Ben Tamburri

Both Sides of Winter

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

Our hour at the clinic, test
results and what the doctor guessed.
Then the bright intensity
out on Industrial Boulevard,
the late October sun so hard
and air so crisp that everything
felt close and brash and nearly stung.

Husbandry

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

By LAUREN ACAMPORA

When Nayana came out of the garbing room, Noah forgot all about the pinworms. He forgot about the perianal tape test he’d just done on the sentinel mouse in Room 8, and he forgot about the disinfecting he’d have to do for the rest of the week. He forgot about the yellow paper gown, elastic hair bonnet, and rubber gloves he was wearing. He knew only the ray of Nayana’s smile, her scent of lemon and ginger.

“There’s a pinworm issue in Room 8,” he said, floating down the hall behind her. “But don’t worry—your mouseys are fine.”

Legion

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

By BORIS DRALYUK

        for Ange Mlinko

Of C. H. Krumm—Charles Harrison, or Harry—
a single trace remains on Catalina,
so oxidized, so salt-worn I could barely
make out the name. How many must have seen it
while rambling from or trudging to the ferry
and given it no mind, no second look?

Undoing

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

By HUGO DOS SANTOS

Despite the brief streaks of self-
belief, a stubborn defeat pervades.
Absent a job, absent a title.

I want to declare: a great undoing has taken place.
And I don’t know where to search for the bricks
that once made up the house of who I used to be.

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.