By Amy DeBellis
I used to pin butterflies to corkboards: arresting flight, staying beauty. “At least you waited until they were dead,” a college boyfriend remarked, eyebrows raised. I mumbled something about Nabokov, but really the butterflies were just a symptom.
By Gina Martucci
Everyone knows the first seat on a plane is a throne. Ass space for miles. A footrest to ensure your feet are never dirtied by the floor. The sterility of the whites and grays of the trays, pillows, and headrests clinical and clean, but none of it makes you think about dying.
By Margaret Camille Berliant
Step One: Choose a large apple that’s firm, fleshy and plump.
Walter walked through the grove, the thinning sunlight filtered between the apple trees: Macintosh, Honeycrisp, Fuji, Gala.
By Brigid M. Hughes
This kind of shit really isn’t allowed anymore but we’re loving it. She’s hammered and dancing in the middle of the dorm room, long brown hair, black eyeliner, one tit kinda hanging out, a perky pink nipple like the cherry on a sundae.
By Christine H. Chen
It all began with the empty bucket in a corner of the living room that collected the occasional water dripping from the ceiling when Ah Ma was showering on a chair in the bathtub upstairs even though I had suggested that she simply took a bath
By Keith Woodruff
Monday
dear 9535 hey, you look pretty badass out there. Weathering this weather. I am one of those people who can’t get warm in winter.
By Rachel Smith
The C spine snakes upwards; from its mouth lines of blue and red and mustard yellow. Blue for veins, red for arteries, and yellow where the spinal cord merges into brainstem.
By Gary Fincke
My thirteen-year-old daughter Olivia and I drove out the strip tonight for dinner like we do every week on Wednesday when I have her.
By Pam Avoledo
A glass slipper is found in a closet, you:
a) Start to sing with the birds.The bluejay tells you it has traveled from a park in Canada. Have you been to Canada, it asks, and you say only once.
By Sarp Sozdinler
Mama got cancer. Bummer. I’m eleven, going on twelve. Making shit of my time. Time is still a friend to me but an enemy to my mother. It’s because I grew up too fast, she tells me, and I can’t tell if she’s joking. It’s because your sun is in Cancer.
By Elizabeth Ohga
The pair of jeans that’s never fit, too wasteful to toss it even though you know you’ll never wear it, like all those friends you exchange thumbs and hearts with on social…
By Michael Czyzniejewski
I wish I’d known you were coming over so I was prepared, but you’re here now and all I have is three swigs of gin from the bottle hiding in my freezer and those chamomile tea packets I stole from the AA meeting I crashed last Tuesday…
By Scott Bolendz
I shove open the front door, push past my dick-head brother-in-law. “I want my sister.”
By Lorette C. Luzajic
It was a chintzy dollar-store tiara, but this queen shone with inner beauty and galactic light.
By Claudia Monpere
We feed it raw chicken three times a day, but it is never enough. The fence is always changing.
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.”