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.

by Hannah Grieco...It isn’t normal, the way you smell. The way your body responds to fear...

by Kip Knott...When I was a kid, the notion of falling into the ocean and turning into a fish that could live and breathe forever underwater became my most fervent desire, especially on those days when the tidal wave of expletives my parents poured upon each other threatened to drown me.

by MB Valente...At recess that first day she told me to punch a boy she pointed out and I did. He hit me back and got in trouble but nobody yelled at me. I just crouched in her shadow and felt its warmth fall over me like a wing.

by Michael Czyzniejewski...I felt compelled to sit, peck at the keys, so many of them missing, yet just enough, the exact keys that I needed still there: Despite me never playing before, not a note, I played a song, my fingers gliding, the music flowing.

by Natalie Paris...For a long while, no one would notice her car in the ocean of cars, stretching out towards the horizon—north, south, east, and west—and that was just the way that Marcie would have wanted it. Her car could be anyone’s. No one would bother her.

by Jack Fisher...everyone within smelling distance would remember what had floated past them. Chickens. Mattresses. Gas cans. Family photos. A horse with one eye open. A young woman's wedding dress, moving in the current as though the bride were still inside it.

by Tymber Wolf...No one here drinks water. They only bathe in it on Sundays. They aren’t a dirty bunch, just don’t want to pay the price of water in the desert. They have an unspoken culture to use what they are willing to have.

by Casey Jo Graham Welmers...I wasn’t convinced of its death. For three days I just left it in the tank, fins dropping across the water like a gossamer veil. Then I scooped it out with my bare hand and buried it as deep as I possibly could in our immaculate lawn.

by Elissa Field...I eye one under glass in diesel green, iridescent like rainbows on petrol. Laser embossed handgrips in swirls of vining flowers. I’d fired yours at the range. First time I heard a shot that close, I cried.

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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Jordyn Damato Олег Мороз 0 I believe in love as much as I believe in any form of God above; below; or to the right of us. I believe in procreation and controlled-population; whatever’s necessary at the time; I understand the importance of marriage; of owning somebody to feel important; of owning somebody else to own anything at all. I understand why homes are built to house couples; to house families; I understand why husband and wife slept in separate beds until the 1950’

by Cole Beauchamp Jan Kopřiva Shauna has had one too many evenings with the cobalt blue de Gournay wallpaper, the glowing chandelier, the polite clink of silverware. She leaps up. Let’s go skinny dipping! And out she charges, into the soft Tennessee night. Voices titter behind her. Good, they’re following. She kicks off her sling backs, sinks her toes into dewy grass as she disrobes. Faux fur stole, purple sequin cocktail dress, thong, Vanity Fair Full Figure Beauty Back Smoo

by Jeff Harvey Delaney Van Momma asks her best friend Edna if she’d help color her hair with a box of dye she got from the discount rack at Fred’s Dollar Store, andwhile the color is setting Momma lights a Winston and says Miss Jasper next door doesn’t have kids since she never hooked a husband and has to work for AT&T all day saying Number Please with nobody to talk to when she gets home, says shelives off TV dinners and drinks fancy wine while watching Dynasty, says every n

by Amy DeBellis Mother’s Embrace by Mikuláš Galanda via Europeana I find her behind the church, tiny in the dirt, curled up like a seashell. I recognize her not with any of my senses but with something banging behind my breastbone, something that screams: That’s her that’s her that’s her! So I scoop her up. I hold her in the palm of my hand, sunk deep into my pocket, all the way home: past the boarded-up storefronts, past the porch where Mrs. Calloway rocks in her dilapidated

by Tom Busillo iuliu illes It was said that you pressed your ear to her cheek. Old men doffed their hats without knowing why. Some remember it as what came after the thunder. Each tooth had its tiny frame. When she smiled, bells rang. When she yawned, wheels spun. When she kissed the air, rubber burned. The town didn’t ask questions. They just learned to look away during mealtimes. Children stopped crying. You could hear a distant street hissing. One spring, a stranger with m

by Sage Tyrtle Isabel Neuffer It’s a quiet time for the children, while the caterpillars are building their chrysalides, attached to the stomach walls. In the towns, in the cities, the children stop their running. Their yelling. They stop asking for food, for another drink of water, they stop asking and their parents lie down on the carpet like children themselves, relieved beyond measure. As the caterpillars busy themselves inside the children’s stomachs, the children like t

by Robin Wilder Adam Mathieu He wanted to be a paleontologist. Unearth fossils jutting from Montana sediment, all the femurs and mandibles of dragon lizards he learned were more like breeds of cockatrice than Jurassic Park attractions. Those dozens of dinosaur figurines migrating across his walls, the shelves housing ancient bedrock secrets, each one anatomically incorrect. He imagined them with feathers, the pillow-stuffed down of ducks and swans, thought maybe scaly monstro

