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Mosquitoes
By Kathryn Kulpa
“Summer. Night. Your hair smells of OFF! The flat pillow smells of OFF!, the damp sheets. Still they sneak in. The buzz. The whine. The slap. Gagging a little when you see the curl of black legs, the smear of blood.”
If You Must Know
By Barbara Diggs
“You saw your lil friends drown in a whirlpool of white, one by one, or sometimes one by two like when Tay-Tay got shot during a pickup and the bullet passed through his neck and hit Raymond in the shoulder as he was running away.”
Things That Are Easy To Lose
By Lisa Alexander Baron
“His questions and routines were now devoid of any impressions, substance, or the least bit of meaningful weight. His every word, every gesture—all too easy to ignore. Like a wet paper towel. A wrapper from a peppermint candy, minus the mint scent.”
In the Dark
By Ali Mckenzie-Murdoch
“Their names in lights, bright as their burning bodies, in the 1800s, ballet dancers often went up in flames. Gauzy tutus brushed flickering lamps, a pirouette of torched limbs, and incandescent hair.”
Elegy of an Eating Disorder
By Lindsey
“When you return to university, to that house that sits on the hill, you resume the painful life you left behind in the spring.”
Are you still watching?
By Catherine Roberts
“Are you sure you’re okay? Are those glitchy hexagons gathering in the edges of your eyes? Faces you’ve never seen but somehow know skimming the middle? Have you ever loved? Will you?”
Aunt Sadie Holds Forth on “Boy Trouble” After You Tell Her Jimmy Wouldn’t Stop Staring at Your Boobs in Chemistry Class
By Kathryn Silver-Hajo
“When some boy snaps your bra strap or comments on your figure, brush it off like a fly tickling your eye. Laugh, even go hobnob with your girlfriends. Teasing just means they like you.”
Shawl with Bees and Sage
By Claudia Monpere
“She wants to want again: the smell of rain on warm asphalt, the feel of granite threaded with glittering mica. She wants to know about ripples not cracks.”
Fire Pendant
By Claudia Monpere
“The debris is mostly cleared, but this land is a black ulcer. I walk around my acres, dark skeletons of madrones, pines. I walk to the fairy ring of redwoods where my son and I made elf houses and at night cuddled in blankets drinking hot chocolate.”
Transplant
By Jamy Bond
“When you take another man’s heart you take his history too: his longing, love and loss.”
When You Were Still Too Young for School
By Luanne Castle
“And though you were hungry for him to change his mind, he didn’t because he never did. At the door, when he set down his attaché case to hug you goodbye, you cried out, “Daddy, ants!” And still he raised his briefcase and walked out that door.”
To the Woman Across the Street Who Doesn’t Seem as Happy as She Once Was
By L Mari Harris
“Practice smiling in the mirror. Run a comb through your hair, rub a little toothpaste along your gums. The table is set when the front door opens again. Answer of course when asked if you had a good day.”
Acid/Base
By JWGoll
“I sanitize thirty-thousand-gallon stainless steel tanks with acid solution, then alkali, then steam. My colleagues say be careful, any one of them can eat the skin off a man’s face. My landlord and at least two of the women in the building look like they could do the same.
Just Not Touch
By L. Soviero
“The dead man remembers the warm sheets from the dryer in winter, the velvety softness of the fur behind his dog’s ear, the calluses in the wood floor against the ones on his feet.”
Pure Michigan
By Jace Brittain
“When pinball was illegal, there, still, still. 1970, 1971. All five of us juniors under Arts and Letters, various: Classics, Mathematics, History, History, Theology. Sundays, we’d slip across the border from South Bend, Indiana for a cold beer.”
No Sunshine, No Home
By Louella Lester
“It’s your nature, you must go, is what I tell my Canada Goose when summer heat sends him north or winter winds pull him south.”
Reading John Cheever During Monday Night Football
By Laton Carter
“Somebody is always settling the score. On the terrace, before and after dinner—drinks, the air rich with assignation.”