Crow & Cross Keys is a new, online literary journal that plucks fiction and poetry from skeletal trees and gives it a place to take root.
Send us your skeleton keys, your tar-black feathers, send us your calcified forests and ramshackle castles. Take us somewhere beautiful and dark and strange.
Latest
A Renewal—James M. Maskell
“There’s a man in the basement,” Aunt Gracie said, her stare locked on the Gameshow Network which she’d been watching when I arrived. “I don’t know what he’s doing here, but he’s been up and down those stairs all day.”
Featured Flash
The Princess on the Glass Hill Becoming—Joel Hans
The princess on the glass hill mourning.
The three golden apples dropping from inside the princess on the glass hill.
The apple tree doing nothing but completing the façade.
The princess on the glass hill exhibiting the golden apples to the crowd.
Things You Find in the Forest if You Go Alone and Don’t Know Any Better—Laila Amado
When the boys, who have been making fun of your sweater—the one mom made for you last year—taunt you from the old bleachers stretching along the back wall of the high school building, you…
a. Go home.
Featured Poetry
All the ghosts are women, and all the women drowned—Lily Beaumont
She learned to be a ghost from trees– to bind herself below ground without burial.
Above the Curdled World A Giant Green Breathing—Sarah Wallis
In Llangollen you can see the trees breathing, the reverse of you and I at respiration, in transpiration
Featured Stories
The Forest Will Feed—K Gardiner
Tara first saw the forest in a dream, rather, a nightmare. It appeared out of nowhere, the sudden presence of trees and shadow. One moment there was nothingness and the next an all-encompassing, all-consuming darkness. The trees were so tall that they blocked out the sky, their leaves forming a thick canopy that obscured the sun.
A Contract with Wild Things—Claire Schultz
It was that hour just before dark when the long oppressive stretch of the day wore itself into the forgiving twilight, that time when all things existed at once, when she was both very old and very young (and she was, after all, both very old and very young). It was the time when storytelling stopped being storytelling and became memory, and when memory stopped being memory and became storytelling.
Would you like to see your work featured among our plume of feathers? Head over to our submission page, we would love to read your words.
If you like what you see, pop us a tweet at @crowkeys or tag us on instagram at @crowcrosskeys. We want to hear from you!
Crow & Cross Keys 