29 minute read
Terrible Lizard Carson Markland
from TEXLANDIA 2022/23
Terrible Lizard
Carson Markland
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I
First, there is laughter.
Tommy and Olivia are pulling at the center wheel of the teacup, making it topple around its own axis in a frenzy, even as it dips and bobs past the others. The music swells like a heartbeat pounding out of a chest and Mallory joins in with the spinning, elbows bumping against her brother, her sister. She is certain they are going to crash and certain she will remember this moment until the day she dies.
They’re at the island’s carnival, an event put on for tourist children like themselves in need of entertainment. “Mom? Mom? Can we get in the water?” Tommy demands as the ride grinds to a halt. And before he gets an answer, he climbs out of the teacup, straining away, the world always too slow for him.
“Beat you there!” Olivia shouts. She’s the oldest, the fastest, and she overtakes Tommy.
Hot from the revelry, the children race onto the small strip of beach. They dip their feet into the lagoon, making dime-sized splashes as their mom looks on. They aren’t the only ones with this idea, but if they look to the horizon, everyone else is excised from the frame. It’s blue and green and resort housing as far as the eye can see. They stare into the trough of the water, the waves rising in small triangles like celebratory pennants.
“Smile!” their mom shouts, holding out her cell phone. The children have the lucent glow of a Rembrandt, gathering all of the sinking light around them, casting the rest of the beach into stillness and dark. They’re almost indistinguishable from each other, aging into the rangy posture of late childhood from the soft-bodied toddlers they were. Their hair curls off their heads, tangling into a collective cloud, blowing around like a shared dream.
“Look at the stars,” Olivia gestures. Her arm is an arrow shot into the freckled bowl of the cosmos. She knows the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, can sometimes find the blunt arc of Draco twisting in a helix through the sky, but this patch is unfamiliar to
her. Where are the usual suspects?
“Why are they so bright?” Tommy demands. Olivia starts going on about light pollution but he didn’t really want an answer in the first place, so much as something to say.
Next to them, Mallory watches the waves, a steady undulation that moves, somehow, like a mouth around words, singing a song that evolution has made alien to her. Through that rhythm is an underlying note, a dark chord eating its way through the water. Her leg is the first point of contact, ushered into the vestibule of the creature’s jaws, a pale flash against the dark. She topples into the sand, keeled over as if by a sudden wind.
Olivia is still looking for the constellations when her sister comes unsocketed next to her. A dull thump registers on a delay, and as she turns, her mother pushes her back, something frantic and unhinged about her movement. To Olivia, it looks like she’s trying to fight the water, lunging toward it with both hands. It’s only when she sees her sister’s flashing arm come wailing out of the darkness that she realizes otherwise.
Tommy understands that something bad is happening before the nature of it is made clear. His mother is shouting and tugging at his sister, trying to pry her loose from the jaws of a nightmare that has climbed out of his mind and slithered onto the beach. He is up now, joining Olivia in the grabbing for Mallory, beating at the crocodile’s hide as it backs toward deeper water, dragging him past his ankles, up to his thighs. It’s like hitting rock, beating his fists against the solid wall of destiny.
The water is lashed into a white fury, spouting up into their eyes, their mouths. They are losing their footing and their grip. Olivia watches Tommy slip, lose his grasp, Mallory’s arm melting through his hands like she’s dissolving on the spot. She wishes her hands were hooks or guns or anything but flesh. The croc pulls.
Their mother is still here, lunging gigantically. It’s a stalemate between desperation and the indomitable muscle of the animal. The crocodile whips its entire body, rolling through the water like a tank, wrenching the girl away. Now, the water is still.
Otra Vida Stephanie Gonzalez By
Clean By Anastasia Kirages
II
Underwater, everything sparkles.
It’s like living in a mirror, or the diamond of your mother’s wedding ring. There are so many more colors: purples that are tarnished blue, greens that burn into yellow, coils of violet twisting in the current. The little croc, newly hatched, is aware she once had a mother, and air breathing eyes, and a name that is lost now.
It all must still be up there, at the surface. The little croc edges toward the dome of light cascading down from above but before she can pierce it with the spear of her body, her path is blocked by a shadow. The shadow tumbles into a form, and that form is her own, amplified. Broad swath of blue-black scales ridged like a fortress, teeth dripping from the jaws like icicles, amber slitted eyes like doors she could fall through.
