Posts by Mather Schneider
White Musk And Crack
Marisa Cadena
The cop and strip club security guard had climbed onto the roof from outside the building and were trying to get in through the locked laundry room window. Claire let them in.
UNDER A VEHEMENT SKY: A REVIEW OF SEAN KILPATRICK’S ‘TANTRUMS’
David Kuhnlein
To a degree rarely rivaled, Sean Kilpatrick lives for words. Tantrums is a testament to the last twenty years of his life, and includes absolutely batshit scripts, joyfully brutal fiction, and
Two Drinks in at the Oyster Bar
Hayden Church
“Have you tried hookers?
Church? God? Your dead
mother? Pills? Coke? Crack?”
A Book As An Epiphany: A Review Of Nicolette Polek's 'Bitter Water Opera'
Danielle Chelosky
Bitter Water Opera is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read.
Excerpt From 'Bloodletter'
David Kuhnlein
His dreams fill with bell towers, stabbing deaths, his lifeless body dragged by split fingernails into consciousness.
KATHY ACKER MON AMOUR
Jeff Goldberg
“Because of nothing we are together.”
—KA
Now, there were two biographers and a documentary filmmaker circling her fame like the moons of Planet Kathy, goddess of love and lust rising in
Just One Bite
Ashley Bardhan
She began imagining what it might have been like to be Agatha, crying and disheveled with both pale breasts exposed.
Pretty Obscure: Oral Sex & The Tumor Of Consciousness
Danielle Chelosky & Jack Skelley
Let’s get more filthy!
Word Problems
Amelia Kindall
In time, the questions become increasingly diffuse, numbers jumble and disappear, the symbolic order smears.
Chaos Questions with Bonnie Jo Campbell
Sheldon Lee Compton
If I could be in The Fifth Element, I'd want to be in the scene where they pulled things out of the blue opera singer's belly. But I would want to keep pulling out new, surprising things.
Le Loup
Adam Berlin
“How do you say, I am the wolf.”
“Je suis le loup. Tu es mon loup. You are my wolf.”
“Je suis le loup,” I say.
"Grateful and Mortified": Marissa Higgins on Publishing her Debut Novel A Good Happy Girl
Anna Dorn
Marissa:
I try very hard to be polite and normal, like manners are weirdly important to me given I'm a huge fuckup generally but my inner world is probably a less palatable version of Helen’s 💀💀
Anna:
You’re out here trying to be a good happy girl
Chaos Questions with Tom Williams
Sheldon Lee Compton
Guys, you’ve got Earl fucking Palmer out here in LA. The guy played on “Tutti Frutti” for chrissakes. You don’t think he could be part of the next hot thing?
I spent the day thinking of Elias
Maxfield Francis Goldman
I could hear the cheering of the crowd, their silent plastic mouths were happy; I could taste the dirt kicked up by the elephants, smell the liquid butter sediment of cheap popcorn.
Alexandra Tanner on her "Seinfeldian" novel Worry
Anna Dorn
i think the other end of seinfeldian is like
tiny things really sharply observed
So Long Sailing
Claudia Elena Rodriguez
Few are lucky enough to realize when their destiny is laid before them. I am one of the lucky few. Mine came when my parents suggested a cruise to the Mexican Riviera from Christmas to New Year’s Eve.
Two Eulogies
Hayden Church
I begin to write a eulogy for
a guy who doesn't exist.
My Nina
Tamara Dragadze
But she is always here, always too strong to evaporate into some kind of hereto after.
Chaos Questions with David Joy
Sheldon Lee Compton
I have no interest in living another 360 years. The folks I get along with have about died off and the world will be on fire by then. I’m blowing my brains out.
Excerpts from X: previously posted on Twitter . . .
@asdkfjasdlfjd
Can't spoil what's ahead but suffice to say I may attempt to falsely accuse a fellow indie writer of war crimes in a psychotic bid for even more attention
Percocet Helps
David Simmons
Crush ten pills into a fine powder, then stir thoroughly in a glass of warm water. Put the glass in the freezer and let sit for twenty minutes. At this point, the mixture will have separated.
Chaos Questions with Leah Hampton
Sheldon Lee Compton
SHELDON LEE COMPTON: The aliens actually showed up. They only communicate through images and demand you show them one overall image that explains our civilization. You have five minutes to Google Image search. What do you type into the search bar?
LEAH HAMPTON: “Image of Donald Trump shitting on an endangered butterfly”
I Appreciate the Company
Jade Mar
Eventually, the coke got to his head. He started becoming extremely paranoid. I was on a trip.
I Like the Drugs (And the Drugs Like Me)
Chandler Morrison
I was ten when my mother first took me to a psychiatrist. He put me on Zoloft at her request. My relationship with pharmaceuticals is my longest running one to date. My normal.
NOTES FROM THE BLOOD FACTORY ISSUE #2 ‘AFTER HOURS.’
Frank Reardon
Chris snaps the seal of a Jack Daniels shooter and pops the brown sugar down his throat. Tommy pops Vicodin: Coronado eats a stick of dynamite and blasts his brain with meth, no judgement.
Her Special Place
Mather Schneider
She sits in the grass in her special place and she does her meditation. It is the place she has carved out for herself in the world.
Sick Gal Seeks Rare Elk Sighting or Mate
Laura Adrienne Brady
Chronic illness already made dating hard. And then the pandemic arrived.
“I almost forgot—” my childhood friend interjected as we were wrapping up a phone call on a blustery September day. “I
Chaos Questions with Benjamin Drevlow
Sheldon Lee Compton
What I mean is I write auto-biographical fiction and as such I’m a habitual and unrepentant liar-liar-pants-on-fire sheep in wolf’s clothing.
What the Dead Know
Joanna Acevedo
Once, I thought I would forgive. Now, a year later, I’m still waiting for the feeling to appear
Chaos Questions with Michael Lafontaine
Sheldon Lee Compton
Full facial tattoo or painlessly losing your lips. One has to happen. What is it going to be? What’s that facial tattoo going to be? How’re you going to face the world without those lips?
3 Poems of the Old Testament
Stephanie Yue Duhem
I have known / a hunger I would undo / my own good birth to sate
Rebecca K. Reilly on Greta & Valdin
Anna Dorn
Rebecca K. Reilly’s debut novel Greta & Valdin was a bestseller in her home country of New Zealand in 2021, and today it’s being released in the US and the UK. Pitched as Schitt’s Creek meets
Last Drink Effort
Anthony Gedell
There is an attitude in the liberated fetal detachment
The Way I Am
Sona Lea Dombourian
My mother always says it was my father’s fault I couldn’t get along with anyone.
Nate
Danielle Chelosky
Jilly says the 21-year-old is weirdly similar to me, specifically because she’s in her early 20s and has a dead dad.
Age/Sex/Location
Dylan Bach
MSN Messenger was the absolute dive of the internet in 2002
Chaos Questions with Ben Loory
Sheldon Lee Compton
I also have a white t-shirt I like a lot that says JOHN PRINE IS PRETTY GOOD, but I don't actually wear it because it comes down to my knees.
1-800-Celestial-Help
Pascalle Dugay
It wasn’t nice to call her eyes empty, Sondy supposed. Guileless, most people would say. Furtive, is probably what they’d call Sondy’s eyes.
Deadhead Driver
Sheridan Wilbur
Your Uber arrives and now you remember you’re not wearing any underwear.
My David Cronenberg Season
Adelaide Faith
I go into parties wearing a long-sleeve t-shirt that says Bonjour on the front and Au
Revoir on the back, eating candy cigarettes.
Dopamine Somersault Blackout
Ray Downs
That comment got 55 upvotes. I downvoted it. I don’t have friends anymore
Last Fuck of the Year
Adam Berlin
I get in bed, move my mouth over her nipple.
“Do you mind if I moan?” she says.
LSD-Take One
Adedapo Adeniyi
I tell her this is all I’m getting, because this is all I deserve.
Baby Birds
Miriam Gordis
Getting chemical poisoning together seemed romantic, the closest you could come to being entombed, Pompeii-style, in each other’s arms.
July 26, 2022
Danielle Chelosky
I wanted you to count on me—if not as a lover, then at least as an object for your using.
The Art of a Boring Diary, The Point of a Memoir: An Interview With Alice Carrière
Andie Blaine
Normalcy has no moment to collapse because it is absent from the start.
Six Vignettes
Ashley D. Escobar
Sometimes he’ll cum on my face, and I’ll have to hear about it in one of his poems.
You Belong with Me
Nicola Maye Goldberg
This place looks haunted as shit.
Three Days 'til Christmas in the Kmart off Hoffmeyer Road
md wheatley
You touch everything you see. You want everything you touch.
What If We Did Something Amazing
Robert McCready
Uncle Dale says, “We’re lucky that none of us can fly.”
new snake
Rosalind Margulies
your uncle has a whiteboard on his wall and on it it says TO DO: TELL TERRY YOU LOVE HER. he wrote that you don’t know how many years ago. terry was his girlfriend but she’s dead now
My Rock and Roll Fantasy: aka My 3 Day Psychotic Break
Andrea Taylor
I felt like a fool in the rain as I sat under the shower head.
Grief Is Information: A Review Of Blake Butler's 'Molly'
Danielle Chelosky
Molly, in its three hundred and twelve pages, transcends time and space, life and death.
Four poems from "KNOWING ME THE WANTING NEVER ENDS"
Bertie Brandes
The fantasies I’ve been having
Are so awful
The Biggest Ball In the World
Robert McCready
In late July, in the mid-nineties, I begged Mom and her fiancé Paul to buy me a big ball at Roses department store.
I Love You, Showboat, and I Decline: Healing from Abuse in the Wild West
Amanda Bloom
Showboat said he'd like to take me out sometime. I asked why.
“Because I think you’re attractive, and so we can hang out somewhere other than the coffee trailer,” he said.
It was October, ten
4 Poems
Kathleen Radigan
Do we keep our husbands’ secrets,
or distribute them like sweets
amongst ourselves?
You Aren't Canceled! Lexi Freiman on The Book of Ayn
Anna Dorn
Australian author Lexi Freiman’s second novel, The Book of Ayn, is the funniest book of the year. In it, a writer named Anna struggles to find meaning after being canceled for her “classist” book. To
Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking: A Review
Jay Velarde
Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking is one of those books you can only describe with negative adjectives, despite your enjoyment of it. It’s quick and easy and invigorating in the way stimulants often
PHILOSOPHICAL ACTIVITY
Brittany Adames
I think I’ve lost the practiced falseness of what it means
to be impossibly young. The fingernail moon
hangs over the welt on my goosepimpled thigh. Where
does the world go when not inside me?
The Worst Thing About Me
Aiden “A.J.” Brown
I am supposed to call myself a survivor, but honestly I don’t think surviving is what I’ve been doing.
Etymologies
Bud Jennings
Under a contrived knit brow, his eyes aimlessly drifted among a thicket of words, until they happened to stop on depling, noun, German to Middle English, a child born to older parents, and thus he found a new label for himself, more succinct than his mother’s change-of-life baby and less piercing than faggot, which Joey Novakis and his friends would blurt as they passed him in the school hallways.
Anatomy of a Ruined Wingspan
John Madera
There are times when you just want to go up to no one in particular, and say, “Fuck you and the nutsack that held nightmare-you for x amount of time,” even if, and perhaps especially when, the eventual target is your own face.
To Play Younger
Elizabeth Burch-Hudson
- A well to do woman hosts an orgy that gets gate crashed by a vanilla couple (I just want to be included).
- A boy is seduced by his ex-girlfriend’s hot mom on the Fourth of July (I’m facing my fear of MILFs).
Tamara MC in Conversation with Athena Dixon, author of The Loneliness Files
Tamara MC, Ph.D.
What does a lifetime of loneliness look like, feel like in the body? Athena Dixon examines this question in her second book, The Loneliness Files, published by Tin House, and edited by one of my
Angel
Cameron Darc
The first man is the only one that kills you.
—COLETTE, La Naissance du Jour
Who is Angel? Who am I.
Have you ever loved a mirror?
Laughed, on suicide watch, until Kool-Aid spilled
Jacko Is Wacko Is Us
Jon Doughboy
Is my dick the one getting off in a peanut can?
NOTES FROM THE BLOOD FACTORY, VOL ONE: SETTING UP THE BUTCHER SHOP
Frank Reardon
What most people don’t know is that most of your town butchers are on some kind of pill, powder, or liquid, to get them through the day.
After Women
Chloe Caldwell
I have a dream, after selling this book, someone asks me what it’s about. I explain and they say, So, the narrator is still pining after Finn? They put emphasis on the word ‘still.’
Sending Up Autofiction: Melissa Broder on Death Valley
Anna Dorn
Internet celebrity Melissa Broder’s third novel is what one Goodreads user accurately deemed an “existential horny cactus western.”
Escapement
Daisy Alioto
Men are tyrants with their time; but women are tyrants with the eternal.
The Branzino
Greta Schledorn
I’ve always wanted someone to tell me what I want, to sell me on a life I want to live.
Bombs Bursting In Air: From New York to the Crystal Coast with the Wartime Author
Derek Maine
Literature is happening all of the time, all around us, all at once.
Waiting Through the Ones Who Came After You
Ella Schmidt
That was my youth: I developed a sickness, a ruinous crush on the man at the filling station
Evel Knievels
md wheatley
I was driving down the freeway listening to Third Eye Blind way too loud
The Horoscope
Hayden Church
My friend asks if I believe in / gay marriage
As the World Echoes
Laine Derr
I was stationed in Osh, a forty minute flight south of the capital. I had
a decent sized apartment
William Burroughs and Sheila Heti on a post-harcore band tour bus, Dante as tour manager, Italo Calvino the support band: A review of Geoff Rickly's debut novel Someone Who Isn't Me
Adelaide Faith
Part I of the book is titled Forest.
Future Present
Brad Phillips
Bobby was going down, not on a woman or a man but fast and with extreme force into the frost covered asphalt of a Holiday Inn parking lot, five minutes from the Detroit airport.
The Redhead
S.H. Woodgeard
My father is talking fast, telling me how the redhead is waiting for him.
Spotted
Reilly Tuesday
Gone, like T9 texting, is the once exciting novelty of being important, popular, scandalous
Yet another person who doesn't give a shit about your existence
Jessica Almereyda
This act of attention lifts you momentarily out of your debilitating amiss-malaise.
doing coke in your 30s is like draw thee nearer to god fr
Vivian Medithi
when congress bans our faves we will smuggle them through customs and call it praxis
Trust Issues
Stephen J. Golds
I knew the talk about a baby was another red flag, but the more uncontrollable Amelie became, the deeper I got hooked. I couldn’t go back to what my life was before. I think it had been drowned the
On All Fours
Marc Tweed
The thing about Grandma is that she seems to show up unannounced and she doesn’t care about the substance of the prayers, just that they end in Amen.
The Losers of Tomorrow
Miranda
I know Max is probably hard by the time we get to the overlook at the dam. He puts the car in park and tells me he mixed a cd, just for me, because I’m so special.
- I can’t believe this is
Friendly Advice
Gabrielle A.D.
He’s still rambling about my womanhood, my untapped, ethereal potential, when I reach for a tissue and blow his hot load out of my nostril.
Virgil Abloh Attends a Filipino Party
Lloyd Alimboyao Sy
But her coup de grace was when she started bringing a white boyfriend to our parties. He was a real champion. His name was John.
Three Poems
John B. Oldenborg
What’s your name? Like an oak
I want to carve a heart
into our washing machine.
My Brief, Disastrous Attempt at Polyamory
Audrey W.
We started as open, NOT poly. This was a very important distinction to us, despite not having a working definition of either types of relationships. It was, we both agreed, substantially less cringe
“A magpie for weird”: Jessie Gaynor on her debut novel The Glow
Anna Dorn
Definitely one poet holdover is just being a magpie for weird
UNDER PRESSURE
Willow Loveday Little
Mysterious beauty spot the farra on cheek.
Rita
Mike Day
By March of 2016, my cousin Josh and I were practically flat broke. We’d been having an incestuous and adulterous affair, one that elevated his title to “cuzband” (he hated that term). Four years
American Made
Anthony Gedell
The great neon calamity of his own life exhausts him.
Consume(d)
Lindsay Forbes Brown
One night I was so drunk, I couldn’t feel my face.
No Such Thing As Florida
Franklin Schneider
Everything would be fine, sort of, if she could close this deal.
Ruth Madievsky on her "vibe-based" novel All-Night Pharmacy
Anna Dorn
Ruth Madievsky’s debut novel All-Night Pharmacy has everything I want from a book: a toxic sister relationship, countless nights at a seedy LA nightclub, and an unexpected sapphic romance. After her
Among the Visigoths
David Nutt
There is a strength of purpose, I suppose, a fortitude and integrity, in simply admitting yourself to be a malevolent presence skulking the dingy alleyways of your own life.
Filial, your father said
Cameron Darc
Right away we shared amphetamines. He fed them to me to keep me awake.
The Peyote Warrior of Window Rock
Scott Laudati
You have to keep in mind this is a true story, and the events I’m about to describe took place before 2006 in a desert land which I’ve never been able to find again on any map. And years later, when I
I’ve Started to Think
Kenzy El-Mohandes
Loud noises bother me. Crunching on chips. What did they do five hundred years ago when they didn’t have chips? They ate grapes. Quietly.
Three Poems
Šari Dale
Dexedrine,
obedient beauty,
a low-calorie
alternative
for excess.
Motherfuckin House of Hunger
Uzodinma Okehi
and by the way, I wear jeans too, and I’ll fuck that white girl, absolutely, from the commercial, the camera trails her on the beach, she’s smiling, now she’s hiding behind her hands . . .
Cosmically Forsaken
Teddy Duncan Jr.
They put her flyer on their mailboxes and look at me like she’s dead.
Three Poems
Daniel Feinberg
My boy on the boulevard bubbling.
Triple wick rip tide in my mind.
Public Freakout
Sydney Hirsch
Seeing a picture of my tits online didn’t bother me as much as it should have.
DON'T STEP INTO MY OFFICE
David Fishkind
With snot running down my chin, weeping, I allowed myself to entertain the possibility that this key situation would go on forever.
Excerpt from 'Counterillumination'
Audrey Szasz
I have to believe that what I am writing — what I am living through — means something.
Jack Skelley on 'The Complete Fear Of Kathy Acker,' Breaking Rules, Disneyland, and BBLs
Andie Blaine
Bliss can flip into alienation and back into elation, adding to the teasing uncertainty of identity.
JOHNNY-THE-ORDERLY & other stories
Jamie Iredell
When you peed in the cup, Herman was behind you, watching.
Girls on Dirty Sofas, Close Together
Adelaide Faith
‘Did you talk about capes,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Mary said.
tethered to the other always
Alexander Fredman
But I don’t even know what a collective is. And I can’t remember if he had tattoos.
Society of Elliott Smiths
Teddy Engs
One weird Halloween everybody dressed up as Elliott Smith.
Exponentially Femme: Jenny Fran Davis on Dykette
Anna Dorn
like HFCA is kind of artless manipulation
it’s not subtle
Self-cleaning car cleans self after nuclear blast
Ben Dreith
People keep saying that they can’t say anything but everyone is saying everything all the time.
Two Bikes, One City
Matthew Binder
Finally, Mr. Mackey, the chair of the school’s English Department, delivered a rambling panegyric about the school’s depth of talented writers. I left my seat in the bleachers to fetch a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine.
When My Mother Could No Longer Talk Me Off the Ledge
Catherine Davis
Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.
Two Halves of the Story
Edward M. Cohen
The other half was the memories of the end. The time Teddy had threatened to burn the only copy of my novel.
The Piano Players
Teddy Burnette
He struggles to come up with actions that give him a sense of joy or purpose when she is not around.
Exorcist Exercise
Danielle Chelosky
He says he feels like all his problems would be solved if he stopped going to that bar.
I Wish I Didn’t Feel Like I Am Apologizing for Existing
Alix Takada Sharp
Things that make sense: plants, deer, video games, sushi, beer.
People Can Be Criminals: Tupperware Thief
Sarah Swinwood
He stole my Tupperware, the largest one in a glass Pyrex set.
Vibe Check From God
md wheatley
I was telling stories. I was enjoying music. I was proselytizing. I was observing.
Let’s Take a Selfie
Wild Card
His white face is red. Mom taught me that people turn red like tomatoes when they’re drunk. I look around and see pink and red faces all around me.
Three Poems
Lauren Ireland
I am torn with longing for many unnameable things.
We Talked to Scientists About Desire
Kathleen Radigan
At night, we lay on unmoored mattresses, pressing hands over our eyes to block out spears of light from the street. We cursed our naked windows.
The Secret
Mohammad Rafiq
What the Mother wanted to show us might be different from what we wanted to see.
2 Fictions
Katie Gene Friedman
“My grandma drinks that,” the kid ahead of me at Duane Reade snarks at my six-pack of Ensure bottles.
If It Makes You Happy
Laura Dzubay
She feels bad for being taken aback before; she really is a very nice doctor.
Für Elske and the landlord, Mr Koen Leeuwens
Arturo Desimone
The attic room in the student town of Ordrecht went for 365, 52 euros monthly, not including the safety-deposit, called borg in Dutch.
“Lucky boy, just too late. Because we have crisis in Holland,
Playground
Andrew Hahn
In the mornings, the woman sees her husband off to work in her night dress, sometimes with curlers in her hair. After he leaves, she always lights a cigarette and stands with the glass-paned storm door cracked open. I can tell the inside of their house smells like knock-off Estée Lauder and menthol smoke.
Pure and Consuming Terror
asdkfjasdlfjd
We drank the acid. I immediately felt fucked.
Two Stories
David Kuhnlein
I imagined finding him hanged beneath the creak of a taut rope as often as I didnt.
Hit something
Hayden Church
Do you ever get mad
and want to
hit something?
I LOVE D-BOYZ
Christian Bodney
don’t say the truth
it’s presumptuous and tastes like an airhead
Twelve Hour Karma Cycle
Sam Redlark
A few minutes later I was presented with a tall, condensation-covered glass, containing an opaque, dark-green liquid that looked like it had been skimmed off the surface of a stagnant pond. I took a tentative sip.
Maximo the Magnificent
Adam Johnson
How they stabbed me and got away with it!
Jen Beagin on her “fast-paced and horny” novel Big Swiss
Anna Dorn
I guess my approach is not to take myself too seriously, which sounds kind of dumb and obvious, and just to write the sort of book I most like to read, which is usually something heavy but also light on its feet, fast-paced and horny, and generally not too full of itself.
I’ll kill myself if you leave
John Doe
Our lovemaking is a demilitarized zone.
Sixty Percent
Will Bindloss
He turns up late to almost all of his final exams, answers whatever questions he feels like and defaces the rest of the paper.
Five Poems
Ashley D. Escobar
I vomited
up a prophecy in a dive bar,
inhaling hot dogs.
Bath Salts
Andrea Taylor
I can tell she’s not convinced. But I’ve been Googling symptoms: confusion, nausea, loss of appetite, changes in sleep patterns, visual hallucinations, erratic behavior.
Wine-Induced Laughing Fit
Danielle Chelosky
“you’re bad at finishing beverages that aren’t alcoholic,” you told me
simone says
Anna Dorn
writing fiction in which people google things,
suffering in a very abstract way
trying very hard to shut the fuck up & failing
An Ordinary Hour
Stephanie Yue Duhem
You must stop dating
physicists, that sere barnacling across
the cold, leeward faces of rocks.
Back to School 2
Matthew Davis
At the head of the conference table sat a man scrolling on his phone, whom Michael intuited was the leader of this secret society.
MY JUNKIE DREAMS NEVER END IN SHOOTING UP
Christian Bodney
I wake up glad to not be strung out.
