I am three days into a new life. In a new state in a new town at a new elevation where there are other things for single 30-year-olds to do than attend baby showers and bridal brunches. Three days into a new life and I am sitting on a beach waiting for a surf instructor, fantasizing about his abs and our potential.
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Dissapearing Act by Peter McInerney
A week later and the horse is a hollow shipwreck, ribcage bared to the quartermoon. The jetsam of carrion eaters strewn amidst a palimpsest of tracks printed in the dirt.
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Alongside Blue by Afton Montgomery
I, alongside him, folded every napkin in the same direction. Nudged straight the faded carpet samples that made every cement step down to the basement a different frugal pattern and color. I wished our house number—off by only one digit—was a clean 12345.
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Colors of Sound by Hantian Zhang
White emerges when all wavelengths of light reflect off an object with equal intensity, much like how white noise distributes its amplitude across its entire frequency range. Examples abound: running water, the whir of a fan, the hum of a vacuum.
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The Third-Best Clown in New York by Aaron Rabinowitz
Suddenly, the building’s main door banged open. Something heavy was being lugged up the stairs. Kevin slid behind me and dragged open the apartment door.
Read MoreThis land is by Bill Marsh
Without trying, D and B are helping me understand the truth about forever—that it works both ways and travels the earth in all directions, thwarting all human attempts to move forward by going backwards.
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Will We Hear it Coming? by Amy Benson
I adopted my father’s fears, but the fear on tap at church spoke to what felt like my native suspicions—that harm was gestating in me in the shadow of an inevitable but unpredictable cataclysm. I learned to be in constant fear of my thoughts, lest something unforgivable dash across them at the very moment of the apocalypse.
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The Plague of Lice by Julie Marie Wade
Lousy: a permissible way to express displeasure, even contempt, without resorting to the verboten profane. Profanity, after all, could get you sent to your room, your mouth scrubbed out with soap, or worse if the Lord’s name was taken in vain. But lousy had a strange twist to it, a little corkscrew in the language that opened a different bottle.
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A 1993 ZR1 Spyder by Rachel Sudbeck
The hotel where I worked saw a pilgrimage then of portly old men with mustaches and cabbie hats, their stomachs tucked into ill-fit jeans. They came into the lobby weeping, clutching at their thinning hair like the oracle at Delphi, asking God or me or whoever else was in the room why this had to happen to those beautiful machines.
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Fridge stocked with food
Disordered Eating: A Chronological Annotated Bibliography by Mauri Pollard Johnson
At age eight, you watched an episode of Full House about dieting: D.J. eats ice pops and hangs pictures of thin models on her fridge; you know this is to bring awareness to the dangers of extreme dieting, but you keep these as techniques instead.
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Florida Woman by Lenore Myka
The most frequent and famous of the stories sent to me wasn't about a Florida man but a Florida woman. A twenty-something former-model-turned-meth-addict, she'd been responsible for burning down a 3,500-year-old bald cypress tree which, at the time, was considered to be the oldest of its kind and the fifth oldest tree globally.
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Joy and Pain, Sunshine and Rain: On Teaching/Reading Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude by Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Even when his poems take a darker turn, such as recalling the murder of a friend and colleague, or the bittersweet memory of a childhood crush who has since passed away—there are moments of true grace within these elegies—a slowing down, not in pacing but in memory’s leaps.
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Memory Waltz by Anne Gudger
I imagined my giant Scrabble board and a pile of letter tiles. Extra vowels, too many U’s. Searching. Wanting to make sense of where I was at with my mom and where she was with herself. Do my memories get erased too when she erases hers?
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Wolf Biter by Sarah Viren
When our habits deform our bodies, we can’t hide the proof of what we do.
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Syllabus for My Mother by Catharina Coenen
Prerequisite: A hunger for written words. Remember how your mother wanted you to stay in school?
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Brief Histories by Joe Bonomo
These images commingle now in memory as my first headlong descent into the strangeness of grief.
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One Last Time by Cathy Luna
Memory doesn’t work like writing, one word at a time, one ant in a line. It’s more like a science-class filmstrip on fire in the projector, one image blooming orange-white and black into another.
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A Mother is Not a Zero-Sum Game by Elaine van der Geld
Before I became one, I’d never been interested in mothers. Those lumpen creatures with sagging faces, boxy, careless clothes, bad hair, beholden to a small dictator. Certainly, I’d never become one.
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For Dorothy, Who Made It By Sara Brody
In this novel, which I would never ask you to read, which once you used to prop open the window during the heatwave in December that gave us cause for dread, there are three brothers. Can I talk about it, just a little?
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Touch Me, Baby by Joe Bonomo
Shuffling through a box of old 45s is like letting fistfuls of soil leak through your fingers. Organic matter, minerals, microbes all seem present on vinyl and worn labels, the grooves veritable garden rows. Heft, ballast, stuff in my hands.
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