by Nicole Tsuno
The first person I date after my husband asks to open up our marriage is dead. Dead Eli, his profile reads.
by Daniel Felsenthal
Alfred sat in French class and drew stars on his binder. Robert wondered if his erection was visible through his jeans. Marsha practiced her verbs.
by Megan Pillow
I tell you I have the words for the first moment I saw you. You were pushing that stalled car out of the middle of a busy road.
by blake levario
gwen stefani could write the communist manifesto
but marx couldn’t write hollaback girl
by Wendy Oleson
Still, things don’t fit together once they’ve broken—too many critical bits get lost in the violence.
by Jason Sebastian Russo
a wedding photo with no one in it
a lone flip flop found on the moon
a fanny pack containing a piece of an asteroid
by Suzanne Grove
He reached out as if moving to hold her hand but instead gripped her wrist, pushing each fingernail into the skin.
by Parker Young
I began to sense that EJ was afraid of the motel we’d chosen. And yet she never wanted to go anywhere else. She locked the door.
by Isaac Zisman
Lucky stands at the end of the pier, staring off into the wild expanse of the west, or maybe it’s just New Jersey.
by Ashley Cline
when lorde says i don’t ever think about death, i do not feel that—i cannot relate.
by Seth Bockley
One day you were born and nothing magical happened to you. This was contrary to all your expectations.
This year, we opted to let the nearly-departed souls guide our theme, and through a spirited bout of automatic writing (daily word count: obliterated), we were given a message.
by Celeste Sea
Something about how your storefront flashed silver the way her bones do now: a moonlit nickel.
by K.C. Mead-Brewer
The tiny gasp of a match-strike. A bite of smoke. Maggie stares at the wick, and backs away.
by Becky Robison
Pour the wine into coffee cups. Stir in the blood, hopefully can’t taste it. Plop in a wafer, watch it dissolve. Take a bite of hashbrowns.
by Jack B. Bedell
If you sleep in this swamp as many nights as I have, you’ll see things you just can’t explain.
by Nicholas Russell
There was the bear in the shed. He made his home out of lawn chairs and camping things we rarely ever used.
by Jillian Luft
In home movies from these years, I am always lurking slightly off-screen until someone asks where I am.
by Travis Dahlke
If you were drunk and/or high when you crashed, does that mean you're drunk and/or high for all eternity?
by Jan Stinchcomb
A white-haired man opens the door and stares down at me as if he cannot fathom my purpose.
by Kathryn Kulpa
If ghosts in houses walk hallways at night, do ghosts in the ocean swim?
by Sarp Sozdinler
They towered above the creature as if the longer they stared at it, the sooner they would identify the bones in its belly.
by Abby Manzella
Yesterday my husband and I saw a blood mobile maneuvering through our town with its red cross gleaming on a white paint job.
by Nathaniel Berry
You don’t know exactly where you are now—not precisely—but you’re willing to bet that you’re somewhere in the immediate vicinity of The Maple Zone.
by Zach VandeZande
There was no reason to go looking for blame, and there was no reason to mess with it.
by Diana Kole
The train was rocking in the present day and ten years earlier; I stood, for an instant that disintegrated as soon as I tried to name it, outside of time.
by Aaron Sandberg
My prayers were a function of footwork,
of one step forward and two steps back
by Adam Berlin
And I know the difference between sad and Hollywood sad. I know sad doesn’t disappear from one scene to the next.
by Kevin Grauke
There he is in the background, our man of sixty-two in his very first film role, rising from a chair to greet a visitor.
by Jaric Sarmiento
The earth is a pale blue dot and you no longer see the romance in that.
by Jessica Dawn
“If we break up, at least you can say you learned something,” I say, and we both laugh, and the seagulls wail overhead.
by Rebecca Irene
Look how easily she is torn, he shouted.
