Entangled
micro series
poetry
Forest Witch Stew
KJ Brydle (she/they) is a BFA student in UBC’s Creative Writing program. They are drawn to writing about the summoning echo of estrangement and moments that sparkle, shimmer, or make one shake. They are Red River Métis and Ukrainian settler blessed to be living on Coast Salish land.
Weaving Practice
Sophia McGovern is a writer and artist based in Tempe, Arizona. Her writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her words and art have appeared in various anthologies and journals, including Needlebound and Motherlore Magazine. She is also the founding editor of Little Somethings Press, which publishes short writings and art in handmade books. Through her press, she leads bookmaking and art workshops in libraries. She weaves fibers, words, and mothering into her daily creative practice.
fiction
THE DREAM GIRL’S FATHER
Out of the dream girl’s mouth, nothing. Out of the next dream girl’s mouth, a laundry line, each garbled word a garment falling from the maw, and as she expels them, she melts. // In the beginning was the garment, and the garment was with God, and the garment was God. / Nobody told me I would be covered until I died. (Nobody had to.) // When I wake in the dark, a broad body hangs suspended from the ceiling over the dress rack, arms outstretched, and stares down at me, his visage only swirling emptiness. I scramble upright as a queue of shrieks issues from my mouth! The dream girl’s father, come to watch me!
Devan Murphy is the author of In the Mezzanine, winner of YesYes Books' 2025 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Prize (publication forthcoming), and I'm not I'm not I'm not a baby (Ethel 2024). Her surreal stories have been awarded second place in the 2025 Italo Calvino Prize, judged by Jenny Boully, and in Southeast Review's 2025 World's Best Short Short Fiction Contest, judged by Kristen Arnett. Her writing and illustrations have appeared in Electric Literature, Gigantic Sequins, The Cincinnati Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. You can find her online at devmurphy.club or @gytrashh. She lives in Pittsburgh.
The Elm and the Ash
The elm and the ash grew fourteen feet apart in the mission churchyard, their roots quietly married beneath the church pews.
When blight took the elm, no buds broke in the spring, its bark grew gray, branches brittle, but still it stood, for nearly a half-century. The ministers often marveled at the grace of God and used the elm as an emblem until the mission fell defunct.
When the gravediggers dug up the elm for plot space, they said the roots were still strong and gave them more trouble than it was worth.
The ash fell the following spring.
Will Peatman is a filmmaker, cinematographer and writer whose interest shifts between journalism, comedy and fiction depending on the moon cycle. His work has screened at Cannes and won the Audience Award at Telluride Mountainfilm. He is currently working on a documentary and a collection of illustrated short fiction.
There is a City of Rats under Your Deck
Their delicate claws scritch scratch at the cedar releasing the scent of pencil shavings and cigar boxes. At book club, Dianna yelped as a big one ran from the rose bush to the fence spraying merlot on the pages of Mrs. Frisby’s quiet desperation. It is not your imagination. You’ve seen sparks of electricity, heard whispers of a secret underground city with tunnels, dens, death, and taxes. A rat king commanding his rodent army with a mycelium twitch of tails. A Gordian Knot of a hive mind is drawing battle plans for a home invasion. You won’t wait for the scampers on the stairs. You go on the offensive. Lace the wood with poison. Lay snap traps at every entrance. Stuff copper mesh in cracks and gaps no bigger than a whisker. But at night, you still dream of them nibbling your toes.
T.L. Tomljanovic is a flash fiction writer based in British Columbia, Canada. She is the guardian of a dog the size of a donkey, an avid reader of anything with dragons, and a superhero in her own mind. She also won the Welkin Earth Genre Prize, and is a Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction nominee. Find more of her work at tomljanovic.wordpress.com/.
The Girl Behind Glass
Butcher’s daughter sells parts all day long. Paper rustles, blood drips. Everyone’s hungry. Sweat mingles on skin, joins ether.
She puts an ad in the newspaper:
Blood bag seeking bloodsucker. Would like to be consumed, in all the ways that matter. Open to other ways, too.
Vampire, cannibal, lover. Whatever word they’re using these days to mean desire like hunger. A lease on love. Appetite that kills you if you don’t satiate it, kills someone else if you do. Blind, devouring adoration.
All she knows is cleaving apart, middleman between feast and barking belly, filled with her own untasted offerings.
Alyssa Blankenship is a working artist who engages with themes of transformation, escapism, and resurrection through the lenses of both naturalistic and manmade decay. Her literary work has been published in Burningword Literary Journal, Camas Magazine, Bardics Anonymous, Ponder Review, and in forthcoming issues of both Fish Girl Collective and Slipstream.