Michelle BittingFOR PHIL All day we’ve bent like Benedictine monks over armoires and bookshelves, rubbing the house clean of grime and wicked thick dust, pausing but once to drop our robes and oil each other bright as snakes entwined in…
Candice MorrowMELT A record high, the porch thermometer reads one hundred and nine, and your father sleeps naked without even a sheet. You left for college yesterday, and I suppose this means, among other things, that we can sprawl exposed…
Josh KrigmanENOUGH FISH The important thing was whether she had enough fish. Rose stared at the open refrigerator, its fluorescent-lit innards threatening to overflow. Stacks of plastic containers and tinfoil-covered dishes formed a towering puzzle without a single piece missing.…
Andrew Vincenzo LorenzenHOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE YOUR ASHES ARE EVERYWHERE. You don’t know how to smoke a cigar. I’m going to teach you tonight. I shouldn’t—but I will. Here, hold it like this, see? Between your thumb and index…
Devon RaymondDEBT OF A DAUGHTER A man who is your father tricks you into believing that there is no price to pay for being his favorite—that you are free to accept all of his attention, and presents, and praise. So…
Varun ShettyO It is a circle, a cipher, the opposite of something. It is formed by an old man’s lips parted midbreath. It is an absence held in the valley of his mouth. It is unmoved even with an endotracheal…
Beth KephartHOW ARE YOU? An Antonym Story If there were a Very Special Prize for the world’s most inadequate respondent to the How are you? question, I would be blue ribboned. How are you? Well… How are you? Just a— How are…
Jeff FriedmanTWO MICROFICTIONS PET PIRANHAS Jess and I loved to watch our pet piranhas swim back and forth, weaving through the lush greens in our aquarium. Though we had seen the James Bond movie in which a pool of piranhas…
Alison LubarGRAND SLAM Tacoma WA, 1939 Jack takes a baseball bat to the river. August spawning season. …………….The dry rocktops steam like the belly of a monster cut open. …………….Unlaces right boot, then left, pulls them off without sitting and…
Amy SavageHAUNTING VIVIAN The first ex to haunt Vivian waits until she’s left her bar stool to use the restroom. On return, she finds his embossed business card cowering next to her martini, the bumpy letters of his name like…
Kim MagowanFAVOR Liam, Emailing because I just heard that you and Genevieve split up, so I wanted to reach out and say—well, I was going to say how sorry I am. But that isn’t entirely truthful. At any rate, I’m…
Suphil Lee ParkOFF You wake up in complete darkness. It is the kind of darkness that strikes you as a jolt of realization that you’ve never found yourself in complete darkness up until that very moment, not that terrifying night…
Phil Keeling34 FEET The gun was small and snub-nosed. It looked heavy, though, attached to the lanky arm of my mugger. Imagine it. Me! With my very own personal mugger. Because in that moment, he was mine and I was…
Madeleine GavalerZOLOFT NANNY Red drips down Dasha’s chin as I watch her through the playground bars. I hold my phone a distance from my cheek, giving my voice air to wade through before making its way to some faraway woman…
Lydia DowneySHOOTING BUCK Peeking around the cliff, I meet my father’s eyes. The horizon’s glowing haze & morbid curiosity as I stretch my palm over the Tetons to haul the buck back to safety from the metal clicks of huddled…
John SchneiderTHAW Still burdened with winter’s whiteness ………….and the darkness of prolonged nights, we gaze out at our world through glazed windows. ………….This is the time of year for crusted glass, cold reflections. Again, my aging eyes ………….look back at…
Emily ParzybokAN EASIER STORY Around the time I had an abortion, the bathroom drain gave up entirely. For months, the drain had been slow-moving. I’d find myself in an inch of water at the end of a shower, shaking my…
Mandira PattnaikCENTER OF AN IMAGINARY WORLD: Place in Fiction Recently, while compiling my short stories and flash fiction for a possible collection, I was surprised by how many of those stories were based in the culture and climate markers of…
Fiction by Kim Fu, reviewed by Prisha Mehta LESSER KNOWN MONSTERS OF THE 21ST CENTURY (Tin House Books) A customer seeks out advanced simulation technology to recreate a conversation with her dead mother, but is refused on the grounds that…
Fiction by Kyle Lucia Wu, reviewed by Annie Cao WIN ME SOMETHING (Tin House) In Win Me Something, Kyle Lucia Wu’s enthralling debut novel, Willa Chen is a biracial Chinese-American girl who starts a nannying job for the Adriens, a…
Coco Mellors, reviewed by Stephanie Fluckey CLEOPATRA AND FRANKENSTEIN (Bloomsbury) I was attracted to the novel Cleopatra and Frankenstein because the title characters and I share something in common: a short courtship followed by elopement. In Coco Mellors’s debut novel,…
Nonfiction by William Turner, reviewed by Jamie Tews The Harlan Renaissance (West Virginia University Press) When I read William Turner’s The Harlan Renaissance: Stories of Black Life in Appalachian Coal Towns, I was living in Appalachia, commuting between Eastern Kentucky…
Mario LopreteTO WHAT SURVIVED: Sculpture For my concrete sculptures, I use my personal clothing. Through my artistic process in which I use plaster, resin, and cement, I transform these articles of clothing into artworks to hang. The intended effect is…
Francine WitteDRUNKDADDY Punches a hole in the cakey window. The hole is the size of a woman’s head. My mother’s head. Tells the window, good, now you are broken, too. Blames the window for being so gooked up with grime…
