November 1, 2020 | Rejected Modern Love Essay
TGOYI
Natalie Villacorta
Not knowing was better than being disappointed. If I didn’t know what TGOYI meant, it could mean anything.
October 30, 2020 | Poetry
Alternate Endings to Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” Music Video
Canese Jarboe
None of us have The Touch,
Though we have felt The Touch
*
We are all (all of us
Wearing leopard-print dusters Just once,
I was thirty hands tall (like one whole horse
Standing on
October 30, 2020 | Fiction
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.
October 29, 2020 | Poetry
Modern Mother-land
Jenny Shi
After Qu Yuan
In my country, our insults give benefit of doubt. Nǐ yǒu bìng—
You are sick— as if there’s an
devotional after alejandra pizarnik
Tara Jayakar
oh longed-for, awaited beloved. she says my name
wrong and makes me come hard. i catalog
lovers like this, coins in kitchen water. six years on,
type thirsty into google
Love Poem for Sandra Oh
Anhvu Buchanan
On that spirited Emmy night,
when the camera cut to you
and you radiating in red satin
said to the world
“It’s an honor just to be Asian”
I lost my breath.
Time stopped,
blindsided by this
Begin Here,
Sara Luisa Kirk
with the flies, small handfuls of sunlight, sensation only one degree
removed from excess.
What to press a heart to, what color pulled up from the earth.
I’m looking for my time machine.
Stone Grandfather
Leona Sevick
(Dol Hareubang, Jeju Island, South Korea)
And there you sit, your basalt belly swollen heavy,
a gentle smile playing at your stone lips. To say I
sought you out would be a bald-faced
Toss of the Dice
T. Abeyta
I wasn’t attracted to him at all but I was single and alone on New Year’s so I listened to him go on and on about birdwatching.
I Love First Dates
Marise Gaughan
One guy told me I didn’t look like my online photos while we sat al fresco in a bougie hotel in Venice. He smelled of vinegar. I ordered two crab sandwiches. I ate one and got the other to go.
Goes to Town
Michelle Finkler
When I return home, Samuelson is still in the living room with his friend Jake. I hear them talking as I enter our apartment through the back door. They don’t know I’m home yet, as I had stepped out
Nocturne with Aroace Girl
Kelly Weber
I steer the moon over my right shoulder, vertebrae
lodged above coyote ridge, winding plains road
I drive all the night’s hungers down. White light
clasping the devil’s backbone. Today snow
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
Blessed Are Those Who Have Not Seen and Yet Have Come to Believe
Anna Chotlos
Lightning struck my grandparents’ house five times in as many years.
1984
Mark Koepke
My 11-year-old son thinks Imagine Dragons is the greatest band in the world. Maybe ever. I learn about his new passion in the most disturbing way.
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
What Happens to the Heart
Malia Márquez
The bartender gives relationship advice in the alley behind the bar every Thursday night while the piano player does her thing on the baby grand.
Longing, Lust & Winnie-the-Pooh
Garnett Kilberg Cohen
Yes, my mother loved Pooh, but as far as I know her love was platonic.
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.
Rats of Autun, 1522
Heather Monley
The rats have eaten the grain again, and the men need a new solution. We’ve already exhausted the usual methods of dealing with rats: traps, prayers, and cats. Our town has many cats, but they simply
Fuck Music
Brian O'Hare
We’re sitting in a pit. It’s deep, well above our heads—a half-finished bunker, really, begun in the heady days when imagined snipers lurked behind every dune...
How to Have a Pandemic
Caroline Plasket
While sitting in the parking lot waiting for masked employee to bring your items out to your trunk you watch customers walk into the store. Count how many are wearing masks versus not. Watch them laughing.
In the Gap
Leah Umansky
so much of what I feel is strain and restraint, not
strength. I feel so much of my days are in want;