Brandon McNeice
We had planned for this. In our pockets: sunflower, cosmos, zinnia, marigold. Milkweed fluff, Kiki said her grandmother called silk. The seeds came from wherever kids get things—bodega packets, porch planters, the torn corner of a springtime display.
Ann Yuan
I meet my future husband on the eve of the Lunar New Year. A forty-seven-year-old Beijing native: a decent job, two apartments, recently divorced, and seeking a stepmother for his preteen son—my auntie posted only this much in the family WeChat group.
Phyllis Rittner
In the office kitchen, all lashes and cheekbones, gift-wrapped cozy in your cashmere sweater, peeling an orange like a surgeon, sectioning each sliver, the way you segment our time, a juicy burst here and there, little pink hearts dotting your calendar.
Toshiya Kamei
The phone call had come that morning. Etsuko’s sister-in-law, Akiko, her voice thin and stretched tight as a wire. “Kenji passed,” she’d said, no preamble, no softening.
Holly Lyn Walrath
“You lie in the grass and let ants crawl all over you. You lie so perfectly still that they start to think you’re just another part of the landscape—a rock, a log, a statue.”
By Victor D Sandiego
“All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence.”
By Sage Tyrtle
“My whole big self stumbles into a woman in a baseball hat who mutters fat bitch and I open my mouth to say I’m pregnant, as if she’s right to say it.”
By Sarah Lynn Hurd
“We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter.”
By Ashleigh Adams
“That June, I stole a red-and-black checkered flannel from my stepdad and frayed the hem with kitchen shears.”
By Carla Bessa
Translated by Elton Uliana
“all I know is that I have to run. that’s the premise of my being-in-the-world: running, that’s how I’m programmed.”
By Chelsea Stickle
“After my mother’s skin cancer diagnosis, I was bullied by my older sister Sally into scheduling a ‘skin test,’ which is what they call it when you strip in a cold room and show a stranger every part of your body.”
By Rebecca Tiger
“A woman swims up to me in the clear blue-green Aegean. We agree that the water is beautiful.”
By Andrea Marcusa
“You will see your mother’s number calling and a strange cardboard voice will strike your ear with She’s passed, and you’ll hang onto your mind, save it from falling into dead air, fingers squeezing the life out of the phone…”
By Matthew Jakubowski
“I later learned people had a lot of opinions about the kind of people we were, and our so-called lifestyles, a word they thought was so vaguely clever. “
By Karen Schauber
“I ram down hard on the pedal driving the blue metallic mustang around the bend, careening headlong into a future without You. A year of joust and weave, submerge and abandon.”
By Mathieu Parsy
“It starts with a tearing—quiet at first, like silk splitting in the dark—and then the howl builds in your spine, in your teeth, in the wet hinge of your jaw.”
By Sophie Isham
“We stare at each other. Both have long limbs; both find pleasure near the shore of the lake. A few turtles on a log soak in the sunlight between us. I admire her balance, how she can hold herself up on just one leg. She’s beautiful.”
By Khouri L.F
“She asked where I was from. I said Chicago. She said, no, like really. I said Palestine.”
By Mizuki Yamagen
“I know your order by scent before I see you—lilies, always lilies, that quiet kind of white, the kind used for altars, for memorials, for weddings when people still believed in vows holding through worse.”
By Benjamin Drevlow
“When we spread my brother’s ashes in the apple orchard just below the barn, they never blew back in our face and made us sneeze…”
By Benjamin Drevlow
“Today at the zoo, someone has posted a video of a polar bear playing with a cow out swimming.”
By Brett Biebel
“Sometimes, I read the news, which is always a fucking mistake, because that day I saw something about federal death row in Terre Haute, Indiana.”
By Marcus Silcock
“The detective scans the tree. Jacaranda sticks to her sandals. Yes, you guessed it. It’s that time. The time of flowers. The fiesta of flowers.”
By Kathryn Kulpa
“It’s August, Saturday, and we’re tired of summer. Watching Creature Double Feature on Channel 56. Me and Danny and Angie.”
By Sarp Sozdinler
“I lift my mother’s urn high to show her the places she’d never seen inside the house when she was alive.”
By Sarp Sozdinler
“Basking in a carnival that never folds its tents. In this vision, dogs wear monocles and deliver telegrams scented with lavender and loss.”
By Jeff Harvey
“After watching The Gong Show, my younger sister and I enjoyed popsicles made from cherry Kool-Aid that were frozen in a plastic tray Mom received for hosting a Stanley Products home party where she spent twelve dollars on snacks and didn’t make any sales.”
By Ryan Griffith
“Kafka is born. You can trace his origins back to smoke, the stillness of staircases, the pallid sleep of bloodless dreamers.”
By Pegah Ouji
“When Fatimah tugs at the peeling bark of a one-hundred-year-old eucalyptus tree, one jagged edge pierces her supple thumb, one drop of blood, red and round as Tehran’s setting sun streaking the sky red
By Angela Townsend
“I have not seen that man in a number of years. I wonder if he is still in the crawlspace of his bi-level, with the wind report in one hand and the edicts of AccuWeather in the other. All he wanted was a fair fight with the flukes of Barnegat Bay. You can fish in the rain.”