Open for submissions 7/1/25 — 7/14/25
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NWWQ July 2025 issue
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Lee Upton ~ Four Poems
The Nap
For so long it wasn’t possible—
although at the credit agency
I would disappear during breaks
to a little cot in the back room until
the timer went off—
but today
no obligations no voices
and the window -
Adam J. Galanski-De León ~ George Lassos The Moon
No one knew what to do the day the sunrise got stuck on the horizon. The orb of pink and gold and the purple shaded clouds just sort of slouched there, watching us.
The engineers didn’t know what to do. The same engineers that brought back the wooly
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Eva Marie Ginsburg ~ Shoes
When they finally let me out of the hospital, nobody could find my shoes. Shoes were the first thing they’d taken away in the emergency room, but now they were unaccounted for. My mom didn’t remember bringing them home,
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Brian Rawlins ~ Tiny Organs
Things finally started to feel okay after I stole the car, paid twenty dollars for a Slurpee and vowed never to wear shoes again.
The luxury car was left running outside the mega church when I happened upon it after deciding
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Robert Kinerk ~ Five Poems
Yelling at the Baby
So, your baby is standing up in her crib
clinging to the railing with her chubby hands
and squalling for reasons you can’t figure out,and Putin has bombed another village in Ukraine,
and Israeli -
Bruce Wagner ~ Marjorie
The old woman, ninety-five come July, had lived a life of fires.
She used to hear stories about the one in 1903 that ate the ranch nestled in the hills of the 13,000-acre Spanish Land Grant that her grandparents bought—Rancho Topanga Malibu Sequit.
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Matthew E. Henry ~ There Is No God-Damned Metaphor Here
I often destroy the printed drafts of my writing. In part, it’s paranoia—an unrealistic and egotistical worry that someone might steal my ideas. Or, far worse, someone might read them. It’s the fear of revelation without
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Lisa Thornton ~ Fancy Thompson
Three crosses on a hill made from rusty clothesline poles watched over the town. The middle one was taller than the two flanking it. “What’s a chigger?” she asked him once. He had smiled while she scratched her ankles.
“I
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Michele Alouf ~ Lani
The baby girl is called Lani because her mother, Nell, feels the name escape from her mouth like a child’s laugh when she says it aloud. She first saw the name in the issue of Seventeen, which she hid behind in
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Kip Knott ~ Three Pieces
Morning Swim
Last night I watched the wind and tide carry my mother’s ashes out to sea. And now this morning it seems to me that her favorite coffee cup holds an ocean. I can’t help but feel God-like cradling its entirety in my hands, even though my mind tells
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Patrick Strickland ~ Rooster
CW: References to suicide
We mentioned it now and then, over beers at Red’s, but none of us knew where Rooster’d gone off and disappeared to. Odds were he’d gone a bender. He did that—vanished, then resurfaced with a story you could’ve just
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Pablo Piñero Stillmann ~ Letters to a Version of Myself in Another Dimension
Letter to a Version of Myself in a Dimension Without Insects
There are these creatures we have here. Or I guess first of all Hello. Does politeness exist in your dimension & is it a good thing? They can have a hundred
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Anna Mantzaris ~ Rocket Science
1.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out how to lose ten pounds but I call NASA anyway. The guy picks up on the first ring. He asks me what I consume. I mention
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Adam Peterson ~ Argonne Youth
How the children lived before they filled the sky—
Wailing underneath lab tables. Grabbing for the scientists’ wingtips. Getting their grubby little mitts into all the atoms.
There’s slobber on the palladium! a scientist would cry.
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Sheldon Lee Compton ~ The Dress
The daughter took care of her mother, as daughters are good to do. She had tended to her well-being for many years, driving her to doctor appointments, buying her beer and making sure it always stayed cold in a mini-fridge
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SE Wilson ~ The End of Summer
It was a Friday late in the season—after Labor Day—and the beaches were mostly deserted, save for a few families and the fisherman on the piers. We got a first floor room at the Seabreeze motel. A bright blue motor lodge from the 1960s with a distant
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Martin Perez ~ Pareidolia (Par-i-DOH-lee‑a)
My father’s heavy boot crunched down onto the cheap, plastic hood of the RC police car, shattering the red and blue lights, splintering the black and white body, and collapsing the top, sending it inward like a tiny white dwarf star, imploding, vibrating,
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Wilson Koewing ~ Lounging by the Pool
I sat melting into a lounge chair by the community pool watching my wife and young daughter splash around in the shallow end. We didn’t live in Swaying Pines, but we’d joined the pool as friends of the community. We lived close by in San Anselmo.
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Michael Czyzniejewski ~ Demons
Mom was selling her house, the house we’d grown up in, me and my five siblings. Dad had recently passed; property taxes were going up. At that point, it was just Mom and my brother, Kent, and too much space. My sisters reminded