He stood tall. His posture and leotards emphasized incredible physicality, as if his muscles’ muscles had muscles. With his hair slicked back and chin held high, he oscillated, projecting zero visible confusion—the antithesis of our expression.
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A Normal Interview with Andrés Cerpa by Rebeca Abidail Flores
Constructing the book is a device for me as a writer to enter it more fully. I like to drop myself in. If I’m there mid-sentence, mid-story, if everything is kind of jumbled, then maybe I can catch the momentum that I had previously and continue on riffing.
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Mornings Are The Hardest by Sarah Terez Rosenblum
Does the girl’s desperation feed the thing’s obstinance? Years ago someone (one of the experts?) told the girl that she’s in control; she has choices. But how can that be when occasionally , no matter which button the girl pushes, the thing takes actions paradoxical and perverse?
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Echoes and Ecotone by Maya Jewel Zeller
When I think of ethnopoetics and the poem as a house, I am immediately drawn to ecopoetics, the ecotone, the edge-things, the house that moves, the shape of something inhabited, like a shell, empty, then full. Too full. Sometimes binding, if it isn’t time to be bound.
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Ghosts-4-Hire by Michael Colbert
I found the flyer outside the grocery store. Feeling lonely? Ghosts for hire! I would’ve thought it was a prank if I hadn’t been seeing ghost children helping the elderly check expiration dates on bagged granola or deceased personal trainers floating alongside runners, cheering them on.
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The Old Country by Michele Popadich
whole plums hang rotund from heavenly branches / puckered fruitless / bruised but beloved on the kitchen table /
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Frosty Diamonds by Michael Bishop
And so it came to be that on that first night, parked on the roadside gravel abutting Hale’iwa Ali’i Beach Park, across the street from million-dollar homes, with the necessities of life stripped to the bone, my nerves humming with a new kind of freedom, the orange glow of street lamps fractured through Frosty Diamonds into scintillating sunbursts unlike anything I’d seen before.
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What They Say If You Lose a Child by Kate Stoltzfus
I remember the neighborhood shrieking in summer, / kids dripping popsicles the color of blood onto hot concrete / & wondering how his voice would cut the air / when I finally heard it. You can always have another
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Dream Mother by Andrew Bertaina
She wasn’t listening. My mother had always been a wonderful listener. Now that she was dead and only a part of my dreams, mother had a bit of a foul mouth and didn’t listen well.
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On The Color Matching System; Or, Marriage by Jehanne Dubrow
I might say last August was a faded blue, like a pair of blue jeans worn to softness.
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Vinegar Instead of Blood by Don Malkemes
The beets knew what they were doing; Kimbark was patsy perfect. He was a visitor in his father’s house, which was a remarried house with a new mom, new brother, and fruits and vegetables.
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Florence, Yesterday Evening, Dusk by Jill Witty
Among the many Monti possessions, all belonging to the Contessa, none was so highly prized as the Palazzo Principio, a magnificent Renaissance building that sat along the Arno, a stone’s throw from the Ponte Vecchio. Beautifully restored and as large as an entire city block, the Principio was said to be the most valuable privately-owned building in all of Florence.
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Genetic Expression by Nicole Walker
Sometimes families fall apart. It’s not always the Brussel sprouts’ fault. One kid loves cauliflower. Another loves kale. That third baby that no one knew about might have loved broccoli but you will never know whether or not just as you will never know how many cc’s there are in broccoli.
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Three Poems by Janice N. Harrington
I am grass and root and loam. A vole tunnels in my throat. / Field mice bed inside my womb. Hair, limbs, / fingers lengthen and rise, lengthen and slender into turkeyfoot / and stands of Indiangrass.
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Cake by Anthony Varallo
Time passed. The boy grew older. Taller. Able to reach all the way inside the freezer whenever he felt like it, which wasn’t often. Most of the time, he could find whatever he wanted in the refrigerator.
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Chaos by Julia Charlotte
When life feels chaotic, it makes me feel better to remember that it is; everything is depressing, but cover it in flowers.
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Two Poems by Natalie Dunn
We would lie on her bed with our legs up on the white wall eating saltines / with butter while we made a list of everything we wanted. / Try to keep your hunger, someone said when she died in the summer. / I ate flour and bone. Measured the distance between two cups on the table.
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Little Pelvic Bone by Jessica Fordham Kidd
The mother bit the very tiniest tip off the snake’s tail. It tasted metallic and felt tough between her teeth. Then, she tossed the snake into a stand of privet hedge.
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A Normal Interview with Michael Chin by Mialise Carney
I came around to the idea of this book being a lot like the storytelling I would do in early romantic relationships, when I wanted so badly to share my whole whole world with this person who felt vitally important to me, who I couldn’t wait to have fully immersed in my life and the world I’d known.
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The Muse the World Forgot to Name by Mureall Hebert
She paints roses under heavy skies. Purple, / the color of bruised plums. The artistry is in knowing / her audience, their heart-beaten stutter riding / on airbrushed waves.
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