by Corey Farrenkopf
The boy’s skin was light blue. Hypothermic. A color rarely seen in nature.
by Chloe N. Clark
I’d heard her name and said it sometimes under my breath because I liked the way it felt in my mouth: Cherry Smith. It felt so accidental, like halfway to the name of a superhero.
by Thom Donovan
I am thinking about Miracle
A 24-weeker, her parents
Are so young, 15 I’m told
by Merridawn Duckler
I was rattling the inside of an old saltine tin when you came home. We’re out of tears, I said. Again, I said.
by Becca Yenser
He sleeps in the basement with the spiders. I take the crickets in the upper bedroom.
by Janelle Bassett
I’ve decided that instead of continuing to look for work I can do from home, I’m going to focus my energy on making Anjelica Huston fall in love with my children.
by KKUURRTT
250sq feet / semi-private outdoor shaded
fenced-in with plush $800 chairs (stolen)
by Anthony Varallo
Even the food in those pictures, upon closer inspection, also seemed to lean toward brown, heavy on bean casseroles, Salisbury steak, and French onion soup.
by Patricia Q. Bidar
I asked my boyfriend Rocky how he was holding up. “Colorfully," he said, each syllable a separate word.
by Nathaniel Berry
In places like Adrian, church lawns are transformed by plastic and electric light into little slices of Bethlehem.
by Rachel Kuanneng Lee
i always wondered how many live pigeons
you could fit into a pigeonhole. probably three—
max—if you can keep them there.
by Prasanthi Ram
Lush grass, fertilised by once-beloved flesh, cushioned the back of our skulls as we watched clouds dance to the live music of gentle afternoon waves.
by Tanner Armatis
“Sometimes when I’m by myself, I feel like paper. Cut down and manufactured. My arms and legs weigh me down lazily like obstructions in a drawing.
by Brian Evenson
Being able to decide meant he could sometimes be fast, sometimes slow. He could move more quickly through the barren parts, then slower in places where there was something to see.
by Lincoln Michel
A small volcano appeared in Don’s backyard. It was about the size of a garden gnome.
by Cathy Ulrich
In the universe where the potato peelers are haunted, we are all orphans.
by Michael Chang
I’ve been thinking abt my book cover,
how advised it would be to use the color scheme of a failed airline
by Leonora Desar
I ask Matt if we can move into his basement. Technically, it's his father's basement. Technically, Matt still lives in it.
by Al Kratz
If Rockwell had captured the American dream, and Taco Nun had captured Rockwell, then the logic was right in front of our faces: the American Dream had turned to shit.
by Benjamin Pfeiffer
“Exposure is good for a writer your age,” the mediocrity said. “Gets the pump primed.”
by Tyler Barton
One man said he was seeing God, and I thought—because he was speaking to camera—he meant me.
by Emily Woodworth
Is it possible that I am the culprit? Could I have purchased a single tomato myself, placed it here on this table in grand estate, and have no memory of such actions?
by Marilyn Duarte
On the rowdy streets of Lisbon’s Bairro Alto, tourists sing loudly, and sway like the droopy streamers hanging above them, connecting from one tiled building’s façade to another.
by Nathaniel Berry
When the Heaven’s Gate cult killed themselves en masse in 1997, they sent their taped suicide letter to Strawcutter, the host of their favorite radio show.
by Giulia Di Stravola
Fibers of Being consists of two silent 16mm films. Between them, is a room filled with mycelium and sprouting mushrooms.
by John Haggerty
“I must have fallen asleep,” Linda says, on the subject of her encounter, “because when I woke up, they were there.”
by Kathryn Kulpa
let’s say we slipper-skated to the window and the window was cake-drizzled with snow
by Olivia Kingery
Here, let me take you to the bottom. Climb on in and I’ll swallow you whole.
by Tara Isabel Zambrano
Since his wife left him, my neighbor, a scientist, mows his lawn at midnight.
by Al Jacobs
I’ll show you around, Eitan said. Bring your drink. We’ll be right back, Harold. I’m gonna show my friend around.
by Aleksia Mira Silverman
The man from Sleep Number had rosacea peeking from his beaked mask. I stood close, but he was skittish. He left me with nothing but a mattress.
by Murzban F. Shroff
The young man put an arm around Sandy. He said, “I, too, have seen treachery, brother, but not like yours.”
by Nathaniel Berry
I’ve been bad at remembering what people said to me, or what I’ve said to them. I’ve been bad at knowing what to say.
by Satya Dash
What’s the use of time spent so vigorously
cataloguing youth if now I can't find a picture
of us at the beach
by Jace Einfeldt
You’ve lost all your money, everything, and this time it wasn’t even your fault even though it feels like it is.
