Weightlifting

When he first started pushing barbells, he did it to get his anger out, throwing the weights from his body, stressing his tendons as he exhaled sprays of spit with every red-faced repetition, every sweaty pump. He realized his joints wouldn’t last long hurling metal, so he calmed his approach, traded manic intervals – of fighting gravity with fury – for calculated precision, and he’d demonstrate, lying down on a chair with an invisible bar connecting his fists, showing us the proper form of a barbell press, his big forearms and biceps flexing and twisting slowly as his muscles contracted, then extended.

From Guest Contributor Parker Wilson

Parker is a writer and editor living in Highland Park. He is a recent MFA graduate and spends his free time running along the Detroit River. He’s published in Bristol Noir and is a founding editor at DUMBO Press.

Instagram:@parkerreviewsbooks

The Island

Emmett had one wish, a quiet place to call his own.

He found his island floating above the planes of a fractured, blackened Earth. A small, dark place, untouched by the sun as it hovers with a dizzying presence. This place does not feel like it belongs to the world that Emmett knows, but it has been here since time began and will continue even when the sun collapses, when all life on Earth ends.

It contains nothing except itself (nothing but pure consciousness), for this is space without form or substance, and it is a terrible sight to behold.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Winter's End

Sounds of breaking ice awaken her mind as she settles back down upon the thawing earth, with its cracks and pops as faults move forward at increasing speeds revealing hibernating secrets.

Inspiring streams, reverting from their crystalline form, fish returning from the spirit world greeted by crimson grass and creeping Phlox in efflorescence.

Rain continuously taunts her from all directions. She watches an ascending pale moon in its most majestic of phases. With welcoming pulsations, feeling her heart stir once again as its frozen arteries struggle to kick off winter's cold embrace.

The heat she now feels comes from within.

From Guest Contributor J. Iner Souster

Echoes And Reflections

It follows me everywhere, the inaudible predator. Fixated upon a daily routine, mocking every subtle maneuver that I made. The thing glissades in a deriding dance upon my every step. A replicant of form cast under the luminosity of ever radiant sun.

Signified in our sinister, daily reflections. An entity of faux similarity and duplication. In such replication a truer self and profound verity obtained. Co-conspiring and willingness etched upon that imitation smile. The backdrop of the unstained silhouette and persona versus my tainted hand. A cheering entourage as the blade is always in my hand painted with crimson delight.

From Guest Contributor Brett Dyer

A Theory Of Justice

The medical assistant asked in a flat, toneless bureaucratic voice how I would describe the pain. Stabbing? Aching? Sharp? Dull? She entered my answer on the form, but without showing any actual concern. A philosopher once said – or should have – that a society is only as just as its treatment of its most vulnerable members: the old, the sick, the poor, the institutionalized. Using a dropper, I strategically place .50 milliliters of Triple M tincture under my tongue. I wait fifteen, twenty minutes, and then gray-clad troops burst from the treeline with a rebel yell. The tongue is all muscle.

From Guest Contributor Howie Good

Howie is the author of Failed Haiku, a poetry collection that is the co-winner of the 2021 Grey Book Press Chapbook Contest and scheduled for publication in summer 2022.

Love Triumphal

Mother hides me in the closet.

You won’t go back to that school. I’ll deal with that asshole father.

She smells of lavender perfume and sweat. Not like Dad with his Old Spice, calculated aroma, who mocks Mother. Arranges my future with Headmaster Edgar. Harvard, law.

Men bang at the doors. Buzzwords waft into my musky space: “Custody arrangement,” “Legal orders.”

Fuck off. Mother’s words hold firmness, edge.

Footsteps draw near, unpleasant pounding.

My mother tells them I’m her son. I’m someone who needs love.

I absorb that word, so foreign, while she spars, words rising.

Love. What beautiful form.

From Guest Contributor Yash Seyedbagheri.

Yash is a graduate of Colorado State University's MFA program in fiction. His work is forthcoming or has been published in journals such as 50 Word Stories, Silent Auctions, City. River. Tree. and Ariel Chart.

Miracles

Steve wasn't one to believe in miracles. He understood too well the depravities of the human heart. More often than not he was victim to the world's machinations. That's how fate had led him to the streets.

So when the woman offered a hot meal, he expected some sort of catch, likely in the form of a lengthy sermon. When she offered a warm bed, he called to mind images of harvested organs and sexual servitude. When she claimed through phony tears to be his mother, he fled at the first opportunity, certain it was another conspiracy plotting against him.

Confession

Jimmy is nervous. His relationship with Susan has developed into something serious. Susan notices Jimmy is shaking.

“What the matter, Jimmy?” Susan asks. Jimmy knows he should tell her the truth sooner or later. It might as well be now. “There’s something about me you don’t know I have to tell you,” said Jimmy.

“What’s that?” Susan inquires.

“I’m a shapeshifter,” states Jimmy.

Susan, who’s in shock, asks Jimmy, “What do you really look like?” Jimmy changes into to his true form. Susan screams. After she calms down she ask him, “What are you awful creatures called?”

“Humans,” replies Jimmy.

From Guest Contributor Denny E. Marshall