Why Don’t Vampires Just Hold Blood Drives?

I want a little more bureaucracy
in my horror.

Apr 12, 2023
  •  
Poetry
Cola Literary Review is an annual journal edited by graduate students in the MFA Program at the University of South Carolina. 

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Side Cars are for Bitches

Zach Braff is the perfect manic pixie dream boy
for any pet funeral, and yet, I suppose
he didn’t get the memo that he was meant


to come down from the Garden State and do the honors.

Feb 22, 2023
  •  
Poetry
Half Past 11:00

HALF PAST 11:00 sleeps in my bed and refuses to be

roused. I tuck the sheets in tight before I leave for work

Feb 15, 2023
  •  
Poetry
Red Filter

At the dark sky campsite I put a red filter over my flashlight.

Feb 1, 2023
  •  
Poetry
Never and Always

       I’m sorry to do this to you right now. I know the movers are coming in two days. I can picture you in your apartment: the sunset over the city glistening through your floor-to-ceiling windows, Joni Mitchell or Linda Ronstadt crooning in the background while you bubble-wrap your dishes. I know you don’t have time for this. Timing has never been my strong suit. My only defense is: I can’t think about anything else.

       Do you, by any chance, remember the first time we met?

Jan 24, 2023
  •  
Fiction
A Conversation with Frau Schiele

He only allows my entrance to unbutton my dress
and form those animal poses. To be near him
is to be reduced to line

Jan 11, 2023
  •  
Poetry

Our chapbooks

Our chapbook contest may be closed, but past poetry and fiction winners are still available for purchase! Check out what we have on sale on our Submittable.

Outro, Prelude

Here,                         riding in a taxi on the Manhattan Bridge
late                            at night in a pit-pat drizzle,
everything                looks puffy from the back seat window

Jan 4, 2023
  •  
Poetry
Photo of a Turtle in Which No Turtle Is Visible

Just under the browned swamp surface: a reaching
neck (not pictured). The edge of a stick (pictured).

Dec 28, 2022
  •  
Poetry
Easy Tiger

The tiger makes it all so easy, the way it sweeps the woman’s house, packs a satsuma for her snack, accounts for the taxes.

Dec 21, 2022
  •  
Poetry
Just an Acquaintance

He was NBA-player height
converted to Judaism to marry

Dec 14, 2022
  •  
Poetry
Need Comes Down Like A Mallett

And the town crier cries la localende! This is one of the stories where a stranger

        comes to town. A stranger with a stranger tool.

Come down from the hill freckled with mustard gesare. You know the stuff, Mara

        how it explodes in middle spring.

Nov 14, 2022
  •  
Poetry
The Draw

Nearing the corner I held the rifle steady, my trigger-finger taut. My heart thumped with this simple thrill. These new guns were quick to fire, and accurate, but we’d yet to work out how to store two rubber bands, so I still only had the one shot. I couldn’t waste it. Halfway to the corner, a blind angle obscured by honeysuckle, I paused, listening.

Oct 5, 2022
  •  
Fiction
Perfection

The perfect object is a bird never seen, heard, or otherwise sensed behind fir trees along the bank of a river sounding ceaselessly, while you walk with her hand-in-hand through the undergrowth.

Sep 10, 2022
  •  
Fiction
epigenetics or: time draws a circle

which summer is this
             arithmetic is one thing, freckles another
                  power drags from the east in a late august storm

Jun 2, 2021
  •  
Poetry
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