Barb Johnson worked as a carpenter in New Orleans for more than 20 years before entering the MFA program at the University of New Orleans. While in the writing program, she won a grant from the

Inside, in the unforeseen, where the sounds of dust susurrus, we glimpse rainbowed light above the shadows. Will we ever reach there, we ask?

Wonders I. Wonders we.

Will and I decided to make "Y" shaped slingshot frames and drape an earthworm between the two of them.

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is like every good girl’s fantasy of being bad turned on its head and twisted into her biggest nightmare. Faith (Selena Gomez) has been friends with Candy (Vanessa

Excerpt from Centers for Disease Control: Obesity in Central Florida, February 2019.

Wes Urban, 32 years of age, 298 lbs.

We weren’t always like this. How fat we are is what I mean. Most of

You stare down at the departed. The fulgurites of your heart chattering. She was, man, an episode. An emitter of staggering forked words...

It started that stupid night you convinced me to walk with you over the bridge and along the river. I shouldn't have done that and I knew it—even before we left, I knew it—and I thought to

My boyfriend hit me in the face with a book. It was an accident, his hitting me. He only meant to hand me the book. He meant to hand the book back to me. But my face was in its path, he said.

The twelve stories in Susan Steinberg’s stunning third book, Spectacle, limn the desperate, neon-lit reality we’re forced to confront when we wake up from the American dream. They make me want to

Slowly he became aware he was no longer traveling down his back-entrance staircase.

The clinical term for what happened was a myocardial rupture, which basically means her heart exploded under the stress of her living. I got the call while I was taking a Latin quiz, and I'll

Whatever crop and bung was leftover he burned in a large heap of muzzy smoke and lapping flame and when it was chopped down to ash and live glowing charcoal ember, he drug the spreader over the field, everything still burning and here and there little volcano puffs of flame and the iron wheels sizzling themselves...

Except for the first single-celled organism
preposterously long ago, firecracker snapped
from a vast nothing, the earth is mulch & rot.

A comic about a yak, that may or may not be an anarchist, in a world that is huge and/or the yak may be incredibly tiny.

Maria say she gon' tell me the future. She say she know. Mama taught her, but Maria had that gift, not her mama. The real kind. She'd seen all kinds of things 'fore they happen, like her brother shot dead in that parking lot, she'd seen it all four days before it happened.

What you gon' tell me I don't already know? I say.

“We’re playing Memory Palace. It’s a medieval memory technique. If you need to remember a list of things, you pick a place that you remember well, like your childhood home or your office or your apartment, and you make a narrative...

If I were a room,
I would be transparent.

If it hadn’t been for my day job, I never would have gone to Steve’s Shoes. I was a personal assistant to a famous actor’s wife, which meant I did the errands she didn’t want to be bothered with.

Just in time for the opening bell (or is it more approrpriately an opening toast) of AWP in Boston tomorrow, we present Daniel Torday's "A&W&P." We first ran this story before AWP last

There were wolves near there. Wolves killing sheep. Poetry is dead. He thought. He could lend a hand.

Kathryn was doing all she could to get her son to touch his food again. She wanted him to eat. “I don’t know what to do,” she said to the doctor. “I don’t know what’s wrong.” The pitch of her voice

Happy Birthday   

You push your bike
on the worn pathway
into the bushes.
You enter my apartment
with chocolate cake
and colorful birthday hats. 
You put one on my head
and

A hand over your mouth. A hush in the darkness. It’s the girl, whose name reminds you of another, who you remember marrying in some uncertain future or almost-forgotten dream.

You wake up to the sound of someone smashing white rocks outside your window. Only it's not rocks. You're just in a city made entirely of bones.

The man woke up and walked to the bathroom. He relieved his bladder and looked at himself in the mirror. He looked at the clock. 6:25. He could either go back to sleep or head down to the basement

I read for the same reason that I fish. So I can feel what I can’t see.