by Ben Lewellyn-Taylor
“Don’t California my Texas” is a catchall phrase for Texans concerned with a growing progressive population in the Lone Star State.
by Akhim Alexis
The old lady with one eye, walked up from the basement
Which was not a basement, but a grave
by Amy Barnes
Buying food for my not-cursed siblings is more important than using precious coins to fill my ghoulish eye sockets.
by Satya Dash
raging a hidden stubble burning
bright listen at night I’m more animal
than teeth more waterfall than water
by Jack B. Bedell
the old people tell it, oak branches
started scratching frottoir sounds
around the bone yard
by Leslie Ylinen
The Smoldering Woman crept aboard the USS Banneret, docked in warm waters off the coast of North Vietnam.
by Jordan Harrison-Twist
You can be whichever version of yourself you want to be, you tell me. And it needn’t always be the one you seem to choose, who is a pitiful drunk.
by Ameer Malik
Yet, there are traces of blood
On one page here, another page there, remaining between the letters, hanging
by Lauren Swift
I read that you can offer strawberry Fanta
to kind ghosts—is it like this with monsters, too
by Juleigh Howard-Hobson
We had reasons of our own that keep
Us bound. That kept us here, root tangled
by Bob Schofield
Through the window, in the wide outer dark, I saw things I cannot rightly describe.
by Elias Baez
Residue of the parasite was swabbed from a Dixie Cup
the infected used to sip water with his morning Klonopin
by Nicholas Russell
She’s not hungry. Besides, there’s a fresh meal to finish downstairs.
by Laila Amado
The track sighs and creaks as the chain pulls the train up the lift hill. The chipped red paint of the last car furrows like the down feathers of a barn owl.
by Kathy Key-Tello
Waited until fireflies fizzled out & breezes pressed fingers
of trees against double-paned windows—my sister loved those Degrassi reruns.
by Shawn Berman
Especially when you’re invited to parties and you don’t really wanna go but you don’t wanna seem rude so you say yes anyway
by Robert Rubsam
Marcel took lunch in his favorite restaurant. It was the sort of stolid and old-fashioned place where everything is made of slightly scuffed wood, and it was known for its rare meats.
by Kristen Cleghorn
KELLY and SAM, two women in their late 20s, stand in front of a mansion outside the city.
by Gauraa Shekhar
Bat comes to visit, a bottle of Bacardi superior clutched tightly under her wing.
by Elliot Alpern
There’s a man in a black suit and tie in the back yard, and I want to have a drink with him, I think, or else, well, I’m not sure.
by Laura Winberry
the one-liner bio on Andrew Cuomo’s Twitter account reads:
father, fisherman, motorcycle enthusiast, 56th Governor of New York.
by Emily Woodworth
I am sad. The pot is empty. I know the pot is empty. The pot knows the pot is empty.
by Rhienna Renèe Guedry
I picked Oregon because I was tired of the floods and hurricanes and I didn’t pick California because they have their own problems.
by Dominic Calderon
you went to a repertory screening of se7en at eight
by nine he made the joke
you know the one
by Ron-Tyler Budhram
The husbands enter a new dimension of welcome mats soaked with designer-dog pee, a new phase in the life cycle of their studio apartment.
by Kathryn Paul
How many times have I disappeared
empty-handed, abandoning
books, dishes, afghans, and men, always
by Matt Mitchell
what happened to making out by the chained-link fence
protecting the Apollo 11 replica downtown?
by Erik Smetana
The cursor blinked, I considered a retort, she continued, “What must your wife think? How can you air your dirty laundry? In a place like this?”
by Zain Murdock
i ask the cashier if they sell vodka here
she says, ma’am this is a trader joe’s
& i say, ah, yeah,
by Michael Aurelio
We lay on wooden pallets
five torsos ten arms ten legs thread and spool
by Ren O. Yama (蓮山)
I left home with just two changes of clothes and a body-length mirror.
by Paul Ruta
The trunk’s packed with important papers, computers, a guitar, and other stuff you don’t put on an airplane.
by Elliot Alpern
Constantly outwitted, frequently couch-ridden, Nick Dunne would barely survive a six-hour power outage.
by Tori Rego
In this version, Darcy is a woman, and you argue over unemployment. Darcy is still proud and flawed and not at all beautiful.
by Bryan Harvey
At night the storm churned through the overstory
as a shrewdness of apes huddled in the cathedral branches.
by Jill Krupnik
Laura Riding jumped out of a fourth floor window. Perhaps you didn’t know this and why would you?
by Cai Draper
M says not every deviation is betrayal
so big up the moments of divine junk
by Loisa Fenichell
In the kitchen, I bake loaves
of bread, pretending that I am
a child star.