I wonder how my drug dealers are doing.
Another Day at the Museum of Forgetfulness
Todd Campbell
I finger a ring of keys and wonder what doors they might unlock.
Sonnet for the Physical Therapist Who Told Me This is Just the Way the Good Lord Made Me
Billie R. Tadros
It’s a sin,
to desire different architecture, I’m told
my beloved forgets how to pray
Anthony Thomas Lombardi
in a cellar not far from here, wine waits years to peak
before a bottle is cracked open only to empty
a bruise.
A Toddler Unmakes His Father’s Laundry
Geoff Anderson
Burying me # alive
in training pants and # rags is my son’s
# gift of sorts
Tattoo
John Picard
The other day she showed up at André’s apartment in the middle of the night with a red rose and, in the bottom of her purse, a steak knife...
Florida Man
Dan Leach
He sits alone on the beach with his feet in the sand, cigarette in mouth, eyes on the water, though there’s no one out here who knows him, and it’s not clear what he wants, unless what he wants is to be alone, in which case he picked the wrong part of the strand.
Maintaining Life
Jessica Daugherty
I worried I had magically bloated between 9 a.m. and lunch time, even though I’d only eaten the prescribed six saltine crackers.
give me all your secrets and I’ll set them on fire
Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo
that was the year that all the carnivals came to town. sounds like a fake small town thing, but when you live in a small town, all the things that happen are fake small town things, except they’re
Allergy
Claudia Lundahl
The summer I was allergic to tap water was the summer I lost all my friends. School was out but nobody wanted to be around me except for Joel who wasn’t really my friend to begin with but sort of became one afterwards. It was understandable. I couldn’t shower and, well, to be perfectly honest, I smelled bad. Joel didn’t seem to mind, though. He worked the check-out at the general store and taped his ear to his head.
Mother Russia
Alexandrine Ogundimu
And V, who had been high all day and drinking since around 4pm, suddenly realized how fucking bored she was of all of it, of once again drinking her way through grad school in a cool city going to goth nights with people she was or wasn’t in love with and so V thought about getting up mid-sentence and leaving and calling her old sponsor and hitting up a late night AA meeting or maybe even just going home and getting some sleep or crying but instead she just listened to herself charmingly talk about nothing until she couldn’t stand it and asked the girl to dance.
Through the Clinic, I Pass
Cassandra Whitaker
I was a glamour upon a glamour upon a glamour, a mouth devouring a mouth devouring a mouth.
dos poemas
Andrea Alzati
hemos vuelto heridos de una guerra que todavía no empieza
yo perdí una de mis extremidades
y él las perdió todas
1 poem
gg roland
HOW DO I GET MORE WEIRD RUSSIAN ART GALS TO FOLLOW ME ON INSTAGRAM I ASK BECAUSE THEY HAVE THE MOST INTERESTING PROFILES AND SEEM LIKE THEY COULD SUCK YOUR DICK SO GOOD THEY COULD ROB YOU OF
Word Problems: Asynchronous Learning'/'Downhill
Laura Bandy
You can never return to the track. A hard truth, heaven knows, but heed me— delay the wreck
and coma. Take a longer backwards way and savor that last downhill run, the final door to close.
A Brief History of an Extinction
Amanda-Gaye Smith
I will feel like a bad country cover of a Kate Bush song.
Love and Other Chemical Stimulants: Rebecca van Laer interviewed by Kate Axelrod
Kate Axelrod
Hobart and HAD contributor Rebecca van Laer's debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark (Long Day Press, April 12) weaves together poetry, fiction, and criticism to follow the narrator Charlotte as she
Maybe Then I'll Be Cured: An Interview with Graham Irvin
Crow Jonah Norlander
You might be reluctant to try liver mush. You might think it’s not for me. But you are at a party, and you’ve been cornered by a stranger, and there’s nobody else there you really want to talk to, and
Jim
Jason Hardung
If a middle-aged man sobs in a dark room and nobody is around to hear it, does anyone say, “It’s just a cat. Get over it?”
A Foil Grip: Lessons in Fencing & Other Indoor Sports
Lindsey Danis
As a baby dyke, I’d waded into sex and romance like a kid at a water park, slowly and then all at once. Now I was on the sidelines.
On Penguins in Brooklyn
Ashley D. Escobar
On Penguins in Brooklyn
the protagonist feels like
she’s never leaving,
stuck on a moving walkway
in the middle of cincinnati
international airport
in kentucky,
headphones dangling,
she
Drunk Love (Interlude)
Joanna Acevedo
I get too drunk on a Tuesday night and tell him I want to marry him. We’ve known each other for six years.
from the archives: "When They Let Them Bleed" from Hobart 13
Tod Goldberg
When They Let Them Bleed: Ten Years After
It took me a long time to write “When They Let Them Bleed” – both in the practical sense, in that I recall writing it in very short bursts because it was
Intergalactic travel departing from berlin
Berglind Thrastardottir
i felt you were floating now with them, in a bubble in space, the bubble has a name, ecstasy, keta, speed, coke, that’s the name of the bubble.
But Then Comes April
Daniel Joseph
For the better part of every year I try like heck to be a better person. Nicer. More caring. This year I’ve taken up breathing. I breathe in and I breathe out each day. Last year I learned to put less
Posing Naked and the Art of Separation
Elena Lee Anderson
1. There is a protective radius of ten feet on all sides of me.
2. I only know the name of one person in this room.
3. My body hair was groomed solely for this moment.
My Shoes Are Ruined and You Said Nothing
Sean Turner McLeod
You are standing on an indifferent platform in Preston Station and a little black spaniel is making unbreaking eye-contact with you as he pisses on your leg.
Queer Time, Sand Too
Aislin Neufeldt
Maybe you didn’t recognize me, me with longer hair, growing tits, a new name.
The Far Side
Julie Goldberg
She was going up to Poughkeepsie to see a girl she had met on the internet who, promisingly, shared her passion for Gary Larson comics.
In a New York Summer
David Ehmcke
Two men smoking cigarettes on Bleecker could mean anything
to each other.
Prep School Drug Mule
Sadie McCarney
Fifteen years before my autism diagnosis - the year I chopped off all my hair with jagged scissors - I hid a not inconsequential baggie of hash in my dorm room closet. I was, as always, trying to
Question for the Rio Grande
Saúl Hernández
Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow
What Men Want
Sandra Jensen
Here’s the plan: we’ll become high-class prostitutes. “Courtesans,” I say, “like ancient Greece.”
Jay
Edward M. Cohen
Jay arrived once a week, every week, for sex. He was a dental student, worked Wednesdays at a clinic near my house so it was easy for him to call to see if I was free. I made sure that I was. He
A Drawing of My First Tattoo
Mercury-Marvin Sunderland
tree tree tree tree calvin calv hobbes
Johnny’s Knives
Mia D’Avanza
I know that I should be sad, or at least look sad, or somber, as I go through the things in Johnny’s room.
Do Not Ask God For The Way To Heaven; He Will Show You The Hardest One
David Wojciechowski
A man was arrested for creating a labyrinth in an IKEA.
Red Aphrodite
Andie Sheridan
doesn’t know how to give a PROPER blowjob
The spittle
of the sea
otherwise known as Jamaica Pond
dries hard on her eros:erring:elbow still deeper
resonating
in her
Carts
Daisy Alioto
I don’t respond and two hours later he sends a photo of the dog.
Carts
Daisy Alioto
Alice sighs in the way only British people can sigh. Maybe it’s all the rain they have inhaled.
Carts
Daisy Alioto
We went back and forth, hyping each other up, talking about the best summer of our lives and how we would never be this young again and if we pet an alpaca everyone would be jealous.
Lake Michigan
Anna Adami
Wind, always strongest by water, whistles and whooshes, knocks a girl off her feet.
Carts
Daisy Alioto
I am searching for the type of room that would change my life if I lived there, you know the one.
Carts
Daisy Alioto
“Bandeau,” I type into the Tumblr search bar. The results load like a quilt of skin.
horse girl
Andrew Ketcham
I'm waiting for influenza in Virginia. Or the taste of something metal.
Horse Poor
Alexander Lumans
After last night, I’m no longer allowed at The Mint Bar. You could say it’s because I choked the owner’s daughter up against the wall next to the jukebox that only plays Cash songs—pushed her hard enough that a quarter fell from the coin slot—or you could say she deserved it.
Adjudicate
Michael Snyder
I’m in accounting. Sally in the lab. Among her other duties, Sally is an odor judge. Her nose is rather ordinary to look at, what my grandma might have called a button nose. But Sally’s nose is legend.
Absent Goras
Avee Chaudhuri
The Chetrams were from Trinidad and listened to Bollywood music on the weekends. They were good, hardworking people. Their kids were polite. They were not Muslims as far as their neighbors could tell, since Chetram liked Miller Lite and the daughter wore high-waisted shorts in the summer. It was not polite to inquire.
Because Mid-Meal, My Mother Says “Now Don’t Write About This”; Or, The Tyranny of We
Sandra Beasley
But to write We thought is a fiction.
We always felt that…the moment you write this phrase, you have lied.
The Reformer
Claudia Ross
I looked up at Rudy, his back hitting the air like a ruler. The mind is an act of balance, he said, looking at me. It is a lever for the body.
Sylvère Lotringer is dead
Danielle Chelosky
Our hypothetical date tomorrow is at a show for the band Tennis. I have never heard of them, but I trust him. I say I will work my magic to get us in.
Three Poems
Jade Hurter
I love you best
like this: sun in your hair, a heavy daze
of pollen on your eyelids.
A Writer's Work: an Interview with JoAnna Novak
Michael Deagler
When we talk about a writer’s work, we are talking about the things she makes: poems, essays, books. It’s a mercantile word to apply to the artistic process, and yet it’s an inescapable one. Short
Hello: It's Not Me You're Looking For
Luna Adler
Like Richie’s “Hello,” Adele’s “Hello” is also an ode to longing.
Centerpiece
Justin Chandler
Under the pretense of repairing things, I go to prove I am not broken.
Penelope Went to Episcopal Church Feeling Melancholy
Jade Song
I will never read this essay out loud, so let me take some risks:
Almond, salmon, Episcopal, peony, Adidas, melancholy, mischievous.
In my head: Owl-mund, sal-MON, epic-SKO-poll.
I add force
Ambire
Shreya Fadia
I’ve never run for political office and have no desire to run—which is not to say that I’ve never thought about it—but I do know what it is to move, to travel, to traverse, to go around for the sake of one’s ambitions.
Choosing a Wedding Gift for the Only Person You Ever Loved
Dillon Fernando
When I mention this flash of sexual fluidity to people, it bothers them.
Midsummer in the Spirit Realm
Dave Fromm
Felt, for a minute, like some façade had slipped, like a glitch in the matrix. Is this in fact the car we came in? Are we who we think we are?
It's Later Than You Think
Adam McOmber
When I was dead, I returned to my father’s house, an old farmstead in Northwestern Ohio, and I stood alone in the gravel drive, satisfied to see that the house was just as I remembered it—small and gray, rising on a plot of land west of a moonlit apple orchard.
Crying at the Russian Ballet
Benjamin Davis
The curtains opened, the ballerinas emerged, toes became violins, hands, trumpets, backs, cellos.
Prison Killed My Libido
Sheryl Anderson as-told-to Christine Fadden
I don’t write “I have the libido of a sloth” in my online dating profile. I don’t use my real surname now either.
Bride School Girls
Amanda Churchill
The Class of 1953 Tachikawa Air Base Bride School girls were fertile, well-fed and rested.
Looking For Love At A Celibate Barbecue
Joe Leonard
“And then after I came out to my wife, she stumbled across People Can Change,” said the man from Fresno.
The Reward; When Things Repeat
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Don’t they let you? Don’t they ever let you lay down your head?
Ten Years Have Passed in Ninety Days
Madison L. Sargeant
The mushrooms I bought yesterday are moldy; the lines around my mouth have deepened. Tomorrow I am a mother for the first time.
Making Weight (pt. 7)
Denny Connolly
Previously on...
Part 6 || Part 5 || Part 4 || Part 3 || Part 2 || Part 1 || Prologue
They Ate the Children First
Madeline Cash
I Googled things that bond people. Google said trauma.
Just Killing Time
Kat Saunders
We’ve sat in pot smoke-filled basements, watching boys play video games, and I’ve sipped wine with my parents on special occasions, but neither of us have been to an actual party before.
Dinosaur III
Zachary Kocanda
Ken pounded out three novelty songs on his busted up acoustic guitar, looking like a knock-off Daniel Johnston.
the novel as a kind of organism: an interview with Tao Lin
Kristen Iskandrian
To try to allay his doubt, or figure out of it’s real, [Li] mentally consults his in-progress novel, as if it were a friend. He intuits, in an intuition described by the line you quoted, that his doubt is wrong, is habitual and self-sabotalogical.
A Fun Game for the Whole Family
Eric Dovigi
If a ghost is the impression you leave after you, then the divot you leave in your old bed is a ghost.
Playing Her Song
Andrew Stancek
Gratitude is not the response she expected. She smiled through thin lips, missing the hoped-for fight.
Slung Out and Wayward
David Nutt
Gunderson could hear the vehicle’s noisy carping from eight blocks away, like a herd of wild trashcans rolling down the street.
The Ball Dropped, Honey!
Darina Sikmashvili
Oh, absolutely a mistake to have given the wealthy Protein Bar Daddy my number.
Three Poems
Andy Tran
Playin’_The_Keys
i love to dance, sing, write, chill, read
and play the keys, but sometimes, life
doesn’t allow me to hang out
and do my thing, which means
i have to divide my time into many
For I Have Sinned
Sean Dolan
My son is fifteen when he asks the first question I am unable to answer.
Everyone Eventually Leaves LA
Heidi Seaborn
When the Santa Anas whipped into town, everyone became a little crazier. They invited the wildfires as if to burn the witches amongst us.
Product Placement
Daniel Fraser
My last suicide attempt was in a park called Jesus Green. I said ‘last’ because I gave up, not because it worked. Writing plays tricks with life and death so you need to make things clear.
I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is
Jenny KangDi Li
I’m Writing from the Other Side of the Universe to Ask You How the Weather Is
This is a soft rain, my father says, his forehead a creased encyclopedia page. It is mao mao yu in Chinese, syllables
I Planned to Ask You to Prom
Cassidy Bull
Seventeen days since you spoke your last words to me. They repeat themselves in my mind, I never want to forget them.
Reimagining with Mexican Candy
Moisés R. Delgado
I am not a pinch, a spoonful, a half a cup of light rivering down into the stomach where, I should know, the heart truly resides.
For Your Consideration
Adrián Pérez
Consideration of Deferred Action for Chilhood Arrivals
This is when your humanity ends, when a pen hits this paper.
Still Life
Tawanda Mulalu
...I'm part of this thing where fish learned to walk...
When You Have a Traumatic Brain Injury, You Should Really ‘See Stars’
Susan Hatters Friedman
Tom Selleck, in his best reverse mortgage voice, volunteers to call your parents and break the news that their daughter almost died. Your mom is happy to hear from him since she always liked Magnum P.I.
Waves of Fun
Dalton Monk
Big Bob sat beside me and watched women he classified as MILFs walk their kids to the pool with large, clear tubes.
Jayne St. Mansonfield
Adam Klein
She arrived at my apartment at 3 a.m. with a soft suitcase on her head, a handle positioned over one eye. I could see the netting in her matted blonde wig. Her broken eyeliner and stained lips
Where Is My Haka?
Janet Rodriguez
After we finish doing the dinner dishes together, Mario heads into the living room and picks up the remote control.
“Guess what?” he says, turning on the TV. “New Zealand is playing England in
The Conversation
Delilah Silberman
There was a time I had a flower in my mouth...
Making Weight (pt. 6)
Denny Connolly
Previously on...
Part 5 || Part 4 || Part 3 || Part 2 || Part 1 || Prologue
Two Shorts
Heather Domenicis
The house on Olean street stands as it once did, a formerly bright white house, the sidings been torn off, revealing dark greenish-black shingles. This house, the black sheep of the neighborhood.
Words Fail, Chapter 2c: The Legend of Mount Woodenheap
Angus Woodward
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog
Chapter 2a: Two People
Chapter 2b: Divergence
The Foreign Zoo: Tour(s)ing in Place
Richard Holinger
Our return to campus one evening to discover spray-painted in black on the university’s entrance wall, “ICI ZOO ETRANGER” (HERE IS THE FOREIGN ZOO).
Words Fail, Chapter 2b: Divergence
Angus Woodward
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog
Chapter 2a: Two People
The Great Conjunction
Leone Brander
It is December 21, 2020, the night of the Great Conjunction. For the first time since the 1600s, Jupiter and Saturn will be the closest to each other they’ve ever been. NASA says you’ll be able to
Dive Bar Theophany
Natalie Rowland
To the left of the counter stands a dead rat on its hind legs, taxidermied, with one front paw extended and one middle finger raised. An insult that looks like benediction. A pair of antlers sit atop
Would You Still Like Me If
Delia Rainey
I’ve been trying to find this quote by Chris Kraus from Aliens & Anorexia I think, but the quote is nowhere in my notebooks, even though I remember writing it down obsessively.
Words Fail, Chapter 2a: Two People
Angus Woodward
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis
Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog
Seven Ghosts
David Mohan
Throughout our first year in that house you woke feeling this ghost’s breath on your face, and at night, sometimes, you’d jump up frantic, swearing you’d felt its grave-clasp on your ankle or arm.
He tells me Bob Ross was in the war in Vietnam
Danielle Chelosky
The night before Easter he ties his belt around my neck and gives it to me to hold.
A Favor for The Dude
Mike Andrelczyk
My brother and I were standing outside of the 30th street station in Philadelphia.
I forget how old we were but we were old enough that our mom let us take the train alone from Lancaster to
Making Weight (pt. 5)
Denny Connolly
Previously on...
Part 4 || Part 3 || Part 2 || Part 1
Lessons in Manhood
Minna Dubin
My husband Paul and I are drinking beers and eating hot dogs at the baseball stadium in San Francisco. It’s even a little boring, and I have my back to the field for a while so can I face my friends
The Widow on Opening Day
Brendan J. O'Brien
From the couch corner where
his ass has crafted a killer dent
for the better part of a week,
my father begins shouting insane cuss words
at no one in particular –
titty fucker bang bang, cunty
An absorbed sound
Lyd Havens
An absorbed sound
There was the night where the snow was quieter than usual
& your car wouldn’t start, so we stood under concrete
steeples to wait for the tow truck until your last hand
Four Poems
Raegan Bird
Times the Dog Looks for God
Sun is too hot
Sun is too cold
Fire alarm
Balsamic Moon
Lightning in remembered spaces
going dormant
Shade avoidance and dashboard doubles
Feeling
It Never Stops
Jared Yates Sexton
By late August, Mary-Beth was sweating on her front porch swing, a bottle of Budweiser resting on the table her daughter Madison gave her for Mother’s Day a decade earlier. Mary-Beth had been watching
sadness dies badly like a waiting room plant
Chelsea Tadeyeske
sadness dies badly like a waiting room plant
every body is mostly water
and will still only sink or float
it’s so maddening
it takes me two hours to finish
an apple
sometimes the human in
Three Poems
Sadie Dupuis
CRYSTAL THINKING
Dream logic gets my sober companion drunk
Vomiting silver in the private beehive of our wagon
I went to the cemetery and played you a too-fast solo
Mud seeped in the ass of my
A Yellow Tulip
Nancy Freund
The moon came out, riding on a motorbike, his head hatted, silver-blue, attached.
Eating Away From Others
Cameron Thomas Snyder
We compiled our snacks and made for the playhouse basement.
Soda Fountain
Janelle Cordero
On my first job I worked for a woman named Jeanie who owned a soda fountain, thrift store, and tavern. I worked at the soda fountain fixing milk shakes and simple sandwiches for the few customers that
Reign in Bliss
Crow Jonah Norlander
He wondered, "What if I never get out of the shower?" and just like that he never did.
The Winter Shed
Samantha Samakande
"Tight coils come / up floating in / my husband's peppermint..."
KID
Kyra Baldwin
I was nineteen, still felt like a kid, and Tom seemed to like me.
Heidi & Bob
Jon Lindsey
She is thinking that when you make love, your brain opens, and everyone knows what you are thinking, and you know what everyone else is thinking, so your husband knows what you are thinking and can control you.
Billy James Henry & Peachy
Connor Goodwin
I told him about Nebraska and how it was a dried up ancient ocean bed, how farmers harvested corn and clicks, how there might be kings buried under the freshly tilled soil or angels who dusted the August crops.
Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid
Danielle P. Williams
after Ruby/Hilary
For just
fifteen seconds
out of my twenty-
six years living
I imagine
myself
a white woman
bones breaking
in a new way
my
A Brief History of a Room
Ahmad Adedimeji Amobi
I packed into this room during my second year's semester break of university. For all the years before, I slept with my mother upstairs. Our building is a three-story building built with rocks and
The First Execution
Scott Laudati
For a few years, before Carl’s dad won a scratch-off ticket and no one ever saw him again, I called Carl my best friend.
Dates with Charlie
Julie Goldberg
Charlie would never cannibalize me; he’d have nothing to eat.
Hockenheimring
Sam Farahmand
On Sunday morning, at eight central in middle Tennessee, I watch the Grand Prix. This season is the 70th anniversary of the FIA Formula One World Championship, which feels like enough of a reason to
Meet 2020’s Most Nonessential Santas
Tyler Barton and Erin Dorney
This is the Santa crushing it on Etsy.
This is the Santa denied unemployment.
This is the Santa whose Zoom background brought his therapist to tears.
This Santa doesn’t give a shit—he’s a
My Daughter Has Never Heard of Home Alone or All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth
Adam Hughes
She lives with her mom
two states away
and I wish this was all
I've failed to teach her.
Acting
Danny Lang-Perez
I’m now constructing a mental pool for how long these two can keep up the corporate veneer before they go insane or at least pop Gene in the teeth or at least say Okay you’re done no more pineapple and then whisk away the tray of pineapple Mom and I have not stopped noshing and ogling and noshing...
Grip
Connor Goodwin
The first time I went rock climbing, I lasted 30 minutes.
On Shaving My Legs for the First Time
Nandini Maharaj
On Shaving my Legs for the First Time
the offending hairs that sprout from dark skin
like unwelcome ants that toil through the night
hairs that signal virility on my father’s chin
draw taunts
Most Accurate, Most Deadly
Hannah Seidlitz
I once let the person I loved prick my ribcage with a needle a thousand times so I wouldn’t forget. A collection of dots arcing messily into two black brackets.
I Write Panic
Sydney Vogl
I WRITE PANIC
into the locked kitchen
cabinet, china chipped
& sticky. i write
myself into a bottle
of vodka, sloshing
in waves of bitter
padded tongue.
i write the morning
green &
Neon; Regret: Lucio Fontana’s “Walking the Space”
Amanda Goldblatt
I am writing you now from a city we scored with nomadic walking fourteen months ago. During that trip I had been ill.
Acknowledgment
Tara Van De Mark
Dan disowned my sister and me via email a year ago
Why Look for Animals?
Alexandria Peary
In this dappled language, like a woods painted by Neil Welliver, in and out of our attention, animals wander in the camouflage. They are highlighted by our attention: each stands in a yellow bar of
Significant Tornadoes
Carmen E Brady
Many days I realize my dreams are fiction half way through.
Rocky Lives in My Head Rent Free
Julia Do
in this one you’re a six foot / two hundred pound prize
A Problem Set
Lauren D. Woods
Why did Train A leave while Train B was still getting ready?
