Tara Barr is a lifelong art lover and a working mom in Washington, DC. She recently decided to make painting a high priority in her life after setting it aside for over a decade to focus on her family and her career in technology.
Kyle Lung
Beneath the redwoods and past the dumpsters, children scream like they’re playing or being sawed in half. I scratch Matilda’s head, she loves that, she hums.
Eddie P. Gomez
We took a flight from San Francisco to Oahu on a balmy morning in early October, risking a small window of opportunity. In Honolulu, high rises poked at the sky in the distance as the taxi raced away from the airport.
Megin Jimenez
I needed secrets as a child. I endowed plastic trinkets with totemic significance I vowed not to reveal. The loss of them would be disastrous.
Megin Jimenez
They will total
the money I’ve spent
digital receipts
money I’ve wasted
money over time
as the sum of my life
Margherita Arco
Just as we were finishing breakfast downstairs, a loud bang resonated through the clapboard house; our father had let the door of the master bedroom fall to a close, announcing his advance on the breakfast table.
Melanie Figg
Her younger self was at the wheel. Way before
the turnoff she knows something is not right.
No houses in peripheral vision, the road like a movie reel, unraveling.
Leanne Grabel
We talked about joy. It was my eighth session with Dr. Misaka, a small woman with beautiful shoes the color of cognac. Kaiser had referred me out-of-network for ten sessions with a psychiatrist.
Cástulo Aceves
Translated by Michael Langdon
1.
The young man studies the computer monitor as his right hand moves beneath his desk. His name is Arturo, and he is a second-semester business major. He lives alone in a building of foreign students.
Andrea Abi-Karam
PART I
ribs pop off/out
fast
NOT like prison
bars raising more like
that fast flash of
blue light when a
fuse blew @ LGA
Alan Chazaro
The process in which a cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapses to form a new star. This can only happen in a gaseous nebulae but who really knows WTF a gaseous nebulae is? In middle school, I’d wanted a Terrell Owens 49ers jersey.
Berna Durmaz
Translated by Dayla Rogers
Jemafer set the zurna’s wet mouthpiece against the iron headboard and lay down to give his soul easy passage out his throat. He waited. As he lay there, he didn’t bother shooing away the things rushing through his mind and from his tongue.
Jonathan Jones
Visiting Hours
I’m waiting where the holes in the ruins and the pavements overflow. These songs just seem to slow things down. A letter like a straight look through the mirror you give me to follow.
Ascher/Straus
Ten a.m. the next morning Jimmy’s got the ancient Mr. Coffee zzz-zzz-ing and chugging and his laundry going in Junie’s half-size machine.
“I could eat some scrambled eggs.”
Erin Slaughter
I wish I was the grieved body of a hare
body that sweetbox of dirt I do not believe in
I would like to be memorialized as sheets of topaz
melting in the weeds in front of you
Xurxo Borrazás
Translated by Jacob Rogers
“So, Xisto’s boy fixed up the house?”
She had announced herself by banging on the door with an open fist, and those were her first words, open-fisted. At noon, I was a ghost: I hadn’t washed up or eaten, my head was throbbing, I was hunched over, the light hurt my eyes, and my breath stank.
Renée Ashley
The gate to sleep does not fly open but the fence around it falls away and you have never dreamed like this before. A year from your life dropped like a page from a sheaf.
Renée Ashley
[So you try to remake a life] after what you’ve been told:
Not one word signified. A word is a sound is a sign
denoting nothing. Would you want more of that same?
You’d say lonely if it had meaning. You’d say done.
Cidinha da Silva
Translated by Ana Luiza de Oliveira e Silva and Daniel Persia
“Girl, all that glitters sure ain’t gold. What does anyone see in that songamonga, anyway?” one woman remarks to her neighbor, as they sit out, sunbathing in front of the condo. Their neighbor walks across the yard carrying several grocery bags stuffed with lettuce.
Marream Krollos
Oh, yeah, I would say he was good. He was really good, it’s a shame what happened. I guess it was like, because of how he wants to know the details of your body, or how he wanted to know all kinds of shit about you.