by Nandini Maharaj
No one ever tells you that you’re going to get your period when you’re ten years old and you’re on a field trip to Six Flags with your fifth grade class.
by Nathaniel Berry
If you’re a student at Adrian, Docking won’t tell you that his salary is worth sacrificing your life for—but you’ve lived in America long enough now that you should know that’s what he means.
by Michael Colbert
Meagan describes her subscriptions to the New Yorker as aspirational. Meagan was sleeping with other men and never thought I’d notice.
by Bryan Schutmaat and Liza Stewart
Chipped paint and unkempt lawns, grass poking through cracks in the paved lots—spaces abandoned to the belief that hard times could be left behind.
by Francine Witte
Let’s start with Sarah’s ringless hand gripping a beer mug. Spidery fingers and her eye on the door.
by Despy Boutris
This is an ode to you in your sweats,
sitting on the couch, reading the paper
by Exodus Oktavia Brownlow
It is 5am-ish in the morning, and the sky is just beginning to become.
by Matthew Burnside
Baby Escher sits disentangling the beveled edges of his pet mirrors, caressing their convexities.
by Sonny McLean
Dreams are like moles and beauty marks— features in the wallpaper growing to some unknown depth below the surface.
by Nathaniel Berry
Maggie works dough with her hands before she gets the hand mixer. The butter makes her hands soft but scrubbing will dry them out again.
by Jocelyn M. Ulevicus
There is a lonely suffering now of something I feel but cannot name, an inherited memory of hunger belonging, and not quite belonging to me, the person of me in this moment.
by Gale Acuff
I don't want to go to Hell when I die
but I could do worse I tell my Sunday
School teacher
by Jemimah Wei
In the ad, a single dandelion seed floats in the air, following Jennie as she rides effortlessly through a field of lalang on a baby blue bicycle.
by Eric Slick
To make art is one thing; to live with it for an extended period is another.
by Mike Nagel
I still think that everything happens for my education. You'd think I'd know better by now. But I don't.
by Aimée Keeble
I am waking in the hours
when our violences are sleeping, saturated in dreams and oily-
a hiatus from breath
by frankie bruno
My lovers are shaped like ice-cream cones because they are ice-cream cones, especially the twisty custards with two colors.
by Nathaniel Berry
We never saw where Kurt lived, not for years and years. He’d meet us at his front door, pointedly; shut it tightly behind him.
by Wilson Koewing
Above a mantle, a blown-up photo from Godard’s Breathless hung. The scene in the convertible with the pistol.
by Thom Donovan
In the beginning there was punishment /
Then there was forgetting why we punished
by Marcus Tan
She pretends she is back home in Manila, sinking into her mother's favorite massage chair. Her teenage bones only feel the ache many years later.
by Adin Dobkin
The living room has scant natural light, except for a short interval in the afternoon’s gut. It brushes across my face and lands at the far closet before the room goes dark again.
by Lena Crown
The uneasy comfort of the hours drowsing between us and the certain storm. A jaunty pickle jigging across the front of the bag in Victorian loafers.
by Erika Veurink
I’m thinking about Mick Jagger. He was a god sent to teach us what it means to be irresistible. Being attracted to him feels universal, like religion. I don’t give a shit about The Rolling Stones.
by Nathaniel Berry
The reception was at Wagley’s: an orange-brick and white plaster-columned funeral home out on 223, in the parking lot of the Family Video, where Jet’s used to be.
by Damian Rucci
on Santa Fe Avenue, at the bookstore
we read poems for local drunks & skids
by Zachary Lipez
Seeing all the punks on the street was as close to going to shows as one could expect for the foreseeable future.
by Gauraa Shekhar
Seven bedrooms, seven-hundred feet of private beachfront, a million summer parties in a pool once cleaned with champagne.
by Elliot Alpern
A pull-quote? Is there even a good pull-quote for this one? Or is that getting too meta?
by Libby Rule
There are good places to run in my town: the old track, the park, and the cemetery. I try to pick the one with the least number of people.
by Evan Shornstein
The future is uncertain but there are 3,000 frogs singing in the moonlight!
by Sean Ennis
One thing I like about the kitchen is that it is the only place in the house that doesn’t have “room” in its title.
by Liz Wolfe
Leash Lady gets taken for a walk twice a day by her two very muscular pitbulls.
by Nathaniel Berry
Every face has the expression can you believe this fucking place? but nobody says it, because this is Michigan, and silent is the kindest we can sometimes think to be.
by Saba Imtiaz
I think about one of my favorite writers, Fran Lebowitz, and how she is doing. Is Fran wearing a mask?
