Issue 5

by Amanda Miska After losing, it can feel like your whole world has gonequiet. The stillness after snowfall. A single car wrapped around a tree,empty. Of all the lives I imagined for myself,this was never one. In memory, he walks towards me encircled by flurries, backlitby a midwestern streetlamp, his hunched shoulders bracingfor something I […]

by Suparna Hande mine onto you my own mother’s gift: a tradition to lose a pretty sparrow’s coo noose untight gubbachi, gubbachi 1 flies away so it unfurls in a haze no way to recapture it 1 Sparrow Suparna Hande is a born-and-raised Michigander. She got her Bachelor’s at the University of Michigan and is

by John Yarbrough He that is without sin,  tell me of the rock in your hand,  of what sheened its surface  to your swollen eye.    Does it weigh heavy in your hand?  What will its absence tell you? Relief  may come before grief–or the other  way round. But it is your eardrums    that

To the readers of Twin Flame Literary, The Summer issue awaits. As August rolls by with September waiting eagerly in the wings, Autumn tugging at their legs, we hope you enjoy these twenty-two stories, each one saturated with the vivacity of Summer. As editors, we were once again astounded by the vivid passion and urgency

by Tessa Shea Whitehead The costume designer never thinks of bodies except as molds. The spangling her domain. When into her home a dancer comes she can tell is new – no makeup, unwhitened teeth, a cartilage ring the Team would never allow – she tries not to be mean. But Mary and Joseph, this

by Michael Akuchie content warning: physical abuse   On a mobile screen, I watch a pair of hands clutching an MP5 submachine gun inch through an underground maze, firing three shots at a masked gun-toting enemy. Three bullets. One. Two. Three. T., my brother, does not trust one bullet to take down a man. He

by Raya Yarbrough So I walked onto that stage, in that jazz club in Berlin, curvy, brown, and American. When you show up like this in the world, the world has certain expectations. Strangers assume a certain sensuality, coupled with gospel emotional bombast. Somehow this is supposed to be inherent to me, biologically. This is

by Helena Carla Gonçalo Ferreira  I. Of the waters Before there was a house there was water, and before the water there was the good dark,which is not the dark of fears but the dark of seeds, and in that dark am I, who am not yet I,who am a wanting-to-be folded upon itself like

by Sarah Elgatian Over 1.2 million Americans are HIV positive. I met B when we were in college. He, like the rest of our classmates, came from a local, affluent white family and believed the world had wronged him whenever there was a line in the cafeteria. We had one thing in common, aside from

by Ally Okun   Some of us are anxious about the earthquake. You know, the Big One. The overdue Cascadia-zone subduction earthquake that’ll ravage the entire Pacific Northwest when it does finally hit. The New York Times published a Pulitzer Prize-winning article about it that they love to trot out on their social media every