Lisa Aldin

Everybody Knows Promiscuous Girls Cause Earthquakes

Abby holds love in her right hand. Walter kneels on the cement. She dangles the love, the size of a marble, over his grease-fumed hair, rolling it around her meaty and sandy palm as she decides what to make him do first. Roll over, she [...]

Jenny Bitner

Is This Part of the Love Ritual?
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It is late at night and I am lying in my bed willing the aliens to come to me, throwing my voice out into the night like a lifeline, looking for a catch. My pillow smells like musty baby powder. I [...]

J. Bradley

For Those Who Are About To Die, We Salute You: A Cautionary Tale
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Chapter 1—Life on Mars

Aulus Minucius Plautus stretches the slaughterhouse of his body in his bedchamber.   He looks at his shield, craning his neck to catch the reflection of the notches.   Aulus counts each [...]

DeWitt Brinson

The Cow
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Demiurgic living space, cows are rooms who roam. Sometimes found in the closet, sometimes found in the den, once in the kitchen, twice in the bed. Sacred objects imperturbable, wonderful as houseboats. One never knows when one will open a room only to stumble into a [...]

Patrick Allen Carberry

Ich Bin Ein Trauriger Mensh

In 1987 a German engineer developed a clear plane.   He did not forge in response to public criticism, did not weld.  He blew.  He tempered, said it must be clear.  The frame and fuselage were constructed from reinforced glass.  The seats—inflated [...]

P. Scott Cunningham

POEMS ABOUT CONCENTRATION FOR PEOPLE WHO CAN’T CONCENTRATE

Imagine an opossum in headlights.
Loop that image.
Now imagine watching the loop.

You’re at your desk.
You can’t concentrate.
Imagine if not concentrating
was concentrating.

That time you took drugs
and thought a piece of tin foil stapled to the wall
was a fish tank. But why
was there a piece of [...]

Phil Estes

Josephine is alone, not lonely
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The cowboy had broad shoulders
Like Jeremiah Johnson
And red hair like brushfires.

His nose broke like the Flint Hills.
The traces of barbwire
In his palms—dead trees
At the edge of a lake.

The cowboy said:
“I slit the throat of a calf
Caught in the fence.
You look like [...]

Megan Falley

BRINGING OVER THE JELLO MOLD

Thinking of me while inside another woman
must feel like sitting in the new neighbor’s
dining room, saying you preferred
the people who lived there
before.

THE LUCKIEST

She blushes from his knuckles.
Her lips become busted
strawberries.

The vessels
lining her eyes surface as if trying
to tell us something.

She believes all the girls
are [...]

Greg Gerke

TELLING

My friend Ari tells me he’s going to tell me something he does not want me telling anyone. I agree and he tells about going to a philosophical discussion about aesthetics that took place at a house in the hills. Most of the people had never met before. He says, [...]

Tania Hershman

Vegetable, Mineral

I   said: “Vegetable.”

“Turnip?” you said.

“Nope. Ask a question.”

“Are you a root vegetable?”

“No,” I said. “Ask again.”

“Are you in salads?” you said.

“That depends,” I said.

“Depends on what?”

“On what you like to put in your salad.”

I lay on the sofa, you lay on the floor, your head by my [...]

Travis Hessman

Notes for a Story

Introduction:

The first line should be exciting, intriguing, baffling. It should fully engage the readers straight-away, drawing them inextricably in both by the artistry of its construction and by some inward, elemental need to explore the questionable (at best) connection to experienceable reality it suggests. [...]

Kristina Knappett

THIS RANT IS BEST WHEN READ ALOUD IN 23 SECONDS OR LESS WHILE WEARING A ONESIE, CATSUIT, JUMPSUIT OR UNITARD. And don’t stop too long at the periods. They are yield signs, not permission to loiter.

u ·ni ·tard (yo?o?n?-tärd)

n. A one-piece leotard and tights combination, sometimes with foot straps.
[uni- [...]

Tara Laskowski

Just Another in a Collection of Objects Not Good Enough to Be Considered Planets

Lucy started calling the baby Ludwig, as a joke, and when she got far enough along that we found out it was indeed a boy, she thought the name was fitting, cute even. Lucy is the musician.

