By Judith H. Montgomery / Poetry /       Today, hunched under bomb burst in Rafah, three men—  bloodied, powdered by dust—scramble from their cracked  shelter to the new crater, its fatal blaze, its blasted concrete  walls. Despite danger. Their bare hands tear at the debris,  red wrack-line of war: to dig out someone, anyone,  who might survive. Today it is a family half-buried  beneath broken slabs. Ignoring mortar flare, they lever out the father, his trapped chest, ravage

By Sarah Safsten / Nonfiction /     It was rush hour in Seoul on May 28, 2016, and at Guui subway station, a platform screen door was broken. At 4:58pm, the subway manager started a work order, promising the door would be fixed within the hour. At 4:58pm, the clock started ticking.  Mr. Kim and Mr. Jeong(1) were the technicians assigned to repair the door. At 5:20 p.m., Mr. Kim was 30 minutes away from Guui Station. Mr. Jeong, 50 minutes out, lagged behind. 38 minutes left.

By Cesar E. Cisneros / Fiction /     The long winding creak and loud clank of the apartment gate rattles us awake. “Mom?” my brother calls out, brushing the sleep out of his eyes.  No scratching of the keys against the lock, no jingling of the doorknob, no yelling to put away our shit—only silence at our door. I yell at him to go back to sleep, smashing the pillow against my ear, but he peeks through the window blinds to find her. It’s still dark out. He puts his head back

By Brian Alarcon / Poetry /       I am sorry for showing up just now  like that  with you, all there right there I was crazy, singing something I didn’t know yet. I have a gash from my elbow to my wrist that sliced in half my Breton tattoo. I was climbing a rock. I never know what to do when I am not loved. I put some sap on it. I am here now for a bandage or a cast or maybe you know better what this needs. I am not medicinally inclined. I hate the sound of touching leaves du

By Grant Jarrett / Fiction /     It was early on a Tuesday morning in May when Leviticus Tate perceived that he had the ability to rise into the air, to hover. This wasn't just the residue of another aeronautic dream. It was a simple, indisputable fact; something he knew, understood, a part of him, like an instinct, like swallowing or breathing or scratching an itch. And yet this was unlike anything else. This was singular, exciting, life altering. There were questions of co

By Jacob Hibbard / Nonfiction /     By way of an industrial kitchen, they do. On the surface of a green cutting board, with a pile of diced onions, in this plastic bin of mirepoix—they grow up.  At a faraway truckstop, in the Brooks Mountain Range, as a Piper Navajo lands, beside the Koyukuk river for the first time. And through wet/dry mop technique taught by the truckstop owner who calls days off, personal mission days , believing there is no rest from our living. In stom

By CD Steele / Poetry /       There are fish that protect their young  by holding them      in their mouths You are bones   pinched between two fingers I want to keep you    in my cheek In life  you would have tasted like gin  and smoke There are cultures in South America that ritually eat their dead During Spanish colonization Queen Isabella commanded none to be   enslaved but those that ate  human flesh There were more cannibals after that. The Amahuaca people of what is no

By Yolanda Kwadey / Fiction /     My sister said they cut her, that one of the babies wouldn’t turn the right way, and that she was in breach even past the forty-two weeks. So, she let them cut her open, seven layers of tissue in all. Nobody in my family was really known for their patience. There were scars to prove it, old streaks of torn skin from Ma’s canes when she’d lose whatever smidgeon of patience she possessed. The people of my generation in this part of the world c

By Andrew Garvin / Poetry /       I teeter along life’s cantilever for the hundredth time over, and today, cancer. Same as my dad’s. I’m ripped open, long after his death, for the hundredth time over, thinking of his singular love of cycling. I’m ripped open, long after his death, wondering if he knew of my utter disdain for cycling? That he would die by it, not cancer? I wonder if he could know how quickly my grief spins the longer I survive my cancer. I look up a definition

By Jeanne Althouse / Flash /      Her truck took the sharp turns of the coastal road with ease. Gripping the steering wheel one handed, knuckles red, with her right arm across my seat-belted chest, Jenny held me, as she always had, my older sister, my protector. All I wanted was to sleep, lulled by the twists and turns, pushed side to side, like a child bounced back and forth on a swing. I heard the wind beat against the passenger window. My white hair whipped across my fore

