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Natanya Biskar I’m Hungry if You Are   The call comes from a number in Todos Santos, Mexico, and at first I do not register what that means. One student has just left and I have ten minutes to clean, breathe, return emails, collect myself, finish paperwork, use the bathroom, drink three glasses of water, […]

Scott Bailey Blue Moon           I walk out to check on the squawking hens & brood     of chicks, the morning night an atmospheric dewimmune to suspicion & fear unlike the nature     of heifers in the barn, a rest from snagging neckson barbed wire to eat honeysuckles along the fence     line, a commotion often thwarted by territorial hensperhaps unsettled by […]

Wynne Hungerford Sacred Window Exhale At the Great Smoky Mountain Retreat for Health & Wellness, our goal was to provide a safe place for people to get treatment and heal, so it was bad when one of our guests got hurt during their stay. I don’t mean on a horseback-riding trip or from slipping on […]

Santiago José Sánchez You Will Not Cry We stopped on the side of the path for two men on their way back to town. One had leathery skin and thick barbell earrings. The other was shorter, wearing a bright neon green Speedo, his biceps banded by tribal tattoos fading into blues and grays. “Hi, love,” […]

Elisa Guidotti Interviewed by Sarina Redzinski So first I wanted to start with a little bit about your background. You’re from Italy, but you live in Germany and “The Drama Club” is written in English. How did you come to decide to write in English, and would you say your Italian upbringing still influences your […]

Elisa Guidotti The Drama Club If you’re looking for the kids, and it’s a Friday afternoon during the school term, look no further than the theater down Risorgimento Martyrs Street, close to the on-ramp to the highway leading to Rome. Rain or shine, ninety-four pages left to study for a biology test on Monday or […]

Daisy Fried A Monkey Thing Inside the plate glass window, I’m putting my whites in, and bleach, and my denims, and lights, darks, and hots and handwashes, when the tourbus grinds to the curb outside to drop the teenage Southwest Drum and Bugle Corps at Clean Laundry, South Philly. There it idles, its slab sides […]

Kevin Wilson Interviewed by John Bolen How did you come to name the antagonist of the story John F. Kennedy in the first place? It was mostly an accident. A boy who antagonized me in high school was named after a different US president, and I used that name in the first draft and then […]

Cameron Thomas Snyder Interviewed by Angela Bell   You’re so successful at making “Houses of the Holy” feel rooted in place and time. What’s your real-life relationship to the setting? Did you grow up in Kansas?  I sort of grew up all over the place. I was born in San Antonio, moved around Texas, and […]

Cameron Thomas Snyder Houses of the Holy One century ended while another century began and my older brother and I found ourselves getting dragged like luggage, yet again, from one place we didn’t want to be in Kansas to some other place we didn’t want to be in Kansas. All around me things were beginning […]

Jana Prikryl Interviewed by Stephen de Búrca Something that stands out in your five “Anonymous” pieces is how careful and precise the speaker is in establishing the scene for the reader, as if to avoid affecting the scenes. Had you a particular series of photographs in mind while writing the five poems? What was the […]

Tom Whalen Interviewed by Mitchell Galloway Walser’s short fictions are often difficult to classify. You submitted “Rain” as a poetry translation, but we decided to accept it as fiction. What about this piece lends itself to be more a piece of poetry than prose? “Rain” is prose, yes, but perhaps it’s more poem than story, […]

Robert Walser (translated by Tom Whalen) Rain There’s gentle but also unruly rain. We prefer the former but take it as it comes. To accept what comes and yet never lose one’s cheerfulness isn’t easy, but beautiful because of that. What tastes the sweetest? Natural honey? No, something else: peaceful, everyday work without calamity. Speaking […]

Emily Flouton The Three Vaporizing Babes It was Thursday, or maybe Monday. I was lying on the couch in my brother’s basement, working my way through a bag of dried mango and staring at this one painting on the wall I’d been staring at for weeks, losing hours a day in the thing. It looked […]

Tyler Barton Breakthrough Mailboxes of Southern Pennsylvania Across the street, the young, blond entrepreneurs have opened for business at the end of their driveway, cardboard signs advertising the sale of their small sister. She sits in the gravel, wearing a leash. Her hair’s in pigtails. Her brothers are screaming. No cars stop, though many swerve […]

Mira Rosenthal Sublet, Pay-Later System Everyone and their mother wants to extend us credit, though we have no collateral, save deposits made of late into the tremendous sorrow bank where the walls seem to duplicate rows, columns, keyholes begging for felonious picking, so I can’t toss the glossy offers straight into the garbage, lest someone […]

Josh Russell Grownups A cop blowing a whistle directed traffic into and out of Piedmont, and when he waved her in, Kim thought she could almost recognize the tune. She wondered if she’d ever visit a hospital that wasn’t several hospitals stuck together, each building an example of its decade’s generic hospital architecture. The parking […]

Richard O’Brien Closed Doors Every Place that you left is Eden in some way. —JOHN DARNIELLE Rooms where for good or for ill—things died. —CHARLOTTE MEW Frewin II.10 In this room, at that desk, I must have written my masterpieces of misogyny (through this knowledge would only come to me far on the other side […]

Yousef el Qedra (translated by Yasmin Snounu, Edward Morin, and George Khoury) Embroidered with Hail In the beginning, he exalted himself above the sinful act of eating the fruit. Then he was burned by trees and frolicking girls, causing his name and the blueness of his soul to bleed.  He searched for prophecy carved into […]

Subtropics at AWP 2018 March 7–10, Tampa, FL Visit Subtropics at the 2018 Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference this March in Tampa, FL. Individuals from the University of Florida Press and Subtropics will be representing the journal at table T508.  

Daniel Wolff From Ayiti 7. SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT Sometime in the night,         as the bougainvillea creeps a finger         higher on the stone wall, the barking of the skinny dog changes. The barks of the skinny dog         grow rougher and numerous:         many dogs. “Lavalas!” they bark. Except it’s not a bark; it’s a chant. Up the […]

A little gallery of images depicting “the state with the prettiest name” (Elizabeth Bishop)