I am in the tree, my foot stuck between branches. So I pick at the skin of a limb. I see the tops of everyone’s dark, brown hair, shiny with the last bit of the day. No one can see me until I drop flakes of bark in their hair. Liz jumps up to shake […]
Issue 98
Brian Andrew: “I’m sorry, but I had to”
You were in the shower when I started setting off the smoke alarms, screaming fire. Fire. FIRE! Running to the door, I started pounding and kicking and hollering, feverishly hurling your name against the wood. You flew out of that bathroom like you had wings, sopping wet and shaking as the towel fell and crumpled […]
Jessica Guzman: “How My Grief Goes”
After Cecilia Llompart Beneath the billow a breeze spawns in the field. Among the mosquito’s preamble. Attendant to tree chatter, the snapped branch catching other branches on its fall. Threading the tire swing and the patched jacket knotted at the top. Outside and inside, like a fly discovers the open window, riffs off radio gossip: […]
John Randolph Carter: “We’ve Been Fleeced”
The slippery slope is littered with grease monkeys. Hot hands reach for the moon. Small black objects appear and disappear with such rapidity that they create a gray blur. Thin little nobodies, disguised as lambs, emerge from the dead zone carrying banners that read, “We’ve been fleeced.” Soon there are battalions of mailmen with sacks […]
Shara Concepción “Ma, In February”
I find ma on the fifth floor of Metropolitan Hospital. She’s sitting in a plastic chair and thumbing at her crocheted sweater, her red hair shooting up like her head is still on fire. Ma looks at me with those horrible eyes—hollowed out pupils tunneling inward like two endless throats, and I remember a time […]
Monica Joy Claesson: “To my Lover in Cusco”
To My Lover in Cusco You stopped to kiss me by the twelve-sided stone, then we laughed and you said I’m hiking the Salkantay tomorrow. I leave in four hours. We kept walking and I knew, already, how you would become one of the men I never loved; knew also how the one who speaks […]