By Bart Comegys
Charlie tried explaining, but the infant weight on his shoulders and the tiny sneakers beating rhythmically against his chest mixed things up. The gravel and crushed asphalt crunched under his feet as he walked, and he held the kid’s knees to keep him steady up top.
“So she said I take things too seriously,” [...]

By Malti Jones
Careful
You lift her
fertile weight
delicate
in your palm
Your fingers trace
her smooth skin
youthfully pallid
untouched
under scarlet rouge
Sun ripened
her thick hide is
unweathered
lustrous in its
naked form
She sounds hollow
so you tear
her open
just to
make sure
She smells acrid
her curving belly
unfolded exposes
red jewels glistening
in her womb
Hungrily
you taste her
bitter juice and wonder
if she tastes as sweet now
as you imagined
she would.

By Shaun Poust
My home is drowning in the warm flood of a summer night—I am preserved in my room, at my desk. I can see the night sky through the windows from where I sit in my chair, but it remains a distant background, an untouchable inky ocean that eats the world outside but has [...]

By C.R. Willsie

There is a doughnut weight to things in my days:
Heavier globes come back around after so many years;
I find myself baking the same gray cakes,
Waking up with the same groggy mouth.
Heavier things, him, are here
Ruining my every birthday dinner
Making me go off in some black hood rage,
Burning everything I put in the oven.
I [...]

By Dylan Emmons
Just a Monday night, but the Sideline Bar and Grill was lively. Not jumping by any means—half the tables were empty and the average age of a patron that night had to be at least 40—but lively it was, in its own sort of way. I’d always thought that about the [...]

By Amelia Blevins
“No, you lift from the bottom and I’ll pull it up.”
“Wait, what if we lay it down on its side and then I push it up?”
“Make sure nothing falls out. I want these books the same way dad had them.”
The whirr of a vacuum punctuates the conversation as the brother and sister assess [...]

By Daniel Sitts
It was a Saturday when the package came. Of course, my parents already knew it would arrive, and so found themselves sitting on my green leather couch, waiting.Everybody sat around the coffee table nibbling away the time. My father toyed with a carrot in his hand as though someone had dared him not [...]

By Nina Boutsikaris
I pump gas and watch what I think is a heron rise out of a flooded field across the salt-stained highway. Blades of grass poke up in all directions, brown and folded, collapsing over each other with resignation. Winter in these forgotten towns, Schooner and Lisle, Georgetown and Liberty, winter here is merciless [...]

By Mike Grippi
They lay intertwined, like the resting gears of an awful machine. His eyes studied her shoulder and side of her neck and her ear, tracing the lines of her muscles and tendons that connected them, each so soft and natural.He watched her skin, a light from outside the window outlining her edges with [...]

By Rhiannon Marino
A thin beam of car headlight slipped around the edge of the heavy curtain that stood in its way. It fell across the mound of blanket that lay beneath the windowsill, tracing the folds of woven fabric, searching for life. An eyelid fluttered open from deep beneath the shadows of pillows and downy [...]