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LITTLE CLOUD by Magda Phili

July 26, 2024

Wouldn’t it be good if I could for a moment close my eyes and find myself in a new scenery where nature plots towards a personal renaissance, a scenery in which I would be able to switch off this painful backlog of asymmetry in my life; lack of funds and lack of kindness, and lack of this and lack of that, lack of that mesmerizing color of the sky like in a Vermeer painting, or any sky of any painting or any sky on earth under which I can walk free from tormenting clouds of thought that make me a prisoner and a punisher pressing me to provide solutions that I don’t have. I can only be responsible for my own actions; but then again, that is the problem. Actions can have devastating, dramatic repercussions even with best intentions, even with love and because of love. Gallantry buried with bare hands, puzzle pieces that won’t fit anymore in a puzzle that was once immaculate.Wouldn’t it be good if for a moment I could be a seed buried into new soil where the grass is freshly cut, and the water masks the green with delight and lucidity or perhaps I could be given a new chance and become a little cloud over your tears or a birdhouse for the little warrior that is you who got its wings halved in its attempt to fly through ferocious winds.

STUMP REMOVAL by Andrew Graham Martin

July 21, 2024

I saw a sign for stump removal and found myself wishing I had a stump that needed removing.Or, more exactly, I wished that should I ever have a stump that needed removing I’d see a sign like that one. Or, put yet another way, I wished that in my life I could see the things I need to see right when I need to see them. Not before, and not after.

DAD FIGHTS by Matt Rowan

July 20, 2024

“Sometimes dads fight,” Dad says. “It’s just a thing we have to do sometimes.” That’s how Dad explained it to me the first time, and he hasn’t bothered explaining it in any greater depth since. Every spring my dad starts preparing to fight again. He spends long hours in the garage with his misshapen Everlast heavy bag he bought from DICK’S Sporting Goods many years ago. “It does the trick,” he says, bareknuckling it with even more gusto. He’s fighting the same fight he’s been fighting since I was born, something about some kind of disagreement that nobody really remembers the details of, but my dad has never forgotten, and is not willing to let go. It’s not totally clear who he thinks he’s fighting, either. He only ever referred to them as his “adversaries,” adding that they “need to be taught a lesson,” and “soon we’ll all know who’s the better man.” Then beginning on June 21st at dusk, he sets off to go fight. He might not be home till morning, he tells us. He might be a little bruised when he gets back, but he insists I’m not to worry about him too much. This is all simply what he must do.Mom has said it’s best to let him have this. “Try not to make a big deal out of it,” she has said. “It’ll only fuel his will to fight all the more if you do.” But it’s not as though Dad can be stopped even if we all wanted to stop him. He becomes a living rampage. I just go about hugging him every night, the same as always, wishing him luck. I always remind him I’ll be there to dab his wounds in the morning.

2000s MOVIES ARE AS OLD NOW AS 80s MOVIES WERE IN THE 2000s by Tanner Armatis

July 14, 2024

Dallas Jones tweeted. The fear washed my wrinkles in goosebumps. I Know What You Did Last Summer now as predictable as rain. I am my brother maxing out his credit card. American Psycho is being remade. I am my father wondering about the vote. Idiocracy now a prophetic tale. I am my mother cleaning dishes for different reasons. Lord of the Rings lives on forever. I am the door to other lives. I scrolled.

WE DIDN’T EVEN NOTICE THE ASTRONAUT by daniel joseph

July 13, 2024

we didn’t even know we were in a rickshaw-type town, but it was a good thing we were, being out of time & money & the rickshaw seeming quicker than walking & like a pay-what-you-can type operation. we were already confused on so many levels – in a real uncertain bind, our heads bouncing along the ground behind us. we didn’t even notice the astronaut when we climbed aboard & about sat on him – as little as he was. but he said he didn’t mind the company, that he was just riding around for the ride of it & that is when he told us about being an astronaut & all. he looked more like a tree-topper to us. he didn’t have a suit on or boots or a patch or one of those hats they tend to wear, but he went right into telling us about being the only composer to ever see the sunrise from the outside of a spaceship on the other side of the moon – about how he had been sent to space on a singular mission to write a symphony about what it feels like up there, an opera about what it looks like up there, a fugue about what it is up there & that in a roundabout way was why he was here on this rickshaw; or, at least, that is what we think he might have said, the rickshaw being a bumpy, noisy ride & us not really hearing well to begin with & worrying about when we should jump off on account of us forgetting just where our stop was or if these things even had stops or what it was we truly owed.

