By Tommy Dean
“Look, I know I shouldn’t be looking, but the city heat has me out on the streets, the dusty air pushed between buildings by gliding cars, windows open, soft music orchestrating their growling engines down the road, bumper to bumper, red lights sending messages to the twinkling skies, exhorting their ownership over the land.”
By Kathryn Kulpa
“Summer. Night. Your hair smells of OFF! The flat pillow smells of OFF!, the damp sheets. Still they sneak in. The buzz. The whine. The slap. Gagging a little when you see the curl of black legs, the smear of blood.”
By Barbara Diggs
“You saw your lil friends drown in a whirlpool of white, one by one, or sometimes one by two like when Tay-Tay got shot during a pickup and the bullet passed through his neck and hit Raymond in the shoulder as he was running away.”
By Lisa Alexander Baron
“His questions and routines were now devoid of any impressions, substance, or the least bit of meaningful weight. His every word, every gesture—all too easy to ignore. Like a wet paper towel. A wrapper from a peppermint candy, minus the mint scent.”
By Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch
“Their names in lights, bright as their burning bodies, in the 1800s, ballet dancers often went up in flames. Gauzy tutus brushed flickering lamps, a pirouette of torched limbs, and incandescent hair.”
By Lindsey
“When you return to university, to that house that sits on the hill, you resume the painful life you left behind in the spring.”
By Mikki Aronoff
“First a whoosh like a runaway locomotive. Silver minnows fell from the sky. Windows feathered, fell onto shifting sidewalks. Buildings tumbled, entombing the townspeople.”
By Catherine Roberts
“Are you sure you’re okay? Are those glitchy hexagons gathering in the edges of your eyes? Faces you’ve never seen but somehow know skimming the middle? Have you ever loved? Will you?”
By L. Acadia
“I watch a soul leave the fresh insect corpse in an unfurling black twitch, stiff like coarse hair slowly twisted from both ends. It is constrained until it flaps free of the mantis, shiny segments recoiling. Gathering. Seeking.”
By Kathryn Silver-Hajo
“When some boy snaps your bra strap or comments on your figure, brush it off like a fly tickling your eye. Laugh, even go hobnob with your girlfriends. Teasing just means they like you.”
By Claudia Monpere
“She wants to want again: the smell of rain on warm asphalt, the feel of granite threaded with glittering mica. She wants to know about ripples not cracks.”
By Claudia Monpere
“The debris is mostly cleared, but this land is a black ulcer. I walk around my acres, dark skeletons of madrones, pines. I walk to the fairy ring of redwoods where my son and I made elf houses and at night cuddled in blankets drinking hot chocolate.”
By Jamy Bond
“When you take another man’s heart you take his history too: his longing, love and loss.”
By Luanne Castle
“And though you were hungry for him to change his mind, he didn’t because he never did. At the door, when he set down his attaché case to hug you goodbye, you cried out, “Daddy, ants!” And still he raised his briefcase and walked out that door.”
By L Mari Harris
“Practice smiling in the mirror. Run a comb through your hair, rub a little toothpaste along your gums. The table is set when the front door opens again. Answer of course when asked if you had a good day.”
By JWGoll
“I sanitize thirty-thousand-gallon stainless steel tanks with acid solution, then alkali, then steam. My colleagues say be careful, any one of them can eat the skin off a man’s face. My landlord and at least two of the women in the building look like they could do the same.
By L. Soviero
“The dead man remembers the warm sheets from the dryer in winter, the velvety softness of the fur behind his dog’s ear, the calluses in the wood floor against the ones on his feet.”
By Jace Brittain
“When pinball was illegal, there, still, still. 1970, 1971. All five of us juniors under Arts and Letters, various: Classics, Mathematics, History, History, Theology. Sundays, we’d slip across the border from South Bend, Indiana for a cold beer.”
By Pete Prokesch
“I never liked Ramon. I felt like he knew all the winners. And the lucky ones weren’t for me.”
By Louella Lester
“It’s your nature, you must go, is what I tell my Canada Goose when summer heat sends him north or winter winds pull him south.”
By Laton Carter
“Somebody is always settling the score. On the terrace, before and after dinner—drinks, the air rich with assignation.”
By Michael Tyler
“She used to skinny dip in the ocean, her swimsuit at water’s edge. I would keep my shorts on and earn her daily jibes.”
By Lorette C. Luzajic
“I did everything they told me, but still, I got smaller. And everything hurt, even the sunlight on my skin. I didn’t tell anyone what was going on in inside of me, how lonely it felt to know you were going to die when you were just a colt yourself.”
By Noah Leventhal
“you are drunk. everyone is loud. the man who smells like burning sage and leather has been following you around the party. you have been longing for a quiet place to fold into.”
By Tiff M. Z. Lee
“When the tide is low, it reminds me of our honeymoon—holding hands as we balance on rocky islands emerging from the sea, hair wavy with salt spray, feeling lucky to be here.”
By Brendan Todt
“Sarah takes her niece and nephew to the trampoline park and for thirty-six minutes mistakes another boy in a blue tee and shorts for her nephew, who suddenly appears behind her to ask for money for a slushie, which she gives him.”
By Angeline Schellenberg
“She keeps close to the courtyard window she came through, her ears tuned to nurses’ flats slapping down the hallway. Her brother’s shaky hand reaches across the tray for a water glass.”
By Annette Gulati
“She never sees her ailing mother. She only listens to her on the telephone, rattling on about the dialysis treatments, the trips to the emergency room, the stabbing pain in her abdomen. Likely the cancer.”
By Annette Gulati
“She’s six years old when she sees her cat dangling from her father’s hands in the open doorway of her bedroom, a circus act in her very own hallway.”
By Tara Isabel Zambrano
“we took off our PJs, and became the afternoon—our earlobes and neck, our limbs and nails turning pink from the syringe of the sun, asphalt gritting our feet, downstairs our mothers calling our names circled red with curses…”