A deep hunger envelops her, aches all the way through her in an empty grimace. Briefly she thinks of ice cream, gummy snacks, macaroni in the shape of cartoon characters. As if sensing this betrayal, the larger crocodile offers up a beheaded fish, white meat floating like a glove. The little croc studies the fish uncertainly, even as she yearns to engulf it. What holds her back? Some impulse from her human life, the absurd thought that she should wash her hands. Disinfect this raw, shredded meat covered in scales and scum.
The larger croc waits expectantly. Pulsing out of its eyes is a current she can sense with her own. And associated with this, a certain uneasiness. The row of fangs takes on a new menace. She studies the fish. She rips into the flesh.
The little croc is a quick learner, adapting to the world underwater and the new body in which she patrols it. Flat, trowel-shaped hands are replaced with webbed paddles. Soft, poppable flesh with a hard rash of scales. She is a glittering
She is a glittering cocoon of green, a dragon without wings. She is impermeable, from the jowls of her leathery throat to the strong whip of her tail that sprouts like a tumor from her back. Maneuvering this body is like steering a missile—slicing through the water after a meal, she moves faster than she ever has.
cocoon of green, a dragon without wings. She is impermeable, from the jowls of her leathery throat to the strong whip of her tail that sprouts like a tumor from her back. Maneuvering this body is like steering a missile—slicing through the water after a meal, she moves faster than she ever has.
She is learning how to be invisible, how to creep with a reptilian slink. Fish yards away flare in her vision, giving themselves away with vibrations in the water. Their movement pummels the sensory organs around the little croc’s snout, earthquakes of information about size, location, and speed. Crabs send quick, scuttling signals; grouper lazy, lumbering pulses.
Her sense of time erodes, her activity untethered from the drought of sun. It doesn’t matter what’s in the sky. The water is enough. She aligns instinct with activity, trawling through the water all night sometimes, searching for fat-bellied trout or bony racer fish. She catches them in her mouth, tips her head back and lets them fall down the chute of her throat, no chewing required. When she is tired, she drifts along the surface, a ridged ellipse and a pair of eyes, or goes belly deep in the muck and murk at the bottom of the lagoon.
Some instincts are left over, kicking inside her like alien invaders. The urge to breathe in shallow gasps instead of one big pull that will last her for hours. Pausing in front of her reflection, doubled back to her as she slithers from land to water. A strange desire to see the sunset.
But words fade fast underwater. The little croc’s neurons are shrinking, folding down. What’s the benefit of all those baubles of a human brain—the hyper-developed frontal lobe, the language centers—when evolution has proved you can do without? Her brain is flattening into the bare essentials. A cerebrum the size of a Christmas ornament. An optic lobe like two knuckles. A cerebellum tacked on like a citation. Enough to swim, breathe, hunt.
These are the kinds of words that matter to the little croc now. Rip, eat, kill. The flute-like speckled swordtails that flit past like butterflies become meal. The low throttle of a boat’s approaching motor becomes danger. And in the waning hours of the day, when the little croc swims to the surface, when the magnolia petals drift along the water, when the earth seems, for a moment, to be just for her, to have slipped off the continuum of time into a space of any age— she has no words for this at all, if she ever did. She is fading into a silent world.
There is only one thing to fear: the angry, upright slashes who patrol the water. The little croc watches them from afar, the flurry of activity on the shore, black-white blur of motion, yellow tape, wind, boats and yelling. If she cruises close enough, she can feel the vibrations of their clumsy footsteps on the land, rippling out across the water. She knows to keep away but still she is drawn to watching them. They feel familiar. The drowned past returns in bubbles, fighting to stay afloat in the little croc’s brain.
Eagle Eye Ellen Orseck By
III
Olivia is dreaming again. She’s watching the start of the world, a light show with no audience. A tornado of dust and rock coagulates into a pinball millions of miles from a volatile nuclear reactor, and she watches the molten surface from above, black cracked with red magma, like the hide of a crocodile revealing the vital flesh beneath.
