by Jeffrey Hermann...You can squeeze a human brain into the same container, she added, but you won’t see anything remarkable. Now you’re looking into a mirror. Lay down your weapons and kill an idea of yourself up close. Face to face. Stop practicing taxidermy.

by Joseph Randolph...He looks tired but precise, like an idea that survived its author. Somewhere behind the interstate’s drone, a train sounds — a single, absolute note — and for a moment he thinks of his mother’s voice calling him home, decades gone. The overlap is unbearable.

by Mallory Smart...On Friday, the company schedules this “optional” team building thing called SURVIVING THE GRIND: A SLASHER-BASED APPROACH TO CORPORATE COHESION. HR departments love acting like Buzzfeed on steroids. Pretending structure is a personality trait.

by Atar Hadari...People on the subway catch your eye and blow away like sparks striking the hay alight flown out before the barn’s in flames.

by Elizabeth J. Wenger...Oh, Amelia, the love of my life who did not love me. There is no use asking what she saw in Gregory. Love, like murder, has its own incomprehensible laws.

by Lucia Lu...In the rheumy distance, a muzzy landform pulses at the edges. I don’t know that we are waiting for anything to happen. The snakegrass, sagebrush, and I. So the sun rises.

by L. Soviero...How when he left us, his body cookie-cut the light from the doorway and he laid a ribbon of finger on his lips, his eyes bright with their own celebration.

by Stevie doCarmo...Like poverty unto ridelessness is immaterial since the only thing the big glittering logos on these palaces refer to, end of the day, is sex, which is their thing, their intellectual property, and fuck any rich twats staring from behind all that glass who don’t know it.

by Kathryn Kulpa...Once we shared the backseat. Trusted someone would always be there to drive. The auxiliary parents: your dad, my mom. They were unemployed, sometimes, or their jobs didn’t matter. They had time for our foolishness.

by Tyler Dempsey...If I cared about linear progress, I would’ve never gotten picked up by a plane hitchhiking. Had I taken my friend’s offer to drive me from Anchorage to Denali in early-May of 2017, after arriving in the 49th State from a winter in Missoula, MT, I wouldn’t remember a single damn thing of that trip today.

Hennie Stander We here at trampset are excited to announce our annual Pushcart Prize nominations: Claire Guo’s “Muckrakers” Ulrik Andersen’s “Noise” Glennn Orgias’s “The Jump from Piper Alpha” Molly Thapviwat’s “the body forgets in parentheses” Oladosu Michael Emerald’s “Reasons to Stay Alive When the World Burns” Kanda Zinguri’s “Arafats in D”

by Mandira Pattnaik...I understand that there is an ethic of anger — a secret code. It frequently slides into unreasonableness, and one may sometimes misdiagnose the source. It is not without peril to play with the “fire” within

by Paul Chuks...I enjoy pretending, Like when I’m at the job and My boss bands with me for A hug. I smile emphasizing I like my pay. That way, lord, I want to pretend You exist.

by Abhinav...That was the day childhood ended. Time no longer a yard but a funnel tilted downhill and revenge suddenly a possibility, not just desire. I knew I could do it. She saw it in my eyes. She knew I could do it.

by Elisa Luna Ady...We held the light at the wrong slant, the cousins and I, like forgetting to floss our teeth or close the faucet. Someone dear to us had gone. It was the Anthropocene. A bit of light went a long way in Southern California.

by Debmalya Bandyopadhyay... It was the Adam’s apple of the night: all we heard was an ad jingle, floating from open window to open window. The distant fox.

by M.M. Kaufman...There is as likely a chance as not that under those giant wipe-o-matic’s you side-step into another reality. Maybe in this one you love yourself. At least in the reality that brought you here, you showed up for yourself. That’s a start.

by Ridwan Fasasi...Somewhere, a fruit ripened from a dying tree. The tree forgives itself for too much love. A forest of desires is sprouting under it. A boy proposes his love to his lover. Somewhere else, a wife proposes her agony to her husband.

by Connor Harding...What we sell here wears itself drop-waisted, accordion-pleated in rust, gradients of blacklisted thrift rubble. A world of grandma’s unwanteds, cannibalized at the edges by cricket teeth.

by Michaella Thornton... I am the moss cushioning her bare feet as she steals kisses from a clandestine lover on a shadowed stone staircase. I am the rosemary that brightens the fingerling potatoes.