What happened in that pause? Did the driver consider his own attractions? The features he desires in a woman, or even a man? Did he consider how little control he had over those desires?
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Empty and Sparkling by Katherine Indermaur
Every night the man came home and saw the progress his wife was making on the mirror. Somehow she found just the right place for each shard, the right edges to slide alongside one another.
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Dawn of Graduation by Mike Yunxuan Li
When the decision letters came, he didn’t even open a single envelope from the Cali schools. He believed the East was where the heart of the country resided. Surely, people there would notice his intellect and talents. Surely, they would give a shit about the stuff he was passionate about.
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A January without Heat by Tara Ballard
What is a lover in hat and scarf at the stove when dead / is the roadmap? He asks me for something unexpectedly beautiful, like a poet / might, so I leave my stone home for the garden.
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Only Boats by Colette Cosner
Blank space skips a generation. / I don't know from art or what I lack. At the funeral / her children fought over last rites and good china. / I said nothing, so got only boats.
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Fitness Test by Sasha Tandlich
The kids say things behind his back when he makes them stand at attention at the start of class. He has three classes at once; there are too many kids and all he’s trying to do is keep them under control. His strictness is read as meanness, but he only looks angry because his transition lenses are taking too long to adjust to the bright Florida sun.
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How to Survive a Date by Holly Pelesky
You will show no signs of weaknesses. There is power in your womanhood. You of pants on a first date, of fight classes, of weaponry.
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Two Poems by Jennifer Lynn Krohn
they want a corpse, / a girl who'll only grow / skinnier with rot. A girl / who will disappear / into a handful of dust.
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Adventures of Ghost Girl by M Jaime Zuckerman
She longs / for the feeling of slipping / between fresh sheets & lying there / like a clean corpse.
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Women's Work by Celeste Colgan
I never learned. In a year’s time, Mother, Buck, and the chicken coop were gone. Aunt Betty bought chickens already drawn at the meat counter. I thought a lot about beheadings.
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Door Girl by Candace Jane Opper
The whole institution seemed to exist by and for men, particularly male musicians, and more particularly male musicians who’d fully bought into the fantasy of rock and roll, which essentially resembles the kind of up-all-night debauchery romanticized in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous.
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The Only Thing Left by Thomas Price
I know it seems odd that that long, strong bone in the leg can think, let alone feel, but it was still part of me, and as it lay in the bed, night into day and day into night, all it could wonder was, with so much of me gone, why hadn’t it been enough?
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