The metal tube growls around you like a mechanical dragon with an empty belly. A voice over the intercom reminds you not to shiver as you’re being digested.
Read More
Sowing Ground by Elliot Alpern
Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
Read More
Soulcraft by Larry Flynn
She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead.
Read More
Memory Like Form Filling Void by Eli Coyle
Where do things go when in their leaving, /when they're uprooted and carried/ somewhere else?
Read More
The Back of the Cereal Box by Jennifer Fliss
At the bottom of the box, amidst the impossibly small pearls of sugar and sharp crumbs, you will never find what you are looking for. Nothing will make you see things differently. But you will never stop searching.
Read More
Two Poems by Michael Battisto
I wear/ my drab green gown and listen/ to the insecurities of the nurses.
Read More
Two Poems by Kathryne David Gargano
a trembling/ of finches, for example: flung down/ a coal mine/ if she returns to me/ i am safe to remain
Read More
Father Francisco Makes a Friend by Charles Haddox
Amid the maize and sugarcane fields, the village looked like a collection of cupboards painted white and left out to dry in the wind. Barking echoed over cactus and discarded glass bottles. Sunday mornings in San Juan Camotlán were usually quiet as a broken-down motorbike.
Read More
Backwards T-Shirt by Genevieve Abravanel
It was like the old days—the earliest days—those chatrooms where lines of text concealed everything except your wit or the way it unraveled but they had already unraveled, now that everyone was home-bound except those who didn’t and got caught by the authorities and everyone wanted that job.
Read More
Gus Who Sells Body Parts Down By The Railroad Tracks By Marya Brennan
When we first started dating, we’d stay up past sunrise doing nothing but blah blah blah, but then the Sad Thing crept in, and my husband refused to speak. The silence in our house is making my ears shrink, I swear. I stick a cue tip in and each day it swirls a little smaller. One day it won’t fit at all.
Read More
Fireflies by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here…
Read More
tripping (in)dia by m.m. gumbin
The plane lands, I look out the window and see the outdoors spinning upside down, round and round. I’ve woken up in another century, somehow sittin’ next to my beloved grandparents.
Read More
A Normal Interview with Ira Sukrungruang by Melinda Medeiros
Something that I’ve really had to tell myself when writing this book was: You have to rip the Band-Aid off. You have to look at the wound for what it is. The genre of memoir—as hard as it sounds—thrives on suffering and it lives on vulnerability.
Read More
There is Always More by Ahsan Butt
As the credits rolled, Dad was leaned forward on his crossed leg, rubbing where his forehead touches the mat in prayer—that’s what it is: man becomes animal when death comes.
Read More
Three Stories by Jessie Carver
By day, she sprinkled into the river alfalfa blossoms and quail feathers and hollow flutes of cattails and tiny shells and smooth skipping stones—offerings to protect her family—chanting incantations of please please please.
Read More
Kingdom Phylum Class by Kara McMullen
I’ll release it amongst my mother’s hollyhocks and tomato plants and watch it shudder away through the grass, feeling like some dark corner of myself is going with it. I’ll resume my search for something lethal.
Read More
Alpha Romeo Fifteen by Quintan Ana Wikswo
We box in the park and when we hit, our first faces crack and shatter. Underneath, now, I see his second face. Narrow and deep.
Read More
The Nightfly by Libby Cudmore
She poured coffee from her thermos and pulled herself closer to the microphone as her cue neared. 'Nina the Nightfly here, with tunes to get you through the long dark night. My lines are open, so call me up and tell me what's on your mind. I bet I've got a song that'll fit how you're feeling.'
Read More
Pigeons, Again by Hannah Gregory
A pigeon. The LED on its collar blinks. Kendra cups its body the way she holds her coffee to warm her hands. The message tied to its leg is unanswered.
Read More
Filet-O-Fish by Wynne Hungerford
We had become fish in time. I smelled my shirt. It smelled like fish, like fry. It smelled like where we had been.
Read More