by Glenn Orgias Piper Alpha during the 1988 disaster. Photo courtesy Cullen Inquiry. July 6, 1988. — Karen: This is all I know. Andre had taken to visiting the helideck of the Piper Alpha oil rig, looking from there out at the fog over the North Sea. He once told me that the sound of the foghorn on Piper Alpha was the sound loneliness would make if given a voice. 200 miles from Aberdeen it was. 170 feet below deck, the ocean smashed up against the pylons. A fall from the heli

by Nate Hirschtick Wesley Tingey Well one time we walked and walked and walked we must have walked a thousand miles it was nighttime all night we walked through the park up DeKalb and down Norstrand I took the G train home after I thought of you the whole way the way you had your books stacked on your dresser it was one on top of the other it was so impractical but you made it work so beautifully they were next to an antique lamp that your grandma gave you cool grandma I thou

by Brett Biebel Denis Shchigolev We’re still married, but my wife hasn’t forgiven me for Michigan City. I left her in an Airbnb. She was five months pregnant. My phone rang and rang, and I let it go, and she sat on the floor and cried, worried sick. The place we were staying didn’t have Wi-Fi. It was more like glamping than anything, just a two-room shack with a kitchenette and a TV with a DVD player and a digital antenna, plus a monster king-size bed. You could tell all the

by Maximilian Martini Savannah Bolton Barefoot and bloodshot, he kneels in the yard and faces the house. In the dirt, between every blade of grass, lie innumerable diamonds. They reflect the light of day a billion fold, coruscating beneath the house’s one window. The diamonds were the window. And then the pane broke into infinity. — - Each diamond is a caustic little rainbow. He works to grip them tight between his fingers and bank them in the trash bag at his side. But they

by Meg Pokrass Nada Gamal 1. Eleanor Rigby stands in the hallway wearing her mother’s wedding gown. Once a year, she puts it on to admire the flow. She is solitary dreamer who belongs here because she doesn’t belong anywhere else. A secret janitor perpetually sweeping up rice in a church where a wedding has been. 2. She is the most famous lonely person in Liverpool. Or maybe she never lived in Liverpool, and she is lonely while listening to the Beatles’ song. She is a late-mi

by Claire Guo Bank Phrom They say I came from a lineage of muckrakers, men and women who lived in the dirt of others. When I was born, I emerged from rot and magazine headlines, scornfully red and already screaming about extramarital affairs, about someone’s unpaid speeding ticket. My mother knew at once that I would be a successful journalist because I clamped my toothless mouth to her teat and didn’t let go, even when she smeared hot sauce over the reddened nipple. A fine s

by Rachel Weinhaus Casey Horner The first girl to kiss a boy was my best friend, Lauren. She was a full year younger than me, only in fourth grade when she kissed that floppy-haired teenager behind our cabin. She said his lips tasted like vanilla Chapstick. The first girl to lose her virginity was Sara, a girl I went to high school with. The tattooed man said he loved her. She wanted to believe him. Sara never loved the tattooed man, but I don’t think he meant his promise eit

by Matt Kendrick 은 하 the living-room carpet is a fever of wrapping paper scrunched into balls / it is Christmas day / Peter has bought a bicycle for his angelfish / Charlotte is staring at me as if I’m the last remaining Brussels sprout / her lips are loose from the ten o’clock sherry / the children’s are looser / they tell me I am old because I still use emojis / face with diagonal mouth emoji / face in clouds emoji / at dinner, Mother moans because we are an uneven number /

by Jon Steinhagen Photo by أخٌ‌في‌الله on Unsplash INTRODUCTION After what was done to Grady Seppellant (as of this writing he is still on display, and the birds have been at him), we have been tasked with the creation of this guidebook not only for the use of hapless strangers and curious tourists, but for ourselves, as many of us may want to venture out once again, for fresh air, for exercise, for liberation, and everyone needs to be as well-informed as possible before this

by Lauren D. Woods Ian Hutchinson I could be found on the bottom floor of a government building making spreadsheets. The important thing was to make the columns neither too wide nor too narrow, so that they filled the page and printed evenly. I learned to create clean squares with clean borders. No, not that kind. Those were being closed down everywhere. What I mean is that there was a sort of satisfaction in the quiet clicking into place of the spreadsheets and fitting and f

by Cuyler Meade Milad Fakurian I met a man last night. He had one of those faces you think you’ve seen before, but you just can’t place. We laughed and talked all evening. Oh, heavens, he was lovely. He asked many questions, not like other men who just want to blather on about themselves. He asked about my family, my children. I told him of my husband, George, and he didn’t seem threatened that I once had a man in my life. You don’t always get that. I let him put me to bed, b