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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
By Katherine Elizabeth Seltzer
Amy Seltzer, you are leaking.
Snap. Filter. Delete. Make yourself new. You can see it all from your screen.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Amy DeBellis
“August in Alabama: air thick with mosquitoes, crickets chirping hoarse and ragged, fireflies blinking on and off like stars gone wrong.”
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.”
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?”
Daniel David Froid
“The man’s identity, of course, is the whole point. But this video does not yield much. From sartorial details alone, it seems difficult to extract any further information about his life, his secret doings, or his proclivities—to derive any signs.”
Alvin Lu
“For there was no doubt I was being watched. The walk back to school collapsed into all that was to follow: the moment I turned on the evening news and saw ‘Uncle S—,’ my son pointing at the screen; the terrifying movie in my head of the police closing in on A—’s apartment, knocking down the front door with guns pulled…”
Ricardo Piglia
Translated by Erik Noonan
“This fear does me in now more than anything. Before, at times, I would sometimes remember the curve and dark bulk of the freight coming toward me, I’d remember the crash and I’d wake up in a sweat then force myself to think about what I’d seen during the day, I’d remember each thing, one by one, and it was like seeing them in that very moment until suddenly, without realizing, I’d fall asleep.”
Bailey Sims
“You know you’re really pretty.” She pinched a half-inch of fat on my side, her fingers cold and leather-soft like a doctor’s. “It’s just that college is different. Especially in California. I want you to be your best.”
Francisco García González
Translated by Bradley J. Nelson
“The ship is the San José. The language is French. The flag that waves on the mast is the insignia of Quebec. The story takes place in the future. Proximate. So close that it seems as if it has already happened.”
James Nulick
“What are you looking at? my sister asked in the loudest voice possible, the abruptness of it as shocking as hearing the metal-on-metal screech of ghetto brakes when one is entering a crosswalk. Jesus Christ, Nicole!?”