Category: Issue 18 – 2025
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Resilience
by Sara Shea On I-26, heading into Asheville,a flatbed rolls beside me,stacked with husks of cars—mud-caked, mangled, dripping.One might’ve been a van, once,Hard to tell.Metal curled back on itself.Windshields blown inlike lungs collapsed. Seven months now since Helene. That blaze of neon orange—search and rescue spray-painttells the story, marking dayswhen the water rose. This load’s…
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Charleston
by Todd Tremble Todd Larkin Tremble is a poet who frequently shifts between mediums. Born in New Jersey and raised in the Catskills, Todd enlisted in the Marines at seventeen and has since lived in many places. He is currently a first-year MFA candidate at the College of Charleston, where he also serves swamp pink…
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Seeing
by Grace Stroup Seeing There must have been so much I just wasn’t seeing. At the end of August, I began nannying for a sweet and stout fifteen-month-old who goes by the silly name of Bird. So now, I begin my Monday and Tuesday mornings reading at my kitchen table, usually some kind…
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Egg Salad
by Jade Rivera Bowden The cheese had blackened around the edges. She dug her fingernail in, scraping the charred bits onto the floor of her car, slamming the brakes at the last second to keep from rear-ending the car in front of her. Her students had been particularly annoying that day. The closest she could…
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Weeping in My Potato Salad
By Amy Singleton The second time my mama had brain surgery, in the fall of 1989, her tumor had returned, resurrected from the dead. All it had needed to grow was one tiny, vicious, tumor seed left behind from the first surgery, tucked away in the folds of her brain, lying dormant and waiting to…
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Rotten Clementines
by Patrick Adkins Jay lived in a slumped beige duplex just past the Watershed Glen train tracks—a place that looked like it had been built in one frantic day and forgotten the next. Mold ghosted the air vents. The front step clung to the doorway like a scab—too tender to tear away without drawing blood.…
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Fireflies
by Valerie Thompson I learned about sex the night I beat up Billy Sims for picking on my younger brother. I was eleven and was spending the summer with my grandparents in Porterdale, KY, a coalmining town in the foothills of the Appalachians. It was such a small town that children had to find ways…
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The Watchers
by J.W. Gibeau “Jazzy, don’t throw that water out the door. You might anger the Watchers,” Mama yelled from the kitchen. Jazmine rolled her eyes and stopped just short of the door. She set the bucket down. Only a few inches of saltwater remained in the bucket from carrying the blue crabs. “I know,” Jazmine…
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Call Me
by Lisa Underwood I lie down too tired to brush my teeth, staringat an eighth-grade picture of you, your mouthbrilliant with metal, your green eyes begginglove me love me. I shut it in the drawer, out ofsight, out of mind, like all the things I keep inframes, on shelves, in closets, the boxes oftrading cards…
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Sirens
by Dylan Hopper She found Cali standing barefoot on the landing of the rusted billboard again. This was their spot, overlooking a pond to the north and tall enough to peek over the trees that lined the highway to the south. She was a vibrant oddity against the double-sided, sun-blanched advertisement for Mac’s BBQ Farm.…
The Petigru Review 