Tidal Ah, hope—featheredlike dinosaurs,now extinct. To think,some may have been rainbow-hued,others iridescent blue. The wave we wanted never reached the shore—just wave after wave of lies.I pick up a stone, ah, a fossil—nothing rare like a wishbone that aides birds with flightbut a shell embedded in sediment rock. I skid it across the thin skin […]
Locker Room Prayer I. head bowed,rows of lockersto my righti want noi need to bein prayerclenchedfingers lacedGod on my mindplease, i need tochangebefore it’s too late i shuffle pastthe boys changingflashes of fleshi don’t want to see.the good Catholic boynot thinking ofstubbled jawlines,dark hair. asking, if you can moveum, i need toget to my locker […]
Girlchild, I bought the pots and pans on my ownwith no one at the register. At home with no one to registerI was alone, the groceries spoiled. I was alone as the groceries spoiled,greened and moldered. My mother called once. Once, I heard her maiden name called,strange, and furtive like another life, pressing between another […]
Seeing Clearly Eloise sat cross legged on her single, unmade bed, illuminated by the soft fairy lights strung haphazardly around the walls. A peace lily, elevated by a stack of dog-eared books, drooped forlornly in a corner. Her housemate, Cayla, was perched behind her, curler in hand. Thanks to Cayla’s ministrations, Eloise’s usually flat locks […]
piggy After we got married, my wife began to eat my hair. I thought it was an eating disorder, but she told me that trichophagia involves eating your own hair and not someone else’s. She said she just couldn’t help herself; apparently, I tasted like chocolate cake. I plucked a hair and tried it myself, […]
The Deer Stand: A Prose Pantoum 1. When November comes, I join my lover in the deer stand, his mittened hand gripping mine from the moment we enter the woods ’til we reach the east ridge, just over an hour before dusk. There, something primal yawns open inside me. From our pockets we unpack cheese […]
Under the Nashi Moon On the coldest morning of January, my mother appears at my door. I had been sick with a cold and cough for four days, and her brow crinkles with worry. “Here,” she says, shoving a plastic sack from her favorite Asian market into my hands. “This is for you.” The plastic […]
Bad Immigrant You came so farand Iwant onlyto go back. A. J. Bermudez is the author of Stories No One Hopes Are About Them, winner of the 2022 Iowa Short Fiction Award and a 2023 Lambda Award Finalist. Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, New Ohio Review, and elsewhere. She’s a […]
I warned you that my grandmother wouldn’t like you and that you wouldn’t like her. The first time she saw me wearing a flannel jacket with my hair chopped off, she said oh boy here we go. That’s who we’re dealing with. The man she’s been seeing—he goes by “Hickory Frank”—is soft in ways she […]
If the Sun Exploded, We Wouldn’t Know it for Eight Minutes The summer we found the body, Mark and I got sunburned every day at the green pool at the back of the apartment complex and flipped his skateboard off the curb in the parking lot. We never smelled the salty air from the beach […]
