By Ryan Dempsey
They’d tried to forget it, tried to leave it in Raleigh, but it made the trip, hiding amongst the other boxes still sealed from the move.
By Madison Blair
my first lover smelled of indiana; cigarettes, dust, and cheap leather. the one after him, kentucky (bourbon and broken horses), and the last, a hint of florida (citrus, salt, and spring break,) and a dash of texas (barbeque, heat.)
By Charlie Stephens
We called that bay “The Liver” then, for its brown thickness, for its shame. We had moved back in like roaches, once the wealthy foreigners abandoned us for someplace cleaner to enjoy themselves.
By Melinda McCamant
Wet footprints, dancing shadows along the edge of the pool. The turbid water glows like fireflies and in its dark center the moon, almost full, overhead.
By Tony Press
“It’s a lonely washing that has no man’s shirt in it, Eileen, don’t you forget it.” That’s what my mother, quoting her mother, told me, and told me, and told me.
By Catina Green
She wore army men as earrings, stretched t-shirts into skirts and blew through a can of AquaNet every two weeks maintaining a rooster comb hairdo of her own design.
By Michael Snyder
Lucy could bend even the smallest rays of light to her will. She created her own humidity, burrowed deep, and made dormant things grow.
By Shara Concepción
Before the necktie hung itself, a knot doing unto me what the body did; before the engine, fuel wound, light, I was the instrument and the song, un-living on the vocal cord of God, an imaginary number on a line I couldn’t see.
By Kathryn Pallant
It was her father’s favorite station: polished marble, vaulted ceiling, windows straight from a mansion house. Just like the best library he ever went to, but never had time for until the end.
By Melinda McCamant
The view is better now, a verdant hillside shattered, not one crimson setting sun but hundreds, the dusty smell of late summer drifting in.
By Colin Lubner
Years after our planes stopped marking white x’s and asterisks across our blue sky (well, years after our sky stopped being blue at all) and years after our graves stopped staying graves ...
By Hoffi Munt
We rent locker space the way our parents rent houses. They are our sliver of space in this public world; a place to store, to fill, to hide.