Category: VOLUME II

Used Tea Bags, Frances Lee [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Mental Illness] The stove is on. I was taught in high school that brain cells are kind of like trees working in reverse. The information starts in the cell body, the bulk of the treetop. The stove is on. A message is sent down the tree trunk…

Untitled, Ryan Baker     after Brian Mornar’s Three American Letters   En Route to Farm California Aug. 9, 2010 Antonia, It’s been a seven-hour bus ride but still sense you here. Pleasure to have met you at Anna’s. So unlikely, this L.A. Six days in a car, with you and Devin, Lukas, Vincent but caught in…

Ghost Print, Amna Ahmed [Trigger Warning: Miscarriage Mention] On the subway platform, 53rd and Lex, an old man in a leather cap pumps tears from the scarlet ribs of a dusty accordion. He doesn’t smile. He doesn’t look at anyone. I hide behind the peeling, rust-colored paint of a steel pillar and pretend we are the only…

Untitled, Noah Aust     I turn from the display of pipeline detergent for the milking system when Bill Mayhew barks my name. He’s luggin cans of primer in both hands. His face loses its harsh look when he smiles at me, and I walk towards him. It saves him from havin to carry those things,…

Afternoon Tea, Ericka Veliz   He’s an Architect and That’s Plenty Noble Samih loses the words to say he’s scared of heights somewhere in the backstreets and alleys of the tiny towns in his chest, so instead he starts taking too many pictures. I’m drawing self-portraits on my palm, thinking about Alyson and how there’s…

Untitled, Alice Zheng     A little girl found herself awake at the hour of siesta. She stumbled out of her family’s shack in an abandoned corner of their Quiapo slum, and found her mother among the women on the street. They were sitting on little stools around a water-pump that rusted in the sun, half-drunk…

Ghana on the Rocks, Jenny Brum [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Domestic Violence] My son Henry is sitting across from me at a restaurant. It smells like a restaurant should. The waiters are always moving and there is the constant chime of glasses coming together, the steady bubbling of coffee percolating that fools me into believing…

Chocolate Eaters, Benjamin Rowe [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Body Horror] It’s hot. Blazing. Arizona, dead middle of summer. I am sweating. I unzip my pants and fling them aside. They won’t be necessary today. I hear the train rocketing towards me. Lightning fast, thunder loud. Powerful and swift. I bend to the dusty ground and…

August 11th, Camille Roccanova     ephemeral i • ´fem • rəl excerpt from a dictionary of poetry … In the morning we lay to forget.   There are the dreams the disasters the dishevelment of our clothes and the way we form our words   —an anatomy yet to be illustrated (undiscovered) covered by sheets.   It…

100 Acres, Martin Swift     I try my best to ignore the man under my mattress   He talks about the little kids that he put in his backpack and how I will be just the right size   I’ve seen his backpack before— green and canvas and small He will have to bend my…

Gansevoort, NY, Nathan Tyrell   Owego is a white Downsville. there’s comfort in kosher Delhi. whether there is Climax is a question of Liberty, i’d say. only braggarts Rome in robes. i was crammed in Camden but Mexico bound. welcome Homer to Mayville, the odyssey of our discontent. q-tips made in Utica get airborne. Fly…

Winter, Beth Reynolds   Just before waking I dream the blind cow has slipped and fallen down, her belly split a clean barrel, a diagram. Inside her heart shakes and squawks, batters the ribcage, a white bird.   She stands still nosing the gray mud this piece of light flips against her bones the knowing…

Bonemask, Colette Butfiloski   The North Country wind blows through the yard as you lace up my gloves, then your gloves. Time to teach you how to be a man. Your breath stinks of whiskey, Chesterfields. You got soft after Ma died. Need to learn that everyone takes a beating but it takes a man to give…

Monsters, Lauren Young Smith     1. It was a war like any other. One night the village danced to the time of the fiddle; the next there were only the sounds of smoke and black boots. In the morning, doves cooed among the ruins and next door sparrows hunted abandoned walls. Papa burying the…

Landscape #2, Sun Lee     I. I met you once on my windowsill The summer I was six. Laughing in a dream, you Told me to be a good girl for my mother. “My bella, behave. Those tears make my sauce too salty,” “She misses you,” I said, Waking with wet cheeks.   II. We keep…

Patient Seems Anxious, Samantha Burns [Trigger Warning: Death Mention] I. I stored the wings in the garage because your body catapulted away so suddenly I was almost sucked in, too. II. In that story with the Greek boy and the ocean as crisp as lapis lazuli (the correct word is azure, but you never knew that color,…

Winter Afternoon, Evan McGrew     “Respiratory!” he yelled. It was loud in the bar, and so he was yelling.   “What?” “Respiratory— it is a gorgeous word!” I considered this as he slammed the kroner on the scratched wooden surface, changing currency for alcohol. Respiratory? “Why?” My own language was under aesthetic scrutiny, and I…

Closed Circuit, Marielle Saums [Trigger Warning: Animal Dissection; Death Mention] My high school biology teacher can tell the sex of a fruit fly as it floats past her head. “Male. Female. Oh, there goes another male.” Sometimes she counts them during class if they happened to escape their jars. She could be talking about the mitosis…

Sulphur Sky, Clare Arentzen [Trigger Warning: Molestation of Minor Mention] You couldn’t live in that town and escape the steel mill. When they graduated from Hopewell High, a disappointment of its own, they walked right off the stage and kept walking, right on down to the mill. Rows of grey lunch boxes filled with home ec…

Sarajevo Rose, Spencer Burke     The call to prayer sounds more mournful in Sarajevo than in Istanbul or Beirut. Walking through the old city—a disorder of cobbled lanes and bazaars spilling over with hammered copper pots, communist kitsch, and bright wool Bosnian kilims—the call of the muezzin comes softly at first. A single cry drifts…

Home Sweet Home, Colin Crane [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Death; Natural Disaster] I am in Mme Guillaume’s class. She’s talking about Papa Dessalines and how he tore the white out of the French flag to make our flag and cut off the heads of white people who made us slaves. I’m not sure how I feel…

Happy National Morticians’ Day, Sarah Parsons     Part 1: Picasso reveals. Cast: Genevieve: slender spectator with a silver scarf Picasso: invisible artist with visible visions and thoughts Chorus: art historians in earphones adjacent to Genevieve’s ears Genevieve enters the exhibit with high hopes of illuminated emotions like rain that brightens a city between overcast skies…