& his wife, freshly bruised, watched
by Nathaniel Berry
Adrian got more patriotic after the attacks, as vicariously shell-shocked small towns must.
by Cameron Gorman
later, I hear someone say yolked, meaning not eggshells but
strong, or looking strong, which maybe is what we want
by Lena Crown
i had a drink at the bar beneath a laser light show about the Beatles
on the ceiling, only Ringo was a crab playing the maracas.
by Jo Varnish
It was about the train—or more truly, the tracks—running across the high street and off towards the city, begging to be followed.
by Brenna Womer
the holes, once fresh traumas to the green meat, now gray-brown, healed around the entry points
by Sophie van Waardenberg
there was a time, friend, when it all looked so good.
the seeds had whorled up green in the window.
by Nathaniel Berry
The homeless shelter in Adrian has a new director, the exact kind of person the Nonprofit Industrial Complex tends to promote.
by Davon Loeb
Whoever said Go said it, and it didn’t matter who because they pumped their legs with their eyes closed and across that intersection.
by Rebecca Rubenstein
They hung from our trees, ornamental, bodies bulbous and glistening and delicate.
by Tania Ganitsky
Translated from Spanish by Hannah Kauders
i write
I left my voice in another silence
by David Byron Queen
He read somewhere if a person were to yell for eight years they could theoretically generate the energy needed to heat a cup of coffee.
by Kevin Maloney
my buddy Isaac was into something else: an anti-fungal cream for birds called Lotricaine that makes your heart flutter and gives you heroic ideas about the space-time continuum.
by Alice Kaltman
She’s the older sister, she’s the one who will bear the brunt of this, their mother’s final escape.
by Danielle Chelosky
I made a scene at Carmello’s which
I guess means I officially live in Bushwick
by Madeleine Corley
we talked, I got drunk
on mosquito bites and bad
beer to stomach the Cool Girl™
by Luke Larkin
If a bear falls in the forest and I'm not tuned in to see, does it only transmute into another bear?
by Corey Miller
You sling me The Works:
Heinz 57, Stadium Mustard,
Sauerkraut, Raw Onions
with a glob of insight
by Nathaniel Berry
On track days, we walked while others ran, talking about Lord of the Rings and other nerd shit that would get your ass kicked if you weren’t as big as Dillon.
by Victoria Mbabazi
It’s electric guitar with a solo that’s mostly distortion it’s being sad in major chords it’s the smell of the bar where the local bands play
by Gabrielle Griffis
There is a photo of a heron on my mantle taken by my dead friend. Elira was outlived by the bird, Alba, so named by the zoo.
by Emily Costa
“We need some kind of grave marker,” he said, “not a headstone, there’s already a headstone.”
by Tiffany Hsieh
Asian Man, 45, tackles a DIY home renovation project the same way he shakes his legs in his BMW waiting for the light to change.
by Uzodinma Okehi
. . . Mind still reeling. Sidestepping, I’m excusing myself, bumping shoulders.
by Gretchen Rockwell
I think our only movement is in slow-motion,
time spooling out in exhausted reels.
by Michael X. Wang
Those with neither land nor education had one remaining way to gain favor: possessing something the king personally desired.
by Kevin Sterne
We belly-flopped on the ice and slid to the other side and when we arrived we were older and our skin had seen a few more suns.
by Andrew Bertaina
The past cannot be rewritten, his wife said ominously as she stirred the dry oats into a morning bake.
by Dale Cottingham
And if I came to a new understanding
how would that fare? It’d be fine
I’m sure. I’d put it on the shelf
by Cheryl Pappas
My tiny elephant had lost part of his trunk. I wondered if that’s where the luck lived.
by Darby Price
He knows exactly where we are, of course, but in the darkness of an empty room, it isn’t the knowledge that matters. It’s the feeling.
by Stephanie Frazee
On the way home, she calls work to say she will not be in tomorrow and begins to sob. John takes the phone and ends the call.
by Danae Younge
I used to levitate above the floor of the deep end
and not feel guilty about how everything stopped.
by Jack Barker-Clark
We often tested each other’s commitments in the realms of fantasy — it was probably what broke us.
by Rashi Rohatgi
In this fishing town we are not fish,
and that is all the safety I can conjure.
by Chelsea Voulgares
But the room rotated around me like it was the last night on earth and besides I was having such a good fucking time.
