Every spring, the inimitable Sam Berman gathers the finest writers in the land, and me, for the StoryFort Festival in Boise, Idaho. One of the writers who made the strongest impression on me at the 2025 festival was Drew Buxton. After one of his readings, I pinned him in a corner and bombarded him with questions about his work-in-progress, a novel titled Daytona Teddy Riggs (Hub City Press, 2026). It’s about a promising football star who gets himself kicked off his college team and then pursues the World’s Strongest Man title. To say I was excited about the prospect of

I was actually at the thing nobody wanted to be at.Taking pics with Asher there like I needed somebody to know. As if my dealer were the whole globe to me reading her poems like it was just me there on this rooftop but all the while in my periphery was a monogamous mosaic blur that pursed my lips into a neutral non-expressive smile moving my face not even a little and still it became most of what I could focus on but never really see. What I came to then and there was a conclusion about poetry that you

Your mother found the place on the website that back then seemed so novel and now is considered low-key evil. “It’s on the second floor,” she’d said. “They say there’s no elevator but that shouldn’t be a problem.”  As the two of you roll your bags through the streets of Brighton, you notice other people moving in festive clumps. Someone told you at some point that Brighton was a party town, a fun fact you had forgotten until just now. You and your mother are wrecked from the red-eye, and as you follow the map on your phone, leading you

I always thought I lacked something, a fundamental muscle or chord. While other children shrieked in delight, in terror, in exhaustion, I remained mute and unblinking.  At five years old, I was questioned, gently, by concerned adults.  I stared at them—they stared at me, a Grand Canyon of misunderstanding between us.  I refused to answer stupid questions. I heard the lie from their lips, saw the masks on their faces, and I was terribly sad for these exhausted, fragile adults.  I said nothing. The suggestion was made, that I would be better suited to the special education classroom.  This was

I despise smokers. With their receding gums and teeth like overripe bananas going black with spots. Never cheap out on anything that separates you from the ground: shoes, mattresses, and your teeth. Or their Duchenne smiles with perfect teeth and imported memory foam mattresses I couldn’t afford even after several months’ salary. *** After graduating from a liberal arts college, I made cold calls from lead lists purchased from companies that trafficked in personal data at an unlicensed real estate company. The office had a half-man-sized fishtank glowing with blue light next to the front desk. The small thermometer always

I lay here in my small bed missing him and want to tell him so. I believe he misses me too. Though, if I were to tell him how I miss him, I imagine he would respond in kind and that I would not believe it. Mike Guajardo-Bennett is a queer Mexican-American poet and short fiction writer. His work has appeared in The Cloudscent Journal and October Hill Magazine, among others. He grew up in Arlington, TX and currently lives in Manhattan, where he collects vintage film posters and dreams of his home state.