From our current issue . . .

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  It’s the Fourth of July by Ken Craft

  and he’s listening to Oh Say Can You See in a sea of runners and an awakening 8 a.m. heat. The blue smell of Ben-Gay on the mentholated old guys & Axe on the sun-venerating young guys & armpit on the just-rolled-out-of-bed lazy guys & no one’s run a New Balance step yet. The ellipsis […]

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  Between the hours of one and six by Heidi Stuber

  Do dishes. Push in chairs. Tidy dining room into acceptable messy genius range. Put towels in wash. Sweep up pet hair. Add pet roller to shopping list. Straighten shoes. Tuck away medical bills and IEP documents. Hide other egregious markers of motherhood. Check couch. If peed on by dog, clean with wet vac. If not, […]

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  The Family Myths by Nicholas Cook

  My name is Hyacinth. It’s the name Mom gave me because I was born the color of spring flowers, wrapped in my fleshy cord. A nurse breathed life into me. Babies are supposed to be born pink, Mom said, born crying. I was as quiet as a bouquet. * The first boy I kiss does […]

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  Munch IV by Kyle Hemmings

  The enemy has devised a new way to rout us: They’re setting our clocks back by means of invisible hands and remote frequencies. This means we can never be 100% sure who we were before or then. Like the enemy we try committing inflicting domestic atrocities—hacking each other’s sex lives but only coming away dry […]

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  the middle of classes by Keith Nunes

  he’s running wildly among the weeding grasses of the frontal lobe, one minute perched on the Jericho wall then tumbling in a roll to the pins of bowling ball alleys lining the middle of classes, this heavily forested man with his singular language is dragging lone-wolf sorrows in a birthing sack, he howls over his […]

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  Building Walls by Glen Sorestad

  with apologies to Frost and Sandburg I live on the northern side of a border that could become a wall—the longest undefended boundary in the world between two countries. Saner heads will prevail, I keep telling myself, because one of America’s notable poets mused, Something there is / that doesn’t love a wall. Indeed, he […]

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  The Outlet by Bob Conklin

  There is only one outlet in the room, down by the baseboards. Millicent sits in a corner, smoking a cigarette, tapping the ash from time to time in a Styrofoam cup half-filled with lukewarm coffee from the night before. She looks through a back issue of Glamour, studying the cosmetic ads. Luke watches television, a […]

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  Smoking on the Back Steps of Bobst Library, NYU by Melissa Goode

  It is eight PM, half way through our shift. The air is warm. Your knee is two inches from mine. I smell the cleanness of your T-shirt, your skin heating the white cotton. You flick ash from a cigarette with a neat flip of your wrist and offer me your Coke. I sip from the […]

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  Brake Lights by Mike Ferguson

    Driving into town today I saw three cars that were each missing a working brake light—a bulb burnt out that needed replacement—and though I didn’t have the opportunity or inclination to tell any of them about the loss which I could see but they could not, I did become concerned how there might be […]

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  Commuter, 1993 by Kyle Potvin

  I sip coffee with the desire of morning. The morning news is fresh and black on my fingers. The pressed edge of the suit coat belongs to the stranger beside me. Pressed against me like a shield, he bobs his head on my shoulder. Shouldering this weight, I shift my legs beneath my skirt, moving […]

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  Sirens by C.B. Auder

  When a silken vision slinks on a mission down the sidewalk of a car-choked street—when her waves swish and bob in the unbearable heat—all you know is one thing: you will follow. Above the hot-dog grime and the blitz of van blats and the millions of pencil-lives grinding in trickle-up sharpeners, you feel this: tomorrow […]

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  Truth is by Karen Neuberg

  I lied about what I wanted. Instead I wrote a thank you note for what I got. When I tricked myself once too often, I tripped myself. And on up the stairs. To see the stars. There he kissed me. That was not a lie. Or not a lie I knew as a lie. This […]

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  In Anticipation of a Lionheart Sigh Under a Dilettante Moon by Pat Foran

  On our car insurance agent’s advice, I drove a different way home. I also adopted a new laugh, something akin to the embroidered cackle of Phyllis Diller. Instead of turning right on Lifehack Lane, I took the bluer than blue Volkswagen Beach Bomb down Billy Goats Gruff Tollway. I saw a Datsun taking liberties and […]

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  The Smell of Yesterday by Craig Dowd

  It was close to midnight when he climbed from his grave at Fifty-Ninth Street, another policy sold. The mourners were gone, only a stray cat crying outside the corner bakery that couldn’t sleep; resurrections here are old hat. Fourth Avenue was pointing to the Narrows, cold and deep. In his absence spring had graduated to […]

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  Po-dunk by Laura Page

  I told him I couldn’t live there. It seemed so grey, a too-long strip of highway lined with used car dealerships, pay-day loans offices, the Lombard pawn crests in neon, on backlit starboard sign panels. Po-dunk as my girlfriend used to say of the cheap jars of alfredo I used to buy at the Red […]

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  In the Light, I See… by Santino Prinzi

  …You. You’re in the strip of light that bleaches my carpet a lighter shade of magnolia. My feeble curtains can’t block you out. If I lay on the floor, you’re in my reach—that is, if I wanted to touch you. And I don’t, even though I know you’ll feel warm—warmer than I remember—and that’s why […]

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  Starlight in You by Daniel Lind

  We relax on my balcony as the night sky sings. Scars are inscribed on your parchment arms, caned by your father. I don’t want you to go home, so I offer shelter. You shake your head. That will only make your burden heavier. Darkness consumes him each night, and you have to be there to […]

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  Drowning Symphonies by Ashley Mares

  This is the home we built: the one we placed on the wings of butterflies so tenderly it collapsed into their veins—the red, bloodied hope and blue from their eyes: my dreams the doorway we’d walk through. In this place, there are ravens in the walls: shadows hang from the chandelier. In this place we […]

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  45 (Episode 1) by Cindy Hochman

  In the room the women come and go / talking of Michelangelo —T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” The jokers are wild! The king has misplaced democracy somewhere, maybe next to his eyeglasses, also lost. The bum in the leather jacket seethes and huffs, and threatens to blow the House down, along […]

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  for girls who don’t know how to say goodbye by Sierra Page

  smile etched in a story. mouth wide open. head thrown back in laughter as you recall it. the last memory of her. getting so high she fell asleep in the car. body folded like a paper plane. hair wild & tangled. smelling like the sea. that dizzy bliss you had in the morning. you carried […]

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  Didn’t Read It by Tom Moore

  I read somewhere that you should piss on jellyfish stings. Maybe I didn’t read it, maybe someone told me about it with a pint in hand and a certain look in their eye. Either way, I knew what was happening when in the movie Nicole Kidman pisses on a teenage Zak Efron to save him […]

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  Trip by Vivian Wagner

  The mushrooms spoke to me. I’m sure of that. They told me they grew from spores left here by aliens. They told me that through them I could connect to other worlds, to other forms of consciousness. They told me they were aliens themselves, rooted in earth’s soil, that they were sentient and could talk to […]

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  In the Backseat of the Limo   by Mare Leonard

  Dad’s in the middle, Mom on his right. I’m on his left. We follow the hearse filled with American Beauties, Baby’s Breath. A cascade of life. Dad in advanced Alzheimer’s sees the roses and asks, “Who died?” “Caroline died.” The beautiful charming, smart girl, your first child who could ride the waves, sweep the ball […]