Dear Reader,
Happy belated Halloween! As you might have guessed, this issue’s theme is inspired by the holiday—that, and the Renaissance tradition of turning to ancient Greek and Roman myths for artistic inspiration.
Alyssa Rim casts a spell with her poem “Rotten Girl, Grotesque Romance,” inspired by the Vocaloid song of the same name which introduced her to the villanelle genre. Beck Jewell’s poem, “Incantation by the Witch of Hanoverton,” draws its inspiration from a dubious legend in his parents’ hometown. CJ Ackerman-Garvin blasts us into a relationship teetering on the brink of a nuclear meltdown (literally) in their short story "Doom Town."
Sydney McClellan lists of some of her favorite technology-inspired horror films in “Dreaming of TV Static: A Brief & Personal Account of Techno-Horror." Freelancer Hallie James Holt gives us the first of what we hope will become a series in “Problematic Male Characters I Kind of Like: Jay Gatsby.”
Andrea Santos conjures a haunting vision of a young girl in her poem “My Twin in the Pink Sheets.” Geovanna Murphy’s column Jo the Word Nerd returns with its second installment, this time about the word “ache,” and how it captures the joint-pain-like feeling of early morning regret and recognition.
Ashley Gyawali makes a story from the Ramayana her own in her (incredible) short fiction piece “Adiśati (Order).” Bridgette Stands ponders the spotted lanternflies that so many of us perceive as monstrous in her poem “Lullaby in Lycorma.”
Madina Fayzieva adopts the perspective of a vampire growing weary of their immortality in her poem “Cold-Blooded.” Monet Gonda confronts the myth of a thorough digital archive documenting every adolescent memory and mistake in her essay “Digital Afterlife: A Collection of Our Past Selves.”
Chasity Quarles wonders how she fits into her menagerie of siblings and half-siblings in “The Many-Headed Creature that is My Big Blended Family.” And Geovanna Murphy somehow makes it funny to hear about the culturally-diverse boogeymen/women that parents invoke to scare their kids into good behavior, in “My Friends and All Their Fiends.”
Emily Frost