49.2, Spring 2026
CONTENTS
7 Editor’s Note
8 Award Winners
FICTION
10 TRUDY LEWIS / Marilyn’s Theremin
52 ANDY MOZINA / Night Traveler
82 ERIC RASMUSSEN / Warmer
116 DREW JOHNSON / Two Bird Lullaby
135 SAMUEL LIGON / Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad
150 SHARON WAHL / Driving Lessons
POETRY
27 ROSS WHITE / Enough
28 KOREY HURNI / Jump Scare
42 JANE MORTON / Self Portrait with Whetstone and Scissors / The Memory Expands and Contracts Like an Eye
46 HANNAH KEZIAH AGUSTIN / in the archipelago, my sister dreams
48 VIRGINIA KANE / I Didn’t Write the Poem
49 DENISE DUHAMEL / Ring / Denise Duhamel and I
63 REGAN GREEN / Night Fishing / Visit from the Rat
66 ALEXANDER SHI / Th e Circus of Masks / Th e Silence
77 AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY / My Loctician is a Shepherd
80 JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL / Walter Reed Army Hospital / Zinc
93 VASVI KEJRIWAL / The First Time
94 CAMILLE CARTER / Twilight Exequy
110 ELIZABETH C. GARCIA / Abecedarian of things to do while you’re waiting to feel
112 MICKIE KENNEDY / Cravings / A House with No Mouth
121 JANE ZWART / Th e Age of Jousting
122 CONSTANT WILLIAMS / Late Stage
123 UGOCHUKWU DAMIAN OKPARA / I Would Like My Queerness to Be Accounted For
130 LAUREN EGGERT-CROWE / Pandemic Pantoum
132 MARIANNE KUNKEL / At a Park, I Th ink about How I Self-protectively Put Men in Boxes
134 ANNA HARTQUIST-LARSON / Carmen’s Brother Takes Us to the Beach after Her Memorial
139 TALIN TAHAJIAN / Maggot
140 ADAM TAVEL / Quay / Lake Somewhere
146 ZACHARIAH CLAYPOLE WHITE / Morning Walk after the Storm
147 LINDSEY ROYAL WAYLAND / Ode to Worn
148 CECILIA MORRIS / Twelve Songs of a Rural Queer
167 AMY RAASCH / Ornament
168 SAMUEL PICCONE / Black Thumb
NONFICTION
32 SHEREE CHUA / Oralities: Sea, Salt and Bones
73 KATIE RHODES / Spread
96 DYLAN LANDIS / The Eye Through Which My Mother Sees Me
124 OLIVIA JACOBSON / Grit
142 SHALA ERLICH / Eighteen Things I Know About You, or The Number Eighteen Means Life
169 GIOVANNI WOLFRAM / Father Poem
185 Contributors’ Notes