Asian Pen Name*
Mine is Kien,
which is useful
in cases
where I need
to prove
I am who I say
I am,
like the time
a cop pulled me
over and said
Sir, do you know
why you
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).
Dear Katie
The movie we watched the night you told me you were leaving your husband for a girl with skin rough as a butcher’s block no storm could ever smooth clean. When sharks were falling from
Even his sacred biosphere (of anime, video games, Oedipal and teen porn, poststructuralist psychobabble, and grad school fellowships) can’t save him from the critical intervention of the collapsing world.
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.
Being There
Describing my body is easy
because I do not know what it looks like.
From above, I imagine my face
when it experiences a thrill.
There could be more to what I’m looking
I wondered what my mother would say about the gun, and then I wondered it out loud. M gave me a look I was too worn out to interpret.
But if it's anything like years passed it'll boil down to something real simple. Start drinking as soon as the coffee is done. Bottles of beer and wine. We'll wrap ourselves up in blankets to stave off the cold. Too cheap to turn on the portable radiators we use to heat our place. Her parents will call. We'll feign sobriety. A hard thing to do at 10:00 a.m. with wine-stained lips.
I had never considered practicing polyamory, so when my girlfriend suggested it to me, I didn’t know what to say.
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
How Come No One On Twitter Is Talking About This
The eye a camera humming across the top of the earth : cavern
gully ravine gorge Far below a tiny man jumps into a tiny
Some hours pass, and nobody has impressed her
Before we entered the most raved about amusement park in the world, we went into the woods nearby . . .
I only want to read erased fucking.
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.
This story is a fresh take on the proverbial phrase: go the extra mile for someone else.
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
It starts like this, the saddest story I know does. It starts with me and it starts with my son.
“You’re damned if you do and damned if you won’t”
