This quarter was rife with mischievous witchery: Political insults and commentary, the thoughts of money galore going in all directions other than where it might be most needed; such colour, and who knows what will happen, what power-players will lead us on from Obama's reign.

Marian Brooks’s Your Honor is a darkly comic story about guilt, self-deception and public respectability. When Dolores damages a neighbour’s car and drives away, her moralising husband condemns her, only to reveal a far more violent hypocrisy of his own.

Mir-Yassar Seyedbagheri’s story is a haunting study of grief, guilt and a mother’s failure to speak love while there was still time. Searching her dead son’s desk, Betty finds his final story and turns it into both confession and communion, as memory, remorse and smoke blur into one last whispered "I love you."

A subtle, magical realist story about a woman who has drifted away from books, only to find herself drawn back into reading through memory, unease, and the living presence of stories.

In “Grandma’s Story,” Bill Frank Robinson lets family history spill out through Grandma’s memories of circus roads, prizefighting, early automobiles, love, loss, and Lonnie’s fateful encounter with Todd Toolbee. The piece blends humour, grit, and oral storytelling into a vivid Archie family chronicle.

Adam Kluger’s “The Party” is a wickedly comic dialogue of literary appetite and social performance, where talk of prose, platform, food, friendship, and flesh turns darker by the line.

Stephen Zelnick’s “New World Poetry” follows Rubén Darío from Nicaragua into modernismo, politics, myth, and cultural resistance, tracing the music and force of a poet who carried the New World into literature.

No Share in the Common Treasury by James Graham is a powerful memoir-essay tracing the author’s family history through generations of hard labour, poverty, grief, and exploitation. Moving from County Antrim to Glasgow, Ayrshire, and the long working life of his father Danny, the piece blends intimate remembrance with political conviction. Through the lives of farm labourers, factory workers, mothers, widows, and underpaid servants, Graham argues for dignity, shared ownership, and a fair place fo

Capsize by Joseph West is a brief, sharp meditation on the hidden weight of mental distress. Using the image of a capsized boat as both joke and lifeline, the piece captures the strange mismatch between inner weather and the ordinary world outside, where the sun still shines and strangers still smile. Honest, self-aware, and quietly hopeful, it follows the speaker through a bad day toward the knowledge that the feeling will pass, and calmer shores can be reached.

In “A Recall for Seamus Heaney,” Tom Sheehan writes a haunted tribute of memory, inheritance, and return. A dark kitchen opens into older Irish landscapes — curraghs, field fires, stone walls, hunger, exile, and Roscommon calling — until the speaker walks toward himself through the echoes of the past.

In “Trout Fishing with Rommel’s Last-Known Foe,” Tom Sheehan turns a quiet fishing scene into a vivid act of remembrance. Beneath bare alders and October crows, an old soldier’s memories of shrapnel, desert warfare, buried comrades, and Egypt’s shifting sands rise through the present, binding battle, survival, and memory into one powerful elegy.