Empurpled, if caught in the gloaming, before the beam sharpens against true night and reddens the dot into super clarity.
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How 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.
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The 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.
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A Normal Interview with Will Betke-Brunswick by Sydney Allison Hinton
"People expect mammals to smile and frown, to have expressive eyebrows, and to make certain gestures with their hands, arms, and front legs. Drawing flightless birds frees me from so many expectations and gives me more space to play."
Read MoreSelf-Portrait, Fourteen Miles and Twenty-Three Minutes from the Interstate by Daniel Garcia
Of time, there’s this: the pink stripes around the neck in the mirror after, which was the most surprising—as if to mimic the sky was as simple as pulling its color into one’s cheeks.
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A Normal Interview with Katie Ives By Rosie Bates
Climbing can be an enticing pursuit for writing because a climb is a natural story… Basically, anytime you go on a climb, even if it’s just a backyard climb, you’re tracing a narrative or the form of a narrative arc with your hands and your feet.
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All 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."
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Seasons 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.
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This 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.
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Up 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.
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What 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.
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Drug 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."
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Chronostasis 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.
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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.