by Meghan Phillips
In the town where all the final girls live, there are pumpkins on porches, all kitchen-knife carved.
by Adam Dalva
My adrenaline spikes every time the door opens; in the last nine minutes, I’ve beamed at four different men in glasses.
by Michael Aurelio
I can pull your car out of the snow. I can warm our wet dog by the fire till his fur steams and his shaking stops.
by Chris Haven
This was what the diplomat has lived for, these lonely meetings, the flip of the wind, a sip of the drink of the other.
by Matthew Mastricova
They yell jump and I jump with them and they yell jump and I jump with them and they yell jump and, actually, that’s more than enough jumping for tonight.
by Sara Potocsny
My memories keep trying to fuck one another, and my patience is growing so very thin.
by Nathaniel Berry
Watching the fire, with its sparks like little stars racing up into the night, I whisper, oh, the days that we have seen — a not-quite joke that was only for me.
by No Contact
The team at No Contact recommends their favorite pieces from the past year.
by Gary Lippman
What a Bruce Jay Friedman story from sixty years ago tells us about contemporary America and our own selves.
by Tara Isabel Zambrano
When you frantically adjust the focus distance and all you see a blur of ocean.
by S. S. Mandani
We time machine through the uncut grass, see the soil; witness the decomposition of our ancestors’ bodies.
by Tommy Dean
Come with us, we demanded, we begged, we hedged, but they loped off together, arm in arm, looking back with cruel smiles, knowing at once that we were too afraid to follow.
by Aaron Burch
or, A Short Essay About Email That Turned into a Metaphor for Any Number of Things (see: Divorce, Family, Writing, Regret, ______ (Fill in Your Own Blank))
by Shannon Wolf
the jut of your lip, hard belly, throat bare and vulnerable,
throttled breath in your chest, snake eyes laughing buchiach.
by Subhravanu Das
There was something evocative about the cabbage — its contours; its likeness to the sun; its likeness to the globe that had been left for Danit at the door, as a gift, on one of his birthdays.
by Kyra Kondis
Margerie wouldn’t call it cheating, what she’s doing with Jonathan, but she wouldn’t call it not cheating, either.
by Marisa P. Clark
As a young woman, she plucked dandelions, met her husband’s eyes, and wished with him for voyages, a little boy, and riches, or sometimes just a kiss, a good day, a night of rest.
by Jo Withers
He comes around the corner of the classroom and every one of them catches their breath. The lion is almost as wide as the doorway. He is magnificent.
by Joy Guo
We were no good at running a business. We crawled on our stomachs along wire-thin profit margins, too scared to look down.
by Rachel R. Carroll
I am thinking of loss in the narrative sense-
a failure to change in time.
by Rachel Genn
Writing demands looking forward so that you don't look down at what you really are.
by Chris Vanjonack
Although they share an instant attraction, Robin declines Ted’s invitation to go back to his apartment, expressing concern that he’s not taking social distancing seriously enough.
by K.B. Carle
I am the femme fatale. I linger in doorways, knee bent, back of my hand pressed to my forehead.
by Meg Tuite
Her tiny face harbors an invincible battalion that smacks of war. She is thrown into a van. The locked door is a weapon.
by Chandra Steele
The Times called and they might come by and profile us because how many people are there living their complete lives but also constantly selling it, too?
by Genevieve Kersten
because once I discover help
is a two-syllable word shaped like you,
your name becomes my whole vocabulary.
by Steve Gergley
When the earth shook beneath us and the black smoke churned into the sky and the falling ash swallowed the sun, me and Kyoko emptied the food from the fridge and closed ourselves off in the basement.
by Hannah Grieco
This morning I do not wake up too early or too late or with a child laying across my neck or with my body blanketed in candy wrappers or scared about something that happened the night before or lonely or wishing.
by Melissa Lore
The doctor takes one last look at the computer screen. "Okay," he says again. "I guess that's just you."
by Amy Lyons
The kids claim they don’t care what colors cling to the walls they’ve escaped, but opinions will flare at Christmas dinner.
