by Wayne Johns Abandoned Duplex What but us suffers from not being touched?Like matter eclipsed, empty space alters light. Emptiness also alters sight. Don’t forget how he looked at you with lust and disdain. Still filled with lust and disdain, you forgetfaking love in a room slowly filling with snow. Two men making love in […]
Category: POP!
by E.B. Schnepp The best part of Rocky Horror is when the makeup starts to run Hair hangs limp, drenched from sweat, from the pool scene, and tears start to form in stockings. Columbia’s breasts break free of her corset; everything decays, bleeds raw at the edges. Frank’n’Furter crying around a waterlogged smile — are you having a good […]
by David Ehmcke The Boy from Porto Alegre Tall and tan and young and lovely as a lovercafé soundscapes cement in public memory, he is describing Brazil to me, what it is to leavea home and find one, how much he missed his mother and his childhood dog, and I am tryingto teach myself how […]
by Sarah Lawrence-Sandkvist Colony (Samsa in Antipode) When you first started to grow, we widened the hills’ openings. We gave you more to carry and celebrated the carrion you wrestled home in ever increasing bounties. Deceased grasshoppers instead of crickets, crusts not crumbs, once a massive unbitten waffle-fry the color of the sun. But when […]
by Cate McGowan Inflation The funeral director calls on a Tuesday, a day I associate with minor indignities. Your mother, he says, then stops. Which is what people do with sentences that are going somewhere terrible. They stop before the terrible part, as though a pause could help. Your mother has … deflated, he says. […]
by Colin Powers There Is a New Game During childhood games of Tag, I never liked to be It. I was never fast enough to tag and pass on what I saw as my affliction. In hindsight, this was actually a very powerful position to be in. I had the choice to stop chasing […]
Categories
Accretion
by Joanell Serra Accretion When you hold a seashell in your hand, you feel the delicate ridges around the edges. These are growth rings, and like the rings of a tree, they can be used to estimate a mollusk’s age, maybe even its experience. Shells are shaped by their circumstances: waves that drag them through […]
Categories
Always Six O’Clock
by Joanell Serra Always Six O’Clock Alone on the beach, I cry in private while my patient husband lies down in our sparse apartment across the street. I mean my husband, the patient. But yes—he is also patient. Mostly. Slippery words. Another week of medical chaos has passed, and my love is still here, alive. […]
by Maggie Wolff She Mer Her on a MondayErasure of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette I was irritable excited the moment approached A bell tinkled. The bell tinkled again. I had to speakthe very first words. bright lights, the long room black beetles, the old boxes, the worm-eaten speech my tongue got free, andmy voice thought ofnothinglistening, watching she observed a certain […]
by Maggie Wolff In the BeginningErasure of Charlotte Brontë’s Villette pleasure if she could only reach it shine in some bright distant sphere yearning to attain, hunger to taste Isaw her my golden sign dark curve I had feelings little as Ispoke, cold as I looked, accidents stirred up acraving a thunderstorm broke; a hurricane shook us the tempest took hold of me I […]
by Trinity Richardson Ode to the Fly from Breaking Bad Whom I have started many fights over,hoping in my passionsomeone might see me.Do you think the fly from Breaking Bad—if he were real—would go to heaven or hell?I know you believein purgatory,but for argument’s sake,(for my sake)let’s pretend there’s no more waitingafter we die.A common […]
by Josie Braaten Five Dollar Dinosaur I had never seen an alligator before. Not live & in the flesh. Not like you & your mom. There was a picture to recreate from back when you were tiny behind your glasses. In the faux rock reptile gardens of my Great Plains childhood, we had snakes. I’m […]
by J.M.C. Kane Borrowed Mouth I learned to apologize by reading footnotes instead of the room. This is not entirely true, but it explains more than the other versions. The other versions involve a locker room, a borrowed mouth, and the sudden realization that everyone else had been given a script and I had been […]
