Candy: A Teenage Gospel

by Tommy Dean
I promised I wouldn’t follow, that I’d have to stay alive, because the people would demand a witness.

Joshua

by Jordana Jacobs
Inside the ovaries of my husband’s grandmother, Sylvie, resided an egg the size of a grain of sand that would have been Hannah, my brilliant and accomplished mother-in-law.

Zilla, 2015

by Jeff Somers
When she signed the lease and moved her stuff into the place, she knew she was leaning into a decline she’d begun some time before.

Wapiti Nocturne

by Douglas W. Milliken
Mum died in the last days of October, leaving—among other things—a lot of fall-time chores incomplete.

Palloncino

by Lauren Lynn Matheny
Whatever the color, there had been a balloon. There had been a boy. And there had been a fall.

My Broken Brain

by Angie Ellis
I keep a list of songs I know well, so that if I get dementia people can reach the real me hidden inside my broken brain.

White Chrysanthemums

by Lori Nevole
My first girlfriend was Catholic, and thought no one would know she was a lesbian if she kept up a great manicure.

Hollows

by Tommy Dean
We’re lying in the middle of a cracked country road, fireflies blinking a message we’re too human to understand.

A Tragedy, A Process, An Adjustment

by Betsy Porter
She would be devastated if something happened to him—a car accident, for example, it’s entirely possible.

Aim

by Rebecca Foust
If Pastor Dale’s deer-stand was built as a place from which to squeeze a hair trigger, it also ladled up a grand view of the valley below, thick with hickory, sycamore, and elm.