by Thad DeVassie...They say it comes with electrolytes. Even the chosen typeface for the word electrolytes! looks exciting and exuberant, and the sound of it rolling off the tongue conjures up images of tiny prizes floating in the fluid.

by Sarp Sozdinler...First: remove all the mirrors in your home. Hide them in the crawl space, bury them in your landlord’s garden, shove them in the backseat of a stranger’s car.

by Claire Lee...The word bubbles under his skin, then pops, dissipating into his blood like soap, air. Brother’s tongue is dry as desert, doesn’t feel the slow, heavy heartbeat need to wet it.

by Ben Starr...Until he could fall asleep while he was already sleeping, burying sleep deep inside pockets fast asleep, tucked away like the hand-painted nesting dolls my grandmother brought with her when she swam the Atlantic.

by Emily Rinkema...The Mongols don’t notice me right away. I’m wearing sweatpants, wool socks, and a Dogs are My People hoodie, which I haven’t taken off since I checked in two days ago, alone.

by Ewen Glass...is not a pub, it’s a stream, meandering black circles halved by footbridge. Kids rhyme their way past skulking little duckies

by Jason Davidson...and I thought I heard glass breaking and wondered if I would ever eat chocolate again and wondered if I would remember the language of this compromise

by Lorrie Ness...She spread newspapers atop the bed & let the ads bleed onto her damp thighs until a Liquidation Sale tattoo blazed across her skin.

by Pravin Vemuri...Unsurprisingly, also unwittingly, he turned to atheism by seven. To existentialism by sixteen. To hard drugs soon after.

by Mitchell Ny...We lie on the switchback, you atop my chest, and become immovable—like my nerves had been pulled gently from my navel. I am denervated meat and cooked clay.

Interview by Mandira Pattnaik... "I like poems that feel like a fever dream, and I like poems that feel like a snapshot of eternity."

by Paul Chuks...Kate’s eyes were blue as though they were molded from the sky and plugged straight into her eye sockets. The black and white spots were an added spirituality...She was black in the way the night did not mean to be.

by Mandira Pattnaik...Yet, as the years pass, my writing has been increasingly reflective of the present, the world we live in, its people, its rules. As you can imagine, my stories have been rather sad as a result. My last two fiction publications had children caught in the crossfire in an active warzone and “honor killing” practiced in India at the center of the narratives.

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.