Fall 2025 Digital Lit

Cover art: Rupture by RUNA

GONE TO BABYLAND Bethany Bruno

“The sea does not stop. It keeps roaring, relentless, guilty and loud, drowning out every human sound.”

NEWTON’S ORBIT Tarik James Ghiradella 

Instead, she said: “It’s drifting, isn’t it? You can see it but you can’t stop it.”

He froze. He hadn’t told her. She couldn’t know.

THE COMPANY Tayler Elise

“The Company at its core is an adult daycare; we talk members through their bad days, we clean up their messes, we build charcuterie boards for snack time.”

SOMEWHERE, FILED AWAY Catherine Shukle

“Her body offered up because she thought it was all she had to give him. And then, just like that, it was gone.”

BIG BANG Lynn Thayer

“It’s your voice and it’s not. Your body and not.
Between flesh and mind, love and friendship”

DISPLACED MONARCHS Brigittine French

“we, farmers’ daughters who became their mothers,
with certitude that books
                                                dates
                                                and equality”

PASSING Sara Cline

“an hour to kill, an hour to spare
I have mercy on my hours”

THREE WORDS Ghazal Azad Jahan

“what do waves whisper? / to be loved / enough / that i could scatter”

FULL MOON OVER I-40 Ty Zhang

You glimpsed the truth,
you think,
at least part of it,
sitting at work today–
through a window and a door

PACKARD Selen Frantz

We stumble over the barrier and into a world only remembered by forbidden feet and the nozzle
of a spray can. Our words fill the air around us, bouncing off the flat walls and down

THE ARITHMETIC OF AFTER Meg Taylor

A stubbed toe can split a day,
so can a birth,
so can silence finally broken.

IN JAPANESE MEMORIAM Wakako Ueshima

“One of three hundred sixty-five,
immortalized
            reduced
now the lonely One”

BARREN Jennifer Keith

no clay feet: airborne in a dust devil
no place for light
or holding water,

POST RETIREMENT SYNDROME Daniel Edward Moore

Who would have thought these days would find me,
hypersensitive, easy to caress, like a toothbrush

GHAZAL FOR NEW YORK CITY Erika Gill

in Central Park I melt, slowly by stages, into a frozen strawberry lemonade
outside of Strawberry fields a sudden void scoops my soul into concavity

HOWLIN’ WOLF Jianqing Zheng

Howlin’ Wolf’s
wang dang doodle
boomeranging

in a somersault
all street long

SECOND SHIFT Sarah Ellis

Here, the parking lot is flooding. Seeping
into the soles of my boots.

DO GET OLD Angela Townsend

Even if they could arrest time like the superheroes on their underpants, your bleak benediction would help no one.

LOVE PEOPLE, COOK THEM TASTY FOOD Misty Archambault

Inviting me into your home and allowing me to see an empty refrigerator is a personal insult, the passive aggressive equivalent of spitting in my face.

CONCENTRIC CIRCLES: A TAROT READING Christie Ellen

My mother’s smile contrasts with something in her eyes. Is she nervous? Tired? 

I glance at the clock. Dismissal isn’t for another 15 minutes and I normally take the bus home. Why is my mother here? 

TUSCON, ARIZONA Emma Jones

We talked about it like the promised land. Cinderblock, sand.

INTENDS TO COMPLY Georgene Smith Goodin

I had this fantasy of walking into the rec center gym with Kelvin just as the game started, of seeing smiles spread through other parents on the bleachers, people elbowing their neighbor and jerking their heads in our direction.

 

 

Fall 2025 Welter team: Cleve Corner (Fiction Editor), Alex Cosentino-Tich, Melissa Foley-King, Zahra Gordon (Poetry Editor), Trinity Gray, Tim Huber (Managing Editor), Nat Kaplan (CNF Editor), Kara Kauffman, Wardha Moriam (Art Director), Alicia Potee, Tracie Pullen, Jayden Rhodes, Johnny Sweeney

Faculty advisor: Nat Raum