From within the planet, there is a great tectonic shift around the core. Eruptions spew from the earth with the reckless release of a shaken soda. Olivia breathes in sulfur and exhales nitrogen. There is a calm in this, and a cooling. The magma subsides; the earth folds, breaks, and dries out. Water rushes in, drinking up the ruined earthscape, overflowing, giving new meaning to the concept of endless.
Something is bubbling beneath the surface, clawing its way out of the mud. An armored silhouette, a creature who could break the earth, scale the universe. The land folds into itself, rises in mountains that scrape the sky. Ants become people become cities. Everything that touches the air crumbles, builds itself again. And still crocodiles trawl the dominion of land and sea. A rock plummets from space and the crocodilians survive. There is ice for a hundred thousand years and the crocs survive. There is a world on fire, a mushroom of death, and the crocs survive. The crocs will inherit the earth. When everything else has ground to a halt, when the sun has exploded in a cold radiance, when the universe folds in on itself and gravity stumbles to a halt, there will be crocs—
“I keep having this dream,” Olivia says.
Tommy, sitting on the bed, waits for her to continue. She doesn’t.
They are being sent home, packed up with their suitcases and shipped back with their grandmother. The past week of searching the swamps around the island hasn’t brought any change. They have been living endless, infernal days trapped in their condominium, shuttled around by well-meaning relatives who’ve come to town for support. Their mother has decided enough is enough. Tommy could have told her that after the first listless afternoon of minigolf. He and Olivia sat down at hole three while their grandmother excused herself to cry in the bathroom.
Last night, Olivia woke to an earthquake, Tommy next to her, crying soundlessly.
They’re supposed to be folding their clothes, a task that has been laid out for them by their parents as if it will take days, not seconds. Instead, they click through articles on the internet, inhaling everything they can about crocodiles, from the anatomy of their dentition to their primordial origins. Many websites call them the last dinosaurs, creatures that have, remarkably,
Canadian Granite By Mhairi Treharne
remained unchanged for millions of years. Tommy reads. Olivia sits at the window, pressing her bruises, drifting away from him.
Her mind slithers with scaly things. Things that are clawing their way through the gray sponge of her brain, a slick mass that is drowning her. Crocodiles. She presses her bruise. Dinosaurs. Press. Crocodiles. Press. And beneath it all, she is sure, is Mallory, if she could only fight her way through.
The sound of the adults seeps beneath the door. The hiss of the coffeemaker, another pot that will quickly be consumed by their sleep-deprived parents. The low murmur of aunts and uncles sitting in the living room. In an hour, Olivia and Tommy will be in the car, driving to the airport. In two hours, they’ll be on a plane, flying back to the landlocked state they never should have left, this strange, swampy place and everything that has happened disappearing behind the white blade of a plane wing as if wiped from memory. Somehow, Olivia is certain that once she leaves, she will never see this place again.
“I want to go back,” she says. She stands, hauls herself to the window. “Let’s go back to the beach. I need to see it again.”
Tommy pushes the window open with her and they climb out. Everything is a rush—their sneaking around the house, their sprint to the bikes. No time for shoes, they churn through the streets with bare feet, their soles grinding against the hard plastic pedals. The wind past their ears makes the sound hurry, quick, fast. They are running out of time they haven’t been aware of spending.
By the lagoon, there are barriers wedged in the sand. Wooden sawhorses with DO NOT CROSS spray painted in red across the lintel. On the beach, all but one boat has disappeared from where many boats were anchored. Olivia and Tommy creep out onto the shore in toeholds, as aware now as they should have been on that night.
“Do you think…?” Tommy asks, but his voice is bitten off. They drip past the back of a tent, catching snatches of bodiless voices discussing the ongoing investigation with a sort of delighted pessimism.
“Don’t know why we’re still looking,” one voice says.
“This kid’s dead,” comes a second voice.
“Deader than dead.”
Tommy recoils into Olivia’s shoulder, but she is glad to have it confirmed, that this is not all a bizarre daydream, a trick of the eye.
“Funny how helpless they are when you get ‘em in the net.”
“Like glorified lizards.”
“Teeth can’t do anything against a gun.”
Olivia and Tommy move on, shuffling against the sand. “Mallory,” Tommy says, looking out at the water. To Olivia, he looks very grownup, and very confused.
“Mallory,” she repeats.