I [...]

Sunshine LeMontree

With Her Light Off

There is a small space between her being alone and her working where she stores up small talk. Sometimes walking from her apartment to the grocers, she will let it loose a little—a hello for the Arabian man who works the news kiosk, a no thank you [...]

Burnt Filament

UNDER THE BUZZ OF FLUORESCENCE AT THE VERMILLION SERVICE PLAZA
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A bowlegged guy with bloodshot eyes stands two urinals
away in scuffed Frye boots, a black ball cap, a cell phone

tucked between his shoulder and cheek.
It’s 8 a.m. He smells of sweat and whiskey.

So, I’m eating my fries when [...]

James Merenda

—and my burden is light

Ode to my Corrective Footwear

It is bent bow-like, a wooden plank
linking two out-turned baby shoes,
a way to find my feet,
a degausser, silencing the magnetism
of my toes towards each other,
heels kicked out like desolate city gates,
two slotted bullets bolting each shoe
to the thing that meant Walk,
the [...]

Robin Lee Mozer

What I Would Have Said to My Sister When She Was 16 and I Was 23

There are People In My House I Don’t Know and I am Drunk and they are Drunk and I hope no one falls off the front porch roof because we have No Railing except the [...]

Michelle Nichols

Gums

Gums moved to town with her gorgeous mother and sister to live with a grandmother, an unattractive woman of Gums’ type though with prominent features all her own.   The old woman’s problem was the opposite of Gums—she had large yellowed teeth that bucked over her lips even when she [...]

Jen Percy

The Eskimo and I

The Eskimos of Brazil are causing problems. They must have felt their bones were too dense for the air, their skin too thick, because one night they visited the Puerto Alegre Zoo with swords of carved bone and lifted the only polar bear in Brazil from his [...]

Jeffrey Pethybridge

Two Consecutive Pages In A Notebook
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3:00 AM.

After daylong labor.

For restoration of his powers and to process the day’s complexities.

The Sleeper elaborates.

His breath’s rhythm, the breathing of those sleeping next to him.

The memories swimming through their separate persons.

The house’s dark and temperature.

Into the stuff of dreams.

‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”‘”

Most of [...]

Andrea Scarpino

Etymology of Goodbye

To say farewell to you—

fare well as you make

your way from who you are

to who you used to be,

fare, a passage for which

a price is paid. Bon voyage,

good travel, travel safe.

To say goodbye, adieu,

adios, God be with you

wherever your atoms realign.

Leave-taking what you leave

behind, closets empty

of your [...]

Isabell Serafin

What I Have Been Doing Since I Was Last with You
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I have been married. I have been divorced. I have been pregnant, since I was last with you.

I have sat on the banks of Hoan Kiem Lake in the afternoon–the lake in Hanoi’s Old Quarter, whose waters [...]

Gregory Sherl

No to the girl with the gun

In some of the pictures you’re pretty sometimes. When your hair is a half moon I want to sleep in your crippled heart, bend in my underwear while you take pictures of me smiling. Call me disheveled skin. Call me your oldest bookshelf. Baby, [...]

Valerie Suffron

Desire

It so happened that we took a class together on the poetics of desire. The professor gave us our first reading assignment, the poem Kubla Khan. He asked us each to develop a perspective on the matter of desire in the poem. He suggested we read the poem somewhere unexpected. [...]

Brendan Todt

Passing Invisible Fence in Winter

You are a smart girl
who waits

for the rustling bags,
the black gloves,
and the key

hanging from my mouth
as I lock you into

the long elastic leash.
Ahead of us: the squirrel
I hold you

back from; the strong men
shoveling snow; the lone
widow; and dogs

in fences you approach
and dismiss.   You,
who are learning [...]

Michelle Valois

Casualties

After the revolution, she sews a new flag.   Her young lover teases that with needle and thread she looks the picture of femininity.   They smile and drink bitter coffee.

The tree was her lover’s idea, who insisted on many small fruit to symbolize that one thing alone will not [...]