Rachel Adams

Sex and the American Rabbit

Lapin

When they were young, they took the male and female rabbit out of their separate cages and set them in the bright wet spring grass. The rabbits, young as well, were uneasy. In the circle of three children they sat twitchy and still. It was warm [...]

Stace Budzko

Beautiful Retards

That Friday you are met by a pool full of retards: downs kids so broken some wear helmets.   Prior to this day your mother and you go to the Y to deal with her post aneurism weakness, and you usually have the place to yourself.   Ever since [...]

Sara Crowley

In July

John’s cock was a hot poker. In, in, in, in. July grimaced and bit lip, drew blood there as well as there. Afterwards she foetal curled while he sweet whispered soothing.

“It’ll get better. The first time always hurts.”

He couldn’t stay with a woman who didn’t enjoy sex. She offered [...]

Alana Dakin

FLESH AND BLOOD

Lydia has a body made of bones. Her ribs are candy canes sucked clean by the puckered lips of a child, her limbs hard and white like the naked branches of a sycamore. Lots of people ask me what it’s like, dating a skeleton. It’s no different from [...]

Tim Dicks

Poem Written While Receiving Oral Sex

This isn’t working. I can’t think
she said. Her voice was too flat
and he would be disappointed.

My thoughts aren’t connecting
she said. She meant the threads
tying one idea to the next idea

were frayed before she even knew
what to tie them to. Toby breathed
against her and hot electricity

should [...]

Chris Erickson

from Henrytown

QUEEN MOTHER BRARD AND HER MALE HELPER drove into Danville to the Bonanza. She kept making a big deal about being there. She put their meals on her Senior Club Card.

Her helper went into the restroom and pointed his wiener down in the toilet. He went to the bathroom [...]

Jen Gann

Tiger Town
listen to this story

We stood whistling on the town beach.   A few miles down, a dead tiger washed up on the sand.   The crowd gathered around the tiger had swollen to the dunes by the time we arrived.

“How on Earth?” people asked over and over.

People snapped pictures [...]

Kyle Minor

The Cruel Father, Learning that He Is About to Be Killed by His Son, Puts to Death All Children Born to Him

He kept a catalog of women’s eyes. Not just green, brown, blue, or hazel, but the shapes of eyes, almond or hooded or deep-set or Oriental, and how evenly [...]

Ansley Moon

Gift

Gift’s mother left when he was only five years old. One day she was everywhere in their house, her perfume filling even the crevices where his marbles rolled. And the next she was gone.   According to his father, she left no explanation. But, Gift found a note tucked [...]

Gena Mohwish

Johnsie Noel

TO UNDERSTAND STRING THEORY

At the ages of six and nine
we understood simply
the ‘theory of everything.’
The 11th dimension was
condensed down
to – a ball of twine
unwound, vibrating secrets
strung between girls
and two tin cans
once filled.

Two decades later, we
understand nothing, simply.
Trying complex equations
to explain the 4th dimension
we entangle – in
your length spanning
the distance of [...]

Tia Prouhet

Falcon Street

Marcy says he loves you, you know and I nod because it’s easier than telling her she’s wrong. I can see it, she says. Marcy is two years older and got her period the summer before me. She thinks she’s a professor of everything, but she’s my best friend [...]

Laura Read

Salt of the Earth

All the way from Spokane
to Omaha, meat-packing capitol
of the nation, I study my legs,
tan from laying out in the yard.
Before I left, my mother made me
apply mustache removal cream,
said you can’t meet the colonel
looking like that. Someday
you’ll be the colonel
and I’ll walk around our house
in my [...]

Keith Rosson

AT THIS TABLE

The table is in a restaurant in a building that was built in 1885. The building was remodeled in 1915 and again in 1952 after it was found that a broken sewage pipe had been weakening the foundation for decades. The building is located in a somewhat gentrified [...]

Chris Sheehan

Notes on a Clean River

There’s no reason for the old man to weigh in; he’s looking out the window, toward the lake slicked nicely with nutrients: he’s not concerned with who they are or where they’ve been.   He doesn’t need to hear about the pregnancy test they picked up [...]

Robert Anthony Siegel

What the American Public Wants

Sylvia Pincus could not tell her daughter, Daphne, that she still watched Late Night with George Rockland, but she felt justified: It was a way of working through her feelings about Daphne’s recent divorce, and about Daphne’s now ex-husband, George Rockland. Every Tuesday and Thursday at [...]

Robert Swartwood

The Chameleon Kid
listen to this story

The chameleon kid is standing beside a tree. Nobody can see the chameleon kid because, in a sense, he has become that tree. The grainy bark, the knots, even the dull green leaves—the chameleon kid is able to morph all of those aspects into himself.

Two [...]

Robb Todd

Gracias, Pero Si

An old woman with a face as colonial as the town hands you a cold drink brewed with corn and she tells you in Spanish how she knows you are an American because you only speak English and she warns you of the thing that scares you most: [...]

Brandi Wells

Some love stories

1. My mother tells me sex is when penis is in a vagina, but she says she doesn’t know how or why. She says it is one way and then another. She says she will ask my father how it works.

2. After my father dies, my mother has [...]

Bill Yarrow

GETTING GODLESS

I.

God is man squared. That is to say, God is man raised to a higher power.
Man is the root, the square root, of God.
We believe in the ideal (truth, wisdom, justice, honor, integrity, selflessness, sacrifice, compassion, goodness) and God is the name we give to that ideal.
What else is [...]