Mimi YangA LETTER FROM MY FATHER TO ME My mother asked me to kill a spider, so I take her body out into the rice fields and I let the millet swell up beneath me in a furious roar. A…
Matt ThomasPOP SONG These eggs that I wash every morning before tucking them into the carton remind me of washing my daughter no less carefully, with an eye to the future knowing her cost and improbability. Like stroking a pocket…
Tess KellyPLAYHOUSE It arrived on a surprise Saturday in the bed of Uncle Tony’s pickup. The wooden playhouse our grandfather built had cedar shakes, a rooster-topped weathervane, and real hinged windows that opened wide like our astonished mouths. Soon enough…
Peter DeMarcoWAR GAMES In the car trip to a Pennsylvania V.A. hospital when I was twelve, my mother told us that our great Uncle Roy was a veteran of World War I and couldn’t communicate anymore. The ride was three…
Sadie Shorr-ParksTWO POEMS Winter on Earth In my bruise blue Subaru with the drooling sunroof rattling down skyline drive. Winter on earth can mean leafless branching, iced asphalt. Headache sunlight ahead: a migraine to match the moment. Winter can be…
Meg PokrassIF YOU WANT TO BE LOVED, LOVE “If you want to be a horse, be a horse.” Her father said this when he talked about the family infrastructure, how weak it was. When she was little, she wanted to…
Rebecca AckermannBIRTHING LESSONS The woman on the screen howls in agony and communion as her partner reaches into the water to grasp their child’s crown and pull him free. They are all three naked, swirling in blood and insides. Sunlight…
Deb FenwickRIDING WEST TOWARD THE WOODS The dandelions in the front yard have the audacity to pop up screeching yellow, blanketing the lawn. I’m crouching, trowel in hand, yanking and destroying. The soil won’t easily yield. But neither will I.…
R. C. BarajasDR. WILLIAM’S FAMILY FIX-U SHOP Youngest Daughter Services and Pricing For Middle Son and Eldest Daughter, see separate price sheets. Limited services available for Eldest Son Overall Assessment of Youngest Daughter………………………$45 Dr. William will give a quick but…
Nathan WillisTHE SOFT ANIMALS There are four deer in the garage. They’re made of metal and they don’t have heads. Mom’s been sneaking out at night when she thinks I’m asleep. This is what she’s been working on. She wants…
Mariana SabinoTHE UNDERCURRENT The Czech woman had returned to the wrong place, that much we knew, and we weren’t about to watch out for anyone, especially this pearl smeared with oil. She arrived in one of the local public vans,…
Luisa LuoSIX RANTS FROM A NASTY YELLOW GIRL One, I am a byproduct of post-colonialism, fortunately and unfortunately. Post-colonialism is my explanation for everything I have been put through from racism to sexism to homophobia to the Red Scare you…
Will MusgroveTHE DRIVE HOME In the distance, black clouds blanket the sky like cake frosting, and streaks of rain shade the warm air. Strong winds jostle my buddy Jake’s rusted sedan, make minor corrections to our trajectory, whisper to us…
Jamie NielsenCONFESSIONS OF A CARELESS CABBAGE PERSON “There’s only one kind of trap that works. It’s the five-for-a-dollar, old-fashioned kind with a spring on a piece of wood.” My sister raises and trains horses in the mountains outside Reno, Nevada.…
Timothy BoudreauLIFE IS TOO SWEET FOR THIS LEVEL OF IDGAF We’re here too short a time to shuffle grumpily to work, we’re missing opportunities. Donny scowls at Mrs. Levinson when she asks him to cash her check in small bills; while…
Maggie MumfordINTUITION 1. An acorn appears. The orb centered on the welcome mat in the curve of the C, the WEL and the OME forming a bracket. I decide the placement is an accident of nature and that this tree…
Damian DressickDECADENCE, ’94 (SOUTHERN) Rounds in quick succession at Café Lafitte in Exile bleed into slave quarters on Iberville. A sofa included in his rent. New Orleans lore. Amyl nitrate. Fan of porn mags spread across the cocktail table, Honcho,…
Mitchell UntchTWO POEMS Twin I I. I had thought we’d said everything we needed to say when you were in the hospital and the nurses were running around trying to figure out how to make you more comfortable. Would you…
Mateo Perez LaraMEMORY REMAINS AS SKELETON The lover: I cut into Mark’s frail // pulled out anxious apologies weathered by silence, we never said much but I come up with shame, loads of Jack Daniel’s sketches of boys he wanted…
Lara MarksteinNO NAME ISLAND In the beginning, in that first month that they’d lived with their uncle on Aorere Drive as kids, Hamish and Kylie passed whole days in the bay. Before Stuart could go on about the cost of…
Rosemary JonesSHADOW WATER This is how I heard the story. The this. The that. The this and that. I was at the hospital with my daughters to visit their grandpa, Geoff, who had fallen playing indoor bowls. One small, ambitious…
Gemini WahhajURGENT When Polly’s father died, she received an outpouring of love from his friends. She was grieving by not taking any calls—no tears, no ceremony, just silence, and a total loss of appetite—but these were international calls, coming from…
Alex Wells Shapiroa rust chewed pipe The glug above my left ear (a rust chewed pipe next to my right arm) manifests as yellow beads welling at my bedfoot ; a neighbor stabs my wall open with the sharp side…
Mike JamesTHIRTEEN POTSHOTS AT THE PROSE POEM An alien lands at a city basketball court at night. He either lands inside a science fiction story or he lands inside a prose poem. ◊ Prose poems are the pulp fiction of…
Poetry by Kelly Cressio-Moeller, reviewed by Dana Kinsey SHADE OF BLUE TREES (Two Sylvias Press) In her debut collection Shade of Blue Trees, Kelly Cressio-Moeller conducts a tremendous chorus of voices that rise in a dirge so mournful and lush…