Cass’s Zapp Attack™ is emblazoned with an orange and red flame design. Carrying it makes her feel like one of Charlie’s Angels. She wishes she’d owned it when the sweaty guy outside the Joslyn Museum groped himself as she walked past. Cass blushed when she described that incident to the women in her Bible study a few days later, ashamed of her helplessness and of the titillation she’d felt alongside her revulsion.
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You Don't Own Me by Joe Bonomo
Infamy is fine. Did you hear the news? John Bonham used a mud shark as a sex toy! Rod the Mod had to have his stomach pumped! Paul is Dead! But when a band gets too famous, literally too big for the room, I resist. My name’s Joe. I’m a fameist.
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Balling by Jerald Walker
A private college in Boston was making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Along with being criticized for its lack of racial diversity, one of its black faculty had filed a discrimination lawsuit, and another had complained to the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. A third had quit. It was rumored that the president, under whose watch these troubles festered, was being forced to resign. And so when I saw their ad for a professor of creative writing, with a specific appeal for applicants of color, I could not believe my good fortune. The college, it seemed to me, like a flowering boll of cotton beneath the hot Georgia sun, was ripe for the picking.
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Unpredictable by Patrick Madden
Each sentence seems its own aphorism, a particle afloat humming in harmony with the others.
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Don’t Talk to Strangers by Bonnie E. Carlson
If someone had asked Jake O’Malley if he was lonely, he’d probably have said no, loneliness being such an unmanly emotion. He just had a lot of time on his hands. After all, he had his dog, Milo, a little gray mutt with curly, wiry hair, his constant companion. No, he never thought he was lonely until he met Zoe in the park.
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Farewell, Cassini, How Far You've Come by Gabriela Denise Frank
Cassini’s impending doom stirred an inexplicable sadness in me. As the broadcast went on, I felt the bitter irony of human gains: here, we create a technological marvel who faithfully increases our knowledge—for two decades, Cassini has delivered images and data of thrilling celestial phenomena to our fingertips—and, in return, we send it on a suicide mission.
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Telway Lament by Andrew Collard
And then one morning, just before the sunlight turns to bees
at my bedroom window, I will see it, through fog—
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A Normal Interview with Jessica Jacobs
“To not include landscape in my poems is like telling only half the story.”
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A Normal Interview with C.G. Hanzlicek
“[W]hen you live with a government run by The Liars’ Club, it can be a comfort to turn to poetry, since poets are only part-time liars.”
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Three Poems by Alessandra Narváez-Varela
When I sit on the toilet, my thighs,/ purple and mold-green, file against / each other, mercilessly. My neck hairs / rise, dandelion-like, aware of her thighs
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Beemoor Romance by John Hearn
The first thing she told me was that she works at Victoria Secret, which I took as a way of saying she’s very sexual, very accepting of all kinds of shenanigans. And that she’s good at sex. That’s how I took it. But at that time she was already pushing seventy or so and I found it hard to picture her liver-spotted hands and bony fingers holding up a black and pink corset, bringing it up to her slightly hunched frame to give a customer a sense of how it would hang, how it would look to the guy she was planning to have sex with next.
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Smallmouth by Justin Hocking
So many things fell into place after that dental exam. The twenty-seven previous years of painful shyness. My trouble pushing words through this tiny oral aperture. Everyone always asking me to speak up. The dentist helped me understand that my social anxiety has a physical component, right here on my face.
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Malus by Geoff Anderson
I find the last crabapple—rotted, not fallen
from the branch but buried up in the leaves.
What has stopped the cankered globe from falling?
By Any Other Name by Carissa Halston
When you were a teenager, you volunteered for an organization in the town where you grew up, a town so small most people called it by the name of the city beside it. The organization raised money for people living with HIV and AIDS. You’ve forgotten the name of the organization, but not the names of the people you met there. Michael. Terry. Anthony. Angel. Always men, even when their names were fluid.
Read MoreCurses by Berry Grass
TNS stands in solidarity with the trans community. As a show of support, we are proud to reprint and celebrate the work of Berry Grass.
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Learning How to be Female by Annie Lampman
As a child of the late 70s and early 80s, I was convinced that glossy “magazine women” were a distinct subspecies of human females who came out of the womb painted like colorful aliens, born complete with purple eyelids, black-lined eyes and thick-coated lashes, bright pink cheeks, and shiny-plump red lips. I studied them for hours, fascinated by their colorful flawlessness compared to the plain imperfection of “normal women.”
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immigrant treatise by Bernard Ferguson
the sun is retreating from yet another day that wishes to lay claim
over our bodies & my friends have taken to the streets in my name.
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Edge of a Piece of Cloth, Made Strong by Holly Willis
If I could I would sew for my sister a coat of soft leather. I would ply malleable pink hide for an effort so vital, but a gabardine twill is perhaps more practical. Gleaned from the coats of animals, culled from the cocoons of silkworms, scavenged from the seeds and leaves and stems of plants, remnants, vestiges, reckoning, reckoning.
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Clementine, My Darling (an almost-memoir) by Joanna Brichetto
It was the clementine that killed me. I peeled it for your lunchbox because you need Fruit to complement the Protein and the Crunchy, and because school lunch is so short and you get busy chatting and if I don't peel it for you and break it into segments, the whole thing comes back home in its BPA-free, nesting container (labeled with your name in silver Sharpie).
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On Becoming a Person of Color by Anne Liu Kellor
She is used to defining herself in the negative—not quite this or that; or as divided—only half or part. She is mixed, which means that she has never seen herself entirely as Chinese, nor entirely as white. As a teenager, her friends were mostly white, in a school that was mostly black and white, so she identified with the white kids. Her friends would eagerly ingest her mom’s Chinese leftovers after a night of partying (where she’d teach them how to say, We are going to drink a lot of beer tonight! in Mandarin); she was their fun Asian friend, different, yet rooted in the same pop culture, white culture.
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