Seeking the wonderful and the bizarre, the beautiful and the dark. Home to all things dark and lovely. 

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.

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Six Questions for...

TERRIFY ME! With Antony Frost (podcast interview)

Elou Carroll

Crow & Cross Keys

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Accept previously published: "prefer work that has not been published recently"

"Contract includes clause for back-paying each contributor in the event we become a paying market"

Will not knowingly accept AI-generated work.

Benjamin Davis (he/him) has stories and poems in several literary journals, including Wigleaf, Booth, Moon City Press, and Slippery Elm Press. His poem collection, The King of FU (Nada Blank, 2018), was such a smashing success it shocked the indie press who printed it into an early grave. He is now writing his first six novels. Find him on Chill Subs.


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Olivia McNeilis is a writer and designer based in London. She grew up in the Somerset Levels, a large coastal plain in rural England, where she developed a lifelong interest in making the familiar strange and the strange familiar. Her writing can be found in independent publishers such as Erato Magazine, Cobalt, and LZ. She holds a MA in visual anthropology from Goldsmiths and a BA (Hons) in English literature and creative writing from the University of Warwick.

Basic Bio

Olivia McNeilis is a writer based in London. She grew up on the edge of the Somerset Levels and is working on her first novel. She completed a BA in English literature and creative writing at the University of Warwick and an MA in visual anthropology at Goldsmiths. Her stories have appeared in CloisterFox, Crow & Cross Keys, and Punk Noir.

New Bio

Olivia McNeilis is a writer and designer based in London. She grew up on the edge of the Somerset Levels and is working on her first novel. She completed a BA in English literature and creative writing at the University of Warwick and an MA in visual anthropology at Goldsmiths. Her work has appeared in Myth & Lore, Punk Noir, CloisterFox, Crow & Cross Keys, and others.

2024 Bio

Joel Hans' work appears in Story, West Branch, No Tokens, The Journal, Booth, and others. He earned his MFA from the University of Arizona, and now edits Astrolabe, a literary journal in the form of a dynamic universe. Find him in Tucson, Arizona, where he lives with his family, or online at joelhans.com.

Basic bio

A short story written at night in November, about a magpie and a statue in a secret garden.
"Baudelaire saw them sometimes, the mice and corvids alike, and preferred both over the magpie that had shown up in an ungainly flutter and refused to leave."

One For Sorrow, But Sorrow Sleeps

You Keep Yourself Alive on the Moon

New Non-Corporeal Lore 

The Princess on the Glass Hill Becoming

"the deer steps into view, wearing its antlers like bared teeth"

Hell is a Deer on a Highway 

"The crisp paper slips spun like deadly silk / beneath the soft sky, each one a small act /
of flimsy fate and tethered tradition"

The Death Lottery

"Mischievous copper wish / formed with a whisper, tossed silently down the well / mistakenly believing it had been freed"

Wish Coin

"I’ve come to understand that the god of accidents /will gladly strip someone of their innocence / as quickly and cruelly as any god of intention"

The Many gods Who Rule Me

Heart of Stone

Perennial's Gift

Perennials Gift

The Clootie

Elegy of a Forest

"If you were looking at this forest in a picture, you would not see the ants, but know that they are there. There were ravens and starlings, too, in the branches but a moment before, now startled into flight into an invisible sky far above ..."

The Dream of Fly Agaric

The Perils of Being Good

"In the storm, there are two boats. Each is alone. Each exists as the sole survivor of the storm. Each is tossed by the waves while deepness swells all around."

Crow & Cross Keys

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