March 30, 2022 | Nonfiction
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.
March 30, 2022 | Interview
Stir It Up: Aileen Weintraub talks food, pregnancy amidst the chaos, and her new book Knocked Down: A High-Risk Memoir
Hannah Grieco
Aileen Weintraub is one of those incredibly funny writers who also has that superpower to make you cry against your will. You may have read her pieces about pregnancy, motherhood, aging, and more –
March 27, 2022 | Rejected Modern Love Essay
Softbox
Anya Maria Johnson
On the first day of my streaming career, I asked Gabe to come over to adjust the lighting design of my “set.”
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
The Grandmas
Chelsie Bryant
When you died in March, five months before I bought my first plant, I learned what sobbing is.
I Laugh at My Great-Grandmother’s Funeral
Josephine Wu
All the time I don’t know what I’ve lost.
Same Difference
Clare Fisher
She opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it, starts to laugh. ‘I guess we're both freaks.’
The Case For Queerplatonic Love
Tenacity Plys
I.
In third grade, we spend every lunch writing comic books together. We invent a cinematic universe of imagined worlds to rival Marvel's. I've known her since I was six, and I've known my sister
Josephine, or Alter Ego
Joseph O. Legaspi
Is this how a woman
Disappears, water-tap and soil
The Stay of Grief
Elizabeth Crowell
There is one boat out every day.
We are never packed in time to take it.
The Red Bird
Michael McSweeney
My six-year-old son stretches his arms to their limit as he describes his latest nightmare.
Outside the VIP Room of Club Private Grief
Nick Martino
She flips a stool on the bar like a lamb
—springtime, I fell in love again
Zoe Contros Kearl
Charming shyness paired with a love of dancing the Charleston in heels in the street past midnight. I kissed her bloodied knees.
Little Prayer for a Snail
Ben Seanor
There’s so much advice
in the world, such as: if you’re feeling
very low, put on a suit
Jen Frantz
Jen Frantz
I made a call
and I lived.
It was the longest
life of my life.
Baggage Claim
Mason Parker
2 is the grade I was in when I thought I loved Lucy. 2 is the number of times Lucy was arrested for meth in a single day. 2 is the number of Xanies she must have taken the night she showed up to my welcome home party, because she was fucking sloppy.
We Are All Just Above Ground Pools: Elizabeth Ellen Interviews Sean Thor Conroe
Elizabeth Ellen
I think Westerners, and Americans especially, struggle with “autofiction” since their conceptions of self are so fixed.
Question for the Rio Grande
Saúl Hernández
Do you remember the names of everyone you swallow
Three Poems
Rebecca Hawkes
One of your axolotls has eaten the other
and every week you clean its twenty-litre tank
of cannibal excrement.
What Men Want
Sandra Jensen
Here’s the plan: we’ll become high-class prostitutes. “Courtesans,” I say, “like ancient Greece.”
End of an Empire
Nikki Blazek
i look like eurotrash
in your red sweatshirt
and blue sweat shorts but
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
from the archives: "Navigators" from Hobart 12
Mike Meginnis
with an introduction from Matt Bell
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.