Grandma’s garage was full of tools, hanging on a rusty pegboard: handsaw, shovel, shotgun ... The ax was nestled among a family of axes – I took the one that looked sharpest-

It was a windy night in Bandar Abbas, Iran’s fishing port on the Persian Gulf. Temperatures cool in the fall as the breeze from the Strait of Hormuz engulfs the city.

A shiver of collaboration—of complicity—runs through me; I clutch my phone and sit with martial attention. A car eases down the block during my vigil, disconcerting me; but it does not belong to Peg

So I set the screw tip along the width of his finger, and drove the drill bit right to heaven. It ran through his wedding band and straight into his bone, bringing them tight and close like Jesus to

in the morning paper someone has bombed a city someone has caused a scandal someone else has sentenced the power plants to death

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She liked the gemütlichkeit, another German word, of hearing him fix coffee and eggs, watching him reading, talking with him about her problems as though she were a student herself. He listened with

Like an itinerant cathedral galumphing to a stop, the city bus unfolded its improbable doors.

The cold paper crinkled with each shift of Avery’s legs. ChatGPT told her to come into the doctor’s office after she listed her symptoms, so here she was. Initially she thought it was the grief. It

Don't yell at the sky this time. Its blushing edge/has already wrapped itself around you./The stars are alive and unafraid.

When he called, Psychic John said that his first opening was in two weeks. The psychic’s voice was low and calm, matter-of-fact but with just the faintest hint of apology. It was a voice that took i

The dawn of a new generation has started. The children of earth are ready for a new beginning.

Eventually, we’ll be reduced to an old couple huddled in a tiny bed...

Frederick stopped at the treeline and made a face at God. "Just wait a second!" God shouted, annoyed. He leaned back over the well and closed His eyes, trying to think of what to say.

with a sudden flash from those red eyes, quaking the leaf with a hop, skip, and a jump

The pads of my fingers slide over her heel. When my daughter was little, I loved washing her feet, loved running my fingers over them. The heels were soft, smooth, pink, like balsam flowers.

She possessed that rhombus trait of supreme self-confidence.  I had seen it in rhombi, oblongs, oblate spheroids, cones, squares, polygons, just about everyone and everything except me.  It was very d

We linger on the centerfold. Legs spread, a prophecy of our desires that will take decades to touch.

Bill Wolak returns to the Parliament of Magpies with his special brand of digital collages

A hot gust shoves against me, thick with the stench of sulfur and churned earth. The smell takes me back to Songkran, to his hands around me as the water splashed and the sky cracked open above Lipe.

Dylan began to think that his mother’s plan, whatever it was, wasn’t working, but suddenly a bell sounded—quick, successive, hysterical bursts—and the lights above the road started pulsating back an

one eye fixed on the primordial ooze of the ocean floor

We’re proud to share this list of literary journals—all members of CLMP—publishing new poetry, fiction, nonfiction, artwork, and more in June 2026.   After Dinner Conversation | June 2026 Featuring…

Sal was unperturbed when Mary sat apart from him on the couch as they watched television after dinner, and even when her favorite comedy didn’t once make her laugh. Sooner or later...she would again l

Anthony Acri is a cartoonist, illustrator and a social critic from Pittsburgh.

parachuting their stem-less dandelions from the sky— the wind just a whisper— touching down for a lunar-like landing

We did a second interview with Michael Isaac Shokrian after our Indie Author Spotlight!

The protests in 2011 had of course never crossed properly into Belgravia. Disorder belonged elsewhere in London. Tonight the distance appeared to have vanished.

... if you have to trust somebody, trust the artists...

Her generations remain i am the surviving seedling in revolt: the Mahogany that won’t go extinct

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Ankles bound, arms crisscrossed against my chest, I’m a modern-day Hatshepsut, wrapped in Egyptian cotton, ready to escape my jeweled sarcophagus.

Mama took her free hand and used it to stroke Pearl, to hold her tighter, to calm her as best she could.  She insisted on calm.

A sparrow pecks cement as if coding a message to a soul long gone

It was just a rainy afternoon in September. I was at a small café, alone, rewriting the same paragraph for the fifteenth time. I had two hours of sleep, a migraine blooming behind my right eye, and a

We built a bonfire in my friend’s garden and it burnt for twenty-two hours straight:

Finally, an autumn morning came damply to life, and Selma’s eyes failed to open. Her cold body remained where it was while her consciousness migrated to another place. It was a busy place. Noise e

Magpie Store What You'll Find Here Now Available! Books American Playground by Michael Isaac Shokrian Buy Books Shop Now. Merch T-shirts, hoodies, hats Magpie Merch Coming Soon Archive Issues

James Reade Venable was born in Manhattan, New York. He has been published in Black + White Photography, Dodho, F-Stop and many more. He was a finalist for the 2023 Monochromatic Awards and 2024 Color

He was born at Edgewater Hospital in December 1952, the Second Son, to a twenty-six-year-old immigrant mother who had passed through Ellis Island in 1951. Born in Galanta, she survived Auschwitz and