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Your Gifts
by Zach Keali’i Murphy You’ve given the worst birthday gifts, and I’ve kept all of them. There’s the crocodile-shaped keychain that hasn’t left my key ring. Its sharp and pointy tail has torn a hole through the pockets in all of my pairs of pants. Sometimes, the tail even scrapes against my thigh until it… Continue reading
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Somebody, Please Think of the Children
by Rebecca Klassen I haven’t seen him since he was a boy, and even though he has his back to me, I recognize him in my headlights. It’s his oblong head and right-angle-ears that ring familiar. He staggers from alcohol, lurching off the end of the pavement onto the country lane. The national speed limit… Continue reading
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Becoming Swans
by Stefanie Leigh After Rachel Rabbit WhiteWe found each other’s eyes in the mirror—tendus, jetes, fouettés—for years. Our conversations, leaning over the piano, heldlike hands. Until my ring finger was freeto trace your throat, my whole palmon your jaw. Your gaze erasing our outlines, our limbsinhaling, gliding, like twilight on a lake. Stefanie Leigh is… Continue reading
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Roping Steers with Milton Erickson
by Bruce D Snyder Twenty third-graders, six parents, and a teacher all piled into four or five vehicles and headed for Decorah, Iowa. The class camping trip circa 1981. Once there, we got the tents up, the spaghetti cooking, the s’mores at standby alert. The kids were into it and the parents, adrift in a… Continue reading
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line and sinker
by Heather Emmanuel You slide pescatarian into the conversation like it’s your word to claim. “When it counts,” you say, scanning the menu. Across the table, in a crisp button-down and cuffed sleeves, she doesn’t bother pretending to read hers. “And when does it count?” The intensity of her slightly downturned eyes unnerves you. Her… Continue reading
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2026 Pushcart Prize Nominees
January House Literary Journal is thrilled to announce our nominations for the 2026 Pushcart Prize. The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses, published since 1976, has become “the most honored literary project in America”. Winners are expected to be announced around April of 2026. Congratulations and good luck to our nominees! Bindweed by M F Drummy… Continue reading
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Artwork by Mallory Caloca
Mallory Caloca passion is to share the little details, simultaneously bold and delicate, and create an imagined image for others to perceive something beyond conventional understanding. Combined sources that are both organic or natural and geometric shapes and forms create a fantastical blueprint of possibilities. Watercolor is an immediate and mostly unforgiving tool that has… Continue reading
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Dry
by Chila Woychik It was the farthest north they had ever been. And time was all Maddie and Saul had left. Hours awash in Maddie’s own thoughts, the strangest memories crept in at even the hint of a connection: an oak tree with a split trunk reminded her of climbing a tree in her back… Continue reading
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What they don’t say about recovery
by Kathy Pon beyond a bunch of discomfort and the slogtowards some sort of body restoration is the delicious act of napping. For ushigh-strung overachievers better suited as boundless Springer Spaniels that flushfulfillment from fields or boardrooms, the notion of turning into a daytime zombieis terrifying. Who allows the brain to surrender its powered thought,… Continue reading
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Artwork by Reena
Reena’s artworks have been published in several print and online publications, including Magazine-The Perch Magazine (mental health and substance), The Climate Art Collection, Aunt Lute, Judy Magazine, Farm Girl Magazine and Art Axis Project Organizing Committee and won Silver Medal in India Art Contest (Khula Aasmaan). Continue reading
January House Literary Journal 