Everything, Fiction, Issue 81, Prose

A Promising Student by Danielle Epting

He is a biology or criminal justice major. I don’t know if he thinks about me outside of class. He writes fiction that destroys me. “I really like your assignments,” he says to me the fourth class of the semester. “Thank you,” I say, cordially. “The semester has only just started.” He is 18, and […]

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Everything, Issue 81, Now Read This, vagabond city

Now Read This: March 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet (translated by Lindsay Turner) In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened […]

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Everything, Issue 81, Opportunities for Artists & Writers, vagabond city

Opportunities for Artists and Writers | March 2023

Cipher Press is looking for book-length adult fiction and creative non-fiction submissions from both agented and unagented authors who identify as LGBTQI+. Send all submissions to both jack [at] cipherpress.co.uk and ellis [at] cipherpress.co.uk with the subject line Submission: fiction, Submission: non-fiction, or Submission: poetry. Deadline: March 31st A Public Space Writing Fellowships is open for […]

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Everything, Issue 81, Poetry, vagabond city

Sapphic Stanza 3 by Candace Walsh

Dinosaur egg rocks, clefts and declivities. Virga daubs sky over mesa achingly. Acid-green lichen. I long to be the sun’s last rake through your hair. Candace Walsh is a queer, multi-genre writer in her fourth year as a PhD student in creative writing (fiction) at Ohio University. She holds an MFA in fiction from Warren […]

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Everything, Issue 81, Poetry, vagabond city

I’m eating an orange by Aekta Khubchandani

and polar bears are dyingon my laptop screen.Black ducks floating backwards, a back-bending sun, the see-sawing skyits bed. My iPhone tells me sunflowers face each otherwhen they can’t spot the sun. I’m eating peaches and living by the riverin my head; sparrows are hopping onto branches with last leaves. How much has changed with weather,much has changed and withered. I’m wearing […]

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Everything, Issue 81, Poetry, vagabond city

ANDROGYNE by Anastasia Walker

in dreams a      wherea hole      should be      a bodypregnant      with ache, withwords      don’t meanyou, what is      whoand where to      find, fixthe shimmer      wind lickedprismatic, amphibious      lung-tied but fervent     for gills, waterbound      but wingedthe […]

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Everything, Issue 81, Poetry, vagabond city

Chicken Imitations by James Croal Jackson

We made Arrested Development-esque chicken imitationsat the restaurant– bakawk, cheep-cheep, wakka wakka– being young, I thought that was the language of love.We always laughed across the chasm of the room when we shut shop, squeezing soap rags into heart buckets,wiping fresh clear streaks on mahogany tables. I vacuumed pita crumbs and invisible dust, emptied bags […]

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Everything, Issue 80, Poetry

an elegy for opportunity by Louie Leyson

On February 13th, 2019, the rover named “Opportunity” went offline after fifteen years of exploring Mars. In goodbye, a final transmission was sent: Billie Holiday’s 1944 recording of “I’ll Be Seeing You.” In the aftermath of a dust stormyour grey body stilled with all the grace of a dogthat dozes inside only the red ghosts […]

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Everything, Issue 80, Poetry

I’m Afraid Of What She’ll See In Me by k.p.fen

after Sreshtha Sen in another life, my hand grips my belly, my other hand an extension of my cell phone, lights flashing in my pupils. nine months will be preserved in my phone’s gallery, waiting to be posted in a carousel. five years pass by and i smile at my daughter circling on a metal horse, bobbing to calliope songs, my camera too […]

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Everything, Issue 80, Now Read This

Now Read This: February 2023

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators the luxury by Darren C. Demaree “In the luxury, Darren C. Demaree constructs a response to the catastrophic death of the natural world that enacts rage, love, and grief all at once. Filled with endless lyricism and an unpunctuated momentum, Demaree’s poems cascade and overflow. As […]

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Everything, Issue 80, Opportunities for Artists & Writers

Opportunities for Artists and Writers | February 2023

Canthius is open for unpublished prose and poetry submissions from writers of marginalized gender identities, including trans, Two Spirit, non-binary, agender, cis women, genderqueer, GNC, and intersex writers. Deadline: March 15th. Chronicle Books is currently accepting applications for one-year paid editorial fellowships in the Art Publishing Group, the Entertainment Publishing Group, and the Children’s Publishing […]

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Issue 79, Poetry

Wild Horses by Claire Pinkston

for Symil heres’s a secret: where I come from,all the fairytales begin with instead, and my neck has earnedits permanent ache from looking backeven though there is no one left to save. in this life the window shares its own desolation and grief is stored in miniature paper cups.some days I miss my old transformations,the kind that turned braid […]

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Issue 79, Poetry

Transubstantiation by Charlie Divine

Transition, sacrament of selfTo die at twenty-two and start anewThis is my body given for you To return the same, but changed–the hero’s journey Do this in remembrance of me Charlie Divine is a current student at Portland Community College studying American Sign Language/English Interpreting. They live with their 32 houseplants in the shrub-steppe of rural Oregon.