The Bulldagger
Andrea Routley
I like sex in fiction to be full of ambivalence—undeniable lust mixed with doubt or disgust. I have done things with lovers I don’t want to tell anyone.
Words Fail, Chapter 1c: Fighting the Fog
Angus Woodward
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
Chapter 1b: Crisis
Why Look For the Animals?
Alexandria Peary
In contrast to wild animals, pets are timelines left on the floor. These models of accelerated, abridged lives can be found to the right of the Lazy Boy and the magazine rack.
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
Brandon Sanchez
I’m standing on top of Drew Barrymore’s star and the song’s issuing from a hot-purple Sony boom box someone set up a few feet away.
notes on archiving erasure
Saida Agostini
love does not begin and end the way we think it does. love is a battle; love is a war; love is a growing up
-James Baldwin
when i say
I love my family
what i mean
is i worship
the
Chances Are
KJ Shepherd
It’s funny: I don’t recall ever hearing music around you, not in the condo and certainly not in the trailer.
Mixed Signals
Albert Abonado
I didn’t have my brother Patrick’s phone number until after my parents had been in a car accident.
IN WHICH THE WHITE WOMAN ON MY THESIS DEFENSE ASKS ME ABOUT WITNESS
Noor Hindi
1. And what does it mean to witness yourself, on television, dying?
a. I no longer watch the news.
b. I’ve exhausted every mirror in my home searching for my
Thirtieth of May
Brandon Sanchez
Gender in the Long 19th Century ends at 4 p.m., which leaves enough time to raid the liquor store on Cowley Road. A and K and I go early, J and S join later.
Pilgrimage
Caroline Galdi
The driver laughed when you couldn’t pronounce the name of your destination. It’s a cobblestoned European town the same as every other cobblestoned European town you’ve seen so far.
Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely
Matthew Duffus
A man sits in a bar in a no-name town in a flyover state. It’s late. He’s alone. A double whiskey sits before him, sweating on a cheap cardboard coaster. The bartender knows his order by sight.
Remedy: A Partial Account of Medicines
Rachel Mindell
Letrozole (2.5mg)
Pharmacists are torn over which tone to take with me, Letrozole being used primarily to treat breast cancer in post-menopausal women after surgery. In Google summary, a
To Her Next Boyfriend
Jane DIESEL
If thinking your own thoughts has never brought you love, is it so bad to let another think for you?
I Saw Jim Jarmusch Yesterday
Ali Motamedi
I saw Jim Jarmusch yesterday.
Words Fail, Chapter 1b: Crisis
Angus Woodward
Previously on...
Chapter 1a: Converging
SAD SEXY CATHOLIC
Lauren Badillo Milici
I was God’s favorite, once—enough
schoolgirl in me to make Mary
sweat. not a fall-from-grace, but something sweeter.
an unlit cigarette wedged between two
adolescent fingers; & the skin like
Crawdad Hunters
Jacey de la Torre
Jilly and I fought a lot when we were kids. When other folks tell me they never fought with their siblings, I think about all the circumstances in their childhood that would have made that a remotely
Smells Like You
Maggie Edwards
Tennis balls were always disgusting. That creep-crawly not-green not-quite-yellow felt that made my teeth grind and my spine twitch, always wet with dog slobber. And it never lost that toxic new car
JFK
Zoe Underhill
This diner has been here since 1949 but I am sure that no one has ever looked as beautiful as you do sitting on these red vinyl seats.
The Complement
Madeline Furlong
I painted my lips and fingers red the first time I was unfaithful. It was in college, with a girl with sharp orange hair who had a smile that said come. I never really liked her--she was arrogant and
Greatest Hits, Al Green
Patrick Daly
She focuses on efficient point accumulation: jam, 12 points.
Skincare for Trees
Divya Maniar
Skincare for Trees
Take care of your skin she says, over the dinner table,
tracing lines on the table with thin long fingernails,
The Drowned Giant
Kholiswa Mendes Pepani
It was a Sunday morning in Delta, Mississippi when the body of the missing Negro giant washed up on the bank of the river. First news of the creature’s arrival was brought to the town by a local fisherman...
My Love Affair With The Dead
Joyce Hayden
About two weeks into the Coronavirus Quarantine, I began noticing some odd behaviors.
Three Shorts
Leah Dawson
Lunar Flesh
Your daughter wraps her arms around your waist and asks, Does everyone have a skeleton inside?
Already dinner is on the table. Brown rice, sticky rice, ginger duck, little saucers
Late June on the North Side of Town
Tyler Dillow
Late June on the North Side of Town
We are in a paleteria eating lime & chamoy ice cream—
or is it sorbet? On our walk over here we talked
about ginkgo leaves & how they offer the
Three Poems
Benjamin DeVos
the only person who texts me is my mom
mostly about how her back hurts
i send her a
proverb that says: you are as old as your spine
she replies: then i must be dead
my mom is always
The Dingos
Dane Harrison
Moonlight hiccups through the dirty windows, jumps around on our faces as the truck hits potholes. We’re already gone, smoking cigarettes.
Room On Fire
Andrew Byrds
And oh god it’s wonderful sitting here, drinking too much coffee, eating too many pastries, and loving everything about this moment.
To Know Nothing of Rifles
Caitlin Feldman
It doesn’t sit right anymore, so neither does he. But in the Brooklyn neighborhood where my mom grew up, he’d walk on his hands for an audience of Irish-Catholic children. Older now than he was then, they’re still in awe.
Boris Yeltsin Roots through Your Pantry
Nora E. Derrington
One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.
What Haunts Me
Molly Magid
The text said: Hey! I think I just saw you cross the street (I’m in the red Prius). How are you?
The Surrender Game
Suzanne Richardson
This is how we played: one of us would lay on top of the other fully clothed, “go dead,” and see if the other could move. He relished it. I would lay on him, every part of me heavy and slack. It was
February
Erica Trabold
I bought a compilation of Michael Jackson Number Ones when the Wal-Mart Supercenter finally opened. It feels right to have viewed the future from my bedroom, door closed, music up.
Letter To My Sixth-Grade Self As He Constructs A Bomb
Neil Richard Grayson
In fact, even if I could reverse my reach through the years spanning us and stop you, I don’t think I would.
Opana, Dying, in Baltimore: An Excerpt from Fucked Up
Damien Ark
I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.
Real American Racehorse
Leon Hedstrom
I suppose I was in a conspiratorial mood when I told you that I don’t always feel like a man.
Hitchhiking Through Florida
Jake Maynard
It was 2007, and the closest that most Americans came to hitchhiking were two new movies: The Hitcher and The Hitchhiker, a lower-budget version of the same plot. In both movies young naïve roadtrippers pick up good-looking psychopaths in the desert. In The Hitcher Sean Bean chains a teen heartthrob between two semi trucks and pulls him apart at the waist.
On Being Outside of the Body
Danielle Shorr
On a bench outside the classroom on our fifteen-minute break, I close my eyes and practice the grounding exercise my therapist taught me earlier that week. Facing the rush hour freeway, I try to
Time Lapse
Uzodinma Okehi
(Iowa City 1995)
What I think I want, is Inez . . . Fuck! Now it’s a blur. Drawing. Rather, a dream in which I’m drawing.
American Picker in Exile
Cameron Thomas Snyder
I came from the city, was sort of swept away by the bristles of time and love and bowel-upsetting uncertainty, and I am now in a dust pan called Mora County, New Mexico. Dust pan is not derogatory; it’s a just a place where things end up.
Siege Liturgy
Nandini Dhar
On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats,
glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its
rickety
another night in a fucking boring Pennsylvania suburb
Kevin Richard White
The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.
The Dog and I
Andrew Bertaina
My husband is a proficient fighter. He catalogs the inconsistencies between the things I say and things I do. Against this tactic, I have no defense. For he is right, but what he fails to understand is the internal consistency in my inconsistency.
The Girlfriend Who Wasn’t a Girlfriend
Dalton Monk
We spent most of the night watching Billy Madison and eating ice cream and cookies and building a fort.
Huddled Faceless in Nippon: An Excerpt
Dale Brett
Later that night, past midnight, I quietly hear her leave the apartment. I don’t stir. I don’t ask her what, where or why. I stay perfectly still and pretend to be asleep.
Splurge
Dan Morey
Before Sasquatch’s girlfriend got into rats, she had dogs. I don’t remember how many exactly, but a lot. One dog was called Pee Dog. Whenever I fell asleep on the La-Z-Boy, he soaked my leg
Tip Top Vacation Performance
Jordan Clark
TIP TOP VACATION PERFORMANCE
Two women velcroed a husky, mesh tank top
in order to separate the men from the boys.
Then, 20 aisles apart, mimed the crucifixion.
Words I’m akin to grasp start in
A Capricorn’s Weekly Horoscope While Her Father is Dying of Cancer
Kendra L. Vanderlip
3/31: The day is young. Dress smart today Capricorn, big things on the horizon. When standing in front of new people, don’t forget to smile. People are drawn to you, but you forget to drop your
The Lion & the Little Boy
Deborah E. Kennedy
My mother mentioned Darren to me only once. I was in college by then.
All of Us Have It
Crow Jonah Norlander
Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.
Ghost
Danielle Chelosky
My writing professor said to me that in order to get better, you had to dismantle the person you were, because that person was killing you. I kept wondering: Why did a killer love me?
Everyday, Mama Reburied the Pig
Connor Goodwin
Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.
Gym Encounter
David Hii
Your gym is perhaps your favorite thing about Hattiesburg. Your student budget is tight, but you’ll manage to eek out thirty a month somehow—you have for the last three years.
In Isolation, I Am Morphing
Lyndsey C. Fox
The day before isolation, I celebrate my birthday, unwed, the first of its kind in my adult life, my divorce from a great man with whom I shared an OK eleven years, finalized by way of a $250 internet
Pluck
Adam Hughes
I’d spend the night there on Saturday nights, get up Sunday morning and drive to my church and preach. I didn’t find God because I wasn’t looking for him. I was looking for me but I didn’t find him either.
Cuts Real Good
Jeff Burd
Maybe you can do this. It’s not your idea. But maybe.
Making Weight (pt. 4)
Denny Connolly
Previously on...
Part 3 || Part 2 || Part 1 || Prologue
The Pros & Cons of Breaking Up with a Boyfriend while He’s at Sea
Tyler Friend
Your boyfriend was the first...
Traces
Hailey Danielle
I followed him up the stairs up to his apartment and once inside he made parachutes, wrapping loose MDMA in tissue paper.
Guided Meditation and Relaxation
Andrew Bomback
Xenia and I had been cheating on each other with the same woman for about three months
Through Thick Glass
Alexandria Hall
After that, I gave up / on finding a good doctor...
Prompting Myself: A Taste of My Own Medicine
Chloe Caldwell
People I Don’t _______ to anymore. This is a prompt inspired by Chelsea Hodson’s essay, People I Don’t Talk To Anymore.
My First NIN: The Downward Spiral
Greg Oldfield
I remember the next morning, puking, shaking violently, asking for God’s mercy. There was too much light coming through the blinds. I was a living, breathing version of “Hurt.”
My First CD: Nine Inch Nails, Pretty Hate Machine
Scott Daughtridge DeMer
I didn’t have headphones for my CD player, so when my parents were home I kept the volume low. At night when they went to bed I played it at a barely audible level and hugged the machine against my ear.
Rapp’s Field
Ed Ruzicka
We played in our cousin’s backyard. It was always pitcher’s hand out, right field out. If you did dish it right over the barbed wire into burdock, Queen Anne's lace, thistle, milkweed, you had to
Invisible Men
Thomas Reed Willemain
Three boys took their positions on the makeshift field. The flagstone wall edging the upper lawn was the outfield fence. One foul line was the street, the other the edge of the woods. Joey pitched.
New Student Worker at the Library
Benjamin Niespodziany
He visited the library later that night still in his baseball gear, his eye black dancing with tears. I'm sorry, I said, but three strikes is three strikes. His batting glove let me know he understood.
Delayed Season: Nine Metropolitan Landscapes
Gilad Jaffe
The veteran second baseman
is fiddling with his glasses in the twilight: The calculated
third baseman is scanning over the crowd for his family...
Baseball Dads All the Way Down
Jim Redmond
It felt like a belly flop
crammed into a calcified bounce house
Walk-Off
A. J. Bermudez
The helmet is slightly too big, and the interior foam padding is the texture of damp dough, thanks to Paula’s fat, sweaty head.
THIS WEEK IN BASEBALL: CHATTER
Mike Andrelczyk
Eighty-five percent of the Earth’s surface is tarp
Dear Amma / Mai / Ma / Aayi / the tune of my breath in anguish
Meher Manda
Even if it is addressed to you, this is a letter for me. If it were truly a letter for you, it would be written in sound, in the words that lilt on your tongue, rise a tempest in your rage,
Utopia Study
Anderson Peguero II
The "UTOPIA STUDY" series is a form of experimental architectural photography that focuses on modern architecture in a number of American cities. Buildings and details within them are transformed into
A Bigger Splash
Jordan Floyd
I could have no path, no idea of what I should be or how I should live. I could skate through neighborhoods, where I wouldn’t find a Mormon church or anyone who knew I had strayed from the path I was raised to follow
3 Poems
Mike Andrelczyk
Since You Left I Have Spent My Days Staring Blankly at the Beer Sign in the Bar From the Time it Opens Until Closing Time
Neon
Neoff
Boredom
My First Sexy Halloween
Lindsey Wente
I walked through the senior hallway, heart beating fast. The boys’ stares burned into my skin as they whispered things to each other.
Bad Construction
Heather De Bel
There is a crawl space in my lover’s house that his wife and children don’t know about. He likes to sing into it when he’s drunk and he’s only drunk when he’s with me.
Brent’s Deli
Jeremy Radin
Were this place to close, or burn, or fall, in an earthquake, down.
Were it to flood or be bulldozed to make way for the gray &
unmusical slab of an apartment building. Were it to be
Getting Clean
Elizabeth Droppers
Q-tips were her guilty pleasure. She loved the feel of them caressing her inner ear, reaching the itch she could otherwise not scratch. Even when there wasn’t a swish of water lodged within, she loved
The Seminar
Jacob Guajardo
She had us trade cardigans. She said it was an exercise in empathy.
My First Edible
Dorothy Rice
I used to write in circles. Starting in the center.
From the Sublime to the Hilarious: On Damascus Gate by Robert Stone (part 4)
Madison Smartt Bell
Part 1 of 4
Part 2 of 4
Part 3 of 4
Apart from all these violent events, Raziel, De Kuff, and the other cult members have been moving between Jerusalem, Safed (site of the ancient
Faye, it’s a Present for Your Birthday by The Fourth Sad Boy
Andrew Tran
He was in love with his friend Faye, had known her since elementary school.
How to Get Crushed
Cara Dempsey
If you get this far, that means that things are all, more or less, going according to plan.
One Of Those Boys
Heather Domenicis
Despite your better judgement, you click on his profile and then on the most recent post: a picture of him smiling on a white slope with his arm wrapped around a remarkably average, yet still somehow traditionally hot (not pretty, just hot) snow bunny.
From the Sublime to the Hilarious: On Damascus Gate by Robert Stone (part 3)
Madison Smartt Bell
The story of religious mania and the story of political violence look very likely to converge on each other. Having consciously elected the first, Lucas keeps being drawn, sometimes unwillingly, sometimes unwittingly, toward the other. Both feature his new inamorata, Sonia Barnes.
THREE POEMS
Savannah DiGregorio
swang
at night i sleep next to you, your skin balmy course. like grinded down sweetgum made smooth in the sweat of the mississippi delta summer. you tear and bend at my will. your spine disjoints
From the Sublime to the Hilarious: On Damascus Gate by Robert Stone (part 2)
Madison Smartt Bell
If Lucas is the most obvious Bob Stone avatar in Damascus Gate, Adam De Kuff might also be a contender, sharing with his author an improperly managed mental illness (it’s made very plain that De Kuff has stopped taking his prescribed bipolar meds a long while back)
Winter’s Children
Mark Benedict
Brian was psyched too. Not about her requests—Tom Waits was more his groove—but about where things seemed to be headed.
The Red Ones Come From Taillights
Erin Lyndal Martin
To be naked on the beach after a storm is something special—the salt and the petrichor and the hum of being unsettled that maybe the torrential rains caused damage, that maybe there were nearby ships that will never make it to harbor.
My First CD: Dr. Dre's The Chronic
Phillip Scott Mandel
My Magic cards were the coolest thing about me.
From the Sublime to the Hilarious: On Damascus Gate by Robert Stone (part 1)
Madison Smartt Bell
Stone had two modes of handwriting: one a gnarly cursive he used to talk to himself and the other block capitals, more easily legible. On a scrap of torn paper in a crate of Damascus Gate research material is a draft of a self-mocking doggerel poem...
Protection
Diana Whitney
I could not imagine the dark well of her grief. I wanted to pretend it had nothing to do with me. But I felt compelled to bear witness somehow.
My First Porn Video
Adeniyi Ademoroti
You would have believed on the screen was where my attention stayed.
Pink
Tammy Delatorre
There was a yearning in me for her soft whiteness, which went powdery pink in her most private of places.
Making Weight (pt. 3)
Denny Connolly
Previously on...
Part 2 || Part 1 || Prologue
Two Micros
Dina L. Relles
"with sky as ceiling, / ground as home, / we can call the stranger / lover / and the earth / ours / at least for a little while."
Three Poems
Dujie Tahat
salat to define the terms of ritual
[adhan]
A calling, a culling, a billowing
minaret banner, a cigarette starter thrown
out a moving car window to prove a point.
No Ducks Were Harmed in the Writing of this Poem
Daniel Paul
I dreamed we were in a department store trying to buy you shoes.
Three Poems
Dustin Pearson
My Brother’s Two Screams
I heard two screams from my bedroom. Outside,
my brother had killed his best friend. That day
the clouds stayed put. The trees swayed under
gentle winds, but not
Biscuits
D. Nolan Jefferson
You preheat your oven to 425°F before measuring out two and one third cups of self-rising flour into a glass Pyrex bowl. White Lily is the best though it can be hard to find outside of the south and is worth tracking down. It’s milled from a soft winter wheat, and with it your biscuits puff up into soft, light pillows that literally melt in your mouth.
Instagram Intimacy
Lyndsay Hall
Every twenty-something in Los Angeles has a comedian friend. In late winter, mine invited me to his show in Culver City with a foolproof pitch: no cover, no drink minimum, nearby parking.
Sticky
Hope Henderson
I had anted up already: pics in the too-small bikini top he liked, back arched in his favorite Brazilian-cut bottoms. Did you just take these for me? he asked. By your mid-30s, romance is infinite regress. Or infinite repeat. Or just infinite, like Groundhog Day, or samsara. I don’t reuse sexts! I replied. This is romantic. We understand this is romantic. It is, in fact, romantic to take pictures just for him.
three poems
Samantha DeFlitch
Macy’s Closeout Sale
I am curious what newcomers think of my city,
but it is not really
Elvis
Richard LeBlond
It was revolution by music. The world would never be the same.
A Temporary Addiction
Michael Don
I don’t smoke, I called out, but no one heard me, and I sounded uncertain.
The Comet
Dan Higgins
I just remember the room dense with familiar sound, the melancholy howl of the perfectly in-tune saxophones, the electric brilliance of trumpets, a drummer with eight arms; my mother looking over at me, expectantly, as if to say, “This is what you wanted, right? This is making you happy?”
San Francisco Municipal Bus Routes 43 & 38R
Steven Duong
July yawns. Flashes its grills...
The Sharp Edge of the Crayon
Anna Laird Barto
At last our molars burst forth from the gum and we emerged from the rose-colored womb of our first grade classroom.
The Bottom of the Order: Every Fifth Day
Andrew Forbes
THE SEATTLE MARINERS' history is one long tale of woe studded with infrequently dazzling displays of capability, with all of it adding up to exactly zero championships. I say this as someone who has
500 Words on Immortality
Dimitry Saïd Chamy
Only 498 words remain. So, let's turn to death.
The Night I Could Have Met the Real Matt Damon
Sarah Broussard Weaver
Our waitress bustles around smiling a strangely huge smile for this boring work night. My boyfriend Nick and I don’t follow football and weren’t invited to any parties, and since most Texans are either holding or attending parties the place is pretty deserted. After the waitress brings our waters she follows her normal script and asks if we want to try a signature TGI Fridays drink, but her eyes keep dancing to the bar behind us.
My First Game Console: Nintendo Entertainment System
David Armand
My wife and kids and I are driving around in New Orleans, not too far from where I spent the first years of my life and then the occasional week during the summer when I stayed with my grandmother
Quick Stop
Christina Drill
I was seventeen, so he was a man — had I been older, maybe not.
Three Poems
Brody Parrish Craig
Bible | Vers
Top to Bottom | scan my profile | For Christ’s Sake | Sing Jesus’ Name | I gospel & apostle | Book of Vers | My rural bottom’s up | My crop /top | down along the road | a hym(n) in
Letter Home from Hyperspace #2
Zoë Ryder White
There’s a song in my figurative head
that I can’t shake loose.
When I was a body,
I did so many things with my hands,
I can’t count.
Around here it smells like lightning,
like plasma.
My First Car: A Melted Ford Explorer
Cordelia Wilks
By the time the keys were in my eager teenaged hand, this car had been through some shit. Even ignoring the holes burned into the driver’s-side door, the missing half of the left side mirror, and the warped, discolored metal down the rest of the vehicle, the car was 13 years old already, and it looked it.
The Bottom of the Order: Snap, Go, Fling
Andrew Forbes
The cherry and strawberry seasons have passed; the apples are reddening. Only a few games remain. A Pit Spitter lays down a bunt, and the runner on third crashes in: a perfect suicide squeeze.
Three Poems
Rosebud Ben-Oni
{All I Wanted Was Everything}
You say you know the reason why Archimedes
King Princess, "Make My Bed"
Kaitlyn Herndon
I’ve started to clench my teeth before falling asleep.
Uncommon Prayer
Julia Dixon Evans
He was super into God. He was super into church. And he was super into me
Arrangements
Merridawn Duckler
There was a Help Wanted sign at the florists. I had a car, so I walked in and applied. This was a time in my life when I’d decided anyone could do anything. In other words, I was an artist.
The Bottom of the Order: Your 2003 Detroit Tigers
Andrew Forbes
The thing I can't wrap my head around, when it comes to the 2003 Detroit Tigers, is what it must have been like to show up to work every day. What must it have taken, as the losses mounted – up to and
My First Weapon
Laura Todd Carns
My first boyfriend collected knives. He was the kind of boy who listened to Metallica and Ozzy Osbourne, who liked to draw superheroes and werewolves, and was drawn to darkness and violence with the
Three poems
Claire Denson
Amoral Impurity
Picking at ingrown
pubes on the porch swing
in the sun on the first
summery day of May
and the dogs reach up to lick
my cooch. This is not
the first time today I’ve
Meanwhile, Et in Arcadia
Patrick Crerand
Of course, Jesus only had hyssop—a bitter wine on a wet sponge—during the passion, but that was not an option at the concession stand.
Three Poems
Lucas Shepherd
"My Favorite Hat," "Blue Hawaii Hat," and "Rust is a Color, the Tech Sergeant Told Me"
Home Maintenance
Dan Shiffman
When so much energy is spent on surveying the territory, adapting to the wonders and confusions of a new place, there isn’t always room to develop as a person.
The Bottom of the Order: Dooley Womack
Andrew Forbes
Horace Guy Womack was in the employ of four different Major League teams across five seasons, a serviceable bullpen righty who lost as many games as he won, but managed to keep his lifetime ERA a
A Snake in the Basement
Lindsay Fowler
I will take an infestation, but only if it won’t spread.
