Who Here Has Heard of Ether? The meadow was like a child, hip-height and wild. The moths had no hope for holding onto any shadow, let alone their own, which was a silent orchestra of throbbing air. The wind, when it arrived, held fire. The sky behaved itself like a mossy violin in the rain. […]
Elane Kim
Transit I want more small kindnesses: glass stained in every direction, the windows stacked tall, a looping stop. Pick a side already: the sky or the sea. More rain or bullets still soft with skin. The open river or the open door. Your blood or mine. Transpose your life onto a railway track & see […]
Tamas Panitz
Within a Secret Cloud Where to grow my orchid that will last for a thousand years … big decisions take many tiny minds– like Dracula in his den my persecutors imagine they’re seeing me smile. If you don’t hide them they’re not even deeds. Thus the most authentic illusion I have crosses itself out, hands […]
Jessica Guzman
Post-Storm Assessment I spray X on my front door. I set the table, plastic on plastic, secured by stone. Two days after the hurricane, I grill freezer burned flanks & elbow bread, sink candles in the split ends of Entenmann Jelly Rolls. All dogs attend. I shovel sargassum from the den, apologize excess is the […]
Conor Bracken
Firstborn A day after the afterbirth’s been rubbed off your head (“like a coconut with injured sentience,” dark-haired and howling) we call you Everett, which means, we learn, brave as or braver than a hog/wild boar. Your entire future, now, framed by a question stitched of pigs: which one will you compare yourself to and, […]
Brett Hanley
Texas-Louisiana Border Dive Bar This place is a metaphor for my dysthymia. If everything beautiful is born of wreck, then take me to the salvage yard of my affect. I sit at our booth, waiting for no one. The mortician sits down next to me and explains what happened to the stars: they were shook […]
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.”
Jeanne Larsen
Shadows Rippling on Bodhisattva Run 2 hundred thousand souls all still in a rush downstream from Hiroshima. Over the gorge, 5 bats wheel like the ones carved in a temple beam below the hill of graves in Nagasaki. Ceci n’est pas une ghazal Charcoal ovens in grave-rows: a rainforest’s smoldering heart aerially viewed. Just fashionable […]
Julie Marie Wade
Largest mammal on Earth … Surely the man at the circus must have mentioned it as he lifted us into the howdah one by one. I was front rider in that row of kids, wriggling four- & five-year-olds in jean shorts & jelly shoes. I was tallest, too, the largest mammal in preschool, though this […]
Megan Neville
Elegy with Apologies to Leon Jakobovits James Six feet away a girl asks do I know a term for saying a word until it loses ground, becomes a different thing a bubble on the tongue & I am sorry to tell her no there is no word in English but in fact there is & […]
