SPRING
2026 | Volume Three
Genre cover by Clinton Khile-Brägger
POETRY
Genre cover by Clinton Khile-Brägger
in birdless weather
Keira Deer
“Your name, spangling the soil / your name, fawned out
in sky-writing.”
“And I remember / the penknife / on softwood pine. / This was after”
Ring Around Rebecca
Audrey Dubois
Had I Asked, You Might Have Said
“beyond the cold wash / of disbelief I recall feeling / my own innocence like a delicate / membrane under my skin”
Laura Ann Reed
“Is this acknowledgment stitched from thresholds, or is it the oldest truth of the borderlands, that understanding is born precisely where categories refuse to settle, where the edges dissolve into their own quiet insistence”
Knowing, Not Not-Knowing
Marie Anne Arreola | Nonfiction
“In January 2023, I saw an invincible man. He stood atop the pyramid of the moon and pressed a stone to his eye. He looked into the sun. He told me he was falling in love.”
Día de Muertos
Rachel Whalen | Nonfiction
The Death of Walter Benjamin, in a Hotel Room in Portbou, Spain, 1940
Erik Harper Klass | Fiction
“And his memory begins with a game of dominoes surrendered,
and his memory begins with her face—ah yes, here she is—green eyes, auburn hair falling over her right eye…”
“Maybe what they'd built—the songs, the memories, the mess of it mattered—it lived on in the people Ray left behind.”
Fragments of Sunlight
John Barrett Lee | Fiction
Good Old Days
Issue cover by Ferris Jones
Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?
Ferris E. Jones is an award-winning, internationally published poet, author, artist, and screenwriter living in Greeneville, Tennessee. He has published 13 collections of poetry and has his work has appeared in numerous magazines and periodicals including Dreich, Oddball Magazine, Glo Mag, Piker Press, Se La Vie Writers Journal, Write on Magazine, Outlaw Poetry, Degenerate Literature 17, Tuck Magazine, The Literary Hatchet, Warriors with Wings, In Between Hangovers, and many other literary publications. He is the recipient of two grants from the Nevada Arts Council and the Editor/Publisher of Nevada Poets 2009. Ferris has twice received honorable mention awards from the Writer’s Digest annual screenwriting contest. His artwork has appeared in Gulf Stream magazine and Oyster River Pages.
“Every piece I paint, every word I write is something I’ve done, I am the man in the red shirt, the hot dog vendor, the guy who built the roller coaster. I have always felt wherever I am is where I am supposed to be, because I have already been there. Paint it, write about it, share it. I already lived it, and I am again.”