Erasure: Not the 80’s brit-pop band, although we do enjoy “A Little Respect,” (not quite a cover of Aretha’s version, but a nice alternative).
Read MoreOn Nerves by Karen Babine
AT SOME POINT, all nerves get old. The body cannot regenerate in ways it is accustomed to doing.
Read MorePrecious Cargo by Felicia Zamora
A honey bee knows the outcome of haste and yet, she is here, in the light. She lives fully, either always in fear of, or without fear of, death attached to her actions.
Read MoreSix Needles by Seth Sawyers
In the bottom of the third, he called back. He was slurring. He was somewhere downtown. He didn’t know where. He was sitting on concrete steps. He could see bushes. Where are you in relation to the big Bank of America building, I asked. He didn’t know. Concrete steps, he kept saying. Bushes.
Read MoreDot by Lia Purpura
Empurpled, if caught in the gloaming, before the beam sharpens against true night and reddens the dot into super clarity.
Read MoreHow Your Body Works by Jacqueline Ellis
The doctor is a wide, rectangular man with side-parted lank brown hair, black-framed glasses, and an untidy mustache. I sit across from him, next to Dan, on the shiny blue cushion of a dark-wood-colored chair. We are at a fertility clinic because we are trying to conceive a baby and our bodies do not work.
Read MoreOf Eagles, Goats, and Space Men by Patrick Madden
Which is to say that you can essay about anything, find some small hook in the overlooked or takenforgranted.
Read MoreThe Madrid Conversations by Normando Hernàndez Gonzalez with Adam Braver and Molly Gessford, Translated By Cynthia Guardado
The simple act of having your rights to liberty and expression, I would say. The simple act of not being scared to say what you are thinking.
Read MoreWolf Biter by Sarah Viren
When our habits deform our bodies, we can’t hide the proof of what we do.
Read MoreAll These Things Engulfing Me by Joe Bonomo
"I can see the singer looking hopefully at the person with whom he’s speaking, seeing the kindness in their shining eyes, understanding the words they offer yet singing, in that eternal melancholia of melody, the real truth."
Read MoreSeasons by DW McKinney
She drinks to forget and drinks to feel different in her skin. She drinks to be someone else and drinks because she feels things she isn’t supposed to feel – because she is Black and Christian and because her parents raised her better.
Read MoreThis I Know by Julie Woodward
My headlights are on. They carve small spaces into the night. I want to shed this skin and curl myself into their void. I want to tuck myself into their cold. I want to be consumed by their nothingness. I want to be swallowed whole, too.
Read MoreUp Brown Jug Creek by Catherine Halley
Of course, this isn’t the witch-thick forest you read about in a fairytale. I am surrounded by green, fast-growing trees and shrubs—buckthorn and black locust and honeysuckle—relentlessly spreading along the banks of the stream. The trunks bow out over the water and form a canopy of shade.
Read MoreWhat Does Your Halloween Costume Say About Your Gender?: Quiz Results By Jackie Domenus
You stand there silently, breathing candy breath into your mask until your face gets damp. Your best friends are cheerleaders, witches, fairies. But you’re just a structure of a person, an outline of a body, quiet and haunted.
Read MoreDrug Facts by Hillary Adams
"The first will make you numb, but you’ll be thin so everyone will tell you how good you look and that should equate happiness, or at least not wanting to die."
Read MoreChronostasis by Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Tamogotchis are everywhere in middle school, cradled in our hands during math when we learn about angles and remainders, the goal to take what is whole and break it apart. The egg buzzes several times a day as a reminder that survival is not guaranteed.
Read MoreA Groovy Way to Grab a Musical Bag that Turns On the Sounds of Today by Joe Bonomo
The voice to which I’m only half-listening sounds familiar, but something’s off, also. I look up blankly from the records I’m riffling through and realize that I’m hearing Elton John, one of his well-known hits from the early seventies, but I haven’t heard this version before.
Read MoreA Review of My Birth Control Methods by Victoria Buitron
I didn’t know there would be anesthesia. I didn’t know there would be blood. I didn’t know my arm would bruise Rorschach. I didn’t know the army greens and deep blues would last so long.
Read MoreReasons to Teach Another Year by Adam Patric Miller
Because you remember your teachers, one with wild eyes who wore a cross over his tie, who made algebraic equations turn and spin in your head, who gave you a graduation gift of Genesis in Space and Time…
Read MoreThe Liar by J Brooke
Thinking myself a nurturer of wonder and awe, I never summoned the simplest truth. This was the Tooth Fairy. This was Santa. Like amassing a grotesque ball of knotted tangled twine, I stretched and contorted tales beneath a guise of creating a magical childhood.
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