Issue 31

Deaccessioning

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

The old woman with the art
paces through her silent rooms,
sunlight reflecting off the frames.
Adult children live downstairs
in the basement. Whose is the art?
Is it the world’s or hers or theirs?

The Strays

April 24, 2026 Fiction, Issue 31, Issue 31 Fiction

By RUSSELL BRAKEFIELD

Reggie pulled his truck up the driveway and past the old goat pasture, a field of knee-high brome that now fed only a rusted tractor, not a buck or a nanny in sight. The only good thing about his wife’s death all those years ago—he could finally let go of the shaggy herd she had loved so much, fill the freezer, and focus on the more agreeable ruminants.

Reggie killed the ignition next to the house. One coal-colored cloud floated like a top hat above his yellow lopsided rancher. Past that, the afternoon sun painted the foothills a fiery mauve. In the distance a trio of bluffs gave way to an abstract canvas, just cattle and rust-red desert smudging south to New Mexico and on into the Navajo Nation.

U N C O N T A I N A B L E

April 24, 2026 Issue 31, Issue 31 Poetry, Poetry

By L. S. KLATT

I leave the house unlocked & walk to the garage jacked to
The White Stripes. My mouth is a guitar; snow is in the sound hole.
Spring. I think it’s spring. The automatic door leaps

in its tracks & is music again. I record on my phone a soundwave
as the GTO convertible wheels out of its tomb, the driveway
chartreuse with maple wings. Tell White I’ll cut some garlic

Ex Situ

April 24, 2026 Fiction, Issue 31, Issue 31 Fiction

By LIZ DEWOLF

The buzzer rattles the empty room. Nearly empty—there’s the bed behind the wooden screen, the couch where Laurel sits in her underwear. Since Arda’s text that afternoon, she’s waited restlessly for him to arrive, imagining his route from where she lived with him on the Asian side of Istanbul to her new apartment on the European side: the narrow streets down to the ferry station, the boat churning through silver water, the near-vertical climb to her sixth-floor walkup in Beyoğlu. She presses the button that unlocks the building’s entrance and decides not to get dressed.

Arda enters her apartment without knocking. “Mutlu yıllar,” he says, though it’s now several weeks into 2013. For the first time since Laurel’s lived in Turkey, they didn’t celebrate the New Year together.