We started spending less time at the park, arriving home while sunlight was still on offer and confusing our parents. We paid more attention to who showed up in the park and who didn’t. Absences now felt like defections, lessening our numbers and making us vulnerable in a way that tightened our stomachs when we thought about Hansen.
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Two Poems by Alana de Hinojosa
I took so long to learn / the black in pockets is you
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Two Poems by Victoria Chang
Somewhere, in the morning, my mother / had become the sketch.
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Three Poems by Sandra Beasley
You are the sunburn / where there is no sun, a canary nested / in the ribcage of a miner.
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De Domum by Melanie Conroy-Goldman
I know my house is a woman because she has a migrating trap door. I’m in the hallway. Whoops! I’m in the kitchen. I’m in the basement. Whoops! I’m in the attic. I can see the door’s outline if I pay attention and it’s possible to tiptoe very carefully around its edges, but it is easy to get distracted in the house.
Read Morebliss kids by Aureleo Sans
Children are backlogs / in the isolation tent
Read MoreTwo Poems by Lisa Huffaker
the raw energy of / threat
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A Normal Interview with SJ Sindu by Nicholas Howard
I think it’s important for writers to rediscover wonder. Without wonder, writing becomes stagnant and preachy. If you haven’t found your place of wonder yet, think about the kinds of spaces that make you ask questions, that make you see in a new way.
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A Normal Interview with K-Ming Chang by Yia Lee
I think part of writing into myth and folklore is that there’s this kind of cosmic presence, this feeling that people are people, but they’re also more than people in a way. There’s something about them that is incredibly ancient and powerful.
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A Cement Mother by Elizabeth Brus
On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets.
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You Think Mom Would Like It? by Steve Chang
We both know how our mom feels about us bringing things home, things we find. Strange things, she calls them. Once, I showed her this quarter I’d picked up at school. I found it in the lunchroom. I said, Look! And, gasping hard, she slapped it from my hand.
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Elegy / Eulogy / Ode by Lacey N. Dunham
For months now, you have not been able to walk through the daily din into the madness, and your life has felt more textured, your days fuller, though you will not admit that you might be happier this way.
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Reasons to Teach Another Year by Adam Patric Miller
Because you remember your teachers, one with wild eyes who wore a cross over his tie, who made algebraic equations turn and spin in your head, who gave you a graduation gift of Genesis in Space and Time…
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Missing by Rick Andrews
You are still learning the subways and have to ask someone which way is south once you exit the train at Lafayette; the dot on your phone is being difficult.
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Two Poems by Kelly R. Samuels
How industrious and cheerful we appear, opening/ the water back up to the sky,
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Sometimes Love Looks Like by Edie Meade
It's love in a silent spell/ tinkering in separate rooms
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The Liar by J Brooke
Thinking myself a nurturer of wonder and awe, I never summoned the simplest truth. This was the Tooth Fairy. This was Santa. Like amassing a grotesque ball of knotted tangled twine, I stretched and contorted tales beneath a guise of creating a magical childhood.
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Loss Leader by Stacey Resnikoff
I have no discernable personality. Is that harsh? I don’t think so. My prescription makes me incapable of harsh, even to myself. I’ve been worn down smooth, plus a shave extra—less steadying than reversal.
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Red House by Lauren D. Woods
There was a last time, of course, inside the little red house, like a last time for everything, except most of the time you don’t know it will be the last, which is why you don’t remember it, only the accumulation of trains rumbling just outside...
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Roadkill by Lisa Lopez Smith
...witnessing the necessary work / of decomposing, composting, nature cycling, / until one day...
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