volume 17.0
Melissa Rudick, Kye Roper, Angela Townsend, Emily Hall, Rebekah Chan, Ashley Espinoza, Sofia Fall, Ashley Hoiland, Erica Reid, Joshua Kulseth, James Engelhardt, Jacklin Farley, Angela Williamson, Rebecca O'Bern, Dante Novario, Jarred Mercer, Neal Allen Shipley, Cindy Milwe, E.G. Reilly, Jessica Poli, Emma Galloway
FICTION
We sit on the toilet, our inside-pants around our ankles. We sprawl on IKEA couches covered in weighted blankets.
A man steps out of his suburban home at the cul-de-sac end, wearing the contemporary attire one might expect a middle-aged member of the bougie class to wear on a casual Saturday morning...
We did not see the mermaids coming, but surprise is the prerogative of mythical creatures and Executive Vice Presidents.
NON-FICTION
Before my husband Fausto and I made the fourteen-hour drive to Maine, he asked if we were going to scatter our dog’s ashes in the ocean there.
Dear Shell, I am writing to remember that time in your car, or perhaps mine.
After my car slid on the ice and another car hit me. After you had said you weren’t sure you wanted to be a father.
POETRY
I used to run up there on Perseverance Trail when I lived in the apartment on top of Gold Street where it met Basin Road and all I had to do all day was run or walk for miles in the rain…
Last night my daughter came to the side of the bed with a nightmare still in her eyelids.
I store recordings of birdsong on my phone. I don’t know which birds, or how to learn…
It was my birthday and we stood—you, beautiful, youthful; me, spectacled, unable for the life of me to comb my hair correctly—in the lobby of a hibachi steak house.
The lake is only a lake because water. Time filled the valley, drowned the stream,..
I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be real. Between meals, I pinch up belly fat, chubby bunny marshmallow bites sandwiched by my suspicious fingertips.
Everything exists within the skin on a hot night in a house permeable by bugs, open windows begging for rain.
The bay window opens to the north. It’s foggy out. I grab the gray, knitted sweater you bought my last birthday.
I ate the cat. It was the first Tuesday of winter and I was missing you.
I saw scenes of war that made me, held the dying child and bleeding mother, watched the man who never lived without shaking shake until he didn’t live.
When I was thirteen, huddled around a portable DVD player with other guys from my class.
In high school, I wore sweatpants, refused to brush my hair. Each day, I chose a button to pin onto my tank.
This summer is exhausted with holding me—the swollen heat, my walls weeping blood…
With her hands, she asks my body to let go of what it’s carrying.
