Contributors

Joe Sacksteder
Contributor History

Biography
Joe Sacksteder is the author of the story collection Make/Shift (Sarabande Books), the novel Driftless Quintet (Schaffner Press), and an album of audio collages, Fugitive Traces (Punctum Books). His experimental horror novel, Hack House, is forthcoming from Astrophil Press in fall of 2024. Recent publications include the OffingDIAGRAMWest Branch, and Michigan Quarterly Review. He currently lives and teaches in central Virginia.

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In Print

Vol. 82
Works & Days
Spring 2024
Bradford Morrow

Online

September 4, 2024
He woke from a dream.

He was in the garage of an old house,
riding one of those toy horses
held to a metal frame by springs.
It was not very fast, not very curious
about the horizon.
August 21, 2024
I made sandwiches with the bresaola from the antipasto the afternoon before and some of the gouda I'd cut thinner from the cubes. I tried to feed the boy some of the gouda and a little bread, but he wouldn't have any. I suspected it was the traces of vinegar, they clashed with the white bread—it was all we had—or maybe it was just an odd new combination of flavors he didn't understand yet. But what was left over would likely get lost in the refrigerator where things were perpetually being pushed back behind more saved food, this striated order of aging and forgetting—food saved until eating what was left at the far back was unwise. Like memory, the economy of our minds repressing one moment for the next and leaving the past like a set of traps that might go off at any moment.
August 14, 2024
Maybe the Leather Skulls were no longer the titans of the death metal scene they used to be in the late eighties. Were they titans then? They had a following, a snug cult of enthusiasts. Their admirers were scarcer now, sure, but as they circled the continent on their latest comeback tour in honor of their eleventh album, The Devils He Casteth Out, the band could still fill bars and small ornate theaters with diehards—haggard bikers and their biker wives, with jazzed up hair and fatal shades of lipstick. The concerts were like nostalgia galas, reenactments of the past. One more spin on the crazy train.