Summer 2025

this is the first chapter of Arlo Z Graves’ novel Black Rose, reviewed in this issue. Two types of men wear spurs. One for broncos or to keep a green…

Disney Made a House of the Future is a brilliant, dystopian drag spectacular combining sophisticated stage sense and computer animation with the plot irony and cinematic “simplicity” one associates with…

Benni Goes Feral There is no sound like the sound of the Mourning Dove. It reminds me of the time my sister died. It was at the beginning of the…

In Baby Geniuses, scientists devise a graph showing genius plummet in the first year of a baby’s life. To ensure I hadn’t drawn up the graph myself, I’d re-watched the…

John opened the door, turned his back on me—allowing me to decide whether I’d stop the door and enter or let the door slam on my face.I stopped the door…

Jamie’s shift was almost over when the call came in. “East wing bathroom. Noise complaint,” crackled the radio. Another night, another chore in a dying mall barely clinging to life.…

In the midst of an unbridled sexual encounter, I lose my head. It falls off and scoots across the bedroom floor, yipping in flagrant disregard for the situation. My partner…

So as we look at this, we can expect something like a wound made of fire opening in the sky around this rotation here. Already a falling of frogs has begun to fill local lawns

Oh my god my father. He goes on the front porch in his bathrobe and those, those slippers, to get the Sunday paper. And stands there puffing his pipe where…

There comes to one a certain hour
when we rise above our pride, cast it aside
like baggage we’ve carried long enough.

My cemetery is only five minutes by foot from my house. I’ve been going for walks here, a few times a week, for thirty-five years. I don’t call it mine…

I had always been very clever about hiding my tracks. The computer just made sense to me. I’d been born into it, and from a young age could use it…

My husband has taken a lover, and to make up for it, he is growing me a garden. The first day he met her, he brought home a tomato plant.…

DJ: Th. Metzger Th. Metzger, one of the 96 immortals, here reveals his genius as a dowser-out of musical hallucinogens. The Texas-born Ross Sisters (Betsy Ann, Veda Victoria, and Dixie…

Arlo Z. Graves, Black Rose, Graveside Press 2025 In this book Graves has created an alchemical alternative-history Wild West, in which metals—once they’ve been worked by humans into sophisticated machinery…