By Steve Barbaro
“The smokecrazed horizonface. Life beyond the life of each last belief-inebriated beach?”
The Temperance of Heretics
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Selected Dates (1998)
By Shawna Yang Ryan
“The Librarian asked to share a table with me at a crowded café where I was writing a paper. He balanced a wooden salad bowl in one hand and a library copy of Blood Meridian in the other.”
Black Man’s Guide to Bookselling / Snap Shot #46
By Jerry Thompson
“Baby on the way… In this city of red eyes and milk-soaked men, the sky beneath Georgia Boulevard drips onto the disciples of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, clawing away the easy markings that cut the chase into tiny conversations behind the counter of TV repair shops lining the block beside me.”
Excerpt from The Confusion of Figure and Ground
By Mary Burger
“I came into possession of the apartment in the way these things typically happen, which is to say, someone died. I was the person deemed by the court, and, if she’d thought about it, perhaps also by her, to serve as her estate executor.”
The Blue Plastic Basin
By Eric T. Racher
“Lying just then on the bed well not bed really not thinking of anything thinking nothing of skin of the heaviness of days of dead starling or grackle not sure which not thinking of the matted old grey longhair who had placed it so lovingly on the welcome mat”
Tabs
By Austin Adams
“The revealed and ultimate truth began, as all things do, on the internet.
James, who’s changing his name to Rick, read that neuroscientists at Cal-Tech— ‘Western,’ Pam corrects.”
Xiaolongbao, My Love
By Karen An-hwei Lee
“As far as I can recall, my first dream in the plague of absentia was not about soup dumplings but simply about wastefulness. In a long waiting room, men and women in lab coats stood before a porcelain gullet, smooth as a swan’s throat.”
An Impasse
By Ian MacClayn
“When the radiance of an epiphany looks into every culpable flaw of your heart, it will not feel heroic or divine. Things long dormant within us grope for growth and all struggle to breathe.”
Clotheslines
By Khalil AbuSharekh
“In our household, clotheslines were a constant source of conflict. Sometimes, my mom asked me to fix them and make them more organized. Other times, they stirred up arguments with my father, leading him to take out his frustration on us, often ending in a beating.”
Requiem for the Golden City
By Molara Wood
“In the end, it was the mining belt that spat him out. But he hadn’t the tiniest intimation of this when he set out that evening, thinking only that he hated short-time.”
My Voice Will Not Be My Own
By Vincenzo della Malva
“As William was checking his guise in the mirror and putting on the finishing touches, he slipped a toothache candy down his throat. Oh, aren’t we all under the pressures of cares and sorrows?”
Bloodsport: Excerpt from Demons of Eminence
By Joshua Escobar
As the pandemic began, I switched to being a travel nurse. Like all healthcare workers, I received the vaccine early but only after a hoe trip to LA. It was almost unbearable without it.
When I Finally Eat the Cake
By Sumitra Singam
After the embryo transfer, Mel and I go to dinner with Aroha. Aroha orders
sake. Mel has some. Nurse Annie had said Mel should go home and rest.
The Sofa
By Jean-Luc Raharimanana
Translated by Tom Tulloh
A sofa floating in the fog. Inside, declining, I sink in sweet softness. 6 a.m. Everything’s fine. A head chopped off by a machete. Pre-recorded. Unfortunate. Reeking trousers on the dirty black flesh, green flies on red blood.
Envy
By Adelheid Duvanel
Translated by Tyler Schroeder
On the radio, they broadcast the description of my missing sister: wears a rainbow-print coat, green with a red sheen or red with a green sheen—asks every day if someone will build her a castle in the garden behind the house.
Overview Effect
By Tanya Žilinskas
I had met Minka once before, also at one of Aria and Hazel’s parties. Tim attended that previous get-together, a combination potluck and game of croquet held on a stretch of greenbelt along the man-made lake in our neighborhood.
Rate My Professor: Allen Ginsberg
By Arlene Tribbia
Professor Ginsberg seems to spend a lot of time at the beginning of class trying to get a poetry carpool going to Rocky Flats. Everyone—except for me—seems to know the reason for this mission. A weekend protest? A pop-up poetry vision quest? An off-campus meditation-on-the-landscape to open dormant horizons of our awareness?
EVPs Captured in the Old Fort
By Addison Zeller
She says: Some skies just hang up there like cracked ice.
She says: It’s not like before. I know who I am. I don’t have doubts. Even asleep, I know who I am. But I hear things. Close or way off. A train rushes by and I wonder: Is it in my head? Is it real?
A Short Bob
By Mehdi M. Kashani
Fresh snow carpets the road and glitters under the faint streetlights. Neighbors snuggle up in their homes, leaving the quiet roads a haven for strays.
The Weight of Drowned Calla Lilies
By Katherine Elizabeth Seltzer
Amy Seltzer, you are leaking.
Snap. Filter. Delete. Make yourself new. You can see it all from your screen.
Omaha
By Jane Snyder
I didn’t know when I would make my father mad. I’d tell him I liked a song on the radio or repeat a joke from school, and he’d go off. I never saw it coming.
The Giraffe
By Charles O. Smith
Atop a hill at the westernmost point of the city stood an ancient fortress overlooking a rocky offshore archipelago inhabited by sea lions, gulls, and crustaceans.
Risky Sex
By Taro Williams
Now, sex is boring. No, sex is something more complicated; it’s neutral. It’s not stimulating, disgusting, or even a euphoric rush. It’s just something people do. It just exists.
The Tangled Mysteries or The Transmutation of Affection
Bruno Lloret
Translated by Ellen Jones
“As I finish writing this, without knowing that I’m writing it, my mum gives me a gold crab on a chain.”
Nova
Veronica Wasson
“As a young man, Veronica allowed her beard to grow wild and bushy like Almighty Zeus, like a mountain man, like a drifter. With her torn jeans and scavenged T-shirts, she looked disreputable and women avoided her, but certain men were drawn to her.”
Crying Spirit
Kasimma
“Just look at you! Yes, you. Don’t even incur a slap by looking around as if you’re confused. Your senses are very much intact. Look at you, sitting on Dollar Tree’s cold ground, beside the opened fridge, breathing frosty air. The smallest bowl of ice cream sits like a lover beside you.”
Diwata, Where She Walked
Wilfrido Nolledo
“Supper the little children, an expatriate poet was to write of the population in Metropolitan Manila, 1990. And she who had just lost hers that windy November morning drifted aimlessly through the memorial grounds where she’d been cannibalizing tombstones of their expensive garlands.”
Fake Moon
Amy DeBellis
“August in Alabama: air thick with mosquitoes, crickets chirping hoarse and ragged, fireflies blinking on and off like stars gone wrong.”
Zeppole (aka Awama)
Khalil AbuSharekh
“When it arrived, it looked familiar—like the Palestinian dessert known as “awama” (donut balls), but this time topped with chocolate syrup. I took a bite. Immediately the taste transported me far, far away in time and place. I remembered I hadn’t tasted this flavor for over fifteen years.”
Excerpt from Imagine Breaking Everything
Lina Munar Guevara
Translated by Ellen Jones
“The worst thing about this story, the thing we need to remember, is that I had the money, the money to replace the printer. At some point in my life I had it, and I turned it into a tattoo, some earrings, and an avocado-shaped coin purse. You absolute mug—who the fuck even uses a coin purse?”