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
Hellabora, Patron Saint of Dark Blooms—Jenny Wong
Sometimes, she’ll toss a little kindness / to the blackberries / whose white flowers / gave birth / to small fruits
Featured Flash
Brood Mare—Tim Goldstone
Remote hill country, once of prehistoric tribes; and even today still a land of buzzards, of sparrow-hawks, of drizzle-smoke, of wood, of stone, of bone, of a life for a life.
Bridget Cleary’s Fingers—Morgan Quinn
You watch her fingers dance, whispering magic into cloth, breathing life into fabric. Her hair is pinned up as she works, a soaring mountain, yielding to the graceful slope of her neck.
Featured Poetry
Two poems—Grace Alice Evans
down by the river, we deprive / ourselves of our bodies. strip down to the bones / dampened by autumn’s longing breaths, the glow / of summer’s caresses ebbing away.
Rust Belt Jessie’s Taxonomy of Ghosts—Jessie Lynn McMains
Trying to classify inherently unknown entities whose very existence and nature remains unproven is a fool’s errand: How many types of ghosts are there? As many as you want there to be.
—Benjamin Bradford, The Curious Question of Ghost Taxonomy
Featured Stories
She is Beautiful—Grace Safford
A woman in white robes stands by my bedside and says she must return to the earth. I open my eyes and know I am not dreaming.
A Small Eternity—Chip Jett
The first gift I received from my mother was a stuffed panda. The panda had been hers, she said, when she was a little girl. Its plastic nose hung by a thread, and many of its seams were resewn. It was worn, and loved, and it became mine.
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!
