By S.D. Lishan
Prelude:
Ah, here we are, wild puppy eyed in the far flung of us.
Like the others, I, too, fling me sad-eared to the one we talk to,
And asked for a healing wind in the once of my needs.
“Let me have a week, just one, of true-work,
By Janice Worthen
We approach things at angles
because a direct approach is an insult.
An ear is a temple,
anger a bird pulling out its own feathers
on a branch consumed by fire,
By Mark Jackley
Your silence and then the mild remark
about the weather brought to mind
how people close a door sometimes
using two hands —
one to carefully turn the knob,
By Mark Jackley
No one but the bee,
and maybe not even him,
knows where he is going
as he zips, loops,
pauses to catch his breath.
By Darren C. Demaree
If this were an orchard
how lovely it would be
if Emily fell from a tree
as the mangos fall, roll
By Darren C. Demaree
If this were an orchard
how lovely it would be
if Emily fell from a tree
as the mangos fall, roll
By Elena Botts
she said,
are you happy. i don’t know that’s the sort of dream
i haven’t yet woken from.
and i said, do the cows in the pasture, do they pray
like we pray.
and i said, when i walk in the cold
By Arielle Greenberg
I really want you the dad I’m babysitting for
to fuck me or rather to want to
bringing me home in your turquoise sports car
babysitting dad will you get me in trouble
give me a story I can tell an afterschool special
By Arielle Greenberg
, the day of Phobias.
Children born on this day will be ugly & die.
You say three years can swallow one moment of a mother
throwing herself against a wall.
I don’t know. I have my doubts,
Abeer Hoque is a Nigerian-born Bangladeshi writer and photographer.
Her coffee table book of travel photographs and poems, The Long Way Home, came out in 2013. See more at olivewitch.com.
By Will Alexander
I am thinking of the ongoing condition of the human species, always signaling to itself what can be considered cellular malapropism. Which means history is a slippage into cul-de-sacs, and general behavioral dyslexia, carrying in itself burdensome seeds, existentially incapable of advancing itself beyond its continuing foment, incapable of extracting itself from the power of gross ruination.
By Will Alexander
The Greek summation grounded its motives in stricken insurrectional dice. Someone the stature of Sun Ra threw them, and could not be stricken or dissolved by such institutional lessening, by such case-by-case squaring.
By Josey Foo
By Rich Ives
I was having trouble remembering where I had parked the car, and then I was remembering how I had been thinking when I parked it that putting the baby in the baby seat was like parking the baby.
By Laurie Blauner
Iwas my hollow self, hands clutched around my arterial neck, squeezing spasmodically. I was tired of all those deadly little assignments. I was taking my time, taking too long for my children, who fervently believed I was already too old.
By Mary Burger
Prologue
Everybody readily accepted that no one had the same idea of ‘red.’ When different people looked, they saw different things. Colors were for when words couldn’t do the job. By extension this was true for everything that everybody looked at.
By Katy Masuga
I found out yesterday that a friend from high school died. She had two little kids. Two years ago she found a lump in her abdomen. They removed a twenty-pound tumor and a kidney. Said she didn’t need chemo but needed regular check-ups.
By Han Ong
There are 315 rooms in the Dream Hotel. I wouldn’t be able to verify that, I’m only repeating what the manager spouted on one of my training days. I have charge of a fraction of that, mainly floors seven and eight, the cheapest rooms as well as the tiniest.
By Thaddeus Rutkowski
My brother and sister and I took my mother to a parking lot to teach her to ride a bicycle. We rolled a child’s bike along with us. The bike had one gear, and its brake was built into the pedals. When we got to the paved area next to the local school, we helped our mother onto the bike. “Go for it,” we said. “Pump.”
By Lewis Buzbeez
It’s true I’ve stopped going out, it’s hard enough to walk to the mailbox on weekends.