Underwater, the little croc feels vibrations, and what’s more, a name she knows. A magic spell pulling her to the surface. Voices tumbling in the music of human sound. On the shore, a pale flash of legs and white sand and blue sky. Closer, closer. Danger, danger.
Olivia and Tommy don’t see the little croc until it shivers onto land, claws deep in the mud. Olivia stops, throws an arm across Tommy instinctively, electric shock crackling down her spine.
The little croc can see their fear in fluorescent violet, pulsing out of the girl child and boy child in seismic waves that pummel her eyes. They’re very still, not even trying to run. So much weak flesh and snappable bone, no hide, no claws—they aren’t meant for this world. Unclear how they’ve made it this long. Lunge. Kill.
She starts forward and is met with weight from above, clamping over her like a trap, struggling, twisting away. Danger, danger, danger. A bulk weighs her down. She is powerless to move and there is shouting, always shouting.
The little croc is dropped to the ground, tackled by one of the rangers who has emerged from the tent. “What are you doing?” He is yelling at Olivia and Tommy. “What the hell are you doing?”
But the children are not listening to him. They turn their faces into the croc’s lurid gaze and something clicks between the three of them—not a key being turned, but a lock fitted into place.
Time doesn’t slow down or speed up. Rather, it begins to heave, moving in all directions at once. The gaze of these creatures—blue, brown, yellow—creates a kind of internal earthquake in each of them, a tectonic sizzling as memory grinds against instinct.
Olivia and Tommy tread the same web of thought. They are thinking of that night, the carnival, their sister. Tommy is still racing his sisters to the beach, the carnival music smearing the night air, his hands sticky from a wand of cotton candy they shared. And Olivia is right there with him, ignoring the blades of grass that whisper, Stop! and the terrified keening of the stars, too high pitched for human ears. She is still running as fast as she can into the wide-open night.
The little croc sees the night sky like an upturned bowl of stars, the thin pulse of human muscle in motion, and something shivers down her spine. Convulses through her hide. Penetrates the impenetrable. Some almost forgotten human instinct flippers
inside of her. The desire to touch, to meet flesh with flesh.
Maybe such a touch would remind the little croc what she once was. The warmth of human skin singing through her cold blood, making her body a home again, instead of an armored bunker. Maybe it would be enough to make one husk melt away, to make a little girl emerge from the caul of a hide. Or, maybe these are not the little croc’s thoughts at all, but some collective idea billowing in the space between the three of them, borne by the children’s desire. Is longing enough to induce a transformation? If you try hard enough, can you reimagine the past in such a way that it reconfigures the future?
The other ranger is approaching fast, a bright gleam of metal shining in his hand. Olivia and Tommy fall forward, reaching out, calling “Let go! Let go!” It is just enough to confuse the first ranger, who loosens his grip unintentionally, allowing the little croc to scuttle away, to disappear into the water.
For the rest of their lives, even after they return home, even when Olivia takes a psychology course and believes the events of this afternoon were nothing more than a delayed onset of grief and denial, even when Tommy declares there are some things you can only believe when you’re young, they will think of this moment.
After two weeks the park rangers will call off the search. They will have caught seventeen crocodiles and shot them in the back of the skull, but the little croc will not be one of them. She will eat, breathe, swim, grow. She will forget. And still, sometimes, in the early mornings, when fog hovers like held breath over the water, when the egrets huddle in their rookeries, there will be a small tickle where a memory would go, something that can’t be hers, something she dreamed: a girl and a boy with molar-wide smiles sitting across from her in a teacup, spinning around and around and around.