By Christie Cochrell / Fiction /     No one really knows why restoration stopped on the abandoned St. Julian hotel, where commoners and kings once came to relax in luxury. The investors behind its latest makeover were said to be from Japan, so weren't around on the island to brief the media, to quell rumors, to affirm or deny any of the unlikely stories circulating of forced labor, trafficking, Somali pirates (Chinese thugs?) on motorboats landing one moonless night and spir

By Kendall Poe / Flash /      Councilmembers made an announcement on Tuesday. Their town, once halcyon, now monotonous, would have a sale on words so that anyone of means could buy their preferred set of syllables. It marked the beginning of great change and self-identification. They hoped to encourage the commerce and conversation that would fend off a stagnation that grew like mildew. Not since the last war had there been so much redefining. The young couple who had owned

By Isaiah Lewis / Nonfiction /     When I first read Simone Weil in seminary, I knew that she was autistic. Not in any formal diagnostic sense, of course—the term “autism” to describe a constellation of neurodevelopmental features was coined in 1943, the year Weil died. Nevertheless, the way she talks about attention as prayer, her fierce sense of justice, her hatred of being touched, her voice, her clumsiness, her fearless quests for purity and truth—I didn’t know that I wa

By Erica Ottenberg / Fiction /     Daniel sits two feet from Jen across a table sticky with a palimpsest of spilled beer. She hasn’t seen him in twenty-four days. Now it’s like she’s looking at him through a microscope lens—a five-foot-ten specimen on a slide. She can count the pores on his nose and the follicular root of each hair in his five o’clock shadow. A man, reduced to a mound of cells. Particles and pigments and collagen fibers converge, affording him the tint of an

By Armon Eugene Newsom / Poetry /       Never fuck someone you wouldn't wanna be Because you really do become them. Just ask me As I hang here still  Stuck between the teeth Of the last man who bit into me. I know why they call it consummation. The want that I placed in him Metabolized into a hymn And coughed up as blood Staining crisp white ties and handkerchiefs. I think I can always tell  Which Frank Ocean song is about a man By how somber it tastes. Someday I hope I'm as

By A.S. Aubrey / Fiction /     I was determined to climb the tree outside my window—maybe because you told me not to. Knock-kneed bony and my oily unwashed hair in my face. Those Levis that made me look like a boy with the bulge at the zipper on my too-skinny body (Shelly and Sarah laughing at me on the playground, pointing), and my legs moving, into those limbs, panting with freedom.  It was early morning, before cartoons, when you would lie in bed with your cigarettes, th

By Holly Aszkenasy / Nonfiction /     i. What is insomnia? Insomnia is boring. Dull to hear about and even more tedious to experience. It’s searching “where is joss stone now” at 3 a.m. (filming Instagram Stories about baking, is where, crooning softly to the camera Isn’t this delicious?  as she fingers a tray of vegan peanut butter brownies) and nervy, aching teeth, and the desire the following day to consume more fistfuls of sugary fruit than a fully grown bonobo. It’s fiel

By Oleg Olizev / Poetry /       Do not ask me why the whole world is trying to crawl into your bellybutton.  I have a huge number of operators digging for my bottle-hole.  Let’s agree on one thing: everybody for himself. That’s fair.  And keep in mind—explosives are still an essential part of human life.  It takes passion and willpower to accept this truth: there will be no better life  unless you put your faith in fairy tales, in something soft and glowing—  an illusion alre

By Patricia Canright Smith / Fiction /           If you wish to live and thrive,       Let a spider run alive.            LET’S BE FRIENDS There’s more to a spider than the number of legs. We would like you humans to know us. We would like to share what we know about you humans. Knowledge leads to understanding; understanding leads to respect. It’s time. Most humans approach spiders with fear and loathing. A furry little creature with four legs:  Oooo. A furry little crea

By Lisa Chen / Flash /      There is the apartment that we leave to move two doors down, because that apartment was apartment #4 and Ma believes it to be haunted .  In Mandarin four  sounds the same as the word for death , but no one dies, though I think she may like to try. I want to say, this is America Ma, no one is haunted by numbers, but even then, I know it not to be true. There is the apartment where I stop the line of ants with my wet thumb, not necessarily to smash