by Erin Gallagher
How many times can you paint a hallway white? If you peeled it back, layer by layer, I hope you would find a nice wallpaper, floral and muted with age.
by Gauraa Shekhar
It’s a tidy trick, an artificial weather system, and most days, it seems to work.
by Elliot Alpern
Down beneath the cracked remains of sidewalks and hot-tar slurry, there exists a different, cooler world.
by Mike Tyler
Startin’ is not so hard, when I’m just, what am I doing, dictating, oh what, yeah transcribing, ah, describing, yeah, that’s right, thanks my friend, ha!
by Bailey Gaylin Moore
The woman smiles hard beneath her mask, enough to make the fabric move with her mouth. White people have been smiling at D a lot lately.
by Sarah Ruth Bates
My students are trying to be people, to become adults. It was hard enough to do before the collapse.
by Nathaniel Berry
My friend John was the youngest of four children. His parents were very old, and I think they were done raising children by the time John came along.
by Rachel A.G. Gilman
Limit the number of passes we are allowed, too. Even Candy Crush forces users to wait after breaking five hearts.
by Marina Li
My dog, Lucy, joins the effort in fighting the spread and takes on the hardships of social distancing.
by Gauraa Shekhar
I am of the Laundry Folding Movie persuasion. Show me a comfort movie starring Greg Kinnear as Dad. Show me Paul Rudd and Courtney Love making out in a dingy bathroom stall.
by Elliot Alpern
Now right off the bat here, I’m gonna tell you straight — this stew’ll take a few past ten minutes.
by Gulzar
That acre or two of land, and five acres of sowing and harvesting, they were all there sorghum, paddy, corn and millets—all that partition of land
by Brooke Davis
I sip a martini to trick myself into feeling lighter and content. The kalamatas soil the vodka purple, as if it’s from the ground, and natural. I pretend it’s a health drink. It’s good for me.
by Jinwoo Chong
I ask Timothée Chalamet if he likes when his fans call him Timmy, Lil’ Timmy, Lil’ Timmy Tim, or any of the other names I have seen them call him. He says with a not-truthful smile, no, not really, would you like it?
by Nathaniel Berry
Robby crossed the river a few minutes before they raised the bridges. He thought, for just a second, Oh, a boat must be coming.
by Becky Shirley
Soon, Tess will untangle herself and slip quietly out of bed into their kitchen, her bare feet picking up dust and leaving shadows of sweat on the tile floor.
by Gauraa Shekhar
Refresh your inbox. Refresh it again. Spend the rest of the year refreshing your inbox.
by Elliot Alpern
“I’ll Be There For You” begins playing, but the opening riff loops over itself, never landing. Nobody ever tells you that nobody told you life was going to be this way. This is not F •R •I •E •N •D •S.
We know that there are more important goals and events to focus on right now, which is why we are advocating any reader to first donate to a fund linked here, or support one of the linked (or your own local) Black-owned businesses, before reading the rest of the issue.
by Jemimah Wei
I like my watercolor girls to leave their stains on me. My watercolor girls now all live in bubbles, seeped in thick art paper, sometimes cupped in frames on the walls, or pressed into photo albums.
by Nathaniel Berry
I suspect that every town in the world has places like these: little doorways into tranquil darkness, places you can only find when you’re young, and can’t ever quite go back to in waking life.
by Amy Kalbun
Six feet: about the length of a hockey stick, or three Canadian geese in a row. If I was in New York, I would turn this into a joke—Canadian analogies right on brand—to seem cool and self-reflexive and gently patronizing of my home city.
by Gauraa Shekhar
There’s a spider trailing the bottom of the bathtub. It’s small and spindly, and on some sort of secret mission completely invisible to me.
by Elliot Alpern
Hi, Elliot Alpern here with Jugableach, the one-stop solution for maybe-sanitizing the dangerous world around you!
by Liza Stewart
The loons do everything together. They arrive early to hunt, trawl the waters with their auburn tufted heads below the surface.
by Adin Dobkin
At three or four in the afternoon, I don’t know why three or four, I no longer want to sit in the chair. I’m offended by its staticity.
by Arushi Sinha
Baby calls two of her exes. This is not an act of restraint; she has only that many.
by Nathaniel Berry
Martin has a collection of old Scotch, a thing that only married men have.
by Sophia Frank
I moved to New York from California because it was a place where a terrible driver with a tendency to daydream, like myself, could get far with her own two feet and a Metro card.
by Gauraa Shekhar
We’ve been hooked on Diet Dr. Pepper forever, but they never have any in stock, so we’ve steadily downgraded from Diet Dr. Pepper to Diet Coke, from Diet Coke to Coke Zero, then Coke Zero to Diet Pepsi.
