Wildfire breathing down our necks. I don’t remember who said the last word, or where we went quiet. Just falling asleep. Eyes half-lidded, heavy. Breathing honey-tongued under nicotine. Told me you’d quit but you were always telling me things. Somewhere up north it’s been burning for weeks and we’d left the windows open, so with …
I always wanted to go to a summer camp like kids did in the movies. The thought of lacrosse in some New England landscape was alien to every summer I endured. This was southwestern Mississippi in the 2000s; we walked upstream in our creek looking for crawfish, the stream cooling us feet-upward. The sun’s oppressive …
Continue reading “Sitting with Aunt Laverne” By Lyndy Berryhill
I’d read about the parking lot there in the Shepherd, a local free newspaper. Parking around Brady was always difficult since they’d built it up and made it a shopping and restaurant district. People would go there, leave their car in the laundromat lot and have dinner or shop. When they returned, there’d be a …
Continue reading “The Brady Street Laundromat” By Mark Putzi
water curls around my calves sticky with salt and chilled whispers my fingertips stroke murky clouds billowing across the sea’s glass feet ooze deeper into sand with each ebb of ocean. water laps at my thighs navel ______________________breasts _____________________________________________collarbones ____________________________________________________________________throat ___________________________________________________________________________________________cheeks silencing my untamed tongue savory silk flows into my lungs filling them filling them …
Out in the pole corral tethered to a shoot of cypress the old mare is most of the time chewing or farting or shitting or some potent combination of these, eyes lidless to the night oracular and half blind as though the freight of her long life were somehow visible to her there in aggregate; …
The merchant was taught—ever since she was old enough to fear anything—that monsters could walk in daylight and nightmares could wear the skin of normalcy for a short time before slipping back into the depths below, shedding their masks as night falls again. So, when she was roused awake by a stranger knocking on the …
Continue reading “Falling in Love with Teeth and Coral” By Penny Senanarong
It was a summer of lemons and cherry pits. Desire set ablaze with firefly circuits, Crushed garlic hands that never pulled back. The heat was so heavy that it all melted, Blood orange sunsets and watermelon clouds smudged together and there you were holding bolts of lightning between your teeth. You were a secret language …
I always liked the quiet. The dull roar of an AC, pumping air that circles my body, a table, a sweating beer. I close my eyes and meditate on the noise, slowing time until it becomes my own, something that I can catch between my thumb and forefinger, like the wings of a bee—my mind …
Continue reading “The Quiet, The Fisherman, The Mud” By Yasmeen Mughal
It started the night you showed me the bruises on your ribs. We were sitting on top of some elementary school, neither you nor I had ever gone to, when you lifted up your shirt. Oh, how it looked: bronze skin stretched so taut against the xylophone of your ribcage, and all those marks, plot …
Give me another ten years, I’ll never find all of your pieces. They’re diffused in me, reincorporated, alive in my liver and lungs. Here they make a home, cerebrospinal drifters squatting in my wrinkles amidst accumulated junk. These won’t be ectomied or argued with. When I shrink they’re my Rushmore, my Colosseum, I see them …
Burnt Pine 