My First CD: This Is How We Do It by Montell Jordan
Cydney Russell
I wandered around Sam Goody, more likely keeping track of my ABCs than taking inventory of the musical selections I passed row after row. It was December 1996, the beginning of another bleak winter in
for mother #4, who dug me from an ocean floor with bare hands
dezireé a. brown
to Mrs. Burrell
When Ms. Griffin was fired, my mother said
it was because she was too gay, too flamboyant
for our small charter school. I mourned her
ombre dreadlocks and her laugh that swept
Your Hair: A Timeline
Dharani Persaud
Now, you book an appointment on a whim. But it’s not a whim. You’ve been thinking about this for a while.
Surprise Party
Amelia Morand
For Caite’s Sweet 16 we get a couple rooms at the Motel 6 on Cerrillos, not the one downtown with the outdoor pool, the one on the southside between the strip club and the mall, and everyone can pay
Whatever You Want to Be
Nicholas Dighiera
Hank sucked what was left of his cigarette back in one pull and flicked it into the alley. The hot light of the ember cartwheeled through the air before disappearing into the snow.
The Bottom of the Order: Jim Beam
Andrew Forbes
I write this from a subterranean lair packed tight with things: books, CDs, LPs, cassettes, an old laptop or two, and a pile of baseball memorabilia. This is where I do my writing, on a desk among all
Surgery Dream (Euphoria)
Duncan Slagle
When my mother built me
again, she did not wait for sobs
to pass. She left clasps undone
then wept in her bedroom.
I tried to reach for the gown
but my fingers mumbled back hair
into metal
Idiot Box Hero
Maggie Dove
I don't notice anything when the television is on. A bomb could go off in my kitchen and I wouldn't notice the wreckage until the next commercial break.
a constellation of stars fall from the sky
Tatiana Dolgushina
the man who touches you also touches
the other women of the city, this special
man who you chose to be your first man
even after you’ve met so many men who
wanted to know you as a woman
Too Long, Too Late
Justin Mundhenk
When I wasn’t on the road, I ate lunch at the diner just to watch Cathy polish the cutlery.
Cut the Cord!
Lindsey Godfrey Eccles
When our baby arrives I am feeling a funny mix of elation and terror – what have we done?
It Rained Laughter
Andrew Bertaina
Sometimes we’d see a slip of moon hung in velvety sky, and we’d find ourselves crying for no good reason, or maybe every reason that we could think of.
Before the Bell
Jasmin Aviva Sandelson
We know who has her period and who is still waiting. If a girl takes her backpack to the bathroom or sits pool-side in swim class, she has her period. So do the girls who—when they ask Can I go to the bathroom? and the teacher says, No—say But I really need to go.
The Things She Did
Lauren Davis
Smart girls don’t tempt the devil. I was a bullseye, a bloody Rorschach blot, walking into the prison flaunting my muleta.
Three poems
Benjamin Niespodziany
Neck Tattoo
Your neck tattoo spoke to me but I needed a
translator. Needed a nail gun, a barn wall to
respond to your forward advances. After a
night together, I woke to find that your
The Future
Brigid Ronan
I turn 30 next month but I’m no longer afraid because I read somewhere that time is an illusion. I am purchasing an anti-aging moisturizer, just in case. It’s expensive, but money is no object. I’m worth four figures.
The Bottom of the Order: Pedro Guerrero
Andrew Forbes
More than most players, examining Guerrero's life feels like voyeurism, or like wandering hospital corridors with your head on a swivel. When he was good, he was, as James suggested, astonishingly good... But his bad times were difficult to watch, and lacked the privacy that we'd all hope would greet our worst moments.
Rub Some Dirt on It
Sam DeLeo
And yet, when it came to hitting a baseball, I always liked my odds.
Stomping Grounds
Chad Schuster
The solidity of contact is registered first in the hands. The knowledge radiates outward from there.
At Old Seals Stadium
Steven Kennedy
Old Seals Stadium is a shopping center now. It is a parking lot, a grocery store, a 24 Hour Fitness, a Ross Dress for Less, a Japanese dollar store. I get all my errands done at old Seals Stadium—all
Team of Goofballs
Janet Bowdan
It's their first practice in good spring weather,
not only not raining, not cold, but full of light.
Role Model
Greg Oldfield
He said that Thompson could be the fastest to hit five hundred, a first ballot Hall of Famer, but I just nodded and sipped my coffee.
Big League Chew
Margaret Madole
Wrigley had put out a study claiming that gum chewing increased performance on assessments and my elementary school took it as gospel, sending letters home asking for us to bring it on test days. Marshall brought Big League Chew.
The Bottom of the Order: A Photograph of Gaylord Perry Being Investigated for Foreign Substances
Andrew Forbes
Gaylord Perry toiled for twenty-two seasons in the majors, and the look on his face suggests it was hard toil indeed.
The Slugger, The Ace, The Shortstop, The Catcher, The Pinch Hitter
Jose Hernandez Diaz
The solitude. In the summer, I dine. On hot dogs. And fast balls. Go Dodgers!
Summer League
Terrance Wedin
Take your pick. Me, they said I hung my off-speed stuff, lost track of the count, lacked mental toughness. I waved off too many signs.
The Gospel According to the First Base Umpire
John McDonough
And everyone in section ten is standing
When Gills Gets Sent Down
John Jodzio
After tonight, I’ll be demoted to my parents’ couch and a job at my uncle’s lumberyard.
The Bottom of the Order: Overrunning It
Andrew Forbes
Then maybe head over to the State Park near Orange City to rent a canoe and paddle gator-infested waters, strafed by black vultures and large, fictional-looking birds, for the chance to see some manatees, large and stationary in the gentle current of a warm, clear river.
Rubber Mother
Adam Falik
I’m on a date with this dude, the guy’s gorgeous, and ripped, skin all sunburnt like a surfer with big white teeth and confident eyes. It’s all too sexy. But I’m on guard. I want to deny him but
Ghosts of Summer
Stephen Seabridge
We are intrepid travellers hunting – or rather haunting – the square. We are exhausting the place of its details.
In Which You Fly Home For Your Brother's Funeral
Bridget Adams
You elaborate: Christmas just makes people emotional. "No," she says, raking at her hair with French-tipped nails. "I don't think so."
On the Yard (An excerpt from The Great American Suction)
David Nutt
They bang their silverware and take turns slamming the toilet seat. They drag their garbage bins too late to the curb and leave them abused by stark weathers all week. Shaker knows there is an awkward progenitor situation.
In Preparation for Radiation
John Oliver Hodges
Being Jack’s a guy, he’s also tasked with the act of pulling my ass apart when needed so the Radiation Oncologist, Dr. Katz, a short petite woman of prissy demeanor who does her ass work in civilian clothes, even while wearing heels and a tiny purse strapped across her midsection, can insert her finger.
Rubber Mother
Adam Falik
I want to deny him but he’s playin’ it natural and attentive. He’s good but I ain’t sure if he knows he’s good or if he’s just as polite as he’s coming off.
Hide and Seek, With My Nieces, In the Large and Empty Summer Home My Parents Just Bought
Alexandra Tanner
A furniture delivery arrives, as my mother warned me upon leaving for the store that it might, and two nieces who have hidden themselves in a cabinet come out at the sound of the doorbell to ogle the brightly-colored truck in the driveway.
Septic
Andrew Waite
Sitting still can be tough on a body, just as the shifting earth, and plunging and thawing temperatures can be hard on a pipe.
People Like Us
Wells Woodman
I didn’t realize, when we were falling in love, that her father was a pathological extrovert.
150 Dollars
Big Bruiser Dope Boy
it's dead at the bar so I say
"sure but I'm not in college
and I'm not wearing underwear
Pan and the Nanny Goat
Andrea Jurjevic
Pan and the Nanny Goat
After ancient Pompeii marble sculpture
The God of the Wild yanks his lover's chin hair,
clasps her knee, his godhood fully aroused.
Now is Not The Time To Be Different
Judyth Emanuel
She hands me a carved pineapple. Big and heavy.
Martha, My Shapeshifting Friend
Lanny Durbin
OUR CHEESE FRIES WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE!
Marco
Keith David Langston
It was 2006, and I had just arrived in Florida for a marine biology excursion sponsored by a certain theme park that dabbles in ocean rehabilitation. To spare myself from any lawsuits, let’s just call it Ocean Planet.
You Were Really Big
Luke Dumas
I live a life of humiliation, but the most embarrassing, most shameful thing I ever did was get thin for a couple years.
To The Boy Who Escaped To College And Left Me With A Ring
Marvin Shackelford
I took to wearing your ring again because everybody likes dealing with a woman who’s married. They want a winner.
The Treasure Hunt
Dakota Canon
You empty your bank account of the $1,326 and sink it all into Facebook advertisements.
The Parts of An Arrow*
Nichole Rued
When we were five or six, well before that shot, we walked together in those woods. It was fall and we had just touched, for the first time that I can remember, in his room, under blankets. They were either 101 Dalmatians or Power Rangers-themed
The Tension
Leisha Douglas
THE TENSION
Sliced peach cool
under fresh yoghurt,
steaming creamy coffee,
the slow, dark wake of an October morning.
Difficult to pull myself
away from comfort and
the waves of
First Inhabitants
Amanda Yanowski
After high school, I moved from Minnesota to Texas. Average annual number of Tornados in Minnesota: 41.9. Average annual number of tornados in Texas: 146.7.
Desire Lines
Dina L. Relles
1. We are young and we snake through synagogue back hallways. Play truth or dare. Seven minutes in heaven. Stay away from the sanctuary.
Chocolate Eggs
Teresa Milbrodt
Tomorrow he will crash from the sugar buzz. I will not look at him with eyes that suggest I told you so, which is part of love.
The Full Knausgaard: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 6
Andrew Bomback
I started reading My Struggle in the spring of 2014. I didn’t know what I was getting into, but I was excited about the prospect of being totally immersed in someone else’s world, and I was curious as
Jeff Buckley
Darby Cashed
I’m at Guitar Center to buy a Fender. I run through the metal heads doing their best Guitar Hero impressions to the only white Telecaster hanging on the wall.
Happy New Year
Emily Alexander
I tried to look / like I was looking for someone above...
Ant Lifeboat
Annie Woods
The day my brother died, my mom ran naked in the street.
THE JUNGLE BURIED IN REFLECTED LIGHT IS CALLING TO YOU
Jason Reed-Mundell
The film was a Disney re-release, full of rollicking creatures with wide-flung arms emitting human sounds through smiles that hummed and flickered like radio speakers. Blake was too drunk to follow what was going on, but he ate his popcorn and drifted in and out of sleep, and the things were laughing and singing to him.
Three Ways To Escape The Trunk of a Car
Cara Dempsey
1. Pull the Release
Before opening the trunk, consider the world outside of it. Think of the miles of hot asphalt rolling underneath you. Think of the many men in the many other cars who might
Five Stories
Bram Riddlebarger
The gas station sat on the corner like a tasteless cheeseburger.
Man on Phone at Gas Station
Sarah Edwards
O Build-A-Bonfire, O
Blue Subaru
Glitter Spill and Devil Bird
Britton Andrews
It was supposed to be
a joyous thing
Illuminated
Michelle Chikaonda
It happened at a small party I’d planned at a nightclub in the meatpacking district.
In The Aftermath
William A. Greenfield
Via some prophecy, my son has
reached one half my chronological
age. And there are so many things
he can tell me: when The Macho Man
first claimed the heavyweight belt,
the year I bought him
A Good And Simple Life
Oliver Zarandi
The Boy was born poor and continued to be poor.
The Ass is a Hole Where The Light Gets In
Jon Lindsey
This is a meaningful story about the intestinal parasite I picked up while living in Salt Lake City, in Ted Bundy’s house.
Merchandiser
Derick Dupre
Esther rises and pulls the cord and moves to the front of the bus, whereupon it brakes and kneels.
Touching Strangers
Tamara Adelman
The door is open, I said, just come in.
We Get Pregnant
Diana Clarke
We receive phone calls inviting us to the ocean, (a beach day!) but of course we can no longer fit in the sea. We are too big for open waters.
Automatic For The People
Andrew M. Howard
I’ve bought more used Automatic for the People CDs than I can count.
Construction of a Last Ditch Garden
Devan Collins Del Conte
One day, recognize your malformed loneliness like a tumor in your throat.
For A Small Donation This Woven Basket Can Be Yours
Jared Shaffer
Welcome. Please don’t take my talking as an assault to your personhood.
An Interview With Darrin Doyle
Mallory Brand
I don’t feel like I’m very good at writing a serious story with super realistic violence and human emotion. I feel like it has to be filtered through some kind of absurd or weird lens.
Business Trip
Amy Oldfield
Did we go to Boston twice or did all this happen in one trip? I remember two different rooms but we used to change hotels all the time, just to feel like criminals. Once we stayed in an old converted
The Poet Debates with his Friend's Mistress, Death
Jason Reed-Mundell
The kettle boiled; I made the tea,
And when I turned around,
I saw she’d set the cups and placed
A third one for the skull.
Four Poems
Lotte Mitchell Reford
"Eve Learns to Dominate," "Farmers' Market," "Small-Town Fuck Geometry," and "Religious Art"
Absence Of The Queen
Dave Barrett
He was at the sink washing dishes ...
When I Am Delilah
D. Gilson
“You’re crafty and wise,” the quiz’s benevolent gods tell me.
The Patron Saint of Loneliness
Sarah Shotland
I saw her at a campus TGIF three weeks ago. Talking Gender Issues Fridays. It’s a weekly chat-session where students come to look at the week’s current events through a gender lens. The campus used to be single-sex, but now we call it gender inclusive. We were going out of business; there are only so many radical lesbian 17 year olds, and most of them already get into Smith.
Hunger Made The Woman Obsessed
Amanda Dycus
Tortellini becomes my password for everything.
Damn.
Darby Cashed
Damn.
Kendrick Lamar
April 14, 2017
Top Dawg
54:54
The first time I visit Southern California, it’s for work. I get lost out of LAX and wind up toting my luggage around Inglewood- the
in style & so-and-so
Katherine Vondy
sentences are donuts bursting with believability custard
Rising Inaction
Ash Sanders
It’s Saturday night, and I am cleaning the kitchen because it’s easier than cleaning up my life; I am putting away dishes because I know where dishes go. I do not know where to put other things:
Fun Facts
Donald Ryan
What do you get when you mix and elephant with a rhino?
Elephino.
That joke has always held a special place with me. I first heard it back in prime time when the American Broadcasting Company
superstitions
Jody Chan
getting a haircut in the year’s first month will cause the death
of an uncle eating fish will bring your family abundance
八 meaning eight sounds the same as 發 meaning wealth
& also hair eight
2 Poems (from The Gospel According to X)
Oliver Baez Bendorf
from
THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO X
Prayer is what you do when you don’t know whether your animal will live through the night. Pink like Pepto-Bismol staining a goat’s chin. Everything lives and
Requiem
C. Alessandra Colaianni
On the street, the music thundered from an unseen source, day and night – but it was, oddly, only audible from the sidewalk. Once ensconced inside our house, we forgot about it, as we neglected so many external things during medical school.
You're Being Followed
Andrew P. Heath
You notice you’re being followed. Headlights in the rearview mirror—though they all look the same, these seem somehow familiar, like a pair of eyes you’ve seen in a dream.
How Vanilla Became White
Deborah Thompson
A spoonful of vanilla ice cream crosses oceans of history. Hold that dollop on the back of your tongue. Consider.
Today, nothing could be whiter than vanilla ice cream. Vanilla means white. It
three poems
Leah Dworkin
to gain followers I use my body then / I lose them with my poems
The Machine Sleeps In The Corner, Dreaming
Andy Myers
The machine sleeps in the corner. Its dreams are projected onto large white walls where we watch them and record our reactions.
She’s So Unusual
Dan Morey
“Get in here!” yelled Grandma. “Carrot Head is gonna sing!”
Four Poems
Darin Ciccotelli
Rain drags its cage / through the neighborhood. You / see nothing but // trenches. Rusty shovels, / the alien rocks sprayed / like genitals.
Four Poems
Brandon Melendez
For weeks after, I watched California burn / out my window & on the evening news & the ash // in my cheeks became the only way/ to pronounce home.
Mopwater Soup
Nikolai McLeod
McGuiness in bed with chow mien. Eyeballs floating in melatonin.
“Watch your back,” moans ceiling fan. TV glow damaging optic nerves, retina, etc.
Trapdoor in Benzedrine bottle on floor. Deep in
Vedran Husic Interview
Michael Deagler
Every writer knows the rule of ‘write what you know,’ but the interesting thing is that you don’t really know what you know until you write it.
Vampire Weekend
Darby Cashed
You joined in, and told Danielle that she should only serve us drinks in diamond pimp glasses.
Three Poems
Alyssandra Tobin
New Jersey as land of claws & fangs & deep fields of grass that stumble onto the side of the highway // New Jersey as fields of soft dirty ice // New Jersey as blondhairblueeyes slapping you in the face at lunch in the cafeteria in front of all your friends
3 a.m. Playlist
Pune Dracker
Some songs sound best under the sun. Some are night-blooming. These you hear clear in dark-dark; maybe there are stars.
“I Go To Sleep (demo),” The Kinks
Play this first, especially if
Lone Star
Rachel Duboff
The day we met, you told me Los Angeles was home but that you were born in Houston. It was the insurance company’s orientation day for new employees, and you were standing alone at the far table, looking around with hesitation, like a child on the first day of school.
The Miles Behind Us
Drew Buxton
She’s still searching for hers but isn’t jealous. She’s happy I finally found my med. I take it in the morning with my cereal, and she knows to leave the milk out. I can put down a whole box at once
Ben Loory Interview
Bud Smith
It's work that I want to do, and then sometimes it's just fun, and then sometimes it's a pain in the ass.
White Lies
Andrey Gritsman
I live my life by white lies.
And poetry is white lies.
Second language is white lies too.
As well as the first.
But language is the only way
to hide love.
White, black, transparent,
or
Ground Rules
Shana Agid
Summers to Harridge, April 20, 1950: I am writing to inform you of the changes in the Washington ball park. It is rather difficult to explain but I will try to give you a picture.
Maybe you
Balls and Strikes III: Transfiguration
Richard Johnston
The victim was the leadoff hitter for the Matsushima Baseball Ocean Temple Gods in the bottom of the first.
Past Time
Miranda Forman
Because fifteen feet and a quarter-sized hunk of aluminum is nothing against the smell of oiled leather...
I Keep Bumping Into Candy Maldonado
Jordan Moffatt
I saw Candy the next time I went out. And the time after that. And the time after that.
Balls and Strikes II: And the Word Was God
Richard Johnston
I suppose all sports officials are gods of a sort...
Balls and Strikes I: Not about Astronauts
Richard Johnston
My friends lived for bottle rockets and Boy Scout merit badges; I, however, lived for called third strikes.
This is Saturday
Leonora Desar
That’s what your parents say when they come in with their Santa suits. But it’s not Saturday. It’s Tuesday. It’s time to go to school.
Portrait Hall Palimpsest: Storied Houses
Kierstin Bridger
Canvas after canvas I see my life in scenes the artist cannot know.
Three poems
Erik Kennedy
I fear being buried alive, but I insist on being buried when I'm dead.
Maggie and Her Gusto
Oliver Zarandi
We agreed to meet in a bar known as the ‘anus of the city.’ It had terrible lighting which obscured its ugly regulars. The regulars had heads like onions with names like Fred, Harry, Deborah, Henrietta. Years of drinking had withered their necks to the size of cocktail sticks and I didn’t pity them because I liked hating them.
Self-guided tours
Lacey Rowland
Self-guided tour: Exhibit #9 from the National Museum of Broken Marriages
A medium says to channel the late wife through beloved objects. I press my ear to a mug, a journal, my husband’s chest.
Chen Chen Interview
Daniel Pieczkolon
Most of the time, I am skeptical of the notion that a writer can find his or her voice. I warn my first-year students against believing the maxim because, to me, it presupposes that every writer
three poems
Mary Boo Anderson
I've been socialized to be alive / the quiet death of women eating salad
Alcoholics
Bud Smith
Dad’s side are all boring fucks. Mom’s side, god—all my mom’s brothers thought they were the outlaw rebel cowboys of New Jersey. Wild ones. Alcoholics. They were fun, while they lasted. All those men
Three Poems
Dana Alsamsam
We lie here together, gold in charred hands, / pulling the ash from each other’s hair.
Art is life: Foof!
Uzodinma Okehi
As always, feel I’ve mentioned this elsewhere—But here’s how deep I’d get into something without being able to have it make sense.
Five Poems
David Schaefer
This is the most difficult sermon, / The one where the disciples / Burn the hamburger buns and / Christ nearly misses his train.
Four Poems
Vandana Khanna
I grow our loneliness in my mouth, feed you— / sweet and bleak— under a halo of buzzing stars.
GOODNIGHT, BEAUTIFUL WOMEN by Anna Noyes
Michael Deagler
An interview with Anna Noyes
Mouth Open Wide
Denise Tolan
First, he ARRIVED – like the swans at Capistrano, or aliens in the desert, or, more likely, a flaming dessert.
“Who is that?” my friend Noelle said, poking me in the ribs; her inflection, a
Forever Ago
Bud Smith
Radio Tower, 4yrs old
The radio tower had big cones on top. We were in the car and I said to mom, “What are those?” She didn't know so she said, “Oh, that's where Mickey Mouse lives.” I was
Jupiter
Leah Bond
Cave In
Album: Jupiter
Released: August 8, 2000
Hydra Head
Length: 44:10
My friend Beth was blamed for everything I ever did wrong. In my grandmother's eyes, it was all her fault.
This is abstract and so entirely without utility, but I’ll note it anyway
d.
texas was underwater, florida had been evacuated, and the eagle creek blaze—started by fireworks in September of the hottest Summer on record—filled the skies for hundreds of miles with the forest’s ashes.
SWEET BEGONIAS
Anne K. Yoder
A sister in place of a father wasn’t an exchange. I’d had twelve years with a father and none with a sister, and I’d preferred it that way.
Three Poems
Christine Stroud
The Gemini
It would be a lie to say I always went to bed with one brother
and woke up with another—that at night he placed pomegranate
seeds on my belly, making constellations on my
Three Poems
Nathan Wade Carter
I sip red wine and weed / and deface anything that looks like me
The Demise of Fragaria Ananassa
Danielle Lea Buchanan
Tongue hasn’t left its .276 square foot efficiency studio apartment in three weeks. To discourage visitors due to lack of space, this space was rented. Tongue is going through a break-up. This
Everything After
Chloe Caldwell
After I finished the reading, I waited a couple minutes, browsing books, until I left the bookstore - alone. All the women who’d watched me, who were so supportive, so attractive, were huddled in a group. They were friends, they were a community.
Interview with Jill McDonough
Daniel Pieczkolon
Thank you for calling that curiosity “innocent.” I like the sense of “innocent" as “guileless,” rather than “not-guilty,” since the poems sketch both our ignorance and our complicity. I
In the 70s Everyone, Including Mannequins, Had Nipples
Lynn Schmeidler
Once upon a time there was no sex, but sex was everywhere: in Laura's 6th grade locker with her roll-on deodorant, in Dr. Davidson's walk—slow and tight-calved, in Mr. Robinson's guitar—Cat Steven's "Wild World" each afternoon before the bell, in Mrs. Roger's wavy, knee- length red hair—smelling of Wella Balsam and cigarettes.
The Record
Dan Morey
The Record
Fear
Label: Slash
Released: May 16, 1982
Length: 14 songs, 27 minutes
This is about a dead guy. But it’s 1995 and the dead guy isn’t dead yet. He’s driving. A black
Africa!
