The October Issue
October 22, 2025
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Puncture → Burst
October 22, 2025
My throat still burns when I think about that summer… It burns all the way down, as if I’ve swallowed something scalding, a thick syrup of fear’s reduction.
First Love Never Dies
October 22, 2025
Set in Santiago City, Philippines, this story follows the bitterness of a love long lost, echoing the quiet ache of a nation’s unfulfilled promises.
Gordon Grant
October 22, 2025
disease, too deep to retrieve / with simple stick or hands that also reach / for my daughter
Things as It is: An Interview with Chase Twichell
October 22, 2025
Chase Twichell on poetry, Zen, and the luminous attention that begins where the self ends.
From the Archives
An Emptiness Yet to Come
The omen of your absence remains in the halls / an emptiness yet to come, a muteness marking the end of your words
The Sad Ballad of Wyckoff
Like the sea, tragedy / knows no fatigue, there is no rest in its mysteries.
The Harvest
In this story, horror is visceral – unearthed and alive – as Nathan Niigan Noodin Adler draws us back to the buried histories of inheritance and erasure that lie just beneath the surface of our lives.
Anna Bruno: Suspense, Secular Gods, and Scandal in an Elite Catholic School
The writer on creating a protagonist who feels authentically young yet insightful, transitioning to writing suspense, and tackling the Catholic church.
Waltz of Stone
Pause between two claps of thunder The artist makes the most of it to belt out his song
In Search of Ouologuem
My journey—on the surface, an attempt to trace my heritage—had in fact been driven all along by a deep longing to meet the man and hear his story.
