There was a last time, of course, inside the little red house, like a last time for everything, except most of the time you don’t know it will be the last, which is why you don’t remember it, only the accumulation of trains rumbling just outside...
Read MoreBoys Least Likely To by Colin Rafferty
Out of the three of us, I am the only one who wasn't wrapped in cardboard. The only one who didn't join the books in the furnace. The only one forgotten, except by the few who take solace in my unknowableness.
Read MoreSouthside Buddhist by Ira Sukrungruang
The Southside me is like the Southside neighborhoods with the cracked and weedy sidewalks, the eroding brown-brick buildings, the abandoned factories. The Southside resists any type of change, unless it’s for the worse.
Ovary-Acting by Melinda Scully
The metal tube growls around you like a mechanical dragon with an empty belly. A voice over the intercom reminds you not to shiver as you’re being digested.
Read MoreFireflies by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here…
Read MoreThere is Always More by Ahsan Butt
As the credits rolled, Dad was leaned forward on his crossed leg, rubbing where his forehead touches the mat in prayer—that’s what it is: man becomes animal when death comes.
Read MoreNo Country for Daughters by Sarah Twombly
They say this is the age of monster hunting, and we are the monsters: mothers and daughters, heroines and crones. The stench of us riles them. The sight of us sets them to howling.
Read MoreOrange Beach by J.A. Bernstein
It catches me, the smell: this ocean drift, tinged with salt. Pungent as seaweed. Sulfurous, perhaps. And for a moment I’m brought back in time: the smell of Galt Drive, Fort Lauderdale, 1983, and the cream-colored pants that my grandfather wore to his chest.
Read MoreMr. Plimpton's Revenge by Dinty W. Moore
So I imagine my rickety-clickety little car didn’t frighten him much. I remember that he was thoroughly gracious. And tall. Very tall.
Read MoreEchoes and Ecotone by Maya Jewel Zeller
When I think of ethnopoetics and the poem as a house, I am immediately drawn to ecopoetics, the ecotone, the edge-things, the house that moves, the shape of something inhabited, like a shell, empty, then full. Too full. Sometimes binding, if it isn’t time to be bound.
Read MoreFrosty Diamonds by Michael Bishop
And so it came to be that on that first night, parked on the roadside gravel abutting Hale’iwa Ali’i Beach Park, across the street from million-dollar homes, with the necessities of life stripped to the bone, my nerves humming with a new kind of freedom, the orange glow of street lamps fractured through Frosty Diamonds into scintillating sunbursts unlike anything I’d seen before.
Read MoreOn The Color Matching System; Or, Marriage by Jehanne Dubrow
I might say last August was a faded blue, like a pair of blue jeans worn to softness.
Read MoreGenetic Expression by Nicole Walker
Sometimes families fall apart. It’s not always the Brussel sprouts’ fault. One kid loves cauliflower. Another loves kale. That third baby that no one knew about might have loved broccoli but you will never know whether or not just as you will never know how many cc’s there are in broccoli.
Read MoreSyllabus for My Mother by Catharina Coenen
Prerequisite: A hunger for written words. Remember how your mother wanted you to stay in school?
Read MoreHoneymoon by Paul Haney
What happened in that pause? Did the driver consider his own attractions? The features he desires in a woman, or even a man? Did he consider how little control he had over those desires?
Read MoreDoor Girl by Candace Jane Opper
The whole institution seemed to exist by and for men, particularly male musicians, and more particularly male musicians who’d fully bought into the fantasy of rock and roll, which essentially resembles the kind of up-all-night debauchery romanticized in Cameron Crowe’s semi-autobiographical Almost Famous.
Read MoreBrief Histories by Joe Bonomo
These images commingle now in memory as my first headlong descent into the strangeness of grief.
Read MoreObituary (For my Cousin) by Emma Kaiser
He tried to form a band with a group that included my high school boyfriend, but kicked them all out of his house when they didn’t take the music as seriously as he did.
Read MorePurple Flowers by Kira K. Homsher
I keep hoping a storm will come and sweep away all this clutter, all these dollhouse messes.
Read MoreOne Last Time by Cathy Luna
Memory doesn’t work like writing, one word at a time, one ant in a line. It’s more like a science-class filmstrip on fire in the projector, one image blooming orange-white and black into another.
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