Black shows I am mysterious as all get out. I sit on my back porch, watching lighting bugs with my black nails wrapped around a cigarette and don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life as I smoke under the starless sky.
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Where We Stay by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
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Hypoxic Euphoria by Ellee Achten
I watched sound escape me in wobbling circles of air, my body moving farther from my voice and from the surface where my calls popped without being heard.
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A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game by Elaine van der Geld
Before I became one, I’d never been interested in mothers. Those lumpen creatures with sagging faces, boxy, careless clothes, bad hair, beholden to a small dictator. Certainly, I’d never become one.
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Naming by Katie Miller
But is there something to be said, too, for the maybe? For the way a maybe snakes into a sentence, into a paragraph, into a narrative into a life, leaving holes where certainty could’ve been?
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The Limiting Value of Trauma by Annie Erlyn
The trigger in my mind ticks like a small time-bomb, cratering my concentration with holes.
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For Dorothy, Who Made It By Sara Brody
In this novel, which I would never ask you to read, which once you used to prop open the window during the heatwave in December that gave us cause for dread, there are three brothers. Can I talk about it, just a little?
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We Shot and Shot by Hannah Harlee
I don’t want you to come away from here inspired.
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114, 000 Units Sold: At Every Stoplight, I’m Watching for One by Mandy L. Rose
I hear my children in the backseat, reading the numbers and letters out loud, recognizing whether the car we can’t stop watching belongs to their father.
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Touch Me, Baby by Joe Bonomo
Shuffling through a box of old 45s is like letting fistfuls of soil leak through your fingers. Organic matter, minerals, microbes all seem present on vinyl and worn labels, the grooves veritable garden rows. Heft, ballast, stuff in my hands.
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Selections from Babyland By Hadara Bar-Nadav
The walls at the infertility clinic are lined with babyheads. Thousands and thousands of babyheads.
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IN THE SHADOW OF THE MIDDLE KINGDOM By Kayo Chang Black
When I was 18, I crashed my car for the third time. My mother shook her head and said, “I should have listened to the fortune teller. He did tell me not to let you drive."
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Contagion by Mary Mandeville
Before, we knew where he was. This time, birth mom also had no idea; he’d run away from us all.
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High Mom by Danielle Privitera
When my son is old enough, he won’t care, because it saved our family.
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Cannibal by Jennifer Sinor
I am eating myself, slowly, from the outside in. Salted skin and blood.
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Shock, Honey by Megan Goss
Mother tries to talk, to reassure her eighteen-month-old daughter, but she can’t get her voice loud enough. Baby’s wails keep cutting out.
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Siento By Sarah Capdeville
I forgot, when it came down to it, that I existed.
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1989 by Lee Ware
My mother always says: I wish you would have known your father before the accident.
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Just Waiting on a Dude by Michael McAllister
He pats the bed and you slide in. You follow his lead—you always will.
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A Man To Occupy My Mind by Elizabeth Morgan
I call them my grown-up friends because these women have translated all of that A-Honor-Roll energy into successful careers as lawyers, engineers, and doctors, while I recently ate more slices of deep dish pizza than my brother and dad combined.
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