SPRING

2024 | Inaugural


POETRY


Genre cover by Ashani Lillie

Kimberly Hall

“What I mean to say is, love, / I do not mean to make myself / a lighthouse.”

“Even the pill on the tip of your tongue is afraid / of what happens in the dark”

Sonya Wohletz

“It’s delirium, the yellow line beside / me… exiting a state / I didn’t know I had entered.”

E.C Gannon

22

“I am so alone I have forgotten / which language ought to sit upon / my tongue”

Mary McColley

PROSE


Genre cover by Paul Deleon

“…he would always see behind them this conviction that violence was a requirement, maybe even as had been the baptisms and First Communions of their children. He could never argue it away.”

Michael Thériault | Fiction

“regardless of whether or not i agree / i will say amen.”

Abbie Langmead | Hybrid

“It wasn’t quite love, what they shared. It was something deeper… And somewhere behind all that gratitude and understanding they’d reached together, there was still the softest echo of that old, familiar terror.”

M. Tyler Tuttle | Fiction

Gia B. | Nonfiction

“Joy and loss share the same, fragile stem. We nurse them both with the same hand.”


Issue cover by Guilherme Bergamini

Butterfly

Why is this piece your Trace Fossil?

"My daughter Malu, who is five years old, has not had classes for more than 380 days. There are only 40 students at her school and only ten are paying tuition. Social isolation generated a lot of unemployment, in addition to Brazil going through a general crisis; a political and social tragedy. Yesterday I received a letter from her school: they have closed the doors. I still haven't had the courage to tell Malu that her school no longer exists.”