Starting this spring, we’ll be sending our subscribers monthly “mini-issues,” each one edited by different members of our staff. We see these monthlies as a chance to showcase more great work, and explore more topics of interest, than we have room for in our regular biannual issues.

To kick things off, I’ve chosen work that blurs the sometimes arbitrary boundary between poetry and prose. As a reader, editor, and writer, I’m most interested in work that blends the finest elements of both — the kind of work in which one hears, as Robert Frost once called it, the “sound of sense.”

I hope you like these “poems” and “stories” just as much as I do, and will keep an eye out next month for a brand new feature, chosen by a different member of our team. Until then, thanks for reading.

~ Ryan Burden
Managing / Fiction Editor

TWO STORIES
by Kevin McIlvoy

THE LUTHIER’S MOTHER’S MOUTH’S OPENNESS

The Luthier’s mother’s mouth’s openness, her hands’ finger’s
tremblings, her red hair’s fires’ warnings. It’s what you saw if you
were making your last visit to her ever. You were the Luthier’s
                                                 mother’s Possession when you walked into her son’s guitars’
                                                 home, in which son and mother also lived together in one room.
                                                 Inside their home’s heart’s sounds: the tub’s faucet’s dripping’s
                                                 splashings and the refrigerator’s coils’ hymning humming…

TWO POEMS 
by Sierra Golden

LIGHT BOAT

Jesse isn’t really a pirate, but the Coast Guard thinks so when he calls to say he found a body. It doesn’t matter that she’s still alive, so cold she stopped shivering, blue fat of her naked body waxy and blooming red patches where his hands grabbed and hauled her from the water. He stands over her with a filet knife, slowly honing the blade as he                                                  waits for Search and Rescue. The glassy eyes of a dead tuna stare up from the galley counter. At dusk, Jesse flicks                                                  on the squid lights…