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.
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A 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.
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A 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.
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Reasons 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…
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The 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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Red House by Lauren D. Woods
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...
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Boys 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.
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Southside 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.
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Fireflies 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…
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There 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.
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No 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.
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Orange 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.
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Mr. 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.
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Echoes 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.
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Frosty 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.
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On 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.
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Genetic 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.
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Syllabus for My Mother by Catharina Coenen
Prerequisite: A hunger for written words. Remember how your mother wanted you to stay in school?
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Honeymoon 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?
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