Solomon Samson
“For a while, she stares at him as if he belongs to a race once thought extinct. This is not part of her job. She is just trying to go the extra mile. But the look on the boy’s face tells her that it is not time to slow down.”
Jasleena Grewal
“A jaguar, like a child, indicates the health of a system. It is a keystone. In this pulse place—its body estuarine, current with blood—a jaguar plays like a cat and yolks her hunts.”
Julia Kohli
Translated by Rob Myatt
“Attending gender studies seminars had become the new trend in the men’s forums he frequented for fun on an occasional, meaning daily, basis: a bit of reporting back and swapping notes, talking about the different types of ugliness among women.”
Robert Glück
“A knock at the door. There stood Nonie’s downstairs neighbor, hands folded and face lifted in pleasure. On second glance she was sixty or so and yes, beautiful.”
Michael Garcia Bertrand
“In the middle of determining whether two multivariate polynomials were indistinguishable, Judas Borges discovered he was Jesus Christ.”
John M. Kuhlman
“neph·ew \ʹne-(ͺ)fyü\ n. 1. A human skeleton that has been unearthed by a burrowing dog, often in an unexpected location, such as a vacant lot or beneath the soil of a neighbor’s yard.”
John Rey Dave Aquino
“His father knelt and held his shoulders with both hands, looking at him from head to toe, his large hands growing heavy on Lyon’s shoulders. Uneasy under his father’s stare, Lyon observed his father in return.”
Olga Krause
Translated by Grace Sewell
“Of course, poetry’s good for nothing. Rich people chew on it, but they’re already full. As for the rest of us, well, read a poem to your grumbling belly and see what good it does you!”
Michele Kilmer
“We lost the house in May 1982. I hate that term; lost the house. I knew right where it was. Still do.”
James Miller
“I asked about Golden Books, for our child. Did she ever read the Hans Brinker one? We couldn’t remember where the death came in.”
James Miller
“Mitch makes each finger in the garage. He takes a block of cheap Home Depot pine and carves out the shape of pointing. I like to say they’re all index, homing for the Forms.”
James Miller
“The teacher woke up one morning and found a dead squirrel stinking up the flowerbed in his front yard.”
James Miller
“The good man wanted to spend quality time with the kid—his wife’s little brother.”
Farhad Pirbal
Translated by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and Jiyar Homer
“That’s it then. This is my life now: always this cold and wretched wandering from this little room to the rooftop and from the rooftop back inside, like a prisoner.”
Marshall Moore
“A darkness had always surrounded our house. Locked boxes, empty rooms. Secrets hinted at, but never discussed. My sister (we’ll call her J.) and I were characters in our own ghost story as it played out in the modern manor house in the country-club suburbs.”
Siamak Vossoughi
“Look at me, he thought, an Iranian man in the middle of this America. Wandering through town after the thing is over and the battle lost.”
Suzana Stojanović
“Why didn’t you ever tell me to avoid some places?’
‘You wanted to meet the world.’”
Luna Sicat-Cleto
Translated by Bernard Capinpin
“But what else could she do? That’s how it was. She was pregnant. Among all the other options, what was best for all would be to let go.”
Nara Vidal
Translated by Emyr Humphreys
“It was vitally important I calm my father down. I betrayed the dismay in my eyes as I announced, yet again, that my mother was dead and that I had come home to a house that was hers forever.”
Darlene Eliot
“Octavia watched the onscreen car chase and shifted in her plastic chair. The chair, bolted to a desktop, was designed for wiry college students, not an eighty-two-year-old woman with abundant hips, long legs, and the impulse to gesture dramatically.”
Alberto Ortiz De Zarate
Translated by Whitni Battle
“With glazed eyes he stared fixedly at his glass mug, which looked so bright, and kept getting brighter as he watched his old yearnings and memories floating up to the surface in those minute amber bubbles, sometimes intense and sometimes colorless, just like his very existence.”
Steve Bargdill
“How awesome would it be to hit the Taco Bells in Columbus? Kick back on the couch with a couple tacos and drink Mountain Dew. We could have coasters to keep condensation off our coffee tables.”
Gillian Parrish
“When he wakes, he wakes in sweat, wakes in panic, turns to see if she’s in pain, if she wants water or his warm hand on her back, but she’s not there, and his heart falls into his stomach and he remembers.”
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
“MOM. YOU CAN’T FOLLOW ME AROUND.”
Khalil AbuSharekh
“I connected with her because, like her, I sit in our family grocery store every day. I found them to be like us: family, traditions, war, and now they are a strong country. Japanese people are exactly like us, but advanced.”
Daryll Delgado
“Gestures, words, details surface like a relief as the background is chiseled away so effectively as to reveal the unmistakable scene. My god, what were we thinking? “
Robert(a) Ruisza Marshall
“It will, I tell myself, do no one harm if I post something about R, if I insinuate a greater relationship than was really there. No one will call me out or call me false. Do we really think the dead aren’t watching?”
Emilee Prado
“If you input more information while the memory is fragile, you can imbed the old memory with something new.”
Linda Morales Caballero
Translated by Marko Miletich, PhD
“An appointment with this man has become a waiting game.”
Caroline Fernelius
“On occasion, home-boundedness was almost frightening; she felt like an amphibian in a very tiny jar.”