THE SEWING KIT by Chad Sullivan

July 12, 2024

Grandma spoke to ghosts and refused her dentures. She’d shit herself and call us thieves. She said her dying was taking forever and that Grandpa stopped loving her, and both those things were true, but only because Grandpa was dead. At sundown, she’d turn werewolf. She’d call me Donald and flash her gums. I’d go to the garage, disturb Grandpa’s tools, taste corrosion; thumb old magazines, and smell decay. I’d sit amongst rot (avoiding the rot in Grandma’s brain) and tie knots in Grandpa’s sewing kit just to feel closure.Grandma’s mouth puckered like an asshole. She’d eventually miss Mass, but never her coffee.

AND SOMETIMES IT FEELS LIKE TIME IS RUNNING OUT by J.R. Chapple

July 7, 2024

We look at houses with acreage and discuss their merits, knowing we can’t leave our jobs in the city. Talk like we have a second life to live. We stand in an open field, dark like it never is at home. The Milky Way appears as a band of light in the sky.

TIGER NIGHTS by David Schuman

July 6, 2024

On tiger nights she wants sex as soon as she gets home. Even if you’re right in the middle of making dinner, no matter if the sauce is just setting up or the souffle must come out of the oven. “Who makes souffles anymore?” she asks. What can you say? This is a woman who’s been tending big cats all day, mucking out their habitat while they pace back and forth in their holding cells, running dry tongues over four-inch incisors as they ogle a pallet of deer-legs thawing in the sun. On the days when she’s on capybara duty, or wrangling the giant tortoises, it isn’t like this. Those nights, she pours the wine and does the dishes. Afterwards you watch bingeworthy television in matching flannel and then make a tidy sort of love before washing up and going to bed. Tiger nights are different. It’s not that you mind, so much. Who would? But there’s something about the brightness of her eyes as she tears off your clothes, the way she doesn’t care when a glass on the nightstand, knocked by a wild elbow, shatters across the hardwood, an event that the next frantic, sweaty, minutes will utterly erase from memory, so that when you rise to retrieve a washcloth you step deeply onto a curled shard from the glass’s rim, which enters your foot and breaks into several pieces inside the wound. It’s a week working with tweezers for an hour a day before you can draw it out. When you do what follows is a pulse of oozy pink. You carry the shard in your palm into the bedroom to show her, but she’s already asleep. You limp to the bedside on your infected foot and lean close to watch the twitching of her lips.

When I fly my suicidal nine year old to DC for neuropsychological testing by Blake Bell

July 5, 2024

All the bodies of water below us are shining circles. They look up at me, like eyes.

SWELL by Lamb

June 30, 2024

We went 0-fer at the tournament, but La Jolla Sports Park has this insanely soft grass, these big ol triangle canopies with shade for days that make it hard to not feel like a winner. But, yeah, on the ride back it was getting dark, and since Jesús and the busdriver are chill, a few of us, just the boys, really, we went to the very back and kicked it, stretched ourselves across the aisle to just vibe for a while, each in his own row. By the way the busdriver smiled at us in his mirror, you could tell he’d have joined us if he didn’t have to drive the bus. Like I said, he’s chill with Jesús. We were a few flat stanleys back there, relaxing, half-sleeping as we listened to the road gentle in our backs. Then Douggie folded himself over the back of his seat, so his arms were loose and swaying, and told us the entire plot of Rosemary’s Baby.Now, as I lie in bed trying to unfocus my eyes to stop a hundred faces from appearing in the ceiling, what doesn’t make sense is how someone like Douggie, nice guy, nice parents, Christian, I’m pretty sure, ends up watching a movie like that, and why he’d bring it up on the bus, when everything was perfectly quiet, just as we’d finished forgetting about our big loss. How could you have something so evil inside of you and not know? I don’t know how that’s possible. Then again, as I rub my swollen shins together, I don’t know why some bruises are dark purple, and others orange.