Uzodinma Okehi
My grandfather, his English name was Benson. As the houseboys opened the gates, he came out on the balcony and fired off a shotgun, boom, one or two blasts.
Aladdin
Chloe Caldwell
I remember seeing Aladdin on Christmas Eve with my friend Kylie when I was seven years old.
The Virgin Mary
Adesuwa Agbonile
It doesn’t make the sound that you think it would make. I mean, I figured it would be loud, or top-heavy. But it sounded like almost nothing, like water dripping from a shower faucet three rooms
Christmases
Bud Smith
Carefully open the wrapping paper. Inside is Teddy Ruxbin. See his stupid face on the box. Fuck you, Teddy Ruxbin. He reads you bedtime stories if you put a cassette tape in his abdomen.
Three Poems
Amanda Hayes
I grew up in grass but here / everything is bladeless, // hair thinned past feathers, / sheets slick enough to grease a boar.
Sam and Chester
Howard Parsons
They sat on the grassy bank, clothes clinging to their wet bodies, watching the river flow. A few raindrops splashed on the surface, tiny dimples rushed away downstream. Neither of them bothered to point out that it was going to rain.
None of This is a Metaphor
Jane Liddle
I was at a party for the end of the world. I came so I wouldn’t be alone. I guess so did all the other women. They must have known there’d be no men at this party because they wore beautiful
Autobiography Inside a Church
Hussain Ahmed
my parents taught me to say ‘surrender’
in a dozen foreign languages.
A Man Protects His Home
David Gerow
I’m in the parking lot, I’ve got Sarah’s prescription, Sarah’s my wife, and I see him.
Osama bin Laden.
Dreams About Water
Duncan Whitmire
“I saw you by the river last night,” Amy says, her eyes still closed and half-covered by strands of almond-brown hair. “Why didn’t you follow me?”
Three Poems
Diana Keren Lee
my angst is still young / and highly flammable / something interrupted / meant to be read out of order / one chord change to another
Hockey in movies that aren't about hockey
Joe Sacksteder
Love Story (1970, dir. Arthur Hiller)
It’s comical that the rich kid with a building at Harvard named after his family is a hockey bruiser while the baker’s daughter not good enough to marry
Under
Marvin Shackelford
Before Nathan underwent surgery he made a list for if he survived, though it wasn’t that severe or threatening a procedure.
Mema's Alaskan Taco Hut
Lauren Dostal
After, we slunk back to Mema’s Alaskan Taco Hut and I crawled into a booth and ordered with two fingers like we were stuck in a Mad Men b-reel. I couldn’t see my hand held up, but from this
death by holograms
Chance Dibben
I am trying to come out to my father / but all he wants to talk about / are the 1985 Chicago Bears
Murmuration
ash adams
Before roosting in the city, starlings dive—
five thousand deep in flock. Like cells they follow the
law of localization. Bound by surroundings. Step into a
crowded elevator and take on
260 Saturdays
Jody Kennedy
We wiped down, scraped, rearranged, shook out, swept, mopped, vacuumed, stripped, waxed, sealed.
Leisure
Julie Hrudova
Welcome to Hobart Photo Stories, a one stop shop for photos that will excite the brain, the eye and the heart.
—Tara Wray, photo editor
Julie Hrudova works and lives in
Interview with Matthew Neill Null
Michael Deagler
Southerners think that West Virginia is the north, and northerners think West Virginia is the south.
Love Story in the Form of a Taco
Daniel Paul
“Isn’t there something called ‘Pizza’?” I whispered to my girlfriend one night, awake from a dream; she kissed my forehead, her breath heavy with the sweet smell of cilantro, and sent me back to sleep.
An Anatomy of Pipes
Hannah Doyle
I was birthed alongside a digested McMuffin evacuated from a parallel pipe—my mother’s last pre-labor meal. She opted for a natural birth, taking only an aspirin, never uttering a complaint.
Police Report
Sonya Gray Redi
When I told you I wanted to file a police report for our missing love, you turned to me with your best impression of a blank page.
Victory Speech
Salvatore Difalco
I feel blessed. I thank God with a capital G for my success.
Three Poems
Brandon Freels
Lying next to her, I wrote the last chapter of the Bible and surrounded our bed with Doritos.
Sock Factory
Greg Chandler
First of all I want to thank you for accepting my friend request. Out of all our graduating class of 1992, you were the only one to do so.
New Miserable Experience
Lanny Durbin
New Miserable Experience
Gin Blossoms
Label: A&M
Released: August 4th, 1992
Length: 45:02
When I think about being a kid, it feels like thumbing through a wet notebook. Not a
Pierrot On The Futon
Derick Dupre
I was a mess at every sunrise. The door winked at me, the comb was losing teeth.
An Interview with Brian Booker
Michael Deagler
The term “unreliable narrator” was first coined in 1961 by the critic Wayne C. Booth, and since then it has become one of fiction’s most recognizable elements. While initially viewed as something
Suggestions for Tinder Experiments We Could Conduct Together
Tyler Friend
Let’s create fake accounts and try to seduce each other.
Trigger Warning
Noah Eli Gordon
It’s not the enormity of the half-eaten doughnut.
The Habit of Cutting In the Edges
Andrew Johnson
You gather one brush, one can of paint, one room, and one hand tethered to attention.
Clothes Are Rarely Important in a Highly Emphasized Way
Dóra Grőber
He's lying in bed thinking about his imaginary lover. He's not touching himself, he doesn't think about him when he does, only maybe in the very final moments.
My Father is a Collection
David Bersell
I used to think my father was a baseball card.
Three Short Fictions
Ryan Bender-Murphy
I knocked your socks off and away they went into another neighborhood, city, state, country, world, and dimension.
Please Interact with This Advertisement
Benjamin Brandenburg
Your content will resume after you answer a brief survey.
How many movies have you seen in theater so far this year?
0
1-5
6-10
11 or more
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With whom
An Interview With Christine Sneed
Michael Deagler
I think everyone has heard this a lot but it’s still true — read with curiosity and hunger — reading is as important as writing, more important, probably, when you’re first starting to write.
An Interview with Rebecca Schiff
Michael Deagler
I don’t have any goals except to make the reader think and feel. What they think and feel is up to them.
The End of the World and Karate
Al Dixon
On the way home from picking up my brother at the airport, I stopped for a hitchhiker. I’d never picked up a hitchhiker before. I think I did it because my brother was with me, Julian. It was the kind of thing Julian would do.
White Dwarf Seeks Red Giant for Binary Orbit
Samantha Edmonds
We’ll have more in common than you’d think—after all, we’re both main sequence stars, I’m just a few million years ahead of you.
Pretty Potion
Jen Palmares Meadows
In the afternoons, I stripped off my boyish clothing and watched back to back episodes of Saved by the Bell, feeding my unhealthy obsession for Kelly KAPOWski. The perky brunette with her slim ankles and come-hither hair tosses was the ultimate teenage bombshell.
Five Poems
Bud Smith
Remember, there’s a light emitting from you and it's not just your cellphone. / The Internet is a scorched wasteland. / But you've walked through worse places / on your way to work.
WHEN ONE MORNING I WOKE UP MISSING JOEY CARUSO, THE BEST SECONDBASEMAN I EVER PLAYED WITH. I COULDN’T SHAKE IT OFF, THIS MISSING. SO I WROTE THIS POEM
Devin Kelly
It means nothing now but it meant enough then, enough to change a life, to alter the smooth rhythmic turning of the world.
The Big Inning: Game 95 // Ninth Inning, Chicago // The Cubbies Win the Pennant
Brendan Donley
What can be said about this game that hasn’t already been said about Christmas morning? Better than that. The first day of a summer break. Better than that. Evening fireworks on the 4th of July. That, too. Better than all. A graduation, an engagement, a marriage, a festival, a celebration. An outdoor fete to anything.
Carl Mays Kills Ray Chapman
Andrew Butler
He doesn’t have any friends and doesn’t want any.
That’s the only way Mays can pitch,
because he doesn’t play the game
of fraternity formed on summer ballfields.
The Big Inning: Game 69 // Seventh Inning, Los Angeles // A Silent Gift, for Vin Scully
Brendan Donley
Vin Scully alone in a broadcast booth, talking by himself, talking to us. Assuring the world that all’s well in Dodgeralia. Calm. Composed. At home, in a park he’ll depart at season’s end. Handpicking his words, off endless branches, branches’ branches, in a deep memory he builds, maintains over many years, keeps polished like a jewel.
Playing Baseball Mediocrely but Playing Baseball with Pure Joy
Julia Dixon Evans
I wanted to focus on the real victims, unthinkable crimes against them, but I kept coming back to those batting cages, to that uniform in Coach B's house.
Hateball
Bud Smith
I wanted to quit, and was too young to realize that I could just quit anything.
Now the wren has gone to roost
Drew Knapp
The trees all richly clad, yet devoid of pride, fat with birds and the season, have called back days and years for the history they are giving me.
Below the Chandelier
Derick Dupre
He can’t respond to the man addressing him as Mr. Sport because he can’t talk, his tongue has been mangled, somewhat ineptly, and he sees the hilarity in this, being tortured by inept torturers, as another larger silent gentleman’s behind him, but if it weren’t him in the chair, if it were someone else and he was watching, he might be amused by these two dilettantes practicing the art of torture.
The Ugly Woman
Laura Adamczyk
The woman sat on the train wrapped tightly in her coat. She stared at herself in the window and eyed the other passengers.
Speech Therapy
Richard Johnston
My therapist’s name was Sean. I remember that most of all because it was easy for me to say. The sound sh never caused trouble. I could curse or tell people to shut up all day long. But es caused a world of trouble.
Take That, Linnaeus
Candice Kelsey
When clearly it could be a mommy or even a child for that matter.
Interview with Donika Kelly
Daniel Pieczkolon
BESTIARY was released in October of 2016 by Graywolf Press and has garnered a great deal of praise, including being longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award in Poetry. Kelly was kind enough to answer a few of my questions via email regarding the notion of self in poetry, how trauma and grief can manifest in art, and how her critical work informs (or fails to inform) her poetry.
Lana del Rey / Mary Tyler Moore: A Review of Friendship
Amanda Goldblatt
In memory, we wanted to repost this gem from 2014 by Amanda Goldblatt that used Mary Tyler Moore as a lens to become a "review of friendship."
You Would Even Say It Glowed
Adam Armstrong
Later that evening, when confronted about my absence, I told her that my grandfather said I looked sick and should go home. His senility always made him my reliable scapegoat.
Three Poems
Brian Laidlaw
Miracles come more seldom now.
It’s satellite interference.
Three Poems
CL Bledsoe & Michael Gushue
In the far-flung depths of the future, historians
will look back to this day and say, "This
is where it all went wrong."
In Silhouette
Mehdi M. Kashani
My perverse compassion had destroyed all traces of a once-in-a-lifetime trip.
We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service
Harold Stallworth
A Tribe Called Quest
We Got It From Here... Thank You 4 Your Service
Released: November 11, 2016
Label: Epic Records
Length: 61 minutes, 16 songs
All of my favorite people are
A Woman's Hair Is Her Crown And Glory
Lynn Mundell
She needs a quick blowout, so I comb and press her golden hair until is a sheer curtain fluttering around a face thrown open to love.
The Heart as a Protostar
Ferris Wayne McDaniel
When I am not exercising or performing space walks or cleaning or developing vehicle software, I watch the sun rise 16 times a day.
An Interview with Adam Ehrlich Sachs
Michael Deagler
I had written a few aborted short stories before, but really I specialized in aborted novels.
WORD FOR LYING ABOUT A DREAM
Emily Dhatt
Because you find it interesting and want it analyzed without the burden of being analyzed yourself.
Old School
K.C. Frederick
This guy’s old school, Roselli says to me over the phone, real old school. How old school can you be, I’m thinking, in a sport that’s already run its course in just a few years.
An Interview with Louisa Ermelino
Michael Deagler
As the real world feels increasingly devoid of magic, we are correct to admire those writers who attempt to interject some magic back into it.
The Art of Fiction Lists
an interview with Chris Bachelder, by Aaron Burch
I think ten t-shirts would be too many to write about, but I’m perversely hoping that twenty-two is somehow not too many. A writer can, I think, pass beyond “too many” or “too much” to a sense of rightness or aptness. The paradox: More than too much is sometimes not too much.
Maybe Rome Grew Tired
Tyler Atwood
I can't in good conscience watch a sixteenth season of Big Brother.
Three Poems
Karl Schroeder
I'm going to abandon everything / after this poem
Naming What We Know
Jordan Castro
Violette moved away from Calvin toward a group of rhododendrons.
Calvin felt calm.
He thought about God.
Five Poems
Davy Knittle
[victory lobe]
tiny towns or a dog could keep me pleased
for six months, then I’d wear felt triangles
look like December, have needles on me
molt on the plane to the
Three Fictions
Shannon McLeod
I sent a text to my father, telling him I saw three coyotes. My father is an admirer of the natural world. I sent another text about a nearby house that had been abandoned. I'd noticed the word “SATAN” scrawled across the front door with blue paint that morning.
Huge Cheap Fake Meat
Amanda Goldblatt
My novel is my father, I am saying, and it too is the best art I could make but not the best art I will make. For I am 33 and my feminist Jungian therapist says often: the beginning of adulthood is forgiving your parents for their sundry errors.
I Got So Good
Adam Tedesco
thinking about how all of it started
thinking about how the poems ends
Incompatible With Life
Amanda Miska
The problem was I’d forgotten about the change in altitude. The grief counselor had suggested a getaway, so I fled the Alleghenies for the Rockies and the guest bedroom of my best college friend on a quiet block in Denver.
Alexander Hamilton: a review of George Washington by Adam Fitzgerald
Sam Farahmand
I am reading a poem called “George Washington” in a book of poems called George Washington in a bar called The Library in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I am spending my last twelve dollars on four beers and my last four dollars on tipping the bartender because happy hour still hasn't started.
Did You Hear That?
Benjamin Woodard
Okay, so there’s that sound again, and you know it isn’t Tommy or Lindsey trying to scare you, because they’ve been asleep for over an hour and you’re certain the sound is coming from the basement
An Interview with Amy Gustine
Michael Deagler
Within its pages, the reader is invited to discover those wondrous things that only great short fiction can offer: an abbreviated window into disparate lives, intense and intricate moments of distress and disclosure, completely self-contained and executed in twenty-five pages or less (Deagler on Gustine's Collection).
Fun Person
Deirdre Coyle
He removed a wad of fabric from under the bed, pulling on boxers and an Anthrax t-shirt. I winced at the Anthrax logo—I knew better than to fuck guys into thrash metal—too late now.
Only Sunshine
Becky Mandelbaum
Her parents, Mary and Don, were overcome first by grief and then by caution: they purchased fire extinguishers and flame retardant blankets, put the fire department on speed dial and plugged the holes in the nursery wall with corks, so that the angry neighbors could not look in and make a spectacle of their only child. Julia was their everything
A Very Small Forest Fire
Andrew Duncan Worthington
Before we entered the most raved about amusement park in the world, we went into the woods nearby . . .
The Peculiar Draw of Orange
Eric Dovigi
John’s hands are on the wheel, very still, and he’s looking straight ahead at the dark yellow lines of Route 66.
Interview with Jade Sharma
Michael Deagler
The Millennial aspect is important because, like many Millennials, its protagonist does not wear labels easily.
Leonard/Fergus/Clemenza/Herbert/ Barzini/Lord Baltimore (noun)
Sarah Destin
You mean to say, “hello” or “good morning,” but you know that, between us, that would be strangely inappropriate before our morning cup of coffee
Two Daydrinking Stories
Bud Smith
We go to a bar for lunch that serves free candy.
Jared Machetes the Porch
Austin Hayden
Jared punches like dang. Gouges, arm-bars. Breaks windows at theme parties.
Interview with Sara Majka
Michael Deagler
But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong
An Interview With Christopher Boucher
Adam Novy
Christopher Boucher’s new novel, Golden Delicious (Melville House), is a kind of referendum on all we presently hold dear in fiction. Its emotional hold on the reader is very strong, but its avant-garde methods critique those special effects by explaining what they’re doing to your feelings while they do it, which somehow only makes the book more sad.
Pin the Tail on the Predator
Stevie Edwards
here were girls who sank/ a thousand leagues beneath his hips/ and never bobbed back for air. I came ashore/ in a body of my own, crooked gate/ and piano fingers
Solicitations
Benjamin Woodard
Two weeks after the scientist’s freak exposure, a man in black arrived at his front step. It was the weekend, and the man in black brought with him a gift: a jumble of neon material he removed from
An Interview with Amie Barrodale
Michael Deagler
The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.
B(Earth)day
Matthew Schmidt
I’m shoving fat candles into dirt,
blowtorching the wicks and tooting
horns.
I couldn’t render enough tallow
to properly honor over 4 billion years,
sorry,
you have so many hills.
Dunn and Hooper Standing in Dunn’s Yard
Brandon Barrett
The cousin had called my thesis advisor and said something like, “Hey, film professor cousin, can you do this film for us?” and my thesis advisor was like, “Hey, no. But I know a guy who is still unemployed four months after graduation and is about to get evicted.”
Morning Rituals
Todd Osborne
He started as a single Clay Aiken, the one we all knew with the smiling face and aw-shucks demeanor
Sal and Dean Are Dicks
Yasmina Din Madden
It’s clear that most of these students hate Sal, Dean, and Kerouac.
People Resent You For It
Ardith Bravenec
Look, you smile too much or too little, both at the wrong times, and people don’t like you.
An Offertory, on a Small Court
Julia Dixon Evans
We turned off the game and drove to the mountains, a dead dog in the backseat
On Not Going for a Beer
Hannah Dow
And she doesn’t know a word of German, except “bier.”
ATMOSPHERE
Philip Dinolfo
One day I came across an inverted map of the Western Hemisphere. Cape Horn was in Alaska's usual position. I felt very disturbed, like air was flooding into the space above North America and
all gods & mysteries
Aran Donovan
love becoming, like an apple,
this requires time, starred
blossom, then summer, the attention
of bees, grown men
bow their heads, concentrating
on the national anthem
in stadiums
The Truth Always Wants to Be Told: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 5
Andrew Bomback
After watching the TEDx Talk, I initially thought, “I wonder if everyone who watches that video will try to write a memoir.”
An Interview with Brian Evenson
Michael Deagler
I want as a reader to be transformed and thrown off balance by what I read, and I try to do that for my reader as well.
Your Adventures Change
Chloe Caldwell
I definitely gained traction in my twenty-ninth year. At twenty-nine, my skin cleared up, I sold a book. But the biggest accomplishment for me was that I stopped working retail and made my money solely from writing and teaching writing.
The Rock and the Wave
Kendra Allenby
The rock is slow to change. The wave can be exploded by a breeze.
Ripped Red Stitches
Dustin M. Hoffman
When I lived in Michigan, I ruined baseball. I recorded every Detroit Tigers game only to fast-forward between pitches, so I could get back to stacks of paper grading, so I could be as productive
TOMMY SUAREZ, DEPORTISTA ESTUPIDO
David Solorzano
Midway through the school year one of the kids in one of the other sixth grade classes hung himself, so we couldn’t call the game we played in the mornings ‘suicide’ after that.
Why I Might Coach the Little League Team
Devin Kelly
I would go back now, though, live in the nervous fidget
before I said I like you & kissed her braces
with my upper lip & bled all over her teeth.
A Single Happened Thing
Daniel Paisner
It was the summer of Monica Lewinsky and Mark McGwire and Armageddon. I was on a short business trip to Philadelphia—a handholding, as it is known in the office. I was sent, via Amtrak, to coddle
Lines Come Last
Richard Johnston
When I first met Dawn, I didn’t know what a lexicographer was. I had to look it up. Later I admitted I hadn’t even realized that people still made dictionaries.
“Of course they do,” Dawn
Impermanent Ink
Chad Schuster
Much has been said about that smile. I'm not in the business of describing smiles.
Fuckface(s)
Andrew Bomback
Let’s start this account of fuckfaces on October 18, 2006. I was 30 years old, recently engaged, in my third year of residency training at Chapel Hill, and depressed about the New York Mets.
How to Eat a Sunflower Seed
Evan Lavender-Smith
Otherwise you'll end up with a mouthful of husk shards.
Nine Things About Bunting
Tara Roeder
Once I googled “Can you bunt in football?” Answers.com had a helpful “Answered by the Community” reply: “No.”
Californication, Special AWP Edition
Daniel A. Hoyt
Season 6, season finale: Hank Moody attends AWP. Moral tragedy ensues.
Bronson Alleys
Andrew F Sullivan
An excerpt from WASTE: a novel
Elvira Moon loved bowling. For four straight years, her team, the Blooming Broads, dominated the women’s league, decimating all opponents until Big Tina quit to start her own team, the South Side Splitters, with that bitch Claudia from Couscous or whatever country she’d arrived from in a banana crate.
Misery Needs Jokes: A Conversation with Jon-Michael Frank, author of How’s Everything Going? Not Good
Andrew Bomback
The third episode of Louis C.K.’s new series, Horace and Pete, is a nearly hour-long conversation between Horace (Louis C.K.) and his ex-wife, Sarah (Laurie Metcalf). Conversation really isn’t the
Between the Lines
Denise Milstein
He was riding down the street like you, contramano, and the image came of you on your bike, and I wished for the dream of the flying bicycle to return, the one where I find you again.
Nothing Has a Location Until It Is Observed
Andrea Eberly
When Sophie arrived home from the Strange Charm concert, she realized she was now in possession of an uncomfortable secret. The next day at work it replayed in her mind at least a hundred times.
Those Bears (pt. 8)
Jarod Roselló
[Previously on... Part 7 | Part 6 | Part 5 | Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1]
Self Defense for Girls
Laurie Cedilnik
Sarah squeezed into a bathroom stall with Ralph. Outside her boyfriend sat at the bar, nursing yet another domestic beer.
Those Bears (pt. 7)
Jarod Roselló
[Previously on... Part 6 | Part 5 | Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1]
Bedtime Story
Doug Ramspeck
Sometimes the two memories grow conflated in her thoughts, especially in her dreams.
Vigil at Fort Jesus
Derick Dupre
Nighttime near Fort Jesus. We point our phones heavenward and hear about the latest rave death.
Three Poems
Rosalynde Vas Dias
And it is easy, so easy / to welcome them into the poem.
Three Poems
Rosalynde Vas Dias
I didn't imagine you could grow into your harness, that it could embed in your skin, that you could plod one circle for so long that actually stopping would open up the ache in your body.
Human Origami
David Alasdair
The wind isn’t really knocked out of you. When you fall, you panic, hold your breath, tense every muscle.
The Lepidopterist
Kendra Fortmeyer
The killer dispatched the boyfriend easily in the kitchen, and then he had an idea.
Tuesday Night Bieber
Joe Sacksteder
At one point, Justin’s stick got swatted and went flying. He hesitated for a moment, before strut-skating to the bench. This is not something a hockey player would normally do, just leave an unbroken stick on the ice during a non-competitive game. Someone eventually pushed the stick over to the dark team’s bench. “Pick it up,” Tony heard him say. For a second, Tony thought Justin was talking to him. Turns out he was talking to his bodyguard.
The GwalaCost // Ep. 4: Happy GwalaDays!!!
Jordan Castro
Jordan Castro writes about rapper Peewee Longway, memories of his dad and Run-D.M.C., his views on Christmas over the years, and some of his favorite Christmas rap lines.
Mt. Silver
Adam Zachary
I couldn’t sleep when we shared a bed anyway, so most nights, when he was deep enough, I wriggled out of his armpit to lay on the floor, play Pokémon until sunrise caught on spots in the window.
