Category: Issue 18 – 2025
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Off-Season at Edisto
by Ann Humphries I will arise and go to Edistoto a shabby-chic inn with rocking chairson a pastel porch with beachfront views,and morning espresso with fresh fruit and sconesand cheer on children cartwheeling on the beach,and, at sunset, I will bathe in turquoise air and plein-air paint the ravenous gullsstrafing the packed hulls of shrimp…
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Sweet Dreams and the Eater-Eater
by Abby Short “Do you remember your dreams? I don’t recall mine either. The Eater-Eater probably got to them. You know, the Eater-Eater? He just eats. And eats. And eats. And eats, and yet can never seem to get quite enough. A single sugar grain, even an imagined one, is enough to trigger the inner…
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Taste of Sun: Eriobotrya japonica
by Jacquelyn Markham Japanese plums, loquats, saffron clusterspasted on palmish evergreen leavesin breezes swinging.Another spring blooms.Let’s gather them & slice the fruit.Each one a center of smooth seed,a sculptor could carve a tiny face from. Loquat in saffron clusters.Let’s gather them & slice the fruit,concoct a yellow cocktail with icestirred in. Laugh & toastto love…
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Charleston Miasma
by Gus Varallo in the dregs of sunset through my closed blinds,the dim light sneaking between folds, the glimmering dust because everything is shedding like the windshields in our driveways, blanketedby pollen, like the sea foam rolling against barrier islands, like chunksof ripped tackle washed away with the sand, like another flood,another hurricane, like the…
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Plein Air on Widgeon Pointe
by Pell Williams I am no good at waking.Still, I borrow Momma’smud-worn shoesand sip hot paper cup coffeeas her van fills one by onewith artists of all mediums.I guard the van while they slipunder the Widgeon Point gate,the night’s bruise healing with light.I’m no good at sneakingthrough the young pine foreststo peek at the easels…
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La Jaliscience Taqueria
by Glenn Miles North Augusta, SC Patriotic buntingand tricolored tinsel decorhang from the ceilingand the black vents above; Green, then red,then shimmering whiteplastic against white ceiling.White against red clay-coloredplaster walls, Mother Maryin a framestrung with festiveLEDs, Other paintings too,of feather-capped warriorsand narrow villagestreets. I order Chile Coloradoin English,too uncertain to try outquiero or maybepido; afraid…
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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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