October 2024 submissions close 10/14/24. We will next accept submissions January 1–14, 2025. We do not accept submissions between issues. Thanks to all who submitted to this issue and special thanks to our Senior editors
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NWWQ — OCTOBER 2024
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Will Pfefferle ~ 16 Nevada Counties
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Shoshauna Shy ~ Now I Know Why There’s This Big a Crowd at My Funeral
Let me tell you, it helps to keel over unexpectedly when in your mid-50s on a sunny morning in June. Catch everybody by surprise–“Aurora? God, no!” But while folks are stunned, hushed and graceful in paying
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David Wesley Williams ~ The Sun Sessions
The bar was just off the frontage road, out front of the dog track and next door to a dive motel. It was a cinder-block building that struck anyone who saw it as that rare example of architectural intent: the above-ground
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Lauren Kardos ~ All I wanted was the $9 coconut water
I remember searching for the nearest trash bin in the Whole Foods parking garage, worrying that the overpriced kombucha might come back up on my bleach-stained leggings and ratty sweatshirt. His roommate looked the same, tall,
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George Singleton ~ Gerald’s Last Girlfriend
Finally, after a full year of college on campus his junior year, Gerald came home to find out that his parents secured him a job working for his uncle Leo, a wealthy man who’d operated a small engine repair shop for thirty years—Gerald’s
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Steve Deutsch ~ Poker
It is nothing to me who runs the Dive.
Let’s have a look at another five.
–Robert Frost in Dive’s DiveMy grandma taught me.
She wasn’t some namby-pamby
who’d let her grandson win
to build his self-esteem.Nah.
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Michael Salcman ~ Poems
IT’S ONLY A QUEEN-SIZED BED
It’s only a queen-sized bed and I’m sleeping on the right-hand ledge because you broke your wrist when you fell with your arm outstretched on the concrete skirt of our neighbor’s pool and it rests in a splint on a
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Ora Alcorn ~ Poem Without Anesthesia
I’m sorry if this poem hurts
and here is a piece of sterile gauzeto bite down on
if it causes pain.You say, by email, that Miriam’s son
came through his surgery finethough there were a few hours after that
his pain meds did not kick in.He’s in
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Andrew McLellan ~ Poems
Spolia
What remains for me: your books, war
relics, and photo albums.With your books, you were quiet.
Trawling their depths
for underlined passages, marginalia,
I found only the cold
Victorian inscription from your father:Many of my sentiments are
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Gary Fincke ~ The Wrath of God
My cousin Sid Morrow told me he’d woken up, just yesterday, from a dream that showed him how to get into a triple-locked box without ever opening it. To convince me, Sid said that he’d bought a crate, locked it, tied rope
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Martha Highers ~ Two Poems
They taught me the colors of the enemy
They taught me the colors of the enemy.
On a map they are red, and we are black.
Our uniforms, of course, were camouflaged,
sometimes the mixed colors of a forest,
sometimes the mixed colors -
Bryan D. Price ~ Five fragments from Dystopian Summer
24.
The world has gone dark. No one reaching out to me from outside the sphere or the great beyond. Just silence. I check the antennae and satellites. I check all the wires. Everything seems more or less in line with how it
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Michael Lauchlan ~ Five Poems
Poem Following a Line from Philip Larkin
On the day of the explosion, cows
kept chewing and we went to work,
coughing out dismay in prosaic bursts
and scrolling news, weighing the chance
of an early winter. On the morning -
Pavle Radonić ~ Solo
Six hours altogether. Rp300k taxi fare; 10k was return on the train.
We had chosen the date badly. Muslim New Year and a long weekend meant a queue at the station ticket-office, seats sold out. The standing option was declined;
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David Gilbert ~ The Singed Hair of the Commentariat
- More Days Than Nights
Tiresias sits alone chewing gum like Lolita. Her dog, Little St. James, sleeps on her lap. Even though her implants are hurting, she soldiers on and will tease the disaster out of the moment. The other passengers have
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Lynn Mundell ~ Beautiful Things
Treasures
You are eight when on a visit to your father’s aunt you see beautiful things. Great Aunt lives alone in a tiny red cabin on the edge of a small town. Before her husband died, he built shelves throughout to display
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Michael Credico ~ Bulk
We would come to blows we got so bored. On bulk pickup day, we rummaged the tree lawns and the alleys. We plucked a waterlogged guitar. It had two rusted strings that broke. We snapped them against our wrists until we broke
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Soramimi Hanarejima ~ The Validation of Social Bathing
1
Outside the kitchen window, the wind is whipping, jostling the tree branches with a vigor I haven’t seen for a while. So of course I have to stop washing the dishes and drive to the hilltop park.
Standing on the grassy peak, I avail
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Glen Pourciau ~ Two Stories
Roundabout
Mike looks at me like I make him sick. I may have done something to make him mad, but I can’t remember what. Maybe I did and maybe I didn’t, or maybe he wants me to believe I deserve to be scorned with his eyes.