Wild Honey by Andrew Brininstool

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Where I live now the churches rival shopping malls in square-footage and parking. The pastor’s are all shellac and glean, with wives made-up as if ready for burial. They don’t speak much of hell or Satan anymore, not even the Baptists. There’s no money in it. I [...]

Up and Away by Blake Kimzey

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The boy never made the cover of the black and white tabloids at the supermarket even though he learned to fly before he hit puberty. The curve in his back was subtle, but it was there and microfiche suggests he was born with a partial exoskeleton, what [...]

Three Poems by Wendy Xu

Where the Hero Contemplates Forgiveness
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Before you there was your father who carried a hammer
& fixed things. Each night like a dark broom swept him

into bed & he dreamed of you, a slowly focusing photograph
of messy hair settled atop a red tricycle,

two buck teeth in dinosaur pajamas you [...]

So Much Rain by Tessa Mellas

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Butternut says if houses wore dresses, ours would have to lift up its skirt so rain wouldn’t soak into its ruffles. Cupcake says if our house’s joists were legs, the water would be past her knees. Puddleduck says by tomorrow the waves will splash up on our [...]

Two Poems by Suzanne Marie Hopcroft

IF JANE HAD BEEN A RENEGADE
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Lizzy let’s run I know you’re
tired to tears of girdles for your hip-
flesh and mind-curves of buttoning
down your mouth to stanch the
bleeding out of rich verbal
life which you instead
replace with that
rosebud likeness all farce and
no face you’re getting to be so

yes [...]

Five Poems by Thomas Patrick Levy

MY THROAT IS FULL
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And there are days when I can’t even speak. You see my throat is a second heart. You see my throat is full of cotton balls. My bloody cotton balls on the bathroom floor. My dim heart as a mess of paint. My heart [...]

Five Poems by Kit Frick

THE LAST ASTRAL ECHO
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Through the car roof comes the last astral echo of our love. We sit side by side, seatbelts still fastened, chins tilted up to the place where a minute ago there was no moon roof. The whole sky, made visible now through the roof’s [...]

Two Poems by Tess Patalano

Serial Killers’ Grocery Lists
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I.

Fred

Fred is currently in the cooling off period between his murders.  Fred was a good student at Fairmount High School, in Wyoming, and was active in a local church, serving as Vice President of the Youth Fellowship. He believes he has cured himself of [...]

Wave and Particle by Regina Marshall

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Attending on the pier Vera feels swells coming to the pier coming in comes rolling forwarding moving on the inward motion as they come one then come the next and come and again.  Vera can’t push back the coming tide water coming forward as she waits waiting [...]

What is a Gun? by Tyler Sage

There is a story my father tells about his father. This was in Wyoming, on the ranch. They had spent the summer together, building a cabin at the mouth of a small canyon; one night sometime after this my grandfather was in that cabin and he heard a noise. He [...]

Two Poems by John McKernan

I ALWAYS THOUGHT

Cinderella
Was a real story

I thought
She lived in Lincoln
And that I would meet her Later in college

I knew her mom
Daylight
And her sisters
Tick & Tock

I didn’t have to convince her
To go swimming with me
In the Missouri in January
I couldn’t She would always
Say [...]

How to Be a Better Girl by Aimee Vitrak

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If I get a pair of name-brand jeans my life in the seventh grade will really mean something. I won’t be just plain old Samantha Sievers with generic jeans and K-mart tennis shoes. And I don’t want no Hunt Club jeans, either. If my jeans are going [...]

The Paris Times by Brandy Wilson

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My mother had sent me the newspaper clipping all the way from Paris, Texas, and I read it that very day. My picture was beside it, almost as big as life.  It was my high school senior picture taken in May of ’62, just a few months [...]

After Me Comes the Flood by Kirstin Chen

It started with a drop. From ceiling vent to bathroom floor. Drops so sporadic, neither of them noticed. When Will went to take a piss, he thought the puddle by the blue bathmat was a wet footprint that one of them had left getting out of the shower.

Only when a [...]

Oh, Dr. Brown by Aimee Pogson

He startles my body in ways I didn’t know it could be startled.  Drinks of water, vinegar, and cayenne pepper make my stomach turn, leave me light-headed and chilled.  Before I leave he feeds me tiny chocolate bars, laced with lavender and salt.

I am cleansing, or so he tells me.  [...]

Narcotic Winter by Danielle Shutt

The snow under the porchlight, the sight
a slow burn. The boy lies in the snow
like an angel in cocaine, a slain angel
put to sleep by too much
white. The boy under the porchlight, he
is waving his wide wings. Do not look
at the snow or step on the angel. Light
like a match, [...]

Four Poems by Shira Richman

Wax Landscape

Ten years seems long to wait for coffee
with you. Strollers line the front of the café,
evidence of parents. If you are part
of the bustle inside I won’t know.
The window is fogged like encaustic,
the reds, oranges, and pinks must be
t-shirts, yoga pants, tennis shoes,
sprays and wads of hair bob over [...]

The Muffin Stand by Teresa Milbrodt

What you need is to return to that day twenty-something years ago and kick the fat guy out of your mom’s living room.  That morning she set up a table for you along the curb in front of your house with two dozen blueberry muffins so you could have a [...]

The Cloud Factory by Court Merrigan

Jimmy brought nothing but a duffel bag.  He strapped the bag in the bed of my decrepit Chevy.

“My last ride,” he said climbing in the cab.  “You’re riding home alone, Gary.”

“You serious?” I said.

“As a house fire.  Take me to the bus depot.”

I pulled away from the dirt alley onto [...]

This Is All the Orientation You Are Gonna Get by John Jodzio

Tell your customers they have pretty hands, even if they don’t, especially if they don’t.  Good breath means good tips.  If you get sad, go into the break room and stick your head in the pickle bucket filled with the Mexican nail polish and you’ll get happy real quick.

Some of [...]

What Gabby Likes by Ian Golding

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Gabby likes celebrity gossip magazines and the faint gurgling noise that a person makes when they’re getting choked with a garrote wire. She isn’t sure if it is saliva or blood pooling in the back of the throat or the tongue wriggling frantically for one last breathe, [...]

Scantily Clad Submissive Women by Stefanie Freele

It is the end of the summer for goddesses. Cal, gray-bearded, Hawaiian-shirted, counts thirty-seven bikini bottoms, thirty-three tiny tops, fourteen perfect midriffs, twelve enchanting sets of hips, two pairs of graceful hands – the kind that can do numbers, and one supernatural mane sent from above.

Because I’m his sister, I’m [...]

Units of Measurement by Saehee Cho

I have been saving my hair in Ziploc bags, labeling in precise script the numeration of days: March 12, March 13, March 14.  Measuring the loss, measuring myself as loss.  There is something enormously pleasing about seeing myself, gathered, documented, consolidated–something so bodily in something so wonderfully plastic.

Taking a shower [...]

Two Poems by Corinna Bain

The Invention of Terrorism

Just as easy to design it without windows
Just as easy to say instead of a floor, a sea of tongues.
Just as easy to give up the ghost of pleasure that’s been haunting the body.
Easy to forget what the purpose of the tool, forget intention.
Wrench. Vise. Tire iron. [...]