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
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.”
“They pay their electric bills on time /
Eat dinner regularly. I could never / Glue two pieces of paper together.”
“if I let my arms / go does it look like I’m letting / my arms go”
MEET THE ARTIST
featured in Volta 2
Maria Golosnaya (b. 1996) is a Moscow-based painter whose practice is a deep and continuous inquiry into the transformation of cultural heritage. Her artistic journey began with a thorough mastery of classical techniques at the Ilya Glazunov Russian Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, which she later re-evaluated through contemporary frameworks.
Maria’s paintings serve as a bridge across centuries, juxtaposing the spiritual gravitas of Eastern Orthodox traditions with the fragmented nature of modern identity. She has exhibited her work at the New Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow and the MARQ Museum in Argentina, and participated in art fairs like Miami Art Basel (Miami, 2022) and the international contemporary Blazar art fair (Moscow, 2024).
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
“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
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
There are places where this narrative will crack, but when you run your hand across it your hand will run smooth.…
Fiction by Drew Johnson
AUTHORS
Eli Payne Mandel
Paige Webb
David Ehmcke
ARTISTS
Caroline Cavalier
Iris Yu