We recommend enjoying this issue with an Albemarle pippin.

Our fifty-eighth issue is packed with dazzling poems and phenomenal flash fiction. It opens with “The Perfect Zen Dance of the Boulder” by a poet we first featured in our Poetry Special Issue last year, William Doreski. Next up are Devin Strauch with “Substitute Angel,” a story that will change the way you think about pasta, and Mansour Chow with two haiku that might raise Basho’s eyebrows. Anna Lea Jancewicz’s story has a fresh take on what to expect when you’re “Unexpecting,” and Anton Rose reminds us why they call them the wee small hours of the morning in his poem “Back Garden, 2 AM.” A client gets “Even” with his barber in Fredric Sinclair’s story, Sally Houtman answers the “Question Mark” with a poem, and Annesha Sengupta finds herself in the “Wrong Dream” in a fanciful fiction piece. Closing out the issue is the newest member of our staff, Amanda Chiado, who appeared in our Poetry Special Issue and also contributed a lovely poem to our special issue for Eirik and Monica, the founders of Jersey Devil Press. (For more on Eirik and his shiny new lungs, please visit our homepage—double-lung transplants are literally lifesavers, but they don’t come cheap.) Also, Telmo Pieper reimagines a childhood doodle in this month’s cover art, “Walvis.”

Read it online or download the PDF.