ISSUE #8

Bloom

Rachael Bohlander, Pay no mind to what they say, acrylic on canvas, 30” x 40”, 2024. The editors would like to thank Rachael for permission to share her work in issue 8. The editors would also like to thank Garth Evans for curating art for Speculative Nonfiction and introducing us to so many wonderful artists.

 

Table of Contents

 
 

A New Song / Anesu Mukombiwa

Writing as process. Writing as a way of muddling through.

 

Dear Nina: A Re-memory/ Mimi Iimuro Van Ausdall

I want to share your story. The one of you, Nina, a mixed-race teenaged lesbian locked in a Japanese-American internment camp in the 1940s.

 

"Time" is the Most Common Noun in the English Language/ Daniel Olivieri

It is no accident that the inventor of the watch was a locksmith. A similar impulse underlies both contraptions.

 

Floating the Breaks / Sarah Stanbury

I wrote the following account more than twenty years ago, working from notes I took as we floated down the Missouri.

 

FLYWAYS / Rose Michael

March fires have bird bodies washing up onshore.

 

At the Edge of an Old Growth Forest / Emily Carlson

Our first time alone together for almost ten years. My mother and I stay in a hotel at the edge of an old growth forest.

 

Sometimes A Child / Rachel Tellus

Sometimes a child comes to the table, all set for tea with tiny plastic cups and matching saucers, a pot of air off to the side.

 

Painted Scar / Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

1 -  COYOTE INKS A TATTOO as legend as map as path as coordinates through winds pushing back through…

 

A Brief History of April / Nicole Walker

In the beginning, there were but three months—

 

LET ALONE BEAUTY / Donald Morrill

Pretending encourages the belief that one begins somewhere to which one can, or must, eventually return.

 

Sympathetic Resonance / Mariah Gese

My hearing began to disintegrate in my mid-twenties, around the same time as my gender.