Our Sons Wrote, Glorious Days Are About To Come CW: Conflict Zone Violence After guerilla training in the mountains, our sons came back with machine guns and grenades, their cheeks soft-grizzled, their gaze scorched like Siachen glacier in sunlight, barely eighteen, our sons had creases on their forehead like electric wires running too close–ready to […]
Nick Sabolik
Before We Stopped Speaking I once watched my friend fall from a height of thirty stories and live. Well, not live, but you know what I mean. At first I thought he only fell out of his chair. He’d been leaning back, same as always, front legs floating above the floor, when he lost balance. […]
Alison Braid
Carpet The widower paid for the abortion, but he wouldn’t come with her. Olive called Susannah from the clinic after it was all over. Olive spoke into the phone and then there was silence. The long space after her voice made her wonder if more should have been said. She looked up at the cloudless […]
Guest Editor Tomás Q. Morín: A Special Feature
“When West Branch invited me to be a guest editor, I told Josh I wanted the story if it was still free. This time, to my absolute delight, it was.”
Patrick Thomas Henry
Seven Flock the Transom: From the Wire Reports On the morning that Chet Alpine publishes his list “Six Surprising Birds That Will Fuck You Up,” the editors of TrendWire email us about an impending financial crisis. “As you know,” the note reads, “ad revenue has declined, and YouTube has again altered their monetization policy. This […]
Jehanne Dubrow
You Must Stumble The memorials are made of concrete and covered in brass. Each one is the size and shape of a small cobblestone, measuring 96 by 96 millimeters. They’re called stolpersteine in German. Stumbling stones. Gunter Demnig first conceived of the stolpersteine in the early 1990s. As Kirsten Grieshaber recounts in The New York […]
Naomi Kanakia
“These days, all stories need to be adventure stories.”
Sarah Heying
Sarah Heying is currently working on a PhD in Oxford, MS. She received her MFA from McNeese State University, and her short stories have previously appeared in The Greensboro Review, Broken Pencil, Kestrel, and elsewhere.
Carolyn Zaikowski
Carolyn Zaikowski is the author of the novels In a Dream, I Dance by Myself, and I Collapse (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2016) and A Child Is Being Killed (Aqueous Books, 2013.) Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared widely, in such publications as Washington Post, Denver Quarterly, The Rumpus, PANK, DIAGRAM, Huffington Post, and Everyday Feminism. She holds an MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Find her online at www.carolynzaikowski.com.
Andrés Reconco
La Creel My mother was obsessed with soap operas and pan dulce. One day, after my photo shoot, I went to a panadería she likes. It’s a Cuban place with little sweet breads stuffed with guava and cheese. I hadn’t planned on visiting her, but the photoshoot went well and it’s still early. My mom […]
