By Sarah Minor

Featured art: American Rural Baroque by Ralph Steiner

The landline clapped as Dinah set the phone in its cradle and saw five new mini-Butterfinger wrappers in the can beneath her desk. There was a drizzle going on in the office parking lot—Giant lake weather. Billy Lloyd the Tobacco King, her Grandad, had finally died. Dinah stared into the gray matter of her cubicle, calling up the blue-frosted window in the fifth-floor bathroom, weighing whether at this hour she could finish an organic cigarette in there before someone noticed her shoes.

Dinah hadn’t spoken to her father in five months and then there he was, Billy Lloyd Jr., pronouncing emphysema, crying blubbery on the phone. Today and tomorrow would be for the examiner. The Lloyds didn’t embalm on account of a fear initiated by Lincoln’s rail-traveling corpse, though most of them had forgotten why by now, and with the heat they wouldn’t want more than three days for a body, even then. If Dinah went, she’d have to fly in the morning through Hotlanta or Dulles to land in time. Read More

By Nick Reading

Featured art: A Rat in Its Natural Habitat by Ellie Sinclair

Your son’s hand is in the shark bowl again
so you say no. Your daughter wears the potty

as a hat. Say no. He lists feces on the wall.
She rehearses a song about it all complete

with refrain. No. You say no when pots
and pans become soldiers’ helmets

assaulted by whisks and wooden spoons.  
No to everything else for dinner and yes

to pigs in a blanket and ice cream baths.
And no more, Can we afford it? Read More

By James Lough

Featured art: Yin and Yang by Mariama Condé

It seems I’m to blame for my three-year-old son’s conversion to religion. It begins around five o’clock on a warm autumn afternoon at an open window. I am bent over, tidying up his Thomas the Tank Engine pieces scattered on the rug. Simon is standing at the tall, open window, a window hung low in the wall, its sill even with his knees. He’s watching the low, golden light play off the grass. Outside the window is a twenty-five foot drop. He presses his little palms against the screen and leans in for a closer look.

I panic and shout. “Simon Simon no no no get back!” Read More

By Julian Robles

Featured art: Disappearance at Sea II by Tacita Dean

for Esperanza Duque

I came to Guerrero because they told me my father had been here, once when he was my age, and later, when he fled. But we came to Pie de la Cuesta for Tía Juana. I couldn’t tell her no while she was sitting there with her blouse still unbuttoned down to her waist, and those lines folded sideways through her armpits. The right side had been more complicated during surgery, so the scar splayed from her chest almost to her back. Seeing me dressed for the beach all week reminded her of what she had lost years before: Pie de la Cuesta, a needle of coastline only she remembered. Adán drove us here so she could show me. And now we were here and Tía Juana was far behind us, alone, almost buried in the sand. Read More

By Laura Linart

Featured Art: some quiet morning in Athens, OH by Sue-Yeon Ryu

Give me a lesson in planetary frisson. Snake
like a vine running up my nervous system.

Provoke me. Ask, even as you trace the length
of my thigh, Isn’t it surreal that we’re here?

Isn’t it surreal? Suspended in heaven,
we’ve got front row seats to the ocean.

We spend time like billionaires. We dance
in slow motion. There’s an angel spinning EDM.

I’m under hypnosis. Take the first bite. Taste
the strobe light. Feel the beat begin to fall.

Down here, gravity loves us. The crowd pulses
in its thrall. Temporal rhythm, room spinning,

my back against the wall. It’s so crude
how my body wants you, animal after all.

By Janine Kovac

Featured Art: Ballet at the Paris Opéra by Edgar Degas

Today we are a cozy family of three—Daddy, Mama, and daughter. We are taking a road trip from our home in Oakland, California to a town called King City so Daddy can perform his signature role as the Sugar Plum Fairy cavalier. It’s our last trip together before the twins are born and Chiara-Noelle has told me in her three-year-old way that she is not pleased about this pregnancy. She wanted a sister, not two brothers and she can’t understand why we can’t just make what’s growing inside me be something else. Read More

By Patrick J. Murphy

Featured art: Untitled by Sue-Yeon Ryu

It was getting late and her grandson Buddy wasn’t back, so Vera decided to brave the heat and go with Alicia to find him. She’d wanted to talk to her daughter in private, anyway, but when she stepped outside, though the sun was low, the light still bounced with a glaring intensity off the pale houses, the plastered walls. Vera felt her skin growing damp, the small shock as the heat hit her body. It just took time to adapt to a Florida retirement, she thought, and remembered Little Rock and the parks along the river, the evening fireflies above deep grass.

It irritated her that Alicia, walking placidly beside her, didn’t seem to mind the climate, or much of anything else. Her daughter was overweight and wore long, black, wrinkled cotton dresses. Her left ear was pierced in five places, and she sometimes wore a silver ring through her right eyebrow. She was making a statement, she said, and didn’t care what anyone thought.

“Then why bother making a statement?” Vera asked once, only to meet with an uncomprehending stare.

By Paula Harris

Featured art: Untitled by Felicity Gunn

we don’t have anything in common

what if you grew your hair long?

what if we went running every morning at 6?

you could be nicer, you could be less judgmental

what if you got a degree?
yeah, you should definitely get a degree

we don’t have anything in common

you look better when you don’t weigh as much

can you talk a bit softer?

calm down

you’d be better with bigger breasts Read More