2 Fictions
Hanna Mangold
six years later and I only know how to be needed
Theory of Natural Selection
Richard Johnston
Latvia’s Baltic coastline is almost completely undeveloped except for a few fishing villages and some dilapidated concrete resorts for Communist Party officials. A forest of black pines begins right at the edge of sixty-foot dunes.
An uncareful mathematician would always mistake this for love
Julia Dixon Evans
Because Math!
drunken texting while watching junjou romantica
Dice Jung
a text msg that was sent:
ur hands my hands
both needed if i hit
u first would u hit me back
Seen two hours after I fell in love with you
the text msg that needed 2 be
Twenty Failures
Ilana Masad
1. She told him to shut the window-slats. Every shred of light should be brushed away. She wanted to feel invisible.
The GwalaCost // Ep. 3: Sauce or No Sauce?
Jordan Castro
From Osama Bin Laden to the WNBA, Jordan Castro and friends explore who/what has sauce, and who/what doesn't.
Tiger Blood
Bud Smith
I meet a girl on OK Cupid and the first date goes well enough.
Lori Jakiela Interview
Sandra Newman
In her third memoir, Belief is its own kind of truth, Maybe, Lori Jakiela uses a collage-style structure to write about the collage-like process of assembling an identity, and the particular
The GwalaCost // Ep. 2
Jordan Castro
Jordan Castro reviews rapper Travis Scott's debut studio album Rodeo.
The Fragile Heroine
Shawn Binder
I’ve thought a lot about what it is that draws me into slasher films as a gay man. Maybe I am drawn to them because I read about so many queer people being victimized; in a way I am turning to them for survival tips.
Reasons Why Ladies Prefer Chuck Norris to Steven Seagall
Andy Rogers
We had no idea what Erotica Week would look like when we dreamed it up, over Twitter, months ago. And now that it's finally here, I'd describe it like this: the stories and poems on the site this
Foul Balls
David Ezekiel Kruse
We had no idea what Erotica Week would look like when we dreamed it up, over Twitter, months ago. And now that it's finally here, I'd describe it like this: the stories and poems on the site this
The Hunter at the End of the Day
Claire Polders
It wasn’t my intention when I set out this afternoon to penetrate these woods, but I am here again, tracking a deer, a tanned phantom slipping in and out of the shoots of fern.
Digger Duane
Dan Leach
I came by to talk. Figured it was time to fix a few things.
Swaingrove
Adam McOmber
Here, in the green glass light of the parlor, Swaingrove cultivates its memories.
The GwalaCost // Ep. 1
Jordan Castro
Jordan Castro's thoughts re: Young Thug's Slime Season and Drake/Future's What A Time To Be Alive in the first installment of his new column re: rap & rap-related things, "The GwalaCost."
Thirteen Halves of the Story
Michelle Dove
E says the sky is fuller today and I say it isn’t. Meaning we aren’t significant so why would our surroundings be.
Three Poems
Jose Hernandez Diaz
By the time I hang up, the goats turn into Roger Clemens and Pedro Martinez. We smoke my last cigarettes, the three of us.
Some Thoughts Re: "Slang"
Jordan Castro
Jordan Castro writes some jumbled thoughts re: "slang" then writes about some words that he likes...
You Told Me I Looked Good
Meredith Turits
You slept for a few hours after that, but I stayed awake, mostly wondering why you hadn’t yet scraped the popcorn texture off of the ceiling in your house.
Notes on Tomorrow's Issue
Cady Vishniac
QUERY 5: About half the time, your APOSTROPHES and your QUOTATION MARKS don’t curl around the way they should— “ or ” , not " , and ‘ or ’ , not ' —which is how I know you are writing half of all your articles on your cellphone.
I Can Self Destruct
Shawn Binder
If you’ve ever been asked to place your anxiety on a litmus test of 1-10 and have no idea what a 10 would constitute, then you know how jarring and disconnected this question could be. I thought about running away from the office, I thought about knocking over one of her plants
Staff Meeting
Ginny MacDonald
In the staff meeting she thought about enemas.
The Most Romantic Eighth Grade Boy
Cara Dempsey
Every night since she stays in, thumbing the wheel. She burns napkins and cotton swabs. She burns whatever she can find.
Sprint: A Plane Crashes Out Over the Atlantic
Andrew Bertaina
We were sitting on the shores of the Atlantic, waiting for the wind to change and the black flies to get blown back out to sea when the plane went down.
Alfred Wichly interviews Sucker June author Sean Kilpatrick
Alfred Wichly
Kilpatrick on the artist’s political responsibilities (these are apparently multiple): Hate has more borders than I can muster into the capability of a vision. That’s why I scream in short bursts.
Chased by the Muse, Part 3
Laura Joyce Davis & Nate Davis
For all the hours we’ve spent with strangers, all the conversations and shared stories, we ask no one’s name—until now.
Chased by the Muse, Part 2
Laura Joyce Davis & Nate Davis
There are five categories for hurricanes; most of the buildings here were built to withstand categories one and two.
If Everything's Under Control, You're Going Too Slow
Meg Wade
Let the okra go to waste, steal oranges from the
corner store. I'll tell you that I love you like I've
loved no one else. Our bodies are made to be
useful, move fast. The fastest man in
Chased by the Muse, Part 1
Laura Joyce Davis & Nate Davis
No one is going anywhere, he says. You will sleep here tonight.
Oh, This Was the World: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 4
Andrew Bomback
Two teenagers are living in my house this summer, and neither has read The Catcher in the Rye. They’ve taken over the basement, binge-watching shows on Netflix and referring to Instagram as
Sucking on Lemonheads
Dorothy Rice
“Ah, so you’ve had an ordinary life,” she said.
Those Bears (pt. 6)
Jarod Roselló
[Previously on... Part 5 | Part 4 | Part 3 | Part 2 | Part 1]
Blackout: an Interview with Sarah Hepola
Chloe Caldwell
the defining experience of Western women today is internal conflict
The Mindreader
Claire Polders
I am a woman of discipline, which is to say: I don’t act at random. But I once slept with a mindreader on a whim.
Those Bears (pt. 5)
Jarod Roselló
He was like, "Everyone knows what racoons like to do."
What an asshole.
The Man with a Fish in His Heart
Michael Credico
I had runoff all over. I hadn’t escaped the heartland.
Three Poems
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett
This has to stop— / you're a year dead. I shatter the mirror // with a glare, pace the hall carpet, / but others arrive by dawn, agitated // by thuribles, syllables scattered from / pulpits, daughters buttoned into pastel.
Flying Machine (Pt. 5)
Lydia Conklin
Lydia! What the heck is the hold up? How long does it take to throw a rope over a branch?
All My Coworkers When I Worked At Zeppe's
Jordan Castro
In 2011, while addicted to heroin, I briefly delivered pizza for Zeppe's, a chain restaurant in rural Northeast Ohio.
A Bunt
Evan Lavender-Smith
We are launching a new project, HOBART HANDBOOKS, the first project of which is our Handbook on Baseball, collecting some of our favorite pieces from our last thirteen years of online baseball
Author Notes on "The Wolfman In Barry Bonds"
Tim Denevi
On the night during which the events of this essay took place—August 8th, 2003—the San Francisco Giants beat the Philadelphia Phillies 9-1. Barry Bonds hit a home run, yes, his 648th...
Animate
Marin Sardy
The story goes that Mario is Luigi’s brother. Nearly all we know about him is that he is a brother.
Those Bears (pt. 4)
Jarod Roselló
I heard about what happened last week.
Oh yeah, that was just—
It wasn't right. I'm really sorry about that.
The Child Bride and Her Artificial Flowers
Carabella Sands
His family was there. My family was there. My bouquet was made of flies.
A Hobart Symposium
Robert Shapard
Authors in Flash Fiction International
from the U.S., Mexico, Israel, New Zealand, India, Australia, and Brazil
respond to questions
deaths in the family
Giancarlo Paradiso
Watching the blood drain was the moment she knew/ that she didn’t have it figured out."
Flying Machine (Pt. 4)
Lydia Conklin
Okay, now -- I'm going to tie this end to the box. Lydia, throw the other end over our tree. Gilly, stand guard over the box.
2 Fictions
Uzodinma Okehi
Nothing Works: 1
-New York City 2005
I should be through thinking about it. Ok, but I remember just going batshit, breaking up with Vanessa on the payphone. Hanging up, couple minutes,
It's Today Right Now
J.D. Hager
Yesterday my mom called me up and asked me to buy her cigarettes. I told her no and hung up.
2 Fictions
Ryan Bender-Murphy
After the Bombing
Santa did not know how to react to the sight; he only stared. At the granite block, there were three rows filled with ten men, each of whom was Santa. The only thing that
Quality Time
Ed Meek
I was afraid the security guards would stop us, but they just shrugged when I took the plane out and put it on the field. One of them even said something nice like, “Whoa, that is a cool.” I taxied it from the end zone; it took off and buzzed up into the sky.
Those Bears (pt. 3)
Jarod Roselló
You want to watch a movie?
Nah, I think I'm going to go write for a bit.
Soul Retrieval in the Southwest
Lana Spendl
At my friend’s bonfire on a chilly Southwestern night, a blond woman in Birkenstocks approached me and said that her name was Singing Humyn.
Night Swim
Dan Reiter
Memories are like Asian pears. Store them cold and they will keep.
She climbed shivering out of the river. The Taigan smeared its nose on her shin. Soily fish. Down on the rug, massaging its
My Father Bottles Howls
Drew Knapp
On the nights my father brings home a new howl my mother prepares a feast and adorns a whalebone corset like a rib carved from the moon. On these nights I love my family because we are together and in this way I have come to worship the wolf.
Future Daughter
Sally Rodgers
Untitled One
Motherhood slept astonished as astronomers wept so-so-ago with this sort of blow. This sort of ovary, yo, the story being if thrown into something sombrous, spokes-of-light, it
Those Bears (pt. 2)
Jarod Roselló
Someone is in trouble! Should I be running toward danger?
Bear Country
Christian TeBordo
I realized that my son’s vocabulary, though impressive, would not help much with anything he was likely to encounter in everyday life, now or in the future.
Flying Machine (pt. 2)
Lydia Conklin
Flying is dangerous, Lydia. I don't want to die today, do you?
I guess not.
As Easter Approaches
Louise De Vilmorin; translated by Madeleine Maillet
Another family story. I can’t get away from it. As Easter approaches, I find myself thinking about one of my aunts who, when it came to transportation, had only known the transportations of
Three Poems
Karen Skolfield
When we consume ourselves, of course / we think no one cares enough to watch.
Those Bears (pt. 1)
Jarod Roselló
I'm just like everyone else... A person drinking coffee...
I Was Potential
Jesse Donaldson
When I was fifteen, I started receiving letters from Division I baseball coaches about the possibility of joining them on such and such Elysian Field and helping the squad reach its goal, which
How to Pitch a Full Count
David Joseph
I trace the windup with my elbow, my arm like a wing
unfurling, red lace licking off my feathertips.
The Eyes of the Storm
David Wanczyk
“I thought it was boring,” he told me, “partly because I'd just learned English. But learning the language and the terminology and how the game is played was the big change.”
Still, It Was Baseball
Chad Schuster
You could tell Heather was a catcher by looking at her thighs, but she brought an infielder's mitt to the game that day.
Hobart "Experts" Predict the 2015 MLB Season -- Andrew Ervin
Andrew Ervin
Here in Philadelphia, there’s a comfortable familiarity in the air, a sense of impending mediocrity to which every lifelong Phillies fan has grown accustomed. The bandwagon is empty, the ride over.
Mill Valley Little League, 1999 to 2004
Dylan Fisher
David
Could be anyone by now. I hope he's okay. I hope they're all okay.
Father-Son Combos
Evan Lavender-Smith
On 14 September 1990, Ken Griffey Sr. hit a home run, and Ken Griffey Jr., the very next batter, also hit a home run, making them the only father–son combo in Major League Baseball history to hit
Altruism on Twitter: The Amazin' @DidMetsLose2Day Feed
Andrew Bomback
I learned about @DidMetsLose2Day because someone I followed retweeted a post.
We Were Homeless
Emily Geminder
We were homeless. We stole blankets, sheets. We took provisions. We carried our houses inside us.
Europe Poems
Richard Wehrenberg, Jr.
These Austrian cows
lying down vaguely chewing
grass what are they think
I Keep Thinking
Carabella Sands
But I have a million lights
I have two million actually
A whole billboard
9mm
Rebecca Hazelwood
Every day after your aunt points a 9mm Smith and Wesson at your head, you think about holding one in your hands. You need to feel that weight.
Forgetting New Year's Eve
Fruzsina Eördögh
We were in Hungary to see his grave, which I did not spit on, and I’m proud of myself for that.
What To Do with the Pain In Your Chest
Courtney Sender
Excise it. Use a cheese wire . . .
Huff and Puff
Eshu Bandele
My man shocked me by pulling out dirty magazines with pictures of fat black women called Black Tail. He had had the mags concealed in an oversize manila envelope.
Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity
Derick Dupre
The Germans call it the downfall. The French call it sleep. The Polish just give you vague directions.
For Luis (2)
Aiden Arata
I wear glasses now, Luis,
you wouldn’t even recognize me.
Take a Bow and Accept the Bouquets: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 3
Andrew Bomback
Coincidentally, I read the third book of My Struggle in the two weeks leading up to my daughter’s third birthday. The coincidence is that my daughter was experimenting with a particularly annoying
Babies from the Dry Counties
Adam Morris
Babies from the Dry Counties became a fated élite. From the creamiest of breasts to organic kale pudding and Montessori kindergarten.
Emails From Beatriz
found text remixed by Rolf Potts
I.
When I was a kid I believed
in good old-fashioned animistic
souls coming out of the grass
and the sky and the rocks.
I loved walking
in Las Rocas de Santo Domingo
and seeing
Shia LaBeouf Interview Erasure Poems
Erin Dorney
I Have
I have a
wet mouth
in this pink
apartment.
I still have that.
Boy—
you think we’re in love?
Don’t you
roughhouse
with me.
You’re trying.
But at this
3 Love Poems
J. Bradley
Ask her to aim her index fingers.
at you. Aim yours.
How to Write a Mother Memoir
Asha Dore
Present the conflict or the mother as the conflict or the mother as the object of conflict during childhood.
My Secret Church
Shannon McLeod
In elementary school, when kids talked about being “Christian,” I thought they were talking about race.
Noah and the Whale's Underrated Second Album
JDA Winslow
feeling in pain
both emotional and physical
I head into the light.
In the park
wholesome children play
their healthiness
throwing
last night's
relative sordidness
into sharp
The Decree
Eric Howerton & Ted Closson
Because we'd lost our sense of value, the day came when the animals voted us out of our cities and towns and homesteads.
Three Poems
Cassandra Nguyen
Modern Conveniences 2012 - 2014
There were moments when I forgot about the dog
Whining and shivering, like a toddler in its playpen
Her instinctual nature, A visceral outward cry
I
Unusual Box Jellyfish Have Human-Like Eyes
Adam Prince
1.
In human beings, the wink is known to convey one of four emotions:
Sexual invitation
False sexual invitation,
Nonsexual expression of friendliness
I Remember When I Met U, Baby
Adrian Matejka
That’s / when the purple doors open into steamy / bathtub of surprise. That’s when there’s / an impossibly-deep Prince breath & then—
Crippling Anxiety And Self-Centered Fear: An Unedited Journal Entry Style Thing
Jordan Castro
There is nothing romantic about being young and dark and confused. Pain is real. It's funny on Twitter but it sucks irl.
My Favorite Art (And Other) Things In 2014
Jordan Castro
A while ago, I predicted Taylor Swift's career arc, and so far, I'm correct.
A Comprehensive History Of Me In Terms Of Dancing
Jordan Castro
Age 10: Wrote an essay for school about how I wanted to be a rapper when I grew up. When I got home and told my dad about it he said "Rap for me" then lay in my bed while I rapped "Lose Yourself" by Eminem for him. When I finished he told me I needed to "get into it more, not just stand there with [my] hands in my pockets."
World Trade Center: An Outlier in the Filmmaking Career of Oliver Stone
Charlie Riccardelli
2006 saw the release of World Trade Center and United 93, the first two studio films to use the events of 9/11 as their primary focus. I recall their impending releases at my local movie theatre
Brass on Oak; Oak on Marble; Marble on Glass; Glass on Steel
Andrew Brininstool
Ed's note: This story originally ran on Hobart in 2010. In celebration of the upcoming publication of Andrew Brininstool's book, Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession, in which this story
Two Pokémon: Bulbasaur & Eevee
Colette Arrand
“An extremely rare Pokémon that may evolve in a number of different ways depending on stimuli.” – Pokémon FireRed
A GHETTO-LIKE STATE OF INCOMPLETENESS: MY STRUGGLE WITH MY STRUGGLE, BOOK 3
Andrew Bomback
Against what, exactly, is Karl Ove Knausgaard struggling?
OXYMORON #FAMOUSPOET
Donald Vincent
- after Directing Herbert White / Writing Ellen West
When James Franco first spoke to me, he said, “Oh, shit. You’re Mr. Hip. We were just talking about you before the reading.”
·
My Dog Is My Girlfriend
Jordan Castro
My feelings of purposelessness and inadequacy vanished. My feelings of self-pity and despair were replaced by love and affection. No more sleeping around. No more yearning for The One. I had found Her. She was here.
The Star Trek Essay
Amanda Goldblatt
This essay is not about Star Trek in the way that Star Trek is not about space.
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
Andrew M. Howard
She asks me to tell her a story. Almost every night she can’t sleep. I’m no storyteller, I’ll say, and at first I would start off with robots and fantastic bears, trying to make my own Where the
Transit (1986)
Debra Monroe
I towed my worldly goods to a remote plot with real snakes in the grass, real primroses near pathways, and I wasn’t a tisket-a-tasket girl running errands but an adult with a narrow skill set that had sent me toward serial opportunities, jobs, my career not careering but ascendant as I checked off items on widely circulated how-to lists, but no one could tell me how to succeed at love.
Plotlines from TV’s The Sopranos Re-Interpreted by Lydia Davis
Christian Hayden
The Mortadella
Sometimes when my husband and I argue he eats mortadella from the refrigerator. Other times he does not.
Rubenesque
There is a term for women of my wife’s size, a
Boogie Cousins
Dominic Gualco
Big Boogie, Big Boogie, after watching the way you move through the years
I bet you could dance across water and sometimes I hold my breath
when I see you twirling in the post, all 280 of you,
The Ultimate “My Child” Story: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 2
Andrew Bomback
My daughter made pee pee in the potty, and my mother, who watches her on Wednesdays, shared a moment of pride with me before offering to do the pee pee dance, much to our collective delight. I left
6 Fictions
Mel Bosworth & Ryan Ridge
Recovery
After draining the toilet I put everything in the toilet. I drank a bottle of cough syrup and went outside. The cat spoke to birds. The birds spoke to bees. The bees spoke to me. They
After Michael Sam
Colette Arrand
In the summer between Michael Sam’s selection in the NFL Draft and the day he was cut, his jersey ranked as the second most popular of all rookie jerseys, behind only Johnny Manziel of the Cleveland Browns. Almost like there are gay sports fans.
It’s unfair how much we allow the sun to affect our moods
Sarah Jean Alexander
It’s time to stop relying on sunsets to help move us away from tonight and into tomorrow.
The New Chief of Cyclops Island Makes Five Promises
Lindsay Merbaum
The afternoon we chose the new chief of Cyclops Island, we stood in a circle at the top of the isle’s highest peak, heads drooping, as we squinted and sweated in the sun. The chief had positioned
Van Halen 2007-2008 Reunion Tour Black T-shirt
Jordan Wiklund
As David Lee Roth straddled a giant inflatable microphone, Alex Van Halen banged out the staccato drum opening of “Hot For Teacher.” Soon, his brother Edward Lodewijk “Eddie” Van Halen turned his
Annie: An Outlier in the Filmmaking Career of John Huston
Charlie Riccardelli
Watching the musical Annie is something like a rite of passage for redheaded children. I’ve met so many carrot tops in my life who grew up humming the tunes of Charles Strouse and Martin Charnin,
A Gaze You Could Meet: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 2
Andrew Bomback
David Shields: Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.
In the summer of
Self Interview with a Hideous Man
Trevor Dodge
But you know, all of us prose writers in the United States have to deal with the shadow he casts and the work he left behind.
Five Animal Poems
Cassandra de Alba
Before, the possums’ noise had been an angry hissing, but now their voices were becoming sweet, even musical, the world of them trilling and humming into their endless, private night.
Your Call is Important to Us: Ballad of a Telemarketer
Shannon McLeod
“My son was murdered last year. His bride murdered him.”
REFLECTING ON MY FIRST YEAR OF SOBRIETY
Jordan Castro
I had my bags packed and was getting ready to leave with two insane-seeming girls who offered me sex in exchange for a ride to Cleveland when a few patients stopped me and essentially pushed me into the lecture hall. I don't know why I didn't put up more of a fight -
Safe Tangents: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 1
Andrew Bomback
I googled “Karl Ove Knausgaard AND Nicholson Baker” and didn’t find much. A review of My Struggle from The Monthly, an Australian magazine, compared some of Knaugaard’s reflections to “Seinfeld’s
Horrible Things Happen
Adam Lefton
Can you teach an eighteen-year-old trauma?
Water Pipes Made Wavy From Heat In The Sunshine Estate
Carabella Sands
I ask the sun to call me at night on my walk home. Everyday I become a little more scared. I recognize people and cars and it makes me nervous. My mother told me girls are most likely to be
I Write Music for Soundtracks Now: My Struggle with My Struggle, Book 1
Andrew Bomback
I thought about taking a picture of the book or, perhaps, a selfie of me holding the book up against my face. I’d upload this photo to facebook or twitter with a caption like, “The journey begins”
LDR/MTM: A Review of Friendship
Amanda Goldblatt
LOL. When I send you emails re: feminism I feel like I'm trolling you. It isn’t that you don’t care about equal rights and access. It’s just that it’s not “your bag” to talk about it a whole lot.
Opportunity is Missed by Most People
Joe Sacksteder
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like squeegeeing sewage out the back door of the break room for three hours. Or push-brooming a greenhouse until your black snot could be used as an adhesive. Cupping each writhing Bag-a-Bug to see if they’ve eaten their fill of Japanese beetles.
Thought-Diving: An Essay
Spencer Hyde
I breathed in deeply, not knowing at the time I was breathing in the lives of all those at the café, those I sat with just moments before, molecules sliding from the rubble of the explosion into my lungs, bones nestling behind bones.
A Bum is the Main Human Vocation: Joe Sacksteder Interviews Sean Kilpatrick
Joe Sacksteder
And here comes this very small girl – this fairly attractive small girl – getting real thug with me suddenly. Suddenly thug. This petite white girl getting suddenly thug. And she physically pushed me saying “Wrong fucking pile!” She was angry about this pile.
The Panda Barn
Lyndsey Reese
It’s called The Panda Barn, where you can go and it’ll just be rows and rows of beds
This Is What That Means
Maggie Donohue
I snapped back into it at the bar. I’d been there the whole time, of course, but I hadn’t really acknowledged it, and I took in the room and the situation like crawling out of a ditch. Billy was
A Beautiful Woman of the World
R. Dale Smith
I sat in my chair and stared at her.
Apprehension & Other Colors, Fit to Size
Sarah Jean Alexander
I have developed the habit
of staring at the hands
of people standing next to me on the train
To the Man with the Synthesized Voice
Rebecca Givens Rolland
It was obvious to me that you needed to talk, and I was there to listen and record.
