Unused Magic

By Maureen McEly
There are wishes in my hair, constellations of fluff from dandelion ghosts my daughter blows in my direction.

Settling Into The Rest Home for Ragged Girls

By Anika Carpenter
The island’s breakers rattle windows. Filthy storm clouds snigger, ‘“the jetty is as brittle as your bones.”

I Wish I Could Tell My Dead Husband

By Jamy Bond
That I stole his Percocet stash and then helped him look for it. That I found his suicide note tucked inside his dog-eared copy of Infinite Jest.

In the Psychiatric Emergency Room

By Yu Li
You make up reasons for skipping pills. You must lie because the robins are watching, rolling both paranoid eyeballs, their jaundiced bellies bulging...

I Lived

By Emily O. Gravett
It was the summer of Shakira songs. We danced in clubs all over downtown Jerusalem until 4 a.m. and studied biblical Hebrew for six hours in the daytime.

Common Ground

By Sara Siddiqui Chansarkar
My name is Sara, I say. I’m from India. Never met an Indian with that name, they say. Is it short for something? No, that’s my first name. I say.

It’s Better This Way

By AJ Atwater
The convertible black as night with straight-up fins and a grille like shark’s teeth comes to rest in the bar’s parking lot among long-bed pickups with pipes and lumber and paint-splattered extension ladders...

Jigsaw Puzzle

By Roberta Beary
When someone said, I saw your husband eating out with another woman, he said she’s a colleague and I believed him...

Foreign Countries

By Emily Farranto
When we fell in love, my future husband wrote: Being with you feels like being in a foreign country.

Lullaby for Mariupol

By Stephen Connacher
I remember the chilly winter carnivals at Drama Theater, and the new green and yellow maternity hospital. Neighborhood babushkas gossip among the falling leaves.

Darling at Dinner

By Ellie Prusko
The waiter was staring at Darling, not me. When Darling admitted she wasn't 18, he left her wine glass anyway. He took mine immediately, probably mistaking me for 12.

Your Hair Looks Like Taillights

By Lexi Butler
You talk to your mother in Spanish, your sister in English, and then in numbers to order Chinese take-out. And you love to talk, especially about how you grew up in a one-room walk-up.

Canadensis

By Corinne Silver
They arrived silently, swiftly during the night and stood present by morning. They flocked the fields, parking lots, and manmade suburban ponds. They were big.

Her Mother, My Mother

By Hema Nataraju
Her mother never wore a sari, my mother never did not. Her mother drove a Mustang, my mother walked everywhere, even though I hated being picked up last.

Photo Story: At a speed of 0.5 inches per second

By Nora Nadjarian
The heartbeat is fast and sharp, except no one knows where the snail’s heart is.

Don’t Bother, They’re Here

By Meg Pokrass
“Guess what, Hon? They’re here!” you said, referring to the clowns. They were pounding on our door.

Gone Hunting

By Binx R. Perino
Danny sucks the wet end of a cigarette, tapping his hand on the steering wheel. Wisps of Maggie’s hair whip around from the rolled-down windows.

Cuata

By Tisha Marie Reichle-Aguilera
All my life they called me Cuata. But I was the only one born whole. Mi hermano, Juan, neverbreathed. But I heard him cry.

Kingdom Come

By D.E. Hardy
Still, I hunger for you: those nights we’d get so high we turned into earthworms, how we would writhe, reverent, our entire bodies capable of taste...

Grace at the Intersection of Cass and Nebraska

By Joanna Theiss
Today, I saw you accepting a dollar bill from a truck window. The shake of your hips as you thanked the driver reminded me of your electric slide at the middle school dance.