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SIX APHORISMS
J.M. Ó FAOLÁIN
In the enduring night, she bleeds, a silent martyr to sick misery. An itch surges through her veins, a shudder nestles in her shoulders. Awoken from her lethargic stupor, she faces a solitary page, barely legible, and discards it—a ritual of disappointment. Defence by abstraction fails her; the thought of a dull blade at her wrists persists.
BUCKY DONE GUN
MAX SHOHAM
Our CO’s daughter got into a nice school, and to me and the other worms that meant he was gonna blow his hooch in one go. Yep, drunk as a boiled owl. After a few minutes of groping around Black Betsy’s dark prefab bathroom pantries stocked with jacked up Euro meds and arm and hammer toothpaste, we finally plucked the prettiest flower in the field—a small orange bottle inside a white paper bag labeled BPM-KET, what they call a mythic pull, but it’s the same painkiller that all NATO SSN submarines are stocked with.
HALOGEN
SALLY CUNNINGHAM
I was in that apartment downtown. Our place on Main that I always used to covet when I visited the TV star and her son before it was ours. But I was alone, and I couldn’t get any lights on. No matter how many times I tried, the switch wouldn’t move—bruising my fingers, bending bone. It was so dark. I just wanted to flick on the lamp, see it again like it was.
KNUCKLE DUSTER
AL DERVISEVIC
There was good fighting and bad fighting
There was good sex and not bad sex
There was drinking and smoking
There was sparring and smokers
Changing levels, slips and counters
Brawlers, meatheads, tanks, and technicians
Water, sweat, Thai oil, Sunday morning coffee
And sometimes
so much blood.
IN DREAMS
GABRIELLE COLE
In the beginning, a possum sneaks into the house through the front door. I’ve never seen a possum in real life, but it kind of looks like the ones from Over the Hedge. Probably a possum. No one else seems to care just yet. It crawls beneath the couch that my brother’s now-dead hamster chewed a hole in that one time.
VALUE VILLAGE
KAT MULLIGAN
It was a glorious day in Value Village, dropped from the heavens like ripe apples from an orchard canopy. Wool-clad children, relieved of their chores on the Lord’s Day, ran to and fro in the cobbled streets, volleying inflated sheep bladders and coaxing wooden hoops along with their sticks.
RAT GIRL
REBECCA LAWRENCE LYNCH
The dirty duvet I was sleeping under slipped off, revealing my bare chest as I blinked myself awake and rolled onto my side. It wasn’t unusual for me to sleep naked, the radiator in my bedroom had been stuck on high for years. Plus, it cuts down on laundry. Snaking my hand through the collection of dirty dishes and empty cans on my bedside table, I grabbed my phone.
SLEEPWALKER FUGUE
JACOB SPONGA
Albertine Todd. Pianist manquée. Young, none too wise, but inculcated well, inoculated sparingly. Though she relishes not in sunshine, daquiris, croquet, bronzed pool boys, Tuscan kitchens, reading. Though she’s badly pitted by her recent competitive upset at the prestigious Rabling Tournament, zillions lost, career down the drain, scouts mutinied, Mums taken off to some white-sand hideaway.
POEMS FOR KORINE
ELIS MONTEVERDE BURRAU
When we pass my old school I always point at it There is my old school
nine paternal poems
LAMB
May the piano strings detune in unison. May the dandelion seeds not float into the neighbor’s yard. May I be patient with my daughter when she hits the baby.
WINTER LESSONS
MAX SHOHAM
In winter, I learned about grown-ups.
The first lesson I learned was of their dim-witted cruelty, always intended as an act of public service but, in the most grown-up kind of way, mutated to become its own grotesque opposite.
HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA
MAXWELL NORMAN
So basically I had to go to a dating event in this rented-out bar in Poughkeepsie, NY since my shitass liberal arts school doesn’t like me or think I’m hot anymore.
CONCUSSION
KAT MULLIGAN
She is trying to remind me of sins I committed before this concussion made me holy. I haven’t even seen her in two years and now she is prodding me with her weird beagle and stopping me from sleeping for three days like a vampire.
KENNY'S DESKTOP
PIP MORRISON
Kenny set his screensaver to a photo of that chimpanzee in the (North) Korea Central Zoo that smokes a pack a day. His tabs are miraculously still open.
THREE CAR CRASHES
CHARLIE ZACKS
When I got my driver’s license my mom gave me her old Cadillac Escalade, the extended size version. Black. The thing looked like the car a president would be shot in and it drove like a school bus.
BAD FIRST DATES
BRENDAN LINDSAY
In my experience, when you’ve given up on a prospective partner, the consolation prize for lack of love is an opportunity for narcissism.
