Her goal in life was to write a short story in the fourth person. This was something she had to do without me. I was told to leave our two-bedroom apartment. The day I moved out it was raining. I …
Lying in bed with Kevin, I’m playing a game of boredom chicken. I won’t reach for my phone until he does. I’m in the crook of his arm, looking at his out-of-focus face. Now that we’ve done …
Mr. Gland said he wanted my hair for a wig because his wife was bald from cancer treatments. I said there are other wigs that she could have, surely, and he said true, but my hair perfectly matched …
You enter from the garage to the wag of dog tails and the sound of their sharp nails on hardwood. Work has drained and exhausted you. You have reflux, eyestrain, a slight throbbing in the temples. …
& ignores it. Instead, the artist paints himself & his easel perched on the edge of a landscape of stone edifices & staircases that hug the earth like the rumored hanging gardens of antiquity.
There are many ways to leave and not all of them involve disappearing into yourself. Some are easy as (_____). Say it: flight. (_____), etymology archery, the passage of days, tail of a dart, a …
Aza Pace’s debut full-length book of poems, Her Terrible Splendor , hovers in a space where poetry meets incantation. Conjuring the mythic figure Circe, the collection lyrically explores …
Fled Sheeran: Ed, but a coward. Dead Sheeran: Ed, but RIP. Undead Sheeran: Ed, but even paler. Bread Sheeran: Ed, but sourdough. Bred Sheeran: Ed, but stuffed with a …
if Lady Gaga was a barracuda, she would be Lady Gargar _____ I’m a Marksist, as in I despise all men named Mark …
Schefflera photos and collages are by author unless otherwise noted. Plant photos on 11-13 are by photographer friend Uli Schackmann with digital manipulation by the author.
If Wednesday, the doctor’s. Trees stationed, canceling the first light. If Wednesday, blue of no privacy. Boston hospital where in me we see. The overwhelming matter. The whole mind. …
Matthew Zanoni Müller and I first met in 2008 as wide-eyed incoming students at Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. After graduating, we kept in periodic touch over texts and …
“May you live in interesting times” is a curse I’ve thought about often, especially in the context of reading. Who am I if I retreat to the fantasy of the page when so much of the …
“A person has to get used to the idea that we live among mortal remains”: this is what Mimì tells his childhood friend Lello and his girlfriend Nina, and this is also the key to …
In Dino Enrique Placentini’s novel The Invasion of the Daffodils , a young boy named Chico Flores finds a crate of daffodils washed up on the cove of an island. He and his brother plant the …
Mattress City USA was tucked off a busy road in a strip-mall that included a gas station known for car-jackings, a down-at-heel florist's shop, and a daycare with grease-paint drawings of rainbows, …
Mme Rimbaud got a new haircut. Une coupe nouvelle. It isn't as good as the old haircut. It has no puff, no coiffed look. Someone needs to floof it. Mme Rimbaud lives in her afterlife wearing her …
Dressing for work the day after her fifty-third birthday, W— struggled to get into her favorite sweater. Supple and soft, roomy but flattering, this sweater, but today it felt as if the …
Systems Engineer Higata was a modest man, but if pride ever thrummed inside him, it was because he had found the secret to a happy existence.
How young his tear-stained face, crumbling under / the fluorescents. Unbalanced on the stool in front of class. / Dogs have to be trained to fight, conditioned / to violence, like humans. He told us how he trained him