3 poems about depression
Alexandra Wuest
Make a vision board
Watch Girl, Interrupted
Eat more protein
Person-Character
Amanda Goldblatt
I
I wake up one morning and want to read Woolf. Being a woman writer. Is being a woman-who-is-a-writer something to consider, or. Yet it is not the gender really but the closeness to the skin,
from The Invention of Monsters / A Performance in One Act
C Dylan Bassett
SCENE
An ill wind that blows nothing. Autumn eats its leaves. It’s hard enough to understand the sequence of things--the king becomes the queen, the queen becomes the joker,
Guns N Roses Chinese Democracy World Tour 2002 ★ 2003 Black T-shirt
Jordan Wiklund
It has bullet holes in it.
Or rather, it’s meant to look like it’s been peppered with buckshot. The front of my Guns N Roses Chinese Democracy World Tour 2002 ★ 2003 black t-shirt features a
Two Martial Arts
Spencer Madsen
1.
as great as our best days will be
our worst days will be twice as worse
you can’t take from somebody their right to be wrong i try to love you as much as i hate myself
i don’t dance
ALL THE DESIGNER CLOTHES I OWN
Jordan Castro
Versace "Medusa" V-Neck T-Shirt
This is the first article of designer clothing I ever owned. A month or so after I got out of rehab my grandma gave me a Nordstrom gift card for my birthday and
How I Turned Skyrim into a Middle-Class Life Simulator.
Darren Davis
In November 2011, Bethesda Game Studios released Skyrim, a gigantic, multi-console fantasy role playing game set in Bethesda's larger Elder Scrolls universe. Also in November 2011, I was just starting my graduate program at the University of Washington. I watched the footage on YouTube and told myself that after grad school, after I was done studying literary nonfiction and contextualizing and living an examined life, I would play the hell out of this game.
3 Comics
Cameron Pierce and Jim Agpalza
As Randy Johnson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a mutant killing machine.
Ellis was truly surprised by
Ode to Joy
Jim Ruland
People spend their whole lives struggling to get what they think they want, and even if they get it, they find that it’s either not what they wanted, or it comes with so many unwanted
You Think You Can Stop Me
Dennis Scott Herbert
You Think You Can Stop Me??
You can’t stop me.
So they don’t let me bring my cooler no more, big deal. I’ll go to my truck. Cold beers in my truck, my personal space. Right there in the
hi my name is, huh? my name is, what?
Richard Wehrenberg, Jr.
rich
in maybe middle school i started telling my teachers, on the first day of class, that i’d prefer to be called rich. my friends started calling me rich too, because i told them to. i think
No Kin in Flowers
Carabella Sands
You drink all the beers I bought
And push towards me an arm full of bottles
You say, “I want to be alone
With my dreams forever.”
I leave you to be with my dreams
They are all of you
An Excerpt from Unchecked Privileges, or I've Got To Sing a Torch Song
Michael Sajdak & Gucci Lean
I'm giving up cold turkey for lent.
* * *
The shuffling of their feet wakes you ask they sneak into your stable at night. These are the biker boys, the popular boys in
Frasier at 31
Amanda Goldblatt
Frasier Crane never gets what he wants because Frasier Crane is a horrible person.
Amanda is in her first year of a new city, Chicago, binging on television on the internet, and suspects
THE 2014 AMERICAN LEAGUE BASEBALL SEASON, AS PREDICTED BY J. RYAN STRADAL
J. Ryan Stradal
AL EAST
1. Tampa Bay Rays
WHY: Erik Bedard, who was the Pirates’ Opening Day starter in 2012, was forced to fight for the fifth spot in the Rays’ rotation, which is a sign of a
Whether You Win or Lose
Christine Fadden
Uncle Max picked me up for tryouts. I must have been fidgety. I changed the radio station a half dozen times before turning it off.
“The Beach Boys shouldn’t call themselves boys,” I said.
The First Game
Nicholas Ward
We parked on Michigan Avenue like we always would, walking hand-in-hand through Corktown, the oldest neighborhood in Detroit. We bought peanuts in brown paper bags from vendors on the street. They
Hobart "Experts" Predict the 2014 MLB Season -- Andrew Ervin
Andrew Ervin
On these frigid afternoons between the Ides of March and Opening Day, when the final roster spots are being claimed, it’s still possible to envision that November parade down Broad St. The Phillies
For Jake "The Snake" Roberts, on the Occasion of Making an Unlikely Out in Centerfield During a Charity Softball Game
Colette Arrand
Like every catch before or since, yours is a matter of geometry
and probability. To say this is to admit that I believe in miracles.
Pro-wrestling is this: the work of death and resurrection.
who are the Bash Brothers, son? do you even know?
Brad Epperson
used to bring my glove
no fan would be without one
allure of the foul
I used to believe
some men were superior
they wore hats and gloves
they had statistics
posters adorned
Edwards, On the Next Flight Out of Town
Andrew Forbes
Edwards, wild, couldn't get out of the first. He put the first three guys on and then walked one in, gave up a double, followed by a hard single. Boom-boom-boom. Nothing was working. His curve had
Jim Ruland: The Hobart Interview
J. Ryan Stradal
Jim Ruland talks with J. Ryan Stradal about his new collaborative book Giving The Finger, the memoirs of Bering Sea fisherman & Deadliest Catch star Scott Campbell Jr., who goes by
break-up in five stages : a kind of sequel
Chris Pedler
This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #15: HOTEL CULTURE. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the month to various "bonus
A Few Scattered Thoughts on Some Films with Hotels...
David Nutt
This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #15: HOTEL CULTURE. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the month to various "bonus
How I wrote Hotel California, the Pink District
George Djuric
This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #15: HOTEL CULTURE. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the month to various "bonus
Hang Ups
Amanda Goldblatt
My new Jungian Catholic Worker First Wave Feminist therapist said that only 5% of the population are intellectuals. It seemed like a dubious statistic. It was, I think, meant to compliment me, to
Attempts to Name a Focal Point
Jeff Hardin
Some accounting’s underway, composed of chiding, shifts in tone, redirections. Surely one or two rumors eventually craft a context where they’re true.
Vengeful Ghosts
Natalie Edwards
Recently I came across a paper I wrote in college at the prestigious University of Florida in 1999 about vengeful ghosts.
Bones in the Belly
Candra Kolodziej
The air in the bedroom sags with mist that won’t touch anything. It hangs around the built-in bed, and stationary lamp, and my sisters and Ma. I can’t be in there. The noises are terrible, and the haze smells like evergreens. It makes me homesick.
The Investigators
Willie Fitzgerald
Inside the restaurant two beams of sunlight hit Spencer’s table at seemingly impossible angles. They meet on his butter dish, which has a single olive pit in it. It seems like outside the sun could be doubled.
The Aquarist
Jacques Debrot
It’s not unheard of now for people to be replaced by look-alikes. Troubled people, mostly. Unhappy people.
A Face Like She Meditated
Chloe Caldwell
I fell in love with a woman who had a face like she meditated.
I Became A Pop Music Fan In Rehab
Jordan Castro
On August 23, 2013 I checked into an inpatient treatment center in middle-of-nowhere Ohio to get off heroin and other drugs. Besides detoxing me safely, teaching me things about drug addiction and
An Interview with Kyle Minor
Douglas Watson
This one's massive. We're just going to get right into it.
Kyle, our friend, is the author of the new collection, Praying Drunk.
—Ed.
The title page says that this is a book of
A Very Tiny Bowl of Frosted Flakes
Lindsey Gates-Markel
My girlfriend moved out. She gave me back the lease the next day. “I’m not sorry,” she said, but she agreed to stay for afternoon coffee. We sat by the window. The coffeepot gurgled.
“I want a
The Man Who Painted Night
Sarah Domet
It was a difficult job for the man who painted night. First off, he always stained his clothes. An occupational hazard, and Frank supposed he could wear an apron, but when he arched his back,
Becoming the Soup Nazi (part 2)
Joe Sacksteder
Read part one of Joe's adventures through soup nazi'ing here.
—TURKEY CHILI (The Other Side of Darkness)—
Done got et.
During the taping of the infamous last episode of Seinfeld,
Becoming the Soup Nazi (part 1)
Joe Sacksteder
Just look at those soup prices when Clinton was in office.
—MULLIGATAWNY (The Pain and the Yearning)—
You could put that rooster sauce on a shoe and it would taste pretty good to
Gift Horse
Jeremiah Budin
Leo and I are dicking around in his room after school when I pull this big cardboard box out of the closet.
—What is this? I ask.
—That’s my card catalogue, Leo says.
—Is this every
UFC 168 Will Bring Our Family Together
Thad Kenner
Mom. Dad. Where have you been? Everyone else is already here. You missed the first prelim bout. I'll catch you up: Siyar Bahadurzada won by tap out in the second due to rear-naked choke. What? No,
xxxmasxxxvacation666
Ryan Bradford
Sometime during the last two hours, Clark Griswold has stopped feeling cold.
He claws at the frozen ground, vaguely aware of the intensifying blizzard. Snow replaces the dirt he shovels between
The Pool
David Englander
At nearly two in the morning, in the room across the hall from where his wife slept, Geoff Devine was awake, gazing down at the above ground pool in the backyard. Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that within the giant wooden drum, the murky water reflected the light of the moon.
Free Advice and Fortunes Told
Bonnie Nadzam
In jest you call for your horse, but there is no horse. It’s a bright lettuce-green morning, birds piping overhead. You are on foot, and follow the derelict tracks out of town past the Shell Station. You step off the road and onto a furry plain of high golden weeds and yellow dross. This is strange.
Two Queens Walk Out of a Bar
Jacob Guajardo
Two queens walk out of a bar and light a cigarette, me and Lucy Littlefist. Lucy says this. She says, “In a relationship,” she traces quotation marks in the air around the word, “one of you always loves the other more.” And she’s right. She secures her wig with another bobby pin, pulls at her sequined dress.
Imperfect Homes
André Babyn
There was once a time when my aunt and uncle had room enough to take us the odd weekends our parents were on vacation. Their house was smaller than ours and I felt haughty in it. The walls were dark and the air smelled musty. In the afternoons dust poured in the air like cigarette smoke in an old black and white movie. Going out into the sun was blinding.
Spanking Diane Sawyer
Daniel Crocker
I want to spank Diane Sawyer
In fact, I'd pay upwards of
fifty dollars for it, at least
if she was wearing white cotton
panties
In my fantasy
I wonder
I stop and ask,
"Is
Blessings & Spray Paint
Aleah Sterman Goldin
I like to believe it started with her grandfather’s blessing and a bottle of spray paint—even though it might not have.
Larissa Communes With the Virgin
Teresa Milbrodt
Because I can tell it's going to be a crappy day at work I dress up as Virgin Mary with my blue silk dress and white head scarf and lemon drop halo that got coffee spilled on it so it's a little warped, but it will do for one day of selling shoes.
`You Know Gumby? The Little Guy with the Horse?` `Yes, I Know Who He Is.`: An Interview with Gabriel Blackwell
Tom DeBeauchamp
Gabriel Blackwell’s been busy. In the past two years he’s released three books, two from Civil Coping Mechanisms, and one from Noemi Press: a book of essays and stories called Critique of Pure
Three Poems
Jill McDonough
THE REAL NEWISM
Tyler Stoddard Smith
Many young novelists have been gravitating toward a movement known as the “Real Newism.” Adherents of the Real Newism assert that effective fiction requires “experiencing events.” And today, you
Buckhorn Golf Course
Dolan Morgan
Buckhorn Golf Course
36 FM 473, Comfort, TX 78013
4 out of 5 stars
This place is a real gem. Just imagine the scene: The Buckhorn Golf Course opens up before you, revealing layer
Be a 22 Year Old American Boy
Atticus Davis
.I
Be a 22 year old American boy—get really drunk and embarrass yourself in front of the beautiful, freckled, 29 year old Italian Volcanologist that invited you to drinks with her 31 year
Reading Is My Prayer: An Interview with Robert Boswell
Andrew Scott
Writers in M.F.A. programs assume, and are often told, that teaching means time away from writing—that after responding to their students’ work, professors rarely have energy left for their own
Milk Sickness
David Greenspan
The boy has horrible teeth and a bicycle. They’re yellow, his teeth, and after school the children take a tree branch to his mouth.
–
His bicycle painted in bird shit: he rides for hours
The Art of Fiction Surfing
Don Waters
Hobart: We’ve seen each other at the last couple Mission Creek festivals in Iowa City, and it was there that we got to talking this last year a little about your new book, surfing,
It's Pity Sex for the Both of Us
John Jodzio
It’s pity sex for both of us, me and Karen and her glass eye, in a motel room off the interstate.
Remember To
Sarah Jean Alexander
I dreamt about walking around Ikea by myself and buying a lime green ice cube tray. I drive to the post office and pick out a large flat rate shipping box. I put the ice cube tray inside and I
Three Poems
Tracy Dimond
After a couple of Martinis, // one may regard oneself pleasantly pixelated. / I cure nerves with a ten-hour Netflix binge, // then curve my vertebrae to you / while our phones update.
Hymeneal in Many Voices (Comments on the Launch of Stacie and Kyle’s Wedding Registry)
Ivy Goodman
The value of a cash gift is on its face, and that, in some circles, is the value of the giver. But excuse me, the value of a $130 vegetable peeler is $5.99.
Have you traveled abroad? I’m sure
Two Short Shorts
Trevor Dodge
EVERY DAY IS SUNDAY
I go to call her for the ribs recipe but then I think how she doesn't respond to my jokes so I go to text her instead. And what I say goes like this: you used to make
Los Pollos Hermanos comment card
Chad Chmielowicz
Dear Sir or Madam,
I feel I need to begin by saying I am a longtime lover of your products. As a single mom some days after my shift I know I can stop by and acquire a good amount of your
Grading Bad
Jon Sindell
She was The Incorruptible, so named by a senior during the most grueling AP World semester ever. “Just one night off, Ms. L,” whined star student Jasmine, comically sliding halfway to the
The Diner Scene
Dan DeMarco
At the diner, when David has been allowed to order a cup of coffee and become a thinking person again, he will begin to attempt to isolate the exact point in time when he decided to leave his wife.
The Part Where Bull Scours His Room for Bugs
Diego Báez
He slides an open palm up and down wallpaper that appears to depict horsemen and battalions in battle. He presses an ear to it. He tilts a framed print of Caravaggio’s Holofernes away from the wall.
Guest Host
Diya Chaudhuri
George Strait’s in this poem now, he’s meddling
with everything. He’s reading words
with the wrong inflections, making me older
than I know how to be. He wants Texas in here;
[defend
4th of July & Two Poems
Katie Schmid
I turned my head so fast / I mistook the moon / for a firework / and then I wanted // to bark too...
Excerpt from the Novella in Progress, Bridges No Longer Span These Waters
Brian Warfield
Daniel heard it driving home...
A Slick Six from Camouflage Country
Mel Bosworth & Ryan Ridge
Encore
He got a nice new haircut. His laryngitis was gone. His heart hurt less and the same with his head. His surgical scars had healed. He felt like food again. Strangely, the older and
The Eyes of God
Amy Holwerda
When Homer went blind, Langley’s remedy was one hundred oranges a week.
Junkyard Fortunes
Phillippe Diederich
Pingo went first. He always did. The rest of us stood at the top of the slope over the place where the sewer pipes from town spilled into the narrow creek that disappeared into a deep ravine west
Astronauts
Dana Diehl
Things they never tell you when your husband leaves the planet:
It’ll happen faster in real-life than it does on TV. 10, 9, 8… A flash of orange and a shimmer of exhaust, and the shuttle is
The Gore and the Splatter (an excerpt)
Adam Novy
In 2010, we published Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels as two volumes, kind of Old and New Testament style. Having sold out of the two-volume edition, the book is now newly available, now been
Adam Novy on Plot: Skyfall
Adam Novy
Some thoughts on the plot of the newest Bond movie, Skyfall.
excerpt from The Avian Gospels (ch. 33)
Adam Novy
In 2010, we published Adam Novy's The Avian Gospels as two volumes, kind of Old and New Testament style. Having sold out of the two-volume edition, the book is now newly available, now been
Daddy's Home
David Ohle
Jerry’s Daddy, looking half dead, sat in the kitchen smoking a Camel and sketching comic faces on a napkin with a stubby pencil. There was quite an odor about him, mostly of sour, poorly washed
The Abridged, Essential Counting Crows Fact Sheet
Dillon J. Welch
“They paved paradise / and put up a parking lot / which was a public
necessity / that boosted the economy / of the city and surrounding towns.”
- - -
Fact: Jim Bogios used to
BLOODJOY 2011
Daniel Bailey
to the right of my heart a button °
if you see the button press deeply into me
I am shining brilliantly on my way down the stairs
in 1984 I thought everything existed as light
in
The Haberdash
Adam Robinson
Suddenly I want to be the one to leave a party.
Maybe life imitates art after all.
Hobart "Experts" Predict the 2013 MLB Season -- Baseball for Druggies by Jim Ruland
Jim Ruland
For the last couple of years, we've asked some of our favorite writers and contributors and known baseball fans to "predict the season," a kind of Hobart version to an expert's panel of predictions
Explaining An Affinity for R.A. Dickey
Lauri Anderson Alford
after A.E. Stallings
That his fingernails are immaculate, shaped
into thin arches of moon. That he files them
in the locker room before games, between innings in the
The Loneliness of the Designated Pinch Runner
Terrance Wedin
— Sunday, October 13th, 1974 –Dodger Stadium, Los Angeles, CA
In the dugout, waiting to run.
The whole game memorizing the pale swirls in the concrete floor of the Dodgers’s visiting
Who Are These People? Very Short Stories About the New Faces Around the American League West
J. Ryan Stradal
Houston Astros: Chia-Jen Lo, P
Dang, it’s weird putting “Houston Astros” under “AL WEST.” That poor team. At least they got to face the Cubs all the time last year; now they have to play
Hobart "Experts" Predict the 2013 MLB Season -- Rick Moody
Rick Moody
For the last couple of years, we've asked some of our favorite writers and contributors and known baseball fans to "predict the season," a kind of Hobart version to an expert's panel of predictions
Who Are These People? Very Short Stories About the New Faces Around the American League Central
J. Ryan Stradal
Chicago White Sox: Jared Mitchell, OF
Jared, who was drafted by the Twins out of high school and turned them down to play baseball and football at LSU, was a backup wide receiver on the
Future Hall of Famer
Adam Robinson
Richard Arndt was working grounds at the ballpark when he caught the great Hammerin’ Hank Aaron’s last home run, number 755. This was in Atlanta.
Right away he told the men sure, of course he’d
Who Are These People? Very Short Stories About the New Faces Around the American League East
J. Ryan Stradal
Baltimore Orioles: Dylan Bundy, P
Dylan takes his diet seriously. He ate grilled chicken, rice, and green beans every day of the offseason. The first purchase he made with his $4 million
Hobart "Experts" Predict the 2013 MLB Season -- Andrew Ervin
Andrew Ervin
For the last couple of years, we've asked some of our favorite writers and contributors and known baseball fans to "predict the season," a kind of Hobart version to an expert's panel of predictions
An Interview with Barb Johnson
Andrew Scott
Barb Johnson worked as a carpenter in New Orleans for more than 20 years before entering the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. While in the writing program, she won a grant from the
Navigating the Ambiguous Blue in Dr. Brenderson's Office
Andrew Stone
Inside, in the unforeseen, where the sounds of dust susurrus, we glimpse rainbowed light above the shadows. Will we ever reach there, we ask?
Wonders I. Wonders we.
Worms & Guinea Pigs
Stefan P. Kruszewski, M.D., Kevin Somers, and Heinz Insu Fenkl
Will and I decided to make "Y" shaped slingshot frames and drape an earthworm between the two of them.
Between Living and Not Living: An Interview with Susan Steinberg
Andrew Ervin
The twelve stories in Susan Steinberg’s stunning third book, Spectacle, limn the desperate, neon-lit reality we’re forced to confront when we wake up from the American dream. They make me want to
All This Roadmap of Hurt
Justin Lawrence Daugherty
Maria say she gon' tell me the future. She say she know. Mama taught her, but Maria had that gift, not her mama. The real kind. She'd seen all kinds of things 'fore they happen, like her brother shot dead in that parking lot, she'd seen it all four days before it happened.
What you gon' tell me I don't already know? I say.
A&W&P
Daniel Torday
Just in time for the opening bell (or is it more approrpriately an opening toast) of AWP in Boston tomorrow, we present Daniel Torday's "A&W&P." We first ran this story before AWP last
A Small City Made Almost Entirely From Bones
Bob Schofield
You wake up to the sound of someone smashing white rocks outside your window. Only it's not rocks. You're just in a city made entirely of bones.
All She Had
Jessica Richardson
A panel of grandfathers lived in the girl like a Greek chorus. One day she woke and they were building themselves bleachers. After that they didn’t do anything. Tired, they complained. They shouted
Tears of the Platonic Man
Mark Richardson
The Platonic Man cries whenever I cry. Tears will be streaming down my face and I’ll look up and he’ll be dabbing his eyes with a cloth napkin.
"I know why you cry,” I say at the Cuban
Dear Money Shot
Steve Davenport
It’s the new plan, Shooter. Poetry for broken systems. Insurance rider attached.
Music Reviews
Daniel Mahoney
To London With Love
Artist: Wilhelm Blech
Album: Musicus Miscellanous; Christian Dean & Musica Immunda
Label: DNS
I am always looking outside myself for traces of the person I
On the Benefits of a Lego Heart...
Matthew Burnside
In my mind, I had already built a Lego wall around the perimeter of the yard, tall as the Siamese twin magnolia trees I sometimes sat in...
BISON cover letter PRIZE winner
Andrew Rhodes
This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #14. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the entire month to various "bonus materials"
photo essay to accompany "We Shall Fill Our House With Spoil"
Delaney Nolan
This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #14. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the entire month to various "bonus materials"
An Interview with the Author of “The Swimmers” (Conducted by the Narrator of the Story)
Andrew Bourelle
This month sees publication of our newest print issue, Hobart #14. As such, and as we have done to accompany our last few print issues, we are devoting the entire month to various "bonus materials"
A.D.T.
Linda McCullough Moore
The A.D.T. man has only come to fix the security system, check each connect, repair the wire that’s frayed, reprogram the alarm before he drives off to do the same thing three blocks over. He wants no part in these people’s lives, he has no heart to join their quest for the secure, their rich man fantasy they can protect themselves, if only they will pay.
Road Snacks
Heidi Diehl
The prison is a test market—a closed circuit, a place where candymakers can focus on the choices made when options are limited. Research into what people will eat when they have nowhere to go.
4 Jeff Bridges poems
Donora Hillard
You tell Jeff Bridges you fear
your dying breath will be just like
the whimper you make when trying
to remove glitter polish from your
toenails. He sets his guitar down on
the fur
Brief Encounters With Famous Women, Famous Men, Fictional Men
Roxane Gay and xTx
Morgan Freeman makes me cry.
Symbols
Rachel Yoder
Sure, sometimes it’s better not to just come right out and say it, for instance “the unicorns” represent “the writing” and that “the unicorns” are the perfect symbol of “the writing’s magical, elusive, cunning, and enchanted nature.”
From the Heavens
Andrew Bomback
The night before you were born, your mother and I watched Knocked Up downstairs in the family room.
Evidence
David LeGault
1) Technically, everything remains but the stereo, circa 1998, a sound system so old it couldn't play CD's for more than an hour without overheating into unbearable skips...
Honest Abe & Emily Dickinson Goes for a Drive
Penny Anderson
Here’s a story. One night in the tedious plains of Colorado, Abraham Lincoln drove his Model T into an embankment...
The Closing
T.D. Johnston
An excited murmur came to life when the audience was informed of the PhD in Biogenetics, the B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, and then the sweet icing: the minor in English.
