Rae Bryant

Emperatriz de la Orilla del Río or  Empress of the Riverbank

She lies on cerulean silk, arms and legs undulating in fleshy waves over the bedcover as if pushing and pulling deep-earth water, a silk and mesquite cenote beneath a canopy of gauze. A breeze washes in from the window. [...]

Alan Stewart Carl

The Nameless

Sweat falls from our noses, an ablution for the ink on the page. Confessions we smear with fingers blackened and bitten.

“Start again,” the huntsman says and spreads new paper across the endless table, a hundred of us lined in naked silence. Chained. Blistered with the silver of other men’s [...]

Kristina Marie Darling

Notes to a History of the Locket

She describes only the Norwegian variety, forgetting the French. Their intricate clasps and long silver chains.

*

Again the milky-eyed beloved.   Her sense of etiquette revealing itself as innate, machine-like.   Would compare her heart to a the inside of a clock.   Its radium [...]

TFD

Nightmare Directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder

They sang before bringing all the waste to shore. Perhaps I am a loony on the balcony, contain irresponsible trophies in my den. I will dance outside the lone barn with cherry soda, bust into the beaded door. Counting my steps is essential, they are [...]

Sean Doyle

Leticia

She comes home from work to find that her cat has died.

Unlike most cats, her cat has died in the middle of the kitchen floor. Quietly, she crouches down beside it, tilting her head to the side as she looks across the surface of the cat’s belly to see [...]

Noah Falck

CINCINNATI

for Mike Ostendorf
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Drink a bottle of Tequila in the dining room. Expand internally. She’ll leave lipstick on the earthy portion of your cheek; lick your nostrils in multiples of four. Allow the wetness to harden. Then undress her slowly in a room fumbling with [...]

Raina Lauren Fields

Evening

Plastic bags rustled as if they were trying to open something
in each other. I expected her worn sigh, her evening
embrace, the whir of the refrigerator when she placed milk on
its top shelf. That night, I heard her rough cough, the flat
sound that the couch made when she sat. Soon, she [...]

Nate Innomi

Drive-thru

This week, Andrea had syphilis.   She was busy wiping her dripping nose (acute sinusitis) onto the back of her hand when she heard the familiar choking of an approaching car over her headset.

“Hello and welcome to Mc Chubby’s, would you like to try a value . . . ”

“No, [...]

Jeffrey Carl Jefferis

Cool Steve

Cool Steve had hair that intimidated even the most ferocious of combs. His hands were impossibly ordinary. His teeth straight and malnourished.

He stood six feet and one-half inch tall. And he could be heard boasting daily how that last one-half inch was the difference between him [...]

Joe Kapitan

A Sort of Theology

Gunny does better with his legs removed.   He stands them up in front of him, on the corner of 12th and Prospect, and against them props the cardboard sign that reads Please Help a Vet.   With prostheses on, he’s a bum; with them detached, a [...]

Annam Manthiram

Superheroes
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Superheroes are not Indian.   They don’t drown in seven yards of fabric or keep their privates cool with man skirts.   Their muscles are predestined, like neglect in a nursing home, so they don’t go to the gym.   They don’t have to distress over MRSA, [...]

Lacey Martinez

Birth Defect
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My baby is born with six fingers on each hand. They’re just little nubs of skin next to the pinkies, but no hay duda they’re fingers. The doctor says the birth defect is very common, and besides the extra fingers, Ernesto is totally normal. I’m not [...]

Hannah Miet

In our wedding vows, I’d beg
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that you withhold your scorn
when I throw up the contents
of our dinner on the rug
and close my eyes, to hide
from your reaction.

I’d ask for the volume
switch on the world,
and you’d hum
in my ear
when it got too quiet.

We’d vibrate.
I’d read The New Yorker [...]

Karen Munro

Karen’s piece is being presented as a PDF so as to preserve the work’s original intent and your reading experience.

Sherry O’Keefe

This Was Supposed to Be About Karl, But It Didn’t End Up That Way
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His name was Pompey but he was not the original one.
This one was tender about old swords but serious
when it came to storing the same sixpence
in his pocket from the trousers he wore before.
If [...]

Daniela Olszewska

you look sensational; you look barely related to me

we used, i think
to share a pawnshop-
owning uncle with a pacemaker
and a brain
wet with rural
afterhours. a barnraising
tempo nudged
through the late
part of our chronic october.
disoriented, i restocked
the terrain with less
toxic squirrels
while you salvaged
the hubcaps
from the caddy
colored like
the insides
of a veterans’ association.
o boy [...]

Shannon Peil

Sam

Sam left her apartment early in the morning despite being ill-prepared. She had brought her bag, but forgotten her phone on the charger and wore some shoes that she probably shouldn’t have. They were comfortable but not well suited to the rain. Sam walked past the corner store, past the [...]

Shanti Perez

Krsto the Little Spy

One sunny afternoon in 1986 on the outskirts of the village Baranda near Belgrade, Krsto spied on his stepmother as she salved her legs after stepping out of the claw foot tub. She peered at the open window inquisitively, as if sensing an intruder; the radio on [...]

Suzanne Rindell

The Beautiful Italian

My boss was married to a beautiful Italian man.   They had gotten married, she said, so that he could stay in the country and work legally.   It was strictly business.   His name was Leo, and she was always careful to pronounce it Lay-Oh, not Lee-oh. [...]

Merritt Tierce

I’m Too Short to Ride This Ride
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K stands for Kavanagh and Kay, which are the respective first and last names of my only remaining offline friend or acquaintance. Even my grandmother, who gave birth to two children before the transistor was invented, has an AOL account. My [...]

Lydia Unsworth

Sometimes They Hang Perpendicularly Like Bats, Blowholes to the Surface

0.

The sea is nothing special; it is like the land only a little more difficult to imagine.   The waves are nothing special; they are like the wind only a little easier to see.

1.

We slide along the surfaces of our boats, [...]