Adolescent Nesting Disorder by David Scott Hay
Mandy screams her son’s name as pine needles crunch underfoot. Missing for thirty-six hours, the Park Service worries. You can go days without water, she remembers, more without food. Her son is lean, but resourceful. So many mornings he’s helped his younger brother get ready for school. Still, she takes an ogre’s swig from her flask and screams into the forest and listens for a response, a rebuttal, an echo. Anything. Nothing. A pine cone lands at her feet, and then a stick. Her heart now the thrum of a hummingbird. She cranes her neck and sees a large shadow.
Brendan Gillen Recommends: Songs for the In-Between
I can’t listen to music while I write. Even as I sit here writing about the music that either inspired, or is directly referenced in the stories that make up Hang Time, my new collection out now via .406 Press, the only sounds I hear are the gurgle of my own stomach, the scratch of pencil on paper, and the hurl and rush of afternoon traffic on the Brooklyn Queens Expressway outside my window. I’ve DJ’d and collected records for over twenty-five years. I still read Pitchfork every morning, for better or worse. I’m always on the hunt for sounds—new,
Narcotics Anonymous by Jennifer Ostopovich
I’m not quite old enough to stay home by myself while my mom works, so I tag along to my dad’s NA meeting with him. I snag a ball from a large plastic bin on wheels and bounce it off the wall in the opposite corner of the school gymnasium where the meeting is held. No one seems to mind. The men are focused on their meeting and barely acknowledge I’m there. I pretend not to listen while each one details his struggles with addiction. Darren “No-Nose” Gibson is the first to speak. He rubs at the bridge of his
Slug Life by Matthew Dexter
I blow blunt smoke of Unicorn Poop in the shape of brontosauruses through my tracheotomy hole. My son Connor is a gangsta rapper. Connor rocks relentlessly on our rickety porch swing, guzzling cans of Coors Light, spitting rhymes to the beat of the squeaky double-loop chain. His Mormon friends listen intently, bopping their skulls with the wizardry of worldly tweakers. Connor can catch a sunburn from the refrigerator lightbulb. His flow is smoother than a baby-oiled boob and colder than a clew of earthworms. Connor’s rap name is Cocaine Cul-De-$ac. His YouTube channel bankrolls cases of Coors Light, gaudy gold
A Day In the Life by Kaylee Howard
I am watching men kill pedophiles in Walmart online while my mother cooks dinner. I guess they don’t kill them directly — a self-inflicted shotgun spray to the skull will do them in after two thousand comments about his texts with minors and allegedly small penis appear in the comments. It doesn’t make the local news because they aren’t allowed to put suicides on the news. My mom got the recipe for the pasta she is making from a blog that insisted on inserting ten paragraphs of the creator’s life story before mentioning a single ingredient. I’m not sure if
Chatting with the Meat Puppeteer: Ben Gross interviews Hannah Smart
Hannah Smart’s debut novel Meat Puppets (Apocalypse Confidential, 2026) is a metafictional romp through the lives of people who know they want more without being entirely sure of what they want more of. Weaving her way through drug-use, acting seminars, and a celebrity-based stock exchange where people can put up real money in the hopes of cashing in on the soon-to-be-famous (or-not), Smart crafts characters whose lack of self-transparency makes them as relatable as they are complicated, as charming as they are repulsive, and as touching as they are fantastic—then she puts them through the wringer. Like all great works of experimental fiction, Meat Puppets’ formal fireworks
by Mike Topp
$25 | Perfect bound | 72 pages
Paperback | Die-cut matte cover | 7×7″
Mike Topp’s poems defy categorization. That’s why they are beloved by seamstresses, pathologists, blackmailers and art collectors.
–Sparrow