Granny Summons the Alligator
Aaron Alford
It’s a different gator every year, but we talk like it’s the same one.
I Deserve This
Kevin Weidner
The night needed a push. I was the only customer in the place, this small dark place called Barely Legal with just one stage and a handful of circle tables and red candles. I’d run out of money
Three Words I Learned from Computer Games
Devan Goldstein
I remember one robot was called a SENTRY and it guarded the door...
I Love This Let Me Sleep
Delaney Nolan
Welcome to Camp Bread Loaf. Put your apron on.
Agreements
Michael Don
A little man in a boat paddles laps around a toilet bowl.
The Spastic Indecision of Squirrels in the Road
Andrew Ervin
An interview with Ted Sanders, author of No Animals We Could Name.
The Haunt of Santa Fe
Ashley Bethard
"She had lost something, but she was not sure what."
Driving to Olympia
Lynn Gordon
"It was terrible the way we were fighting, Janine saying how many other girlfriends of yours are going to call me, pulling out the ashtray and stubbing her Doral cigarette..."
The Buddy System
Jon Morgan Davies
The afternoon David was fired for stealing company office supplies and reselling them in an office superstore parking lot, the four verificationists took lunch ninety minutes late to see the
Ken Burns' Little League
Dan Moreau
Episode 1
Humble Beginnings
The first official Little League was played in 1882 on a balmy summer afternoon in Springfield, MA. It was a perfect day for a ball game, the grass freshly
Only Catchers Get Credit For Their Unflinchingness
Ronald Metellus
The Catcher showed his pointer finger, the signal for a fastball. Two fingers issued a polite suggestion for a curveball. If the Pitcher included a change-up in his arsenal, and he really should,
Out In The World
Curtis Dawkins
Renteria almost hits one out in the bottom of the ninth of a 3-3 game against Cleveland. It’s been a nightmare season of almosts for Detroit. Still, I watch them every single night. Inge pops up to
Great and Powerful
Chad Chmielowicz
The toilet is leaking again and the handyman’s been here twice already. The refrigerator was failing every other month and the radiators were calling to each other from across the apartment
An Interview With: Jennifer Tamayo
Andrew Ervin
Having had the pleasure of hanging out with Jennifer Tamayo on a number of occasions, including at a mardi gras parade and at a Busdriver/Abstract Rude concert under a Louisiana interstate, I
Cakewalk, Motherfucker
Ian Golding
Talk to me about red velvet, butter cream, German chocolate—it’s all I give a damn about. Some thick-framed, salad eating nobodies bring kids to a cakewalk. Fine. Whatever. Their loss. I
Twitterfeed: TheSinner'sCorpse
Alexander Lumans
Day 1: Escaped labs today—power outage. (Years since our last repair; upset@SRSresearchers) In the sun, we’re some pretty fucked up “inventions.”
1: Role call (twelve of us left):
One-Act Plays About Blonde-Haired Ponies
Rachel Yoder
I’ll be the blonde-haired pony and you be the three-toed sloth on LSD. You be “altered.” You be “tripping balls.” You sit there, slowly drawing booger-like animals on a pad of paper with your three
The Second Person
Ted McLoof
You are a good-looking man. You know this because people tell you all the time, sometimes out of nowhere. You assume that people don’t get told that all the time unless it is deserved. You have
Easter at Uncle Nikolai's
Matthew Purdy
After the divorce, my uncle Nicolai became an amateur taxidermist. His first attempts were on roadkill, then the mice he took from the traps he set in the kitchen. He sent us pictures. My
Cities are Beautiful Creatures 10 Questions for Alex Shakar
Lindsey Drager
The epigraph to Alex Shakar’s Luminarium could be a request or a demand; “Lead me from the unreal to the real.” For Fred Brounian, it is a plea. Fred finds himself in the middle of “a spiritual
The Cage Beneath The Stairs
Robert Hinderliter
[The following text and pictures are taken from the personal website of my brother, Austin Hinderliter. It includes all posts made from April 25 — May 6, 2011. —Robert]
April 25,
My True Companion
Donna D. Vitucci
All Paige heard was her watch ticking. She peeled away the cement smell and damp that grew in the old basement where Buddy Cantrell had pitched her. You didn't grow up without running through a few
The Plumber Who Found Treasure
Dustin M. Hoffman
The holes in Dean's shoes let in the rain that streamed in rivers down the sleek asphalt of Ruby Lane. His feet squished miserably along the rows of dark Tudors built on spec. His pockets were
I'm an Asshole and My Life is Retarded: an interview with Julia Wertz by Elizabeth Ellen and her daughter, Andie V.
Elizabeth Ellen and Andie V.
Julia Wertz's first two books are called Fart Party, a great, attention-grabbing title. I remember grabbing the book off the shelf at the comic bookstore, poking my boyfriend and laughing
Poetry and Songs for My Voice Cartographer
Ledia Xhoga
The men I meet always want someone I’m not. Naturally, I think the one I’m meeting tonight will be different. I’ve never seen him before; we’ve only talked over the phone. He runs a voice mapping
Two Stories
David Joseph
FORECAST
Little Thomas and I are out in the yard, ripping up dead saplings by the roots so the wind won’t. Last week a gust sent a dry limb through the kitchen window. It took thirty minutes to
The Mistakes of Summer
Wendy Oleson
Expecting Dodger Stadium to be half as awesome as Camelback Ranch
Asking husband why he can't lay down a bunt like he used to
Purchasing Swarovski crystal accented team logo tee
Two Baseball Atrocities
John Dermot Woods
LATE SEASON
In Remington, concerned neighbors who had not seen Mrs. Gross, an elderly woman who lived alone in a corner house, in almost a week, called the police to report their fears about
An Interview With Bradford Morrow
Andrew Ervin
Memory is its Medium:
A Conversation with Bradford Morrow
Bradford Morrow's latest novel, The Diviner's Tale, uses some tropes of the traditional murder mystery and elements of the
The Cuckoo Clock
Jody Brooks
My aunt willed me a cuckoo clock. It’s the clock I ran to watch every hour after school, waiting for the bird to pop out, the cuu and then the coo while she taught singing lessons in the
A Model Life
Andrew Scott
The Elders rented a two-bedroom unit in Building 16. The office staff knew Harv and Jean from their numerous complaints. Marvin Gardens, located just five minutes from the university, sold
Fitzhugh Falls
Todd Cantrell
Fitzhugh was there for the convention. Marcy held out a brochure which he took, then on his third lap around the hall, he asked her to dinner. Over better-than-average calimari, he told
Interoffice Romance
Dan Pinkerton
In the weeks leading up to Valentine’s Day, Stacy conveyed a secret to Maureen as the two dined together in the food court at the downtown mall. They sat overlooking a rather obtrusive
Rough Guide
Dylan Hicks
In a city with little meaningful work, he pays for non-services, pays to be shown things he’s already looking at, for instance, or things he’s not interested in looking at. He pays a guard to
It's Going to Be Okay, I Love You
Kristen Iskandrian
The first time I got in trouble for telling the truth it was a Monday when I was seven and my teacher asked us what we had done over the weekend. I told her that I’d spend it in bed with my dad
He Maketh Fire Come Down
Jared Yates Sexton
He was on the TV again. That pudgy-faced man strutting up and down the stage. Preaching about the downfall of the species. Working himself up again until he got down on the balls of his knees and
Antoine is Not Here
Tom DeBeauchamp
We'd survived the rope bridge, the dangling, the torn muscles in Miriam's shoulders. We'd survived and dusted off our luggage and laid our fine things in their cabinets. We held open the door
Russians (from The Book of Freaks)
James Iredell
In Russia there are so many Russians! It’s like one of those neighborhoods where a bunch of Russians live, but way bigger. This place is big. It’s like they took a country the size of Russia and
A Reimagining of Five Calamitous Dutch Soccer Defeats
Karl Taro Greenfeld
1. The Netherlands 0 – Argentina 16
July 18, 1978 World Cup Final
The Dutch side were hamstrung when they were informed just minutes before the game that a new equal rights ordinance passed
489 Points
Andrew Borgstrom
I bought secondhand hunting attire that I only wore around the house. You corrected me when I called our apartment a house. We howled until we were gender tired. You howled when you stubbed your
The Man With Two Arms (An Excerpt)
Billy Lombardo
In the summer that followed Danny's sophomore year at U-High, he took Bridget to a White Sox game. He knocked at her door on a Sunday morning with a baseball glove in each hand and a White Sox
Spinning Yarns
Thomas Mundt
I did some fact-checking after the wedding. I bet you thought I never would, but I did. And you know what I found out? You were never an ace reliever in the Orioles' farm system, like I overheard
How Lucky, She Thought
Kelcy D. Wilburn
She woke up as excited as she had twenty years ago on a St. Patrick's Day morning in her childhood home, despite the fact that everything around her was unfamiliar, despite the fact that her hotel
Ma Vie En Rose: My Life Wrapped in Cellophane
Neil de la Flor
She is not a warthog in the zoo. She travels with a whip and rope through space and time. She is not a girl but feels like one. She understands the principles of Schrödinger and Heisenberg,
Chorale for the First Rental House on Your Block
Craig Davis
Outside on his porch was an indoor sofa. But he kept the lawn mowed. Early in the morning when the grass was still too wet — there he was, limping behind the mower, cursing God and us when it
An Interview with Laird Hunt (Part 2)
Jim Ruland
A Conversation with Laird Hunt (cont'd)
(read part one of the interview here)
THE REIFICATION OF FICTION
Ruland: When last we talked, you recommended some
Two Stories
David William Hill
The Night Sky
Looking west over the ocean, watching the yellow crescent moon dip behind the low strip of fog off the coast. It disappeared and returned several times, as the fog bank in its
Puppeteers
Lydia Ship
Unfortunately, Chin fed her sock puppets too many vegetables. She didn't always feed them in front of me, but the smell of steamed broccoli and half-empty bowls of it greeted me in our dorm suite
An Interview with Laird Hunt (Part 1)
Jim Ruland
A Conversation with Laird Hunt
A criminal operative helps a woman fill her shelves with mundane objects. A gentleman with psychic powers reflects on the days before his wife went insane. A
Sad, Sad, Sad
Stace Budzko
Not more than two steps in and Ali had the Sadness Museum exhibit sized up.
Her words, This exhibit is sad, sad, sad.
I tried to look on the bright side. My words, At least it's
Fan Fiction in the Voice of Kobe Bryant
Karl Taro Greenfeld
One of the things that most fans don't know about NBA superstars, is that we like to meet in the off season and fight to the death. So, this past Saturday, I called LeBron James while I was
Notes on a Failed Town
Trent England
It was a long time before slavery went away. The town kept their own slaves well into the Carnegie Administration, trading them and gifting the young to newlyweds. When it was outlawed, seven
House Calls
Chad Simpson
The sun wasn't even fully up yet and there I was, on some stranger's roof, about to begin work for the day, when this girl, maybe four or five years old, tottered down the front steps of the house
A Businessman &
Reynard Seifert
I put on my suit. It's a business suit. I'm a businessman and I mean business. I mean 'business' with a big 'B' and an ampersand. So from now on, I will say, I'm a Businessman &. Because it
Mechler & I
Andrew Roe
With apologies to Jorge Luis Borges' "Borges and I"
The other one, the one called Melcher, is the fuckup.
I travel a lot for work (sales) and when I'm driving or flying or sitting in an
An Interview with J. Robert Lennon
Andrew Ervin
I first read J. Robert Lennon in a short-lived lit mag out of Philly called Night Rally. I picked up a copy of the first issue at Borders after a Michael Chabon reading in October 2000, and
Interview with a Union Soldier, Recently Dead
Erin Lindsay McCabe
Near a mound of fresh dirt under a sprawling oak tree. Cannons rumble in the distance. Lounging next to the mound is a young man, about 19. He is dirty. Underneath the dirt and blood streaking his
A Letter to Amandas
Amanda Marbais
My friend Brandon has packed his friend's Jeep with provisions of snowballs, dried turkey, Finlandia. Observing the heaped vehicle, and considering the 2,700 miles to California, I am reminded of
In the Land Between the Valley and the Hills, What Men Said, They Meant
Damian Dressick
Before the blue was sailed by Columbus and his greedy, maritime ilk, before the men who followed him brought plagues, monotheism and gunpowder, there dwelt in the Piedmont a small band of itinerant
Garbage Day
Baird Harper
Early Morning
Debra Jims dreams of Kool-Aid. The juice leaves a red mustache above her lip. Men around her have mustaches too, real ones, thick and masculine. Her husband Todd rolls over and
Some Kind of Memorial
B.J. Hollars and Brendan Todt
Georgia Ambler used to jog on Thursdays while Jake and I shot baskets in the drive. "You're outta shape, old man," Jake laughed, doubled over himself. Locking his hands to his knees, Jake spit
An Interview with Joe Meno
Douglas Light
Joe Meno is the author of six books, most recently the story collection Demons in the Spring and The Boy Detective Fails. His new novel, The Great Perhaps, is out in May.
* *
The Quality Controller
T. M. De Vos
He was temping at a website, one of those online radio stations that you could customize based on music you already liked. It was backed up by evidence, a tab you could click to find out which of
Defending Reggie
Litsa Dremousis
"Becca, you're in charge," Mom said, craning her neck around the driver's side burgundy vinyl headrest. "I'm picking you kids up in three hours at this exact spot, in front of Gate D. Do not, I
His Point of Sadness Now Becoming Light
Adam Robinson
There he was in the dugout crying.
All the guys were on the field. They were slugging it out because what were they supposed to do? Clint got beamed in the small and Gary charged from the
Some Little-Known Statistical Anomalies in the Game of Baseball
J. Ryan Stradal
It is not for nothing that baseball has existed since 1846 and now encompasses 30 teams playing 162 games each a year. In that span of time, speculative taxonomists and fly-by-night actuaries have
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service
Robert Swartwood
I stop at a 7-Eleven for a pack of gum. I give the cashier a twenty.
"You don't have any ones?" the cashier asks.
I don't, but I say I do anyway.
The cashier just stares at me.
"Um,
Two Stories
Grace Andreacchi
Shopping
I was sitting at the kitchen table, it was morning, the light was pale and fine, he was messing about, making something nice for me to eat. 'I want you to come with me to buy a
Three Stories
Edward Mullany
In God's Country
Camping in the northern part of the state, two guys and a girl woke to the sound of what they thought was a nearby bear. The sound did come from a bear, but the bear wasn't
Jesus Or Happy Birthday
Molly Gaudry
It's Christmas Eve, our birthday's less than an hour away, and, per Tannen family tradition, it's Davie's and my first night home for the holidays. Unlike me, Davie's not much of a drinker—not
Unpreparing
Lindsay Hunter
My boyfriend and I have sex and when we're finished he holds me close and whispers into my ear, I just date-raped you. What do you do now?
In the grocery store he throws an avocado at my head
Blank Spaces
David Valin
In a walk-in closet, my father's ties were exactly six centimeters apart on wooden dowels. I gently touched the gaps between his ties and ran my fingers through the ties. Before anyone else, he
Bowling Alley
Jill Widner
Sumatra, Indonesia, 1963
The hibiscus hedge is the boundary line the girl is not supposed to cross. Sometimes, for something to do, she walks to the end of the sidewalk and listens through the
Mind and Body
Ed Meek
Those days I believed in Body over Mind. I believed Mind followed Body because I knew matter could think. I was a cook in this little hotel/restaurant in Missoula, Montana. The manager put me up in
They Whisper
Tai Dong Huai
They think I don't hear their whispers, but I do. Even with a bathroom between our bedrooms, all I have to do is put my ear to the wall and I can pick up every word.
At twelve, I know a lot. I
Colossal Crimson Crop
Gabe Durham
I met her on the corner of a street and an avenue. "We didn't fix anything," she told me. She was no-nonsense, a fast-walker, a liberal. She agreed to show me around.
I tried to ask what it was
Words End Here
Blaze Dzikowski
"I don't really know how to put it across," said the private detective.
Birds of spring flew across the bright sky behind the window of a dark office. The 50-years old woman sat down and looked
Psychology, Cooking, Chemistry
C.A. Conrad
ADLERIAN THEORY
A little girl in a red princess-style coat with a checkered lining, aged three. She's on tiptoe on the back seat of the Chevy, a red and white finned '57. That's what I remember
To Save the Dying
Jason Jordan
"Sometimes things aren't supposed to change," Billy would say, lying in bed while rubbing my back, when we got to talking about the town, about how unfortunate it all was, how opportunity had gone
House of Words
Scott Tomford
The Living Room
This is where we watch TV, where we entertain guests and let them add to the walls. You can see some of the words from the last dinner party on the ceiling if you look
Not Just Another Day at the Ballpark
Jim Ruland
If the game of baseball is a narrative in numbers, try this one on for size: on Saturday March 30, 2008, 115,300 people showed up at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum for an exhibition game between the
The Dark One
Daniel McArdle
I Telltale
My dad still has the lanky, deceptively thin frame typical of most pitchers, with long, gibbon-like arms – he is 6'2' but wears 37' shirt sleeves, giving him the reach of a man four
It's Like I Hit a Homerun or Strikeout Every Time...
David Kramer
When I was a kid, my dad took me to a Mets game at Shea on my birthday. I remember walking up the ramps and looking outside the stadium, past the corrugated blue and orange panels that hung
I've Got Dreams to Remember
Andrew Bomback
To the editor:
I enjoyed your baseball preview issue but wholeheartedly disagree with your predictions for the National League East. If you look at the schedules for both the Mets and the
Of Modern Bags
Dave Prescott
I had worked in a bottle factory, a bottle-top factory, a paper factory, a nut factory, a bolt factory, a clock factory, a wall factory, a door factory, a window factory, a whisky factory, a wheel
At the Zoo
Dan Pinkerton
Tom had been promising for some time to take Stevie to the zoo, and today was the day. He paid their admission and the two entered the zoo grounds, passing the gift shop, built to resemble an
Roy G. Biv
Jared Ward
I'm a big fan of blue. The dark, deep blues. Like that James Taylor song, deep greens and blues are the colors I choose. Green's nice, too, but I prefer blue.
Don't know if I could call it my
Test-Tube Jesus
Richard D. Treat
And the earth died screaming
While I lay dreaming
--Tom Waits
He came from Wal-Mart. Some fellow was loitering by the automatic doors with a stink my wife described as rotten apples
An Interview with Rick Moody
Andrew Ervin
Rick Moody's not the kind of writer who needs one of these introductory paragraphs. Author of some of our most indelible recent literature, winner of big prize after big prize, National Book Award
Autobiography
Tiff Holland
"You played sports?" he asks over dinner. They're having baked chicken and baked potatoes. Clean food is how she thinks of it, only a little butter on the potato and no salt. He's pouring ketchup
Crimes of the Post-Divorce Era
Diane D. Gillette
Gerry let out a loud belch and tried unsuccessfully to focus on Albert.
"I've got to get her back. I miss her so much."
There were tears in Gerry's eyes and Albert felt his stomach clench,
Agnes and Ned
Jonny Diamond
She had death in her hands, in her heart, in the americ tang of her angry sweat: she was jealous of a piece of bread. It was a dark, trunk-thick loaf of Polish bread, and Agnes could think of
Four Sieges
Erin Fitzgerald
I.
Deirdre doesn't talk to Nicole anymore, but she thinks she does. Last winter, six months went by with neither one of them saying anything. Right around Memorial Day, Deirdre asked if she
Unpublished Manuscript #36
Joe Clifford
Kitty peeled dead flies off the screen. She squinted in the direction of the boatyard. "No boats today," she muttered to herself.
A late season heat wave had brought a constant haze that made
Liberating Crabapples
Richard Osgood
Leonard Crank is an ass. He's a beer-in-a-can-drinking, White-Owl-cigar-smoking, wife-beater-wearing, greasy-haired slug. He is also my next-door neighbor. As for me, well, I have always been the
The Cousinfucker
Litsa Dremousis
"Rita, I know you've slept with one of your cousins," Mom told me this morning at brunch.
My stomach kicked. I stopped chewing but couldn't swallow.
"Here, drink some juice," she said and
It's About Time
Martin Dodd
He sits in his chair, absently running his fingers through his thinning white hair. She hunches on the sofa, quivering, holding a shredded tissue in one hand and rubbing warmth into her forearm
Proofreader
Jeff Landon
1
My father’s ashes clumped on the way to Smith Mountain Lake—it was probably the humidity. We had transferred his ashes from the urn because my mother thought the urn was ostentatious. We had
Sandy Koufax 1964
Litsa Dremousis
Mark took a pencil out of his royal blue gym bag. He hunted for a scrap of notebook paper, something to write on, but all he could find was a half-eaten tuna fish and potato chip sandwich, a
For Everything Else there is Mastercard
Tadzio Yuko
The man wiped his mouth with a silk handkerchief embroidered with his initials ($75.- a piece). He had just finished his meal of raw sea scallop carpaccio drizzled with white truffle oil and
The Way There and the Way Back
Dawn Corrigan
I. The Way There
On the way there you notice the light again, the same light you’ve noticed ever since you got here, a light that seems stronger than light you’ve seen elsewhere, as though
The Train, Stopped
Jodee Stanley
Sometimes there is a freight train stopped on the tracks. The tracks split the town, dividing it into one half and the other. On the one side, there is school. On the other, there is the little
How Thurleen Met Skeeter
Martin Dodd
Thurleen’s feet hurt. And her head hurt from Parmalee’s algebra homework. Her eyes hurt because she didn’t have the money to replace her glasses. Her heart hurt because Roy never said the three
The Reenactment is Never the Same
Derek White
My current employer, The Wor(l)d Economist, sent me on assignment to interview Gandhi’s grandson, who was in exile on an unchartered island near Fiji. I was in a BarbaryTM skiff with a maniacal
The World Isn't There
Andrew Roe
There was a bump on his head, and that’s what made him crazy. That’s the story he tells whenever anyone asks about it, the Doctors, the Police, the Park People, the Guy Who Sort of Looked Like
Rose Petal
Michael Obilade
When Isabel Araya was born in the southern tip of the pampas, twenty-one years, three months, and seven days before she would hold Juan Diego’s warm hand in the candlelight of the church, the
Summer Hits
Kilean Kennedy
Ernie peered over the dash with a cigarette in his left hand and a can of spiked Pepsi in his right, fingertips grazing the ribbed underbelly of the wheel as he steered. He and Blume were on the
Creatures of Habit
Andrew Dicus
Andrew peeped out the window and noted that the end of the world, astoundingly, was small as a bee.
"When's the last time you looked outside," he asked Julie, spread like Orion on the rug with
On Outlaws and Other Characters An Interview with Chuck Kinder
Dory Adams
On an unusually sunny February afternoon in Pittsburgh, I had the pleasure of talking with Chuck Kinder in his sixth floor office at the University of Pittsburgh’s Cathedral of Learning building.
why you should never go to used car sales in minor league ballparks
brad
cheney stadium, home to the now defunct tacoma tigers and current tacoma rainiers, once held a monster used car blowout extravaganza in their parking lot. i was 17 and needed a cheap car, so i
Mickey Mantle's Liver
A.M. Amodeo
Summers we watched baseball, my father, my uncle and me sitting riveted for innumerable innings, rooting for the Mets. We scoffed at the umpires, cheered when the players kicked dirt on their shoes
All My Childhood Heroes Played Ball
Devan Sagliani
She slurps her cherry cola loudly through her novelty straw and winks at me. I’m just turning eleven. She’s got candy pink lip-gloss on and a touch of blue eye shadow her older sister helped her
An Interview with Salvador Plascencia
George Ducker
Salvador Plascencia is the author of The People of Paper, a novel in which the people of El Monte, California, wage a “war against omniscient narration” while the author himself is busy getting