Aspirations By Ellen Orseck
130 / TEXLANDIA 2022
131 / TEXLANDIA 2022
2022 “Best in the Land” Prize Winners
Fiction
This singular story about a girl born with a birthmark that looks just like Elvis Presley gripped me from its opening scene and never relented. Every character is tragic, flawed, unique, and they seem to want to break out of the confines of the story’s pages and come alive. “El” is a superb example of what the short story is capable of. It was a great pleasure to read it, and now a great pleasure to share it. ~ Fernando A. Flores
Poetry
“A Season of Caterpillars” by Laura Villareal
One of the many areas where this poem succeeds is in its clear attention to craft. The line “the first birth is the hardest, the second” is such a great example of enjambment as it plays off the word “second” as both a duration of time and as an ordinal number which the poem returns to later in the fifth stanza (“the second birth takes time”). The transitions between stanzas is also impressive as it shifts from one context of seasons–that of the butterflies and girl/womanhood–to the next. Bookending a poem can be difficult to execute well, yet the speaker’s understanding that they don’t have to meet intrusion with mercy makes for a triumphant close. ~ Brittny Ray Crowell
Creative Nonfiction
“Party Favors” is a voice-thick coming-of-self story about a young Black college student negotiating her identity between cliques and subcultures. A party (not a kick back) she doesn’t want to be at erupts in near-violence and the narrator is forced to face the disintegration of freshman-year friendships past their sell-by date, as well her own growing sexual and emotional maturity. At times, “Party Favors” leans toward the psychic force of Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, and the musicality of Junot Diaz’s This Is How You Lose Her. Amber D. Dodd is one to watch. ~ Cameron Dezen Hammon
2022 “Best in the Land” Prize Judges
Fiction - Fernando A. Flores was born in Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico, and grew up in South Texas. He is the author of the collection Death to the Bullshit Artists of South Texas and the novel Tears of the Trufflepig, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and named a best book of 2019 by Tor. com. His fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly, American Short Fiction, Ploughshares, Frieze, Porter House Review, and elsewhere. His collection of stories Valleyesque is forthcoming May 2022. He lives in Austin, Texas.
Poetry - Brittny Ray Crowell is a poet and artist. A native of Texarkana, TX, she earned a BA in English from Spelman College and an MA in English from Texas A&M-Texarkana. Recently, she won the Donald Barthelme Prize in Poetry and the Lucy Terry Prince Prize, judged by Major Jackson. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems and art have been published or are forthcoming in Frontier, The West Review, Mount Island, Aunt Chloe, Glass Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered. Currently, she is a teaching assistant and a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Houston.
Creative Nonfiction - Cameron Dezen Hammon is the author of This Is My Body: A Memoir of Religious and Romantic Obsession (Lookout Books), the Nonfiction Discovery Prize Winner for the 2019 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards, a bronze medalist for the Independent Publisher Book Award in Creative Nonfiction, and a finalist for the Foreword INDIE Book of the Year in Autobiography and Memoir. Kirkus called This Is My Body “a generous and unflinchingly brave memoir about faith, feminism, and freedom.” Her nonfiction has appeared in The Kiss anthology (W.W. Norton), Vogue, Ecotone, the Literary Review, the Houston Chronicle, NYLON, and elsewhere; and her essay “Infirmary Music” was named a notable in The Best American Essays 2017. She earned her MFA from Seattle Pacific University, and currently teaches nonfiction writing at Rice University.
Contributor Bios:
Adele Oliveria
Adele Oliveira is a writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she grew up and lives with her family. Her nonfiction and essays appear in Longreads, Hyperallergic, The New Republic, Salon, and other publications; her fiction appears in the Santa Fe Literary Review and Cagibi. She is at work on her first novel.
Anastasia Kirages
Anastasia “Stacy” Kirages is a Houston-based collage artist, zinester, and community organizer for Zine Fest Houston (ZFH). She received a BA in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin, and certificates from the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice and the University of Houston’s SURE™ Program, in Arts & Cultural Strategy and Entrepreneurship, respectively. Check out more of her work on Instagram: @k.llages.
Amber D. Dodd
Amber D. Dodd (she/her) is an award-winning writer with a special interest in contextualizing Black America. She is a former Racial-Equity Reporter and an assistant nonfiction editor at Sundog Literary Magazine and also edits poetry. Her nonfiction can be seen in Carefree Mag, CP Quarterly and Stellium Literary Magazine. She is a Latin scholar and the founder of blaQplight, a storytelling platform for the Black and queer community.
Amelia Brown
Amelia Brown is a queer writer whose debut manuscript has been shortlisted for Penguin’s WriteNow mentorship programme, longlisted for Mslexia’s Novel Award and the Blue Pencil Agency First Novel Award, and was a finalist in the Brighthorse Prize in the Novel. They’ve had short stories published by Bridgehouse Publishing and in The Bombay Review.
