By Lorette C. Luzajic
It was a chintzy dollar-store tiara, but this queen shone with inner beauty and galactic light.
Love and Light
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The Fence is Always Hungry
By Claudia Monpere
We feed it raw chicken three times a day, but it is never enough. The fence is always changing.
Detention Seeds
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.
Squirrel Fish
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.
Girl Crushed – 1985
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.
Two Funerals
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.
The Ants
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.”
A Highway of Whispered Rain
By Victor D Sandiego
“All the dead truckers from the pileup on the highway gathered around the afterlife elm to proclaim their retroactive innocence.”
A List of the Reasons Women Feel Shame
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.”
We Were Just Girls
By Sarah Lynn Hurd
“We never meant any harm. We were just girls, picking at our nail polish—pink, and teal, and silver glitter.”
The Summer After Kurt Cobain Died
By Ashleigh Adams
“That June, I stole a red-and-black checkered flannel from my stepdad and frayed the hem with kitchen shears.”
don’t ask what any of this means
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.”
We’re All Bananas
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.”
Subjective Condition
By Rebecca Tiger
“A woman swims up to me in the clear blue-green Aegean. We agree that the water is beautiful.”
The Things You Will Do
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…”
Libation
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. “
Sparrowhawk
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.”
Your Body Is a Wolf
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.”
My Friend, the Heron
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.”
The Lemon Trees Don’t Care You’re Sexy (But I Do)
By Khouri L.F
“She asked where I was from. I said Chicago. She said, no, like really. I said Palestine.”
A Weekly Arrangement
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.”
That Scene From Every Movie Where the Dead Person Gets Cremated
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…”
Today at the Zoo
By Benjamin Drevlow
“Today at the zoo, someone has posted a video of a polar bear playing with a cow out swimming.”
Anthem
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.”
Chalk Talk
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.”
I Don’t Like Anybody
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.”
Ash Wednesday
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.”
The Carnival of Accidental Heroes
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.”
The Longest Day of the Year
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.”
The Abbreviated Kafka
By Ryan Griffith
“Kafka is born. You can trace his origins back to smoke, the stillness of staircases, the pallid sleep of bloodless dreamers.”