By Sergii Pershyn / Fiction / One morning, Juan decided he would never return to work. Just like that. Without picking up the things he left at his desk—a photo of him scuba diving three years ago, a portable fan, a bonsai tree that hadn’t grown an inch in the previous eight years. Without taking a lunchbox with leftover chicken and rice from the communal fridge. Without even notifying his boss or any of his coworkers. That day, after turning off his alarm, Juan took a slow

By Dan DiPiero / Nonfiction / On a trip back home I decline the University’s offer to pick me up from the airport because I’m excited to take the Red Line, which goes where I need it to, if slowly. I am looking forward to it in part because the train feels like a miracle in a state that has always regarded public works as strange antiques, indecipherable curios from a time before reason. I am looking forward to it in part because I know the romance that inheres in infrastruct

By Jessie Petrow-Cohen / Flash / It is Sunday and I linger near a table that seems close to finishing. Their red baskets of fried fish are nearly empty, their oil-stained napkins are piled high. It’s gray out. Evening. You fill my water. We’re here to talk. It’s been six years and we talk about everything which means that sometimes we don’t talk about the thing and by the thing I mean sex. It didn’t used to be this way. When we first met, we were animal. We were barely

By Caitlin Thomson / Poetry / In the beginning of the world my father was gifted a knife by his boss. The whole office was. Sharp, heavy, and expensive. A bonus for the winter break. A good year celebrated in steel. Three people ended up in the emergency room. Not anyone in my family—although everyone cut themselves, and I still have the scar thirty-two years later. It’s the only one I remember the source of. I was younger at the time than my oldest daughter is now. It’s hard

By Becky Petterson / Fiction / “If we lived here, we could play tag whenever we wanted!” Her seven-year-old, his cotton socks skate-slick on the hardwood, rolled around the corner, the furnitureless space still wide and willing to take their bodies. She throbbed, became weather, the pressure of heat and cold coalescing, fog rising, snow falling, whiteness. She stood in the blue nacre of her breast milk and her mother’s before that and her grandmother’s before that, an infinit

By Raia Small / Nonfiction / In my dream, I was cleaning cow’s blood from the cloth mother. It wept through the fabric, a heart continuing to pump through a broken circuit. Sharp, mineral, and rotten, it stained my fingers, recalled garbage bags outside of New York City restaurants, how they stewed in the summer heat. I was repulsed but fastidious; just doing my job. The cloth mother housed a computer with wiring I couldn’t control or understand. Her head fanned like a lamps

By Mistee St Clair / Poetry / - at Süleymaniye Mosque Outside the barrier to the prayer hall, I get down on my knees with the other women and listen to the imam lead the prayer. I can’t tell if it’s music or instructions. I fall into his rhythm and wipe my eyes with my headscarf. Concentric rings of chandeliers hang so low I could almost reach them. It’s only been a few weeks and I am here, in ruins and existing. A young woman kneels next to me and asks if I am ok, that maybe