Waiting, Shiya Wu You are sleeping on 400-count sheets colored fitfully red, your mattress flipped soft, your shades unworried, your lilies unanswered. The window is silent, as you are silent: it is September and you are in love with…
Beach, Jacob Roosa Two bicycles, one twisted and its back wheel spinning crazily; one boy limps, the right half of his body supported by the other’s hip; we grow up separately and unavoidably flawed, in the way a tomato plant…
Lagomorph Greetings, Natasha Change Everyonehere has a scarecrow smile, dried up and useless as the land. Makes my skin prickle, how these dead stalks like to hiss at closed windows. Bent and forked like devils’ tails, they scratch this…
BODIES!, Serena Hocharoen He told me my Body wasn’t his preference. Said it was: too big too loud too feminist and I could feel the slice of his tongue open up trenches in my flesh and skim over…
Suffocating Nature, Camelia Rojas My grandmother planted herself here among the arrowheads. She dug her husband out of the marsh— hands cupped as she washed him. They turned metal siding into brick. Within the lilies, she told me to…
A New World of Light, Jacob Fisher We went to an amusement park in downtown Calcutta, with fire-breathing macho men and an artist who wrote my name on a single grain of uncooked rice. There was a water slide…
A Meal of Crayons, Bryan Rubin My first art teacher was my uncle who was a boy. He, at fourteen, took my seven-year-old drawings of long-haired mermaids and flowers and handed me the backside of one of his exam papers,…
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Morgan Granosk Far above our paper houses, God spilled milk into the sky. Smeared clouds to make curd sunsets. Beautified that chalky orange against the white street lamps, as if to…
Untitled, Zachary Vaughn [Trigger Warning: Depictions of mental illness] “Are you dead?” My best friend is bitter. She has become my masked enemy. When I wake up and decide today is a good day to plug my phone in, it immediately…
Baptism, Mia Silvan-Grau There is no dignified way to walk through a green plastic kiddie pool filled with 11.2 gallons of room temperature tartar sauce. The first issue, of course, is the high viscosity of the material, which…
Fog in Dingle, Emily Mui From the river something is stirring in a Pacific ultrablue, an edgeless ripple or a water bomb where the sea sinks into violet. The rower bends over his boat with its talon curve and cargo of grasses. His slender pole paints the…
Livelihood, Liza Ashley It began somewhere along the creek, where the bunch of us were playing around, each of us 13 or 14 years old, far too old to be doing this sort of thing. Still, we were having fun,…
Ocean, Miyuki Blois I remember the pool where I first learned to swim. Blue as the dark and wider than dream. I do not know if they threw me in. I do not remember if they said, “You cannot breathe…
Floral Bones, Raegan Jaeger [Trigger Warning: Depictions of abuse] Yesterday your mother mailed you nine of your baby teeth wrapped in plastic, no return address. I named you. Not your father. She kept one molar for her back pocket. In the first year…
War is Over, Ernest Volynec Before she was drowned in forty feet of silt and squalid water Red Rock was a post for river rats meandered up the muddy Des Moines, come to toe the line of east as far west…
A Better World is Possible, Ernest Volynec For months, she wrote only of estuaries, which is how I knew she was leaving. It was February when she began packing— sweaters, her collection of dried leaves— pieces of her vanishing as she would…
Rome is the City of Echoes, Gabe Montesanti I hate my sister’s laugh. Laugh isn’t really even the right word for it, not really. I guess you could call it a cackle. Or a maniacal chortle? …
Synchronized Formation, Deirdre Murphy I hang from the last brick of August, and cold is tolling. I don’t hear you, but I remember your summer breath, and you still feel like the softest blue behind my eyes. The months we…
Fruit Basket Part II, Jordan Sommer Last week, when Deb asked me to go to dinner with the Qureshis—the Qureshis are students at the University where Deb teaches—when Deb asked me about going to dinner at the Qureshis, we…
