When Jan Brady slams the door, it stays closed. No class trips, no family reunions, no happy hours.
Jan Brady by Jan Stinchcomb
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Issue #17
Homesteading by Gretchen VanWormer
In August, Sarah said she’d begin by preserving water. A test run. She’d placed an order online: Ball Pint Jar, Regular Mouth, Set of 12; The Canning Essentials Boxed Set; I Eat Local Because I Can Apron.
Good Mood by Joanna Ruocco
I am in a good mood, but birds are in a bad mood. What’s up, birds? This morning I did the stretches I never do, the hamstring stretches.
Downwinders by Sarah Blackman
Inside the body the baby is coiling, flexed, not on the way to becoming but already become. Mother is having a picnic with father and brother and sis.
Fable Number 1: Des Moines, Iowa by Luke Rolfes
A paperboy disappeared from the streets of Des Moines, Iowa when I was a baby. News of his absence rang through the state for years.
Temp by Rob Roensch
The van had no side windows, the driver’s-side mirror dangled like a hand from a broken wrist, the passenger-side mirror and half the windshield were blurry and blue with ice from the storm, and the view out the back windows was blocked by boxes.
Yellow by Constance Squires
In the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 199,5 a Ryder truck rigged as a bomb went of at 9:02 AM, killing at least 168 people and injuring 680 others.
Silver Bell by Evelyn Hampton
The trouble with the cow was the cow had an adumbrated esophagus, which caused a gastrointestinal incursion from its first stomach into its second, so that nothing from the first could flow into the second.
Estranged by Mark DiFruscio
The last memory I have of my mother is from when I was eight and she broke my arm: a bad fall.
A Multiplication of Tensions by Christina Milletti
There are two babies. One is big. The other small. One is loud. The other mild. One sleeps. The other does not.
A Mischief by Jennifer Natalya Fink
I. Every time I see you I bleed. Not the optimistic red of love newly born. More oil spill. Menstrual cramp. Black porridge.
Work Done on the Flesh by George Looney
A cave-in one county over keeps me up. The late news has live cameras at the entrance where men come out, coughing up clouds of dust that shroud their faces and shimmer in the stark light of the video cameras.
Noncompliant by Carol Guess & Rochelle Hurt
You greet me with an accumulation of slaps, thin broken red line: we both want this. There’s no con and no man.
Monster by Aurelie Sheehan
I am lonely, so lonely that I go to the store to buy lemonade and when l see you at the register I say, hubba hubba, sweet lady, and you say [shriek]. This isn’t helping at all, this whole, other people thing.