Meghan Kemp-Gee

I plant runner beans on the eighth floor It strikes me this is the kind of kindnessyou would do to someone else’s body.One month later, lung-shaped leaves have green-stretched and orange-scattershot themselves acrossthe balcony, panting with coiled pleasurein thirty degrees, carbon dioxide- drunk. Meanwhile, I have questions I don’t ask.Will we sink or swim. That’s […]

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S Graham

Waves It was the principal of my high school, or the assistant principal, a teacher, the chaplain, one of them who came to my class and retrieved me. As I rose from my desk, he or she said to bring my bag along, and it was at that moment, or maybe the one before it, […]

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Ivy Raff

Destiny Is Destiny The recliner, that witherednavy dog, pancaked to accommodateEsther & her decay. Its adjustable anglesdulled the blades that sliced her guts. When the doctors said bagels are fine butonly plain, I heard the engine turn coldin my grandmother’s mind – Boy,these are some young doctors, and anyway,what’s a bagel without seeds? When she […]

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Kristina Erny

The Aliens Watch the Mother Dream Tonight’s watching arrests us,makes us think. She bolts in bedsuddenly, her heart mammal, muskrat;she’s feral, a small bird with a smallerheart, she wakes, blinks several timesin the dark. We are silent, studying. Watch her there,as we observe what we know is languageunformed beneath her shallow breathing,notice her thought move […]

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Shana Ross

For All Mankind I assemble shrinesto the porous limestone; corpse of seaspongesundried, scentless; bonerigid around tunnels;ceramics, unglazed—women leak, that is our nature I, myself, still feel the tugof milk, pulling itself through my left breast when the cryof a child catches meaccidentally on a newsfeed weeping the fat ofmy own bodybegging, begging to servein ways […]

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Katie Burgess

The Story of Art We all supported Mom going back to college—that wasn’t the issue. She’d devoted her life to others—raising four sons, filling in at Dad’s shop, keeping grandchildren. At sixteen she’d helped start a labor union at the Friendly’s mayonnaise factory, still the only unionized business in Foote, South Carolina. She deserved something […]

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Jennifer Steil

Last Summer Home Inspired by “What’s Love Got to Do?” by Richard Blanco All that summer I wondered why the gentle green mountains around my parents’ home weighed on me so darkly. In the room my dad cleared out for me, leaving me two empty drawers, I woke in a panic, trying to figure out […]

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