by bailey loveless...I try to arrange the hair of her forelock to cover it. But the foam is as yellow as a highlighter. Misty the unicorn plushie did not transform into a horse—as in Chincoteague. She is now just Misty with a massive, oozing head wound.

by Elisabeth Giffin Speckman... They come to him again and again. He never needs to stalk, just holds a pinky to the sky and they come. They come and they land and he smiles. You try to snap a picture but it's always blurred.

by Mar Prax...If I have the time, I’d like to dig my own grave. I’d purchase a spot in the graveyard back home, the one with baby dolls and stained glass and bear prints adorning dead grass.

by Naa Asheley Ashitey...Watch the way the clavicle collapses Beneath the heel of the boot. The strain it placed on the bone Was too fast for angiogenesis.

by Brett Stuckel...I asked the clerk at the smell store for the Vanillaroma rearview yellow-tree sunbaked-dashboard velvet-cloth light-and-sweet coffee aroma of Kenny Serafini’s Dodge Daytona on the way to high school at seven a.m. on a black-ice morning.

by Adam McOmber... Because even if you did, even if you drove two thousand miles, you wouldn’t have gone far enough. You’d bring all of it with you. Cornfields and Ruined Love and Backroad Graveyards.

by Dale Bridges...I grew up in a small town in rural Nebraska across the street from a kid named Jimmy Sutton who was born with a gun for a penis. This was back in the ‘80s before the Internet. The world was a bit more mysterious back then...

by Bob Hicok...As you know very well now, silence is quiet, and love has nothing to do with the heart, and time heals some wounds and makes others deeper...

by Zhu Xiao Di...Everything hosts a party at home, inviting nothing, something, and anything.

by Elena Zhang...In this movie, God falls in love with me. Our meet-cute is at the grocery store. I bump into Him and drop a carton of eggs. From the splattered yolk, God creates a dozen yellow-throated warblers.

by Jenny M. Liu...How the sparks flew as shearers cut. How the sheep gleamed so cleanly sleek. How their trusting silver eyes blinked, baby calm.

by Adam Michael Finney...He hands me the telescope. Says, Look. And I see a speckled smudge suspended there like an ultrasound.

Interview by Mandira Pattnaik..."The world is not my oyster, and I find the lit world also, especially poetry, to be very colored by classism, the ism no one here talks about."

by Paul Chuks...Frame narratives are stories and plots with internal pocket-sized stories and subplots that meet at the nerving point of narrative.

by Paul Chuks...not even birds should answer for the songs in their mouth. not even lovers should answer for the sins of their tongues.

by Zach Wallis...Snow-shark-finned and vast and built of poems for someone else to write, the San Juan Mountains bracket the world. I try to place my feet where we were before, by the lopsided cairn you made...

by James Callan...The sun was directly over our heads. The asphalt was soft under my shoes. Insects were dying, cooked alive beyond the shadows of parked cars.

by Lyndsie Manusos...That a young girl, perhaps seven, found the diadem the robbers dropped while making haste to exit, and tucked it under her skirt, the curves of jewels pressing against her skin.

by Ross McMeekin...That lack of definitive explanations isn’t dissimilar to the questions many of us have about God, in the sense that God by definition can only be described insufficiently.

by Jan Stinchcomb...After the rupture your parents become great storytellers, but they only want to talk about each other. As you get older, the stories mutate into tall tales.