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.

MONUMENT

YOU SPECIFY IN YOUR LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT “BURY ME WHERE I STAND” SO THEY REMOVE A CHUNK OF TILES FROM THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF THE GOLDEN PANTRY’S CHECKOUT COUNTER AND THEY SET YOUR

On Miracles

Jesus trained a dolphin to swim up under him and lift him over the waves.

Jesus wanted to show everyone his trick.

It looked like he was walking on top of the

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).

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.

Red Teeth

Left work early to meet delivery peeps at my building. 100 weeks ago we ordered a couch. Tell ya, I've never seen two guys more pissed off to have to deliver a couch. It was like they

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

I didn’t say sorry, because it was hard to explain. Sorry I felt the way I did, absolutely. But not sorry I did it. I tried to make him understand.

Before we entered the most raved about amusement park in the world, we went into the woods nearby . . . 

John’s hands are on the wheel, very still, and he’s looking straight ahead at the dark yellow lines of Route 66.

The Millennial aspect is important because, like many Millennials, its protagonist does not wear labels easily.

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

We go to a bar for lunch that serves free candy.

I got a flat tire last month and my life spiraled out of control just a half mile from the rest stop.

Jared punches like dang. Gouges, arm-bars. Breaks windows at theme parties.

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

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.

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

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

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.