August 5, 2020 | Fiction
Boris Yeltsin Roots through Your Pantry
Nora E. Derrington
One evening you come home to discover Boris Yeltsin standing in your kitchen.
August 5, 2020 | Poetry
I'm Going to Butcher This
Farah Ghafoor
a man stands on stage his cue cards flashing...
August 3, 2020 | Fiction
Pacific Theater
Brett Stuckel
Twelve hours later, I surrendered to sleep at a rest stop.
August 2, 2020 | fucked up modern love essays
What Haunts Me
Molly Magid
The text said: Hey! I think I just saw you cross the street (I’m in the red Prius). How are you?
Knowledge
Peter Witte
On Human Origins
You take a half-person’s body, then another half-person’s body, and you connect them together and put them inside the mom’s body. Then they grow and grow and grow. Then you
The Surrender Game
Suzanne Richardson
This is how we played: one of us would lay on top of the other fully clothed, “go dead,” and see if the other could move. He relished it. I would lay on him, every part of me heavy and slack. It was
UNTITLED IN A WORLD CALLED MONEY, LOVE, AND FAME
Chris Hutchinson
On Day One, Larry-the-Lizard quits smoking
and eating saturated crap.
Day Two: he buys a hard pack of Dunhill King Size
on his way to Fatty Patty’s Burger Palace. Why?
Because the purplish
February
Erica Trabold
I bought a compilation of Michael Jackson Number Ones when the Wal-Mart Supercenter finally opened. It feels right to have viewed the future from my bedroom, door closed, music up.
Letter To My Sixth-Grade Self As He Constructs A Bomb
Neil Richard Grayson
In fact, even if I could reverse my reach through the years spanning us and stop you, I don’t think I would.
Opana, Dying, in Baltimore: An Excerpt from Fucked Up
Damien Ark
I return to the kitchen and walk in on Jodeci pulling a syringe out of her neck. She takes the rope from my hands and uses it as a tourniquet for my arm.
girl/rampant
A. Prevett
“But beauty wasn’t enough.”
– Gretchen Marquette
Nurturing as a kestrel checking your sheets for mice I am a woman designed. Because I was designed
it follows that I was
The Rats
Alex Tronson
We hear them in the kitchen, leaping around with meaty thuds, and in the morning Cheryl has barricaded the kitchen door. She tells me the landlord sent someone to assess the situation.
“Okay,” I
Real American Racehorse
Leon Hedstrom
I suppose I was in a conspiratorial mood when I told you that I don’t always feel like a man.
Life Left
Laura Price Steele
The last dozen years of my life could be mapped out by my Craigslist history, moments when I’ve called out into the abyss and some voice has come whistling out of the darkness with the exact inverse of my need.
Big Foot Walking
Jon Berger
Psycho Trev scared the shit out of me. He did the dishes at a Tony’s diner in town. He lived in a singlewide out in the woods and did a lot of shrooms. He had huge parties at his place too.
Hitchhiking Through Florida
Jake Maynard
It was 2007, and the closest that most Americans came to hitchhiking were two new movies: The Hitcher and The Hitchhiker, a lower-budget version of the same plot. In both movies young naïve roadtrippers pick up good-looking psychopaths in the desert. In The Hitcher Sean Bean chains a teen heartthrob between two semi trucks and pulls him apart at the waist.
Three Poems
Anis Gisele
young girls walk alone
at night and
laugh from their bellies, sing
in jungle gym voices
to cradled stars
Splitting
Katie Culligan
There is a loneliness to many things, I am finding: there is a loneliness to sidewalks, to tea bags, to guest bathroom wastebaskets. This hickory wood sits like concrete in my hands; there is also a loneliness to interacting with materials, materials that can’t know what kind of end they’re meeting.
On Being Outside of the Body
Danielle Shorr
On a bench outside the classroom on our fifteen-minute break, I close my eyes and practice the grounding exercise my therapist taught me earlier that week. Facing the rush hour freeway, I try to
Time Lapse
Uzodinma Okehi
(Iowa City 1995)
What I think I want, is Inez . . . Fuck! Now it’s a blur. Drawing. Rather, a dream in which I’m drawing.
Memento Mori, or in Other Words
Stephanie Tom
Canada Goose — the age-old adage of
whether or not a ton of bricks or a ton
of feathers is heavier & the fact that it’s
always the feathers because you have to live
with the guilt on
American Picker in Exile
Cameron Thomas Snyder
I came from the city, was sort of swept away by the bristles of time and love and bowel-upsetting uncertainty, and I am now in a dust pan called Mora County, New Mexico. Dust pan is not derogatory; it’s a just a place where things end up.
Siege Liturgy
Nandini Dhar
On the tip of my tongue, the shadow of your incomplete rebellion
a riverine blister ; a city-street broken into brick-brats,
glued together again to fashion a ceramic gnome, its
rickety
The Alumni Association
Maggie Siebert
“Hey buddy, are you alright?”
The husband looked at me with a smile disguising mild alarm.
“I’m going to be.”
another night in a fucking boring Pennsylvania suburb
Kevin Richard White
The guy looks over and sees me eating my pepper steak. He is a hard blur of hair and grease. For one brief minute, I think he’s going to lasso me or ask me to come over and polish off a bag of pork rinds.




