by Sara Quinn Rivara...I was so scared back then. I was incandescent. I held his hand in every snowy lakewood, I held him on my shoulders in Lake Michigan. We speed down the mountain,

by Sarah Kaplan-Cunningham...Normally, disassembling isn’t so dramatic. Tag comes over. We make out, have sex. And sometimes, we remove each other’s limbs and reattach them.

by Genaro Emiliano Aguilar Saucillo...Endings are as simple as this, cynical, like the full stop after every lavish gasp. In my mind, I had left the phone on, waiting for my call to be returned. Irony settled in when I realized my first call had been rejected.

by Jane Wageman...It was August. Everything was meant to be apples and leaves and fresh starts. Everything was meant to be autumn and cool. It was a heat storm with no rain.

by Nathaniel Julien Brame....These soft owl wings: you can’t even hear them until you’re already being carried, incredulous, into the bloodied electric night air.

by Joshua Jones Lofflin... She sits in profile, the Lady Mary Davis of Saughall, her magnificent horn curling downward like...

by Cate McGowan...It’s not a metaphor. My mother meant it; she said that if she could raise a child to belong equally to land and water, she could unmake the loneliness of the shore.

by Seth Hagen...Once we were so stricken with the dream of each other, mornings came on like a sickness. In your convalescence, it rained robins and worms.

by Sacha Bissonnette...My girlfriend and I were buying birdseed for the feeder on the back porch, because sometimes, the yellow finches, the little ones, get so close you can wrap your hands so gently around them. And they’re precious like glass but soft and also warm.

by Julia Strayer...Mama wanted a house, so she stole one she found abandoned on the corner of Sycamore and Grant that she said would be happier with a family to love it.

by Litong Nie...my mother named me in a smoke stack, in sordid puffs that meander past the pacific, past bays that burn ochre at dusk.

Rohit Dey We here at trampset are delighted to share the following nominees for the 2025 Best of the Net anthology. Creative nonfiction: “Dissection” by Rebecca Tiger “The People Persevere” by Angela Townsend Fiction: “Spill” by Nancy Connors “Ten Seconds” by Sarah Lynn Hurd Poetry: “Drinking the Gender Fluid: a Zuihitsu” by Quinn Rennerfeldt “Like Adam, hiding among the trees” by Gbolahan Badmus “if I were to be the patron saint of anything” by Bea Montemayor “God Online” by

by Mandira Pattnaik...Like all wordsmiths, I’ve built forests from alphabets. Like all forest dwellers, I’ve been a gatherer all my life.

by Kanda Zinguri Rockwell Branding Agency/Unsplash after Chris Abani how cool they looked, the boys who could afford them —  safari boots, tight denim, those funny hats, hard boy brooklyn bridge stance. by now they had started smoking, had girlfriends (wives), would soon be teenage fathers —  they’d join a gang, kill for the fake silver chains around their necks, later afford cotton nappies for their kids. the early age of khat and big g’s and chain links, menthols, sportsman

by Avra Elliott Wiki Sinaloa I remember a story he wrote about seaglass, followed by the words of Dybek whispered as foreplay. It isn’t easy to fall in love. There has to be strangeness. There has to be a dead ladybug offered as a bridal shower gift. I’ll seal it with modge podge and lace. Make it a bracelet, an adornment covering scars from toy cars thrown in jest. She’s weird like you, a coworker says. The pumpkin vine climbs the apricot tree, and the color of the fruit tha

by Theodore Heil Joao Prates Camera means chamber, as in shot through with light. In dreams, pasts of my mother appear and the she-wound remains. I crush Tylenol with a spoon — stir into coffee, never finish. On the train, I sit after her face winning over mine. I place my hands over the heat off of license plates, thinking, like a baby bird, it’s her. In the dreams, I am young and my mother opens her fist of iron, a flower blooming at the center of her palm. I reach for it —

by Clifton Gachagua Lee SH when the beluga shows up and offers me her child first i have to learn the sign language for no and sonar for madness and some ottoman script for sadness, anthropocene, debilitate, how the sand on the beach is now only fine glass, each one an illumination of what it means to be, and how, now that i am in the company of a whale, polishing its bones, dawn to dusk, the monsoon on our backs, sailing through the estuary and into mauritius, learning creol

by Oladosu Michael Emerald Nishaan ahmed after Nikita Gill Because the sky still hangs its blue between the bombs. Because your mother’s voice is a compass needle trembling north. Because the taste of mangoes clings to your teeth like a hymn. Because the boy on the bus folded his laughter into a paper crane & left it on your seat. Because the moon, even shattered, stitches its light into the cracks of your ribs. Because your father’s hands, calloused & whiskey-stung, once cra

by Benjamin Drevlow Joe Vasquez When Johnny Cash died I pretended Johnny Cash was my father and my father, like Johnny Cash, was finally dead so I could finally forgive him all the ways that he’d been mean and dismissive to me and how I’d been worthless to him, the youngest of three boys, the mama’s boy, how I didn’t know a crescent wrench from a phillips head, didn’t know patience for boredom, my father finally dead to me because in boredom I had imagination and in my imagin

by Paul Chuks...This is my first poem post-depression. My therapist is not sure I’m well because I tell her the world is still grey. Yesterday, I walked past a knife without the thought of blood.