by Daniel Kennedy River Her rideshare apps won’t connect. She tried calling a taxi service, but the phone just rang and rang. She’s been searching on foot for hours. A moment later, headlights pierce the fog. Pausing to catch her breath, Becca sticks out her thumb. Her Jameson buzz has morphed into a headache. […]
by M.D. Smith Love’s Bite Detective Brent Pate had walked into plenty of dangerous rooms in his career, but none quite like the parlor of the Miles house, not too far south of downtown Richmond. The old Virginia mansion loomed above the mossy oaks like a relic that had forgotten how to die. Its […]
by Cate McGowan Little Sting The world ended in the food court, right when I was lining up three eight-year-olds, triplets, for cartilage piercings at the Piercing Pagoda kiosk. Their mother, dressed head to toe in rhinestones, said, “Don’t make the holes uneven.” Then came the popping. Not bombs at first. Smaller. Meaner. Personal. A […]
by Rebecca L. Monroe You Forgot About Me There was a time, before. He’d been young then, just him and Man in a largish house – each pretty much doing what they felt like. If he wanted, he could usually slip inside at night. If not, there was piles of hay in the barn, surrounded […]
by Lexi Gomis Event Horizon Max wakes up before I do. He tests the knob on the bedroom door, then knocks. “Are you awake?” he says. “I’m hungry. I’m actually kind of starving.” He is obsessed, I think, with starving. This and outer space, which he tells me is a vacuum, filled with a crushing […]
by Hazel Brown Ingrid My mother had me when she was young. All the dolls I had played with were her very ones, whose names were still fresh in her mind. She would hand me a hard-headed, hard-limbed little baby, with a soft fabric gut, and say “this one is Sandy because her skin is […]
by Sarah Shotland The Patron Saint of Rust I am searching for the Patron Saint of Rust. I don’t expect to find her here, with my legs spread at the gynecological oncologist, but since this is where I’ll be spending the next several hours, it’s my best option. And by best, I mean only. I […]
by Dara Goodale Growing Pains I’ve never known what to do with my hands. I don’t deal in absolutes but I tend to swallow guilt like zeros, stuck behind a screenwith my binary mouth encrypted all wrong. I take the train. There is nothing waiting for me at the end of the line. The minimart is always closed.I’m out of cigs so […]
by Samantha R. Sharp Cedar Key Not usually do I sleep in the dark, hear an animal in the house, a damp body rattle the hot iron grate, the wind as it stalks the gaps in the sand. I keep the light in here too harsh, bleaches the skin of my eyes, burns off the […]
by Charles Kell An American Werewolf in London In one vision, I’m running naked in slow motionacross a damp field, a salmon rose poking from my anus. In another, my eyes melt into syrupy red wine sloshing in a plastic cup.We stagger from the atavistic shock of recognition.The apartment walls close in, smell of burntdust from an […]
by Charles Kell Reading in the Dark In Pataias I lie flat on an abandoned tennis court to watch the ants slowly rip apart then devour the carcass of a small gecko. Weeds, tufts of grass poke from the cracked concreteto touch the sky’s grayish blue. Earlier, walking alone on the beach, sandand cool water mixing on my […]
by Joshua Zeitler I Need to Grieve a Little Louder When I was a child, my mother could have whirledthe world like a lollipop, tongue-wet and color-spun. Instead, she hid all the candy. When asked,my father said, What candy? Only now do I understand that this was the beginning of understanding.I used to think the universe was […]
by Kevin Grauke For Noah’s Raven Everyone remembers the dove Noah sent forth from the ark perched atop Mount Ararat to see if the swollen waters had abated. And everyone remembers how this dove returned with an olivebranch clutched in its beak, a sign that dry land had risen again, but no one remembers the raven he sent first, the […]
by Alexander Duringer Notes on Doom We started work in the factory where sweatcrept through boxers to asshole, fetid & slick as the slit throat of a bull sacrificedto a god gone estranged. Together we walkedto the car through a group of men who’d sniffed my voice, watched my hands swish buckets or fold the new-printed shirts too […]
Gulf Stream Magazine 