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Don’t Pick Corn Before It’s Ripe and Other Lessons
Grandma’s Cupcake Stand, Jessica Ashworth Mom and I built a planter box in the spot where the oak tree used to be, before it was killed by Tussock Moths. We planted patty-pan squash, Tuscan Melon, blue pole beans, strawberries, and corn. One day, in early summer, she went outside to water the garden, and found…
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Namjadeul
Untitled, Elise Ketch Matthew The vaulted ceiling of early morning and hemlock canopy float around you like a vulture. I can see your fjord-blue eyes from this bird’s eye view. You look up at me- a splayed and pinned Vitruvian man encircled in heavy sleep. You turn your head on a bed of peanut brittle…
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Becoming Zero
Wrung Out, Kaitlyn Kugler It is my thirteenth birthday. At the lunch table I sit facing my friends with a ten calorie bite of vanilla cake marinating on my tongue. Amylase is breaking down the microscopic sugars, sending them sizzling down my gullet where peristaltic movements smush and squeeze them…
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Asphyxia
Talking Dead, Amanda Stephen As a child, one of her favourite games had been holding her breath. This usually took place in the bathtub, still big enough to swallow her whole. She would let the warm water relax her, chasing the tension from her muscles and her lungs, before she went limp. Her…
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how i swoon
Do You See Me?, Hannah Elizabeth High your footfall drops on the cement outside where I wait sound echoes my heartbeat matches your step stepped in the way I remember from those old films and the lover was coming to give his lady a long kiss but not too long before I see…
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What My Roommate Remembers From Fainting in Middle School
Junglescape, Meagan Dwyer You wake up. You don’t know how long you’ve slept, but it’s time to get ready for school. Oddly enough, you rolled over onto your stomach at some point in the night. Open your eyes with the expectation of cotton candy walls with butterfly borders, because at eleven years…
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How to Kill Yourself Slowly
Self-Portrait, Thomas Vause When you wake up, you will weigh yourself one, two, three times for safe measure. 95.0 lbs, 94.6 lbs, 94.8 lbs. Fat, fat, obnoxiously fat. You will poke at your cheeks where they are swollen from overactive salivary glands and you will drink ten glasses of ice water to…
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2 Girls
Suffocation, Elise Ketch Two girls at a softball game. One with silky golden hair and one with red shoes. It’s one of their boyfriend’s games, one of those interchangeable boys—maybe he has long hair, maybe he has a nose ring, maybe he’s in a band, maybe he wants to be a chemist,…
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Killing a Chicken
Smooch, Cassandra Warner Grandma was squatting on a low stool in the stuffy bathroom, lit only with a window open to the traffic below and reeking of blood splashed over the tiles. In between her legs was a blue plastic tub, and in the tub was a half-naked chicken. Her hands worked efficiently,…
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Hairy Girl
H2O, Erin Lee You must have stared at your reflection for an hour before the choice was made. Your eyes followed up the slope of your nose to your eyebrows and the jet black hairs subtly connecting them. It was an easy decision to make if you didn’t think about it, but that was never…
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Rapid
Emerge, Meagan Dwyer [Trigger Warning: Graphic discussion of suicidal ideation and self harm] When I was seventeen, I wanted to die. There was something terrifying about it, more terrifying than the depression or the self-harm, something about wanting to end everything and realizing I actually could was frightening. And yet soothing. I was in control for…
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Debt to Bees
Bee Girl, Kate Mitchell I am the woman bending on a busy sidewalk to scoop up the pests, the one pulling her car over on the 101 freeway to help one off of the windshield wiper and into some nearby bushes. I am the first to pry them from the shirts of panicked friends…
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Sloppy
Tiny Bust, Jordan Sommer My mom made Manwiches the night I came out. It was a coincidence, probably, and not because she contemplated the image of her fifteen-year-old son nuzzled between two other men when she was deciding what to make for dinner. Her cookbook had a little over seven entries, and three of them…
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Satin
Girlhood, Adira Bennett Today, on an especially beautiful Saturday morning, you run through a list of errands. First grocery shopping, then laundromat, license renewal, and a gift for your sister’s birthday. It has been a long week, but it does not matter as you tend to live with a…
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Numbers
Lost Time, Erica Lee 2697815320. I dialed it one day in late October, waiting for her to answer, the croaky “Hello” crackling through the receiver after a few dial tones. “The funeral was yesterday,” I said. “I played my flute during the service and Brendan turned my pages and it sounded good but I…