Austin Miller
Austin Miller is a photographer, artist, and designer based in Houston, Texas. He earned a BFA in Studio Art at the University of Tulsa and an MFA in Photography/Digital Imaging at the University of Houston. His artwork has been exhibited in many galleries both nationally and internationally. In addition, his work has been published in numerous publications such as Leonardo, Silk Road, Rice Review, and Studio Visit.
Anthony Sutton
Anthony Sutton resides on former Akokiksas, Atakapa, Karankawa, and Sana land (currently named Houston, TX), holds an MFA from the currently under threat program in creative writing at Purdue, and has had poems appear or forthcoming in Guesthouse, Gulf Coast, Grist, The Journal, Passages North, Prairie Schooner, Puerto del Sol, Quarter After Eight, Southern Indiana Review, Zone 3 and elsewhere.
Audi Barnes
Audi Barnes is a poet and essayist and the founder of the WE HAVE VOICES reading series, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit for Black Orlando writers that fundraises for pro-Black initiatives, organizations, and local businesses. Her work can also be found at The Offing and in Capable Magazine.
Brendan Egan
Brendan Egan’s fiction and poetry have been published by Witness, Catapult, Threepenny Review, Rattle and other journals. A graduate of the MFA program at McNeese State University, he lives in West Texas with his wife, Stacy Austin Egan, and their two children. He teaches at Midland College and attempts to keep a garden.
Caleb Braun
Caleb Braun earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, where he received the Harold Taylor Prize. He is a PhD student in creative writing at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. His poems have appeared and are forthcoming in The Gettysburg Review, 32 Poems, Image, Blackbird, Cherry Tree, and elsewhere. He can be found online at calebbraun.com.
Carson Markland
Carson Markland’s writing has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly and Breakwater Review. Her work has also been selected for Best Microfiction 2021. She currently lives in Phoenix.
Chukwu Sunday Abel
Chukwu Sunday Abel (Sunabel) is an Igbo-born Nigerian writer and a journalist. He is the winner of the 2020 Creators of Justice Literary Award in Short Fiction and Essay by the International Human Rights Art Festival Awards in New York. .His literary works have appeared in anthologies and magazines across four continents and he is the publisher of The Reliant News (thereliantnews.com).
Daniel Combs
Daniel J Combs’s photography observes human-made and nature-made landscapes. He hopes that his images invoke a connection to a sense of place and one’s personal beliefs. Daniel hails from Waterford, New York. He attended Hope College in Holland, Michigan, earning a B.A. in English and Communication. He divides his time between life in Michigan on the lakeshore and in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of New Mexico.
Daniela Pasqualini
Daniela Pasqualini is an innovative Italian painter based in the United States whose abstract works have been exhibited internationally and are held in private collections worldwide. Mixing acrylic and impasto, her paintings result in a sculptural, three-dimensional appearance.
David McClain
David McClain is a Houston-based artist and writer. He earned a BA from Rice University, a JD from the University of Houston Law Center, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His artworks have been exhibited and published in Texas, New York, Chicago, Germany, and his writing has been published in a variety of literary journals. He currently serves as the arts editor for Superpresent, a journal of art and literature.
Ellen Orseck
When she was three years old, Ellen Orseck painted on the walls and furniture of her parent’s home in Baltimore, Maryland. Her work can be found in museums, private and corporate collections and at her studio at Winter Street Studios in Houston. She teaches at Watercolor Art Society, Houston and at the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies at Rice University.
Emma Aylor
Emma Aylor’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New England Review, AGNI, Colorado Review, 32 Poems, and the Yale Review Online, among other journals. She lives in Lubbock, Texas.
Contributor Bios:
Emma Bolden
Emma Bolden is the author of House Is An Enigma (Southeast Missouri State UP), medi(t)ations (Noctuary Press) and Maleficae (GenPop Books). The recipient of a 2017 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, her work has appeared in The Norton Introduction to Literature, The Best American Poetry and journals including the Mississippi Review, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, New Madrid, and TriQuarterly. She is Associate Editor-in-Chief for Tupelo Quarterly and an Editor of Screen Door Review. Her memoir, The Tiger and the Cage, is forthcoming from Soft Skull Press.
Gin Faith Thomas
Gin Faith Thomas holds an MFA in poetry from Indiana University and continues to live and write in Bloomington, Indiana. She has published work in [PANK], Hobart, Flying Island, and her poem, Lucy the Teenaged Werewolf, is forthcoming in Bluestem. She’s still hunting for a publisher for her collection but to date neither confirms nor denies being a werewolf, herself.
