and Xena Warrior Princess to Princess Jasmine and Ariel. Even Princess Leia lived on through those of you rocking her iconic buns in anticipation of the newest Star Wars movie. Which iconic nineties princess is your ultimate hair match? Answer these simple questions to find […]
by Jessica Dubey There is no easy way to kill the weeds, only neurotoxinsto clear the brambles and invasive species that interrupt my sleep. I dress for bed in star-spangled nightgown and matching spurs,ready to ride roughshod through the five plains of sleep. Side effects may include unraveling of thread count,sudden blackout shades, lavender-scented sleeplessness. […]
by A. Molotkov A. Molotkov is an immigrant writer. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows and Synonyms for Silence; he has received various awards and an Oregon Literary Fellowship. His work appears in Prairie Schooner, The Triquarterly Review, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review among others. He co-edits The Inflectionist […]
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