Let me pledge allegiance to the planet. Let me list all the places I love on a passport that actually represents my sense of belonging and identity.
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He Was a Friend of Mine by Munib Khan
Murad’s gaze meets Saad’s. Two dozen feet between them. There is no hatred in Murad’s eyes, only pity and kindness, if boys can possess pity and kindness, certainly not desire, and it is not an unforgiving gaze, but that is how Saad will remember it later. He will remember it often, at will, give himself shivers, like reciting a beloved poem. It was love, he will say.
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Love Nest by Marshall Howell
Lynn met me at the airport, and we took a yellow taxi into Boston and pulled up in front of this dilapidated building on Boylston Street and walked up five flights of stairs. She put a key in the lock and opened the door. “How do you like it?” I put my hands in my pockets so she couldn’t see them trembling and gazed into the tiny room.
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Daddy by Alex Ebel
Pacing the halls of my house in a pair of penny loafers so dusty they might have been robbed from a grave, I counted on trembling fingers all the ways my night could unfold.
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GRIEVING MOTHER IS FOUND LIVING WITH CORPSE OF HER DAUGHTER, 47, WHO DIED EIGHT MONTHS AGO Daily Mail July 2 2018 by Katherine Fallon
but have since / come to learn that the body won’t go shrivel up / like a raisin just because you tell it to, and it sure / won’t turn to dust.
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Redress by Megan Sweeney
To redress: to remedy or set right; to relieve from distress; to make fair and equal; to compensate for wrong or loss. From Anglo-French redresser: to set upright, restore, set straight.
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How the Rain Remembers by Shebana Coelho
My curls return in rain and in sudden wind. They returned that day, on the beach, standing beside a sand wall, scooped out by wind. We were on vacation, him from his regular self, and me from the self that pretended he was truly like this.
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Mermaid IPA by Linzy Garcia
I remember even the most beautiful, mystical things still die.
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Hard Salami by Kent Kosack
How am I supposed to know where here is? How does anyone?
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A Brief Affair by Thomas Cardamone
Every weekday at four PM, a small piece of Paulita Paulo died and went to heaven.
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Where I Was From by Steven Moore - Winner of the Bradley & Stucky-French Prize
I live in a college town in western Oregon and lately people here have been talking about their small-town Midwestern upbringing like it was a war they barely survived.
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Photo of Dr. Harris Mirkin
The Incomplete By Dylan McGonigle
It was at the end of Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times that I'm pretty sure I heard Harris Mirkin crying.
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Oops by Amelie Meltzer
A moment like / the moment when I accidentally chewed on my tongue / instead of food and realized / how powerful and dangerous I am
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The Salesman by Terek Hopkins
In two days, Roger turns twenty-seven. But Roger doesn’t want to turn twenty-seven. He’s more afraid of it, of turning twenty-seven, than he’s ever been of anything in his whole life.
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Ape Destiny by Ethan Chatagnier
I’m at the high school to meet with Derrick’s counselor. I don’t know I’m about to say those words, don’t know what they’ll mean. I’m even mistaken about why I’m meeting Mr. Crenshaw, but there he is, waving me into the library.
Read MoreRoundtable Discussion: “Lessening our Existential Despair,” a Conversation with Fiction Writers, Emily Wortman-Wunder and Jennifer Wortman by Emily Sinclair
I read these stories as, in part, witnessing our current political, environmental, and cultural exigencies and the way they push on our interior lives and our relationships. Of course, it’s easy to read everything that way these days, given the lightspeed of our news cycles and the dire tones of our news.
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Resolution (in Twelve) by N. H. Azmi
He was her first in a list of firsts: first kiss, even though that should have been in high school; first hook up although that should have been in college. He was a second or third love though, but the first to ever leave her imagination and take root in reality
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Primum Non Nocere: First, Do No Harm by Michael Bishop
Consider for a moment the end of your life.
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Anatomy of a Flower by John Moessner
A flower / is able to reproduce with itself, or wait for a bug to float / on the tongue of the wind and visit the bell of its face.
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Prodigal Daughter by Clara Trippe
Generations of us did not migrate to bluer places to remain dry on the shore.
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