ALL THE BEES IN CALIFORNIA ARE DEAD by Piper Gourley
I’m in California now, where bees die in the light. Where everybody dies first, then lives forever.
SEX, OR by Brett Milam
Unbeknownst to you, you were in a ménage à trois with me and depression and I was only able to pleasure one of you.
CORPORATE CHAD by Miss Unity
My profile was very clear. In my photo my lips were puckered, my eyes narrowed seductively. Rose emojis meant I wasn’t giving freebies. I talked a big game on the app, but I had only turned one trick so far and had no idea what I was doing.
OMENS ASIDE, I KENNED IT WOULDN’T LAST by Gabriela Denise Frank
The chugging train slowed, then sighed to a halt over the England-Scotland border, the so-called station a mere strip of platform engulfed in endless verdant meadow dotted with clots of creamy sheep.
POLAROIDS by Mila Jaroniec and Cory Bennet
Why waste energy saying you know what I mean in five separate words when you can smush them together and let them fall off the tongue like your drunk ass down the stairs after several bottles of MD 20/20?
COUNTDOWN TO MOONLIT ROSES by Ange Yeung
I am lost in a sky of turbulence and haze—and to be lost is to never be home. Today is the first day of the year; it is also the first year you are not around.
THE KEYS TO IGNITION by G. R. Bilodeau
I gripped a dirty pint. Sometimes I hold a glass and feel the urge to grip it till it breaks. This was one of those times.
CRUSH by Kelsi Lindus
On the white sand, I stand with a man who doesn’t love me and we watch a bald eagle–big as a boy–bent over something bloody.
STAYING CLEAN by Megan Premo
The foamless rectangle was greenish-blue, an institutional color, not a tropical one, and it smelled like something meant to clean dishes or toilets or floors, not human hair, not fourteen-year-old girls’ bodies.
OYSTERS AT THE FAMILY FARM by Jo Unruh
The old say to the young: 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘭𝘥 𝘪𝘴 𝘺𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘰𝘺𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘳. And when the old men speak these words, they are sincere, because the world has been delivered unto them, and the world is now theirs to bestow.