VOLTA No. 2 Spring 2026

Almost, Empty Dinner Table (2025), Madeline Eldridge

POETRY
CYNTHIA ATKINS Post-Truth Age
SMILE XIMAI JIANG Swim
PHILL PROVANCE The Man Who Sculpted Angels
EVAN KERR Future of an illusion
PAIGE WEBB Sundry theatres leap toward a future tense
DAVID EHMCKE Balcony Scene

FICTION
DREW JOHNSON You Could Be a Sportcoat
ADEEB CHOWDHURY Glutton
FLORENCE ASHLEY Seams

NONFICTION
‍ELENA BOWMAN Ithaka

EDITOR’S NOTE

FROM THE VOLTA ARCHIVE

“I often think I’ve been places I’ve never been. I see the city lights and remember crawling into each and every window. It’s devastating. Each and every window.”

— Marie Ungar, from "Winter Hill"

“They pay their electric bills on time /
Eat dinner regularly. I could never / Glue two pieces of paper together.”

— Oliver Preston, from "Interview with Minor Painter"

“if I let my arms / go does it look like I’m letting / my arms go”

— Liliana Greyf, from "Providence River"

Browse Poems

FEATURED

And he is, after all, an actor, and the occasion was a show—yet, I took the story to be true. I believed that everything he said had happened had happened in essentially the way he described. It had the wandering, baggy quality of real life, and the character he…

Fiction by Rose Gowen

A RIDE WITH HIM

“People have to have jobs, Douglas,” my mother would say on the phone call when I mentioned the reopening of coal mines, as a way to try to address it being too early for her daffodils to be blooming, she says without wanting to consider any of the attached policies…

Nonfiction by Douglas A. Martin

ITHAKA

The blundering gummy migraine and the flight attendant with lipstick on the canines asking, What brings you to California? and you say research and she says what kind when…

Nonfiction by Elena Bowman