In the bottom of the third, he called back. He was slurring. He was somewhere downtown. He didn’t know where. He was sitting on concrete steps. He could see bushes. Where are you in relation to the big Bank of America building, I asked. He didn’t know. Concrete steps, he kept saying. Bushes.
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Taking Your Formerly Human Lover on a Road Trip to Nowhere by Angela Liu
I break eye contact and focus on the road. There is nothing but asphalt and leveled plains. Something scrapes behind me, and I know you’ve hit bone.
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Dot by Lia Purpura
Empurpled, if caught in the gloaming, before the beam sharpens against true night and reddens the dot into super clarity.
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How Your Body Works by Jacqueline Ellis
The doctor is a wide, rectangular man with side-parted lank brown hair, black-framed glasses, and an untidy mustache. I sit across from him, next to Dan, on the shiny blue cushion of a dark-wood-colored chair. We are at a fertility clinic because we are trying to conceive a baby and our bodies do not work.
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Three Poems by Felicia Zamora
A slow/ soiling exponentially catches fire. Myth as warning. A myth stays with us, despite our/ forgetting.
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Mockingbird by Lia Purpura
Plain bird whose one song is all songs. / Who accompanied me once / while I waited and waited and no call came / and who, for god's sake, will not stop singing now.
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A Normal Interview with MariNaomi by Lee Lee
My first pieces were our letters and notes to each other, our photographs, and the boxes full of journals I read through, one by one. Once I put it all together, it felt significant. As I collected them, it felt like a scavenger hunt.
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Of Eagles, Goats, and Space Men by Patrick Madden
Which is to say that you can essay about anything, find some small hook in the overlooked or takenforgranted.
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The Extravagant Art of Seeing: Thoughts While Tearing Up a Novel Late One Night (CHAPTER 30) by Ben Miller
Soon enough, living in a house that did not connect on any real level with the surrounding community--its assumptions, laws, and dialogues--I figured the best way to exist in a fragmented reality and abide by its dissonance was to make myself a fragment, a live sliver of what I might otherwise have been physically, spiritually, mentally or intellectually, a job I had done well by age fifteen...
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Greater than Gold by Areej Quraishi
You won’t believe me, but an angel visits me in my dreams.
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Vertebrae by Jess Masterton
Her bones had been bleached, stripped of all muscles and tendons, and you called me to your side as though I were your own.
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The Madrid Conversations by Normando Hernàndez Gonzalez with Adam Braver and Molly Gessford, Translated By Cynthia Guardado
The simple act of having your rights to liberty and expression, I would say. The simple act of not being scared to say what you are thinking.
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Wheat Simulator By Alexander Metz
But, if you didn’t think about that, didn’t think about the unreality of everything, it was great. I couldn’t have said how long I played Steer Rope, or how many steers I managed to rack up. For me, the whole point was not to think.
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Transmissions from the Baby Monitor by Sarah Gerkensmeyer
“You tell us death, and you tell us pain, and you tell us there are good things, too.”
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Before I Stop by Katie Kalahan
I see a woman running towards me at the farthest edge of the path between Jimi Hendrix and Sam Smith parks. She's light on her feet, but tense, taut, and I feel that she's familiar.
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Two Poems by Marilyn Nelson
In petticoats, ribbons, and ostrich plumes,
with watch chains, snuff boxes, and monocles,
we were enchanted individuals
last night, cinderellas without our brooms.
Fatality on the Tracks by Patrick Hicks
Molten steel fills my ribcage,
my teeth are barbed-wire,
but the killer bees I want to spit
are stuck on the flypaper of my tongue.
A Normal Interview with Will Betke-Brunswick by Sydney Allison Hinton
"People expect mammals to smile and frown, to have expressive eyebrows, and to make certain gestures with their hands, arms, and front legs. Drawing flightless birds frees me from so many expectations and gives me more space to play."
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Eagle Beach by Maxwell Suzuki
There are echoes of a childhood and a boy I can just barely remember. There has been an ache in my stomach for me to return.
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Fairy Tale by Sharmila Voorakkara
“The children stare into space. No one here knows what too much means.”
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