Roberto Rodriguez-Estrada
On Friday she decided to risk the blessing of her mother’s beating. Left the washing on the clothesline out back despite the rain. She knew well what was coming, her retribution: her mother’s handprint on her cheek, bruises stamped round her throat, welts branded on her thighs.
We flee from the ordinary; yet from the ordinary we come. We seek comfort in the brilliant lights without, but no refuge will we find there. Instead, we must shine from within, and face the electric truth: that the true haven is the private, pervasive sanctuary of our ordinary existence, the burdens of which we can share with each other, and the wisdom of which we can gift to ourselves
Mia Ayumi Malhotra
X days
I’ve come unmoored from the hours. I crawl into pockets of time where there is none, lose a string of days without noticing. The weeks disappear like a dropped stitch.
Elizabeth Spires
i.
i left the capital hurrying away i carried nothing
a dark night before me a dark dark night
but when morning came i stood free & alone
casting a seven-league shadow west
Elizabeth Spires
You stand so straight and tall
and from afar you could be
a column, but up close I can’t tell
how tall you are. I run my hands
Adam Clay
Nothing much to speak of: they grow
Away from each other, not like this action
Should be seen as less of an existence.
Order in everything,
Adam Clay
A touch of madness mixed
With the news
& this moment feels like the new
Normal, the new slice
Thomas March
Mary Agnes would watch
my uncle and my dad
while their parents were down
at the tavern, drinking.
Thomas March
Because she never went
outside, and no one knew
whether she’d had her shots;
because the officers
Martina Reisz Newberry
Once, when I owned my years,
I walked with my friend up a dirt road
that ended at a falling-down house where
two children sat on a slivered porch step.
July Westhale
You left the door agape as a mouth, met me
in the middle of the road. Car red
as a throat, your hair on my tongue, your breasts
on my breasts—I hardly cry, but your body
July Westhale
We all feel like magical realism.
As if we may ascend, like Remedios Moscote.
Maybe we haven’t fathers to show us something pedestrian,
like ice. Nor the trajectory of a firing squad. We at least
Amitai Ben-Abba
I found the psychiatrist via my health insurance company. The clinic was underground. Dystopian, really. A white, fluorescent light made me feel even crazier than what I had hoped for. I think he was called Dr. Hofstatter.
Rob McClure Smith
”It’s raining diamonds on Uranus right now.” Julia smirks, staring rapt at her phone in that irritating way she does. She has the sense of humor of a ten-year-old boy.
Silver Damsen
Rachel’s curly reddish-brown hair bounced in slow motion as she explained the unfairness of her parents’ insisting that she NOT come out as lesbian to her grandmother, who was over ninety, dying, and thought computers a fad—that was when she remembered they existed at all.
Molly Yingling
He could be handsome but for the tooth. The shriveled front tooth that juts from his mouth: gray, dead, but stubbornly suctioned to his gums. It makes his grins menacing; grimaces.
Brooks Sterritt
The building’s facade was smooth concrete, giving it a bunker-like appearance, though oddly topped with an ornate cornice. Its function was announced in neon: “RUSSIAN, TURKISH, SAUNA, BANYA, TANNING, DAY SPA, MASSAGE.”
Dia Felix
I woke up with my wig on, well, wait, no, I, woke up with a social panic and an itchy head, soon thereafter diagnosed myself: WIG. Well, you know you shouldn’t look at yourself in the mirror, anyway, dumb stupid head, bloated pumpkin, but especially now, but look I have to, to see what’s up with my head, I need more information, the information oh my god, hahaha.
Lise Gauvin
Translated by Aliya Esmail
Eight O’clock
Just a few details distinguish this building from the rest of them. A slightly wider facade, shutterless windows decorated with a white trim give it a bourgeois air in a street otherwise noted for its motley appearance.
Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Robert Croll
IN THE BAR
Alife is not divided into chapters, Emilio Renzi said to the bartender of El Cervatillo that afternoon, leaning on the bar, standing before the mirror and the bottles of whiskey, vodka, and tequila lined up on the shelves.
Miguel Barnet
Translated by George Henson
The sky at this hour melts into the ocean. The egrets are dark specks against the backdrop. A single blinking yellow beacon lights up the rocky strip along the malecón.
Joanna Ruocco
Four years ago, I was released from a long hiatus in my life and moved to the city nearest the town where I was born. I found old friends who shared an apartment, and I asked if I could sleep on their couch until I found a place of my own.