Pleiades: Literature in Context is pleased to announce that former fiction editor Jennifer Maritza McCauley and current editorial staff have chosen the short story "Maestro, Hold On" by daniel barrios as the winner of the 2025...
Heat WaveThe summer my oldest daughter is born is a blaze,roaring up from the Sahara to blanket all of Europe.Roads buckle from the boil. Bascule bridges lift and swell,stuck half-risen and unable to fit back in place.The news reports rising hospitalizations, even...
MOST DAYS I FEEL LIKE PNIN I’d be remiss if i didn’t share that it’s very difficult to leave even more-difficult to not blame yourself for the rest of your life, your nose was bleeding while we were playing the fog rolled in, if clarity is a napkin, thrice I was a...
I believe in the belief of you, numb-kneed women hunched like commas over the cap rail,smelling of dry tears and talcum, fingers basket-woven, or men bent slightly at the middle like folded playing cards, heads hung, the mumblings of their prayerslike the humming of...
And there you were—the sun, salt-haze,survival vaporized in my blood. Fever humid, Juneweekend in June, I was looking for younot knowing I was looking. What should I call you? An anniversary, a terror, my real life, a window? I offered myself up to the pale field of...
Rakija (Again)My grandmother-in-law likes to tell us the same stories after dinner, the yearsclear as the windows of our glasses, filled again with the firewater made from winemaking’s remains: seeds, stems, and skins. Faint grape fumes wafting mirage-like into our...
The art of loveThe wet finger of Our Lady of Rain taps across the seadown the karst-bright tower blocks, past the cars disappearing in fog.Our one-bedroom flat echoeswith Siouxsie and the Banshees and I leaf through Dad’s paperbackromances and the glossy Erotika:...
Infomercial for Soft Things (Alcibiades) Alcibiades—Athenian playboy, politician, and general who switched his allegiances between Athens and Sparta during the Peloponnesian War—embraced wantonness and excessive luxury. He had the planks of his ship taken out to...
Bradley steered his Chevy S-10 through the dark to the back of the Campbell property to drop off the deer. He saw Dewayne back there discussing something into a cordless phone, pacing across the open-aired shed where deer and other game were processed. In a past life...