by Stephanie King
My favorite bowl has started to crack. I’m sadder about it than I should be.
by Candace Hartsuyker
When your girlfriend who says she’s Catwoman hides, it’s your job to find her.
by Michael Colbert
I wonder how we put friends in time capsules. We’ve known the other has been going through the world independently, yet we’ve never had enough time to actually interrogate what that means.
by Archana Sridhar
Another friend attends a virtual funeral, watching another family cry and moan, helpless – without the ability to hug or touch or pat. This kind of silent witnessing must be teaching us a lesson, right?
by Nathaniel Berry
DANK was the purest artist Adrian ever produced. We knew them only by their work: the name, or maybe just the word.
by Ross Showalter
It is good to be reminded there is a future beyond this, I think. I can summon myself upright and be of service to anyone, anyone. I can be alive to the world, I tell myself.
by Mallory Smart
I will come to you from the woods of the suburb surrounded by highways adolescent. We will start a rave with all our friends, instagram it and get all the likes.
by Aaron Burch
One of those presents that you would never buy yourself, would maybe never even think to buy, would possibly never even know existed, but that feels perfect when received as gift.
by Claire Hopple
I take things personally like anyone else, including the quote on my chocolate wrapper.
by Ashley Hajimirsadeghi
One day you’ll scrounge for pennies in the
lobby of a shabby nickelodeon, somewhere
in Brooklyn at dusk, just to get a thrill
by Chella Courington
counting years like a handful of coins, knowing they would be spent for trinkets, a pair of gold earrings or the mermaid wind chime sculpted from copper wire
by Robert Vaughan
I taught myself to disappear, that summer we moved into a duplex without dad.
by Adam Voith
She’s got friends
in the industry
Restaurants with reservations
and the best mid-brow places
by Canaan Morse
What other liquid would give me
the benefit of the doubt? At 12:08 I deliberate
an extreme course of action, palms on tile.
by Jack B. Bedell
And I want her to be able to say “okay” and mean it. To know the difference between asking and praying.
by C.C. Russell
I was going to buy you a CD player. We would listen to a few discs, see where it went. We were listening, there were pills. That was not all part of the initial idea.
by Ruey Fern Tan
I woke up again, the sun still green,
and got muesli stuck between
my young coffee-stained teeth
by Nathaniel Berry
It’s really not that big a house, Robby says, and he’s right in a strictly architectural sense, but I believe that things like houses expand and contract.
by Tara Srinivasan
The redditors on r/medicalmysteries say it’s common; “psychosomatic gaslighting,” one user calls it.
by Hilary Leichter
Once, the couch was mid-century modern, but the century has since changed.
by K-Ming Chang
I didn’t know what a calorie was, so Lanny explained it to me: if you input enough of them into your body, you’re pregnant.
by Salomón de la Selva
Translated by Joel Whitney
Because they were like birds /
flying, the grenades—
by Leonora Desar
I took the D train. Sometimes a road trip involves other things—like sacrifice.
by Jack Balderrama Morley
“I’ve known love from both sides now.” —Joni Mitchell, obviously, after fucking a younger guy.
by Justin Lacour
I can take your obsession with
Egon Schiele and hard seltzer,
what I can’t take is the way you disappear
by Evan James Sheldon
I am chasing a woodpecker by climbing up a blue spruce in my backyard when a pebble falls into my mouth.
by Carolyn Oliver
In a city not quite famous for being the birthplace of lawn flamingos and Johnny Appleseed, Hazel lived alone in a two-bedroom house.
by Mary Catherine Harper
The story of the baby says “wah, wah, wah,” and that could mean just about anything.
by Pat Foran
Dolly Parton and I, there’s mutual respect between us, I think, because of the way our mutual friend has grown since Dolly found him writing messages in the sky with his finger.
by Brianne Battye
in the too-early, I watched a milky warped sunrise
its own reflection puddled on a string of cloud
by Nathaniel Berry
The lack of concrete information in Marshall’s case allows it to be bent into whatever shape is useful.
by Kate Carmody
ivanka punctuate prose with ivanka one starts and one ends forever and ever amen
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