He sticks his hand in his pocket for a brush but pulls out melted gray taffy instead. He thinks, can only think, of that painted tree in the rain.
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Two Poems by Rita Mae Reese
I will give him this bird trapped in a doorway,
a mad heart in feathers and pulsing eyes.
Six Needles by Seth Sawyers
In the bottom of the third, he called back. He was slurring. He was somewhere downtown. He didn’t know where. He was sitting on concrete steps. He could see bushes. Where are you in relation to the big Bank of America building, I asked. He didn’t know. Concrete steps, he kept saying. Bushes.
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Taking Your Formerly Human Lover on a Road Trip to Nowhere by Angela Liu
I break eye contact and focus on the road. There is nothing but asphalt and leveled plains. Something scrapes behind me, and I know you’ve hit bone.
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Dot by Lia Purpura
Empurpled, if caught in the gloaming, before the beam sharpens against true night and reddens the dot into super clarity.
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How Your Body Works by Jacqueline Ellis
The doctor is a wide, rectangular man with side-parted lank brown hair, black-framed glasses, and an untidy mustache. I sit across from him, next to Dan, on the shiny blue cushion of a dark-wood-colored chair. We are at a fertility clinic because we are trying to conceive a baby and our bodies do not work.
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Three Poems by Felicia Zamora
A slow/ soiling exponentially catches fire. Myth as warning. A myth stays with us, despite our/ forgetting.
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Mockingbird by Lia Purpura
Plain bird whose one song is all songs. / Who accompanied me once / while I waited and waited and no call came / and who, for god's sake, will not stop singing now.
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A Normal Interview with MariNaomi by Lee Lee
My first pieces were our letters and notes to each other, our photographs, and the boxes full of journals I read through, one by one. Once I put it all together, it felt significant. As I collected them, it felt like a scavenger hunt.
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Of Eagles, Goats, and Space Men by Patrick Madden
Which is to say that you can essay about anything, find some small hook in the overlooked or takenforgranted.
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The Extravagant Art of Seeing: Thoughts While Tearing Up a Novel Late One Night (CHAPTER 30) by Ben Miller
Soon enough, living in a house that did not connect on any real level with the surrounding community--its assumptions, laws, and dialogues--I figured the best way to exist in a fragmented reality and abide by its dissonance was to make myself a fragment, a live sliver of what I might otherwise have been physically, spiritually, mentally or intellectually, a job I had done well by age fifteen...
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Greater than Gold by Areej Quraishi
You won’t believe me, but an angel visits me in my dreams.
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Vertebrae by Jess Masterton
Her bones had been bleached, stripped of all muscles and tendons, and you called me to your side as though I were your own.
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The Madrid Conversations by Normando Hernàndez Gonzalez with Adam Braver and Molly Gessford, Translated By Cynthia Guardado
The simple act of having your rights to liberty and expression, I would say. The simple act of not being scared to say what you are thinking.
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Wheat Simulator By Alexander Metz
But, if you didn’t think about that, didn’t think about the unreality of everything, it was great. I couldn’t have said how long I played Steer Rope, or how many steers I managed to rack up. For me, the whole point was not to think.
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