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Issue 79, Poetry

pick up the phone by Kelly Mullins

no seriouslytake ithere’s my passcode there’s likeover 200 finished poems on there nowplus drafts of old textsyou already have plusevery drunk thoughteveryone’s numberevery tinder chatevery bored selfiea few nudesit will take youyears to get through everything there’s also a 250+ page google docof my spark notes for a new economybet your girlfriend’s read some of thoseanywaythere are passwordsperiod appsshopping […]

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Issue 79, Poetry

How to Win After Leaving by Lisa Baird

Delete the voicemail before the end. Win. Burn the letter. Smear the ash into the sidewalk. Win. No, save the letter for the restraining order. Lose.  Decide against filing the police report. Cops are transphobic already. Lose. File it after all. Feel worse. Lose. Order pizza. Panic at the doorbell. Lose. Forget to close the […]

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Issue 79, review, Reviews + Interviews

In Review: Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Kazuo Ishiguro, a Japanese-born Englishman who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, reminds readers that humans and robots both fall under the definition of ‘being’. Klara and the Sun does not just include the loss of being when devoting everything to serving higher-ups, but explores spirituality and mortality, seeking God when God does […]

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Everything, Issue 78, review

In Review: Susan Nguyen’s Dear Diaspora

In her debut poetry collection, Dear Diaspora, Susan Nguyen engages us in a conversation on grief and ecstasy, and how those two seemingly juxtaposed experiences are intrinsically linked. Winner of Prairie Schooner’s Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora was published in 2021 by the University of Nebraska Press. Nguyen is exploring grief as it’s related […]

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Everything, Issue 78, Now Read This

Now Read This: December 2022

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Another Way to Split Water by Alycia Pirmohamed In Alycia Pirmohamed’s debut collection, Another Way to Split Water, a woman’s body expands and contracts across the page, fog uncoils at the fringes of a forest, and water in all its forms cascades into metaphors of longing […]

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Everything, Issue 78, Poetry

chatoyancy and release by Vanessa Couto Johnson

We are all initial-ly named what our families can say.Glanced and category theorized, my morphismsurvives to asterism, even as dopped cabochon.To rock the dome is a beautiful breakage,if it happens. Cleave define or indefinite-ly or to infinite stroked to part-icle spark—when -ever it turnsout my grain can do all that and unbag. A Brazilian born […]

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Everything, Issue 78, Poetry

Poem I Never Submitted to Workshop by Daniel Felsenthal

Here I am wonderingIf my poetry will make meA goddamn Master of Fine ArtsAnd you with your talking blues. Sometimes entire days pass and one thinks aboutJust money. It’s toxic.Aren’t weekends forDrinking beer and lemonadeAnd getting fucked?Count your blessingsFor they comeEvery few weeks.In betweenDream-crawl orWrite an ars poetica:You know the form so well. Now that […]

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Everything, Issue 77, Poetry, vagabond city

Being Ill by Aiyana Masla

Laying stillhas ripped opena thin, temporal levity on a morningit is snowingmy own worth revealed to me again & again, againan    incandescent    nothingness. Aiyana Masla is the author of the chapbook Stone Fruit (Bottlecap Press, 2020).  Her work has appeared in Cordella Press, Field Notes, West Trestle Review, in the collection So Many Ways to […]

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Everything, Issue 77, Poetry, vagabond city

Transsexual Daydreams by Apollo Chastain

i.An angel came to me the otherday, said “Wanna make out in mycar?” I’ve not been so keen onthat sort of thing sincedysphoria set in, the guilty teethof wolverines sliding scalpel-sharpin the space beneath my breasts. Butthis wasn’t a beautiful command, norwas it the word of God:The angel pleads like 50s loungesingers in with the […]

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Everything, Issue 77, Poetry

(NORF NORF) by Julián David Bañuelos

I’ve always tried to proceed with caution. The few things we owned I made sure not to break. How selfish could a poor brown boy be? Let alone three? Grassless backyards and baseballs there we were. Unminding any manner we learned in a country that molded & scolded us. America’s past time to pass time, […]

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Everything, Issue 77, Poetry, vagabond city

apology scribbled on the back of a receipt for a jar of green olives by Madeline Langan

hey,super sorry forthrowing up on your couch last night  missed the antique hunter green velvet thanks to the deli bag you haphazardly tossed over  never knew i could havesuch good aim i keep doing thisThing – not the puking but thebleeding mascarabuying myself baby’s breatheating crumpledvalentines losing my left shoeneeding you to find itasking my therapistwhyit-is-so-hard-to-be-lovedthree months laterstill i can’t believea […]

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Everything, Issue 77, Now Read This

Now Read This: November 2022 

Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators Prescribee by Chia-Lun Chang Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the […]

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Everything, Issue 77

VC’s Pushcart Prize Nominations

CNF:Aftertaste of Coffee by Simra Sadaf (Issue 72)Finding Grace by Sam Frost (Issue 75) Fiction:Daughter of a King by Shaelin Bishop (Issue 69)Sprout by Morgan Dick (Issue 74) Poetry:Tehillim 96 by Miriam Saperstein (Issue 70)Sonnet Against Capitalism by Timothy Otte (Issue 67)

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Everything, Fiction, Issue 77, Prose, vagabond city

The Failure Gene by Chris Klassen

At precisely ten o’clock on the morning of March 23, the spokesperson of the World Health Organization entered the press room and walked up to the microphone. Assembled in front of him were reporters and bloggers from the international media community. The majority represented mainstream newspapers, television channels, podcasts and websites. A few were fringe […]

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Art, Everything, Issue 77

Join the VC Team: Call for a New Art Editor

We have a new opening for one volunteer position: Art Editor. See below for application details. Please note: all staff positions are volunteer and are thus unpaid. All positions are also virtual/remote. We encourage applicants who are members of marginalized groups (LGBTQIA, POC, WOC, women, disabled folks, etc.), but all are welcome to apply. Please […]

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Everything, Issue 76, Poetry, vagabond city

Spin Out by Molly Williams

A girl on the plane says, I was stuckwith all these crazy people and I wasnormal. Incredibly, I say, Same same.It was not I who pulled madnessfrom the water. My arms are my own.But everything I’m saying is true:nothing real has changed. Thesewhiskers, these black eyes were there all along—what am I becoming, I say, […]

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