Rachel Andelman

Harquebus

Rape wasn’t like another pop song. But here she was getting ahead, having lumped it with the general condition of adversity, like a puddle to walk through or a sandwich board waiting for its human meat. The answering machine glared at her in the dark. From its blinking stupor she [...]

ZZ Boone

Mom the Poet

My mother was a writer although, as best as I know, she never had a single word published. She possessed the necessary tools—stationery, a computer, lots of time—and often late at night I could hear her tapping away in the kitchen while I couldn’t sleep.

One July, the summer [...]

Julie Babcock

Grandmother Advises the Dodo
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Next time you fall off a cliff

wind the gramophone.
Light a cigarette
and recite “The Harp-Weaver.”

Drink coffee black as night
on the settling davenport.
Brace yourself for better bones.

Grandmother Invites Me In
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You hungry? I’ll fix you
an egg. Two
or three. Come
into the kitchen. [...]

Leah Bailly

Stampede Queen

Tonight, a swirl of hay, loosened from its twine, rolls around and around under the orange buzz of a streetlight. The street has been cordoned off and bleachers set up along the curb and it’s empty now except for the valet manning the swinging glass door to the Palliser. [...]

Nik De Dominic

On Balloon Boy
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There is a pretty distance between you and I:
I want to say it looked like a star fish, no,

jelly fish, it’s undulation in the sky, the sky
a refraction of the ocean, the terrible terrain.

But I will not say that, I know it’s tired.
I will name [...]

Kerri French

Daytime Television, Late Night Sex

If this were a soap opera, the music would switch on
before we made it to the bed, the lights would dim

as if on cue: no need for knobs or remotes, electricity
would live only in the spaces where we touched.

On television, the hidden parts [...]

Mindy Hung

The View From Below
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Maria had made a radical career change. She cut her hair with kitchen scissors, and had her dog put to sleep. But she still wasn’t satisfied. I need new friends, she said to her old ones, I need a new outlook on life. It’s [...]

Jamie Iredell

VAMPIRE, A

A volume of something stupid sweats in the sweat of his fingers, reading “a novel” on its cover. If you breathe garlic breath at this vampire’s pores, nothing happens. Buy him a Silver Bullet, and he’ll gag. Remember, this man said “vampire,” not “werewolf,” and that only frat boys [...]

Brian Kubarycz

Bone Lagoon
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Amelia’s eyes are far darker than the side of the chrome hubcap which affords her a vision. She is, in fact, squatting uncovered above the mirror image. It is the smooth surface of her giblet over which she runs the middle finger. She [...]

Andrea Kneeland

But I Will Make Your Sandwiches Just The Way You Like Them, With Too Much Mayonnaise And No Mustard, And I Will Make Sure Not To Use My Hands Too Much When I’m Giving You A Blowjob, Since You Told Me That’s How You Like Me To Do It, And [...]

Desmond Kon Zhicheng-Mingdao

The Martian Martian Poet and Green Groupie
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Someone had untied the five segments of the stuffed goldfish, so the five pieces lay about the African blackwood table like assorted shapes shining in velvet and satin. It had eyes made of corduroy, a pink tulle section, a hairy belly [...]

Michelle Menting

On the first day of class, we wrestle heuristics
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What was your first nickname?
Did it include your first pet (Mittens)
and the road (Shady Lane) you lived on
when you were ten? (Did children make fun
of your stutter or lisp? Did they call you
Mitten-Spittens, Thady Thlane, Shady
Spit-Shit?) What are [...]

Eric Neuenfeldt

Bee Inside a Bullet

Congrats, you snagged the one job in the East Bay that didn’t require a resume during the application process. Before you left Milwaukee, the ex-hippie framebuilder who let you hang around his shop told you never to trust anyone who required a resume, which is why you [...]

Jonathan Papas

Hadouken

After Street Fighter II
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Japanese schoolgirls on fire -
Red bean squid pork bun
Into the yawning inferno.

~

Run a finger along ‘em -
Those green turgid abs,
That shock of coarse red hair.

~

Helicopter kick
The shit out of onlookers
With misplaced white thigh.

~

You never hear about the
Boxes of heartburn
Drugs – fireballs fuck up sphincters.

~

Of [...]

Gregory Sherl

The Oregon Trail is a lonely place to die from syphilis

I am cowering in the corner of a corner, the halo
so bright I’m like holy shit I can see through my
fingers, holy shit I can see through penance, holy
shit holy shit burning like a heated aerosol can.
We always ford the [...]

Rachel Swirsky

Tipping the Velvet
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Whip me. Cut me. Maim me. Whittle me to almost nothing. What remains will always love you.

Nightly at the cabaret, we take the stage together, dancing side by side. High kicks; petticoats whirling. Lights cast us blue and orange and yellow. Your face shines beneath [...]

Robert Swartwood

Seven Items in Jason Reynolds’ Jacket Pocket, Two Days After His Suicide, As Found by his Eight-Year-Old Brother, Grady

1. Plastic compass, about the size of a quarter. On the morning Grady extracted it from the cereal box, he overheard his dad say it wasn’t worth its price in shit. But [...]

Chris Tarry

Hole
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It took the entire world to fix the hole in the System. Chinese Control Officers, Eskimo Energy Anthropologists, US Department of Technology Practitioners, Canadian Space Enthusiasts, and Croatian Computer Component Manufacturers—anyone and everyone. The hole was three thousand miles long, five miles high, and had required the [...]