Lauren Becker

You Should Know

Going crazy is more subtle than you’d think. You won’t notice until going becomes gone. I’m telling you because it’s probably good to pay a little more attention. It’s harder to pretend from this side.

I know when I tipped to past tense. [...]

Myfanwy Collins

Liar

Lisa’s room was small but artful and Cassie coveted it. Her own room seemed that of a young girl still—the walls papered in images of red and pink giraffes and elephants, were thumb-tacked with posters of her heroes—William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy—yellowed and peeling at the edges from age. Her [...]

Geordie deBoer

Cutaway: Good-Evil in the Garden of Grapes

—go inside from eating Concord grapes fresh from rickety arbor, garden of fruit-fleshly delights, can’t resist globey-purple grapeflesh, sucking eyeball-center with juice by popping skin aburst directly into mouth, fruity pop-gun—

—grandmother asks, “have you been eating those grapes?”, she knows, waits, wants me to [...]

Taylor Mali

The New Ash on the Roof of our Building

Haunted is an apartment where a woman lived.
Someone like your wife, or soon-to-have-been-ex-wife.
Do people even say such things?

Haunted is an apartment where a woman died.
Except instead of the apartment,
it’s the sidewalk outside six floors below,

the place where later candles and flowers
bloomed into [...]

Heather Momyer

Love and Paradise at Superdawg

How does one write a love story that is not tragic? Must all love be tragic as all love must end as the story ends? The plots are basic. The characters love, but they are flawed and the love ends. The story is tragic because the [...]

Nick Padron

Papa’s Bastard Son

Sometimes you look at the world and you can’t understand it for all you try. They tell you the trick is to adapt, to get used to it, to conform. I know that much already. What other choice is there? Well, sure, there is something else you can [...]

Sarah Sweeney

LAMENT FOR A FRAT BOY

He liked baseball and porn,
favored Girls Gone Wild and the Mets, liked me
to watch him pee while he sang Love Hurts
by Nazareth. His favorite color was a blue
Camaro, rain-rusted and troublesome.
I don’t remember his name,
just his breath: Jameson’s and a sweet candy
tongue. Oh, you are bad, [...]

D. Harlan Wilson

TO BED, TO BED—GOODNIGHT

I marched into the kitchen and dropped my suitcase onto the floor. It exploded. Dirty socks and frayed underwear sprung onto the appliances.

“I’m home,” I said.

“Where have you been?” asked my mother, blowing steam from a cup of coffee.

“Everywhere. I am a world traveler. [...]

Corey Zeller

Thick Rib of the Lamentation Animal

To rub one part of I against another to create music.
This violin of oneself, this rough strum of I, arc of wing over thick rib. This masturbatory chirping like the meat of God [...]