Issue 29 // Skin

Dear Readers,

For this themed issue, we asked writers to use skin as their canvas, to peel back the layers and let us see beneath the surface. As the largest, most visible organ in the body, our skin tells stories and secrets, acting as protective armor while also exposing our deepest truths. Skin contains and defines us, mapping our personal history. It can even reveal the horrors of the past.

In this issue, you’ll find scars, tattoos, snakeskin, fish scales, and puncture wounds. Skin that shivers, shrivels, and shapeshifts. An ode/elegy to aging skin. A splinter buried deep. Lovers who trace each other’s surgical scars. Hands that hold memory and resemble our grandmother’s. Hardened skin that carries grief. Skin that beckons and betrays, tingling from another’s touch or even just their gaze. Skin that tastes the earth like a tongue. Skin that reminds us who we are and what we’ve become.

A boy is born five shades whiter than his mother. A mother longs to unscar her daughter’s adult skin. A woman yearns to escape her flesh—a terrifying bulk of meat. A girl grows red-velvet antlers when she turns sixteen. A sister’s skin turns animalistic from an unknown disease. A woman throws a party before her ovaries come out—a send-off for the final bleed. The writers of Issue 29 explore, confront, symbolize, and celebrate the miraculous landscape of skin, and we invite you to take part in it.

Sincerely,
Amy Dupcak

November 2026

Poetry

Body - by Tori Grant Welhouse
In Memoriam - by Savannah Brooks
I make myself daily - by M. Soledad Caballero
Doppelgänger Portrait - by Simone Muench and Jackie K. White
Two poems by David Allen Sullivan - Tash Sultana // Universal Bodies
Mapping the Mission - by Beth Kanell
Playa las Gatas - by Matthew Landrum
Wonderland - by April Salzano
Two Poems by Kristen Holt-Browning - Twentieth Anniversary of Being Stabbed While Being Mugged // Ode to / Elegy for My Skin
The Thing About Antlers - by Emilia Urcola
Ocotillo - by Meg Bishop
Second Skin - by Laura Stanfill
Two poems by Mary Alice Dixon - My skin a tongue // After her night at Bad Daddy’s Bar, Teacher tells Sunday School she found the foreskin of Moses

Fiction

Big Daddy - by Morgan Kinnally
A dress so heavy, a dress so light - by Sasha Lubomirsky
The Ways I Keep my Sister with Me - by Rebekah Sicari
Blanquito - by Chris Kubik Cedeño
In Translation: Armor for Irmgard - by Tamar Noort, trans. Don Henderson
I Remember It Differently - by Vennila Krishnan
Splinter - by Joshua Wetjen

Nonfiction

Gaze - by Kate Verhoef
Dread in the Marrow - by Joy Gehner
Berlin, 1964: Two Kinds of Skin - by Curtis C. Morgan

Issue Cover

Anastasia Klimova-Musicco (@klima.tattoo)
Ornamental Tattoo Artist
Italy-based, available worldwide

Varvara Bobyleva (@bashaproduction)
Creative Photographer & Visual Storyteller
Montenegro-based, open to collaborations