Jasmine Ledesma
Jasmine Ledesma is a writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in or is set to appear in places such as Crazyhorse, Rattle, and [PANK] among others. Her work has been nominated for Best of The Net and twice for the Pushcart Prize. She was named a Brooklyn Poets fellow in 2021. Her novella Shrine was listed as a finalist for the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize. Her poem was highly commended by Warsan Shire for the Moth Poetry Prize.
Jessica Barksdale
Jessica Barksdale’s second poetry collection Grim Honey and her fifteenth novel The Play’s the Thing were both published in 2021. Her novel What the Moon Did will be published in February 2023. Recently retired, she taught composition, literature, and creative writing at Diablo Valley College in Pleasant Hill, California for thirty-two years and continues to teach novel writing online for UCLA Extension and in the online MFA program for Southern New Hampshire University. She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband.
Josh Hickman
Josh Hickman is a Texas artist and writer. He has published six books, numerous articles, and his work has been featured in several solo exhibitions.
Julia McLaurin
Julia McLaurin is a multidisciplinary artist working out of Houston, Texas. Her artwork is best known for combining vintage and modern imagery in a contemporary style. Today she is a full-time artist, rainbow enthusiast, creative visionary and lover of all things pop art. Her studio is located in the Silos at Sawyer Yards in Houston, Texas.
Justin Jannise
Justin Jannise is the author of How to Be Better by Being Worse (BOA Editions, 2021), which won the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Recently a recipient of the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry and a former Editor-in-Chief of Gulf Coast, Justin is pursuing his Ph.D. in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Houston.
Laura Villareal
Laura Villareal is the author of Girl’s Guide to Leaving (University of Wisconsin Press, 2022). She has received fellowships from the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and National Book Critics Circle. Her writing has appeared in Guernica, American Poetry Review, Waxwing, AGNI, and elsewhere.
Mhairi Treharne
Mhairi Treharne is a Canadian artist based in the UK. Wooden panels are uniquely cut and milled, decoratively burned, and embroidered with wire before painting. Treharne is driven to create work about places which are magical, sacred and have a ‘thinness’- an apparent closeness to another dimension.
Mark Jackley
Mark Jackley’s poems have appeared in Fifth Wednesday, The Cape Rock, Natural Bridge, Cagibi, Talking River, and other journals. His new book of poems, Many Suns Will Rise, is forthcoming this year by The Main Street Rag Press. Other books include Every Green Word (Finishing Line Press), Cracks and Slats (Amsterdam Press), and On the Edge of a Very Small Town (Nameless Press). He lives in Purcellville, Virginia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Paul Garson
Paul Garson lives and writes in Los Angeles amidst a forest of telescopes and vintage cameras. To date he has published over 2,500 nonfiction features focusing on a variety of subjects along with a smattering of short fiction, numerous photographs, and several books dealing with military history.
Peter Wakeman Schranz
The writing of Peter Schranz has most recently appeared in the Decadent Review, Metamorphoses, the Automata Review, and somehow also his website, dailydoofus.com. He has a “podcast” on bandcamp.com called Flight Of The Fifty Fancies which is a lot like dailydoofus.com. He has also written secretly under a mysterious pseudonym. He lives in Philadelphia.
Rusy Singh
Rusy Singh was born and raised in India and is currently working in Houston, Texas as a business analyst. His work contains a wide variety of motifs with main focus on street, abstract and documentary genre. He seek to demonstrate wide-eyed openness to whatever passes in front of his camera.
Stephanie Gonzalez
Stephanie Gonzalez received her BFA in Interior Design from the Art Institute of Houston and her MFA in Painting from Houston Baptist University. She has created works for public collections such as Starwood Hotels, Le Meridien in Saigon, Lot 8, designer Chloe Dao’sretail, Skyline Art Services, the Make a Wish Foundation, Pearl Bar, and more.
Tyler Sones
Tyler Sones is a writer from Waco, TX. He received an MFA from Ohio State in 2019, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, The Pinch, Beloit Fiction Journal, Washington Square Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Austin and can be found online at tylersones.com.
