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27 Objects You Need to Have a Baby
by Helen Raica-Klotz Helen Raica-Klotz is the winner of the 2025 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Chapbook contest for Superior Stories, a collection of short fiction. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The MacGuffin, The Great Lakes Review, and MER; two of her nonfiction essays were nominated for the Pushcart Prize in 2026. Helen… Continue reading
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Artwork by JJ Cromer
JJ CROMER is a self-taught artist from Virginia. His work is in many public collections, including the American Visionary Art Museum, the Intuit Center of Outsider Art, the High Museum of Art, and the Taubman Museum of Art. He and his family live on a farm in central Appalachia, where they have kept chickens, ducks,… Continue reading
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After I Discover the Islets of Langerhans
by Annie Stenzel Coming to this charming name by chance,of course I wanted these small bodies of land to bean exotic, intriguing place I might visit one day, and nota tricky body part, essential in the managementof glucose. Which means my sundry diabetic friendshad Islets of Langerhans that ran amok somehowand their bodies needed rescue.… Continue reading
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Votive
by Carole Greenfield Candles in blue votive holders sputter, mutter as their lightshutters, flutters, flickers while demons snicker in shadows and corners as warnings come thicker and faster, tonight six of uscluster round the table, flustered, attempting to muster our courage, our wits in starts and fits, each of us realize it’s happened before,as students… Continue reading
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What Happens in the Morning
by Paul Ilechko This is what will happen in the morning in that brief interval when the ghosts are still visible as they scurry towards their hiding place in the darkest corners of the daytime house before the buckets of almost boiling water are spiked with bleach and soap before the hay is baled and… Continue reading
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Elegy for a Mole Crab
by Heather Truett I want to write about the molecrab, its smallwhite claws halfheartedly openingand closingin the air, the waythe waves refuseto take it and I askthe sky to senda bird to eat it,so at least its deathwill matter, and thisis me, putting myhuman ideas of lifeand matter, of meaning,into the ocean and askingher to… Continue reading
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Two Poems by Laura Denny
The Nature of SunlightI want to give in again the way I did when we were newly married.In My Life, was your wedding song.I was pregnant, and we were happy for three months. Then you got sick. I remember one afternoon I wheeled you to Ocean View Park to shave your head. I bought you… Continue reading
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Artwork by Najib Joe Hakim
Najib Joe Hakim is a working documentary photographer, artist and photography instructor. Hakim also serves as the President of the Board for the Network of Photographers for Palestine and is a founding member of Class Conscious Photographers. He is the recipient of the Rebuilding Alliance Storytellers Award for a trilogy of projects on Palestine, a… Continue reading
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85 Seconds to Midnight
by Kip Knott We are born out of nothingness,the emptiness of the universe.All of us know this void well. We spend our days filling itwith something more than light,something more than darkness, something more than the atomsthat bind us one to the otherand the atoms that may one day split us apart. Kip Knott is… Continue reading
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A Moment With Jesse
by Cal Harris On June 24, 2023, I drove down I‑94 to Chicago with my son to visit friends—brothers, really—who had seen me grow from a precocious teen with too much ambition into a father of a precocious toddler. One of my buddies lived in a beautiful Hyde Park apartment, with a doorman and real… Continue reading
January House Literary Journal 