For those Sunday afternoons caught between doing nothing and everything,
for the insomnia-driven, for the wanderers and wonderers,
for the unwritten stories of a blank page: please—tell us your story.
“She takes a step backwards, then another one forward, makes a comment about being sure to check the stove. And could you please turn up the heat, she says, her words soft, cracked. We don’t want things to get colder in here.”
By Yash Seyedbagheri
“His favorite stories to tell were about the crew and the passengers he never met. / That plane was arriving from Paris, bringing home a family of four exhausted / from their two-week lavish vacation. He fueled my imagination and I / took flight.”
By Thaina Joyce
“Fortune favors the ferocity now, so I breathe / and I breathe and I tell you I’m sorry / for that thing I said in a different car on a different day / with a different series of skies painted above us.”
By Kayla King
“The wheels of the cart start to make a turn down the aisle and, if the timing is right, they’ll run straight into the cart of the man who is ransacking the French-fry supply. I hold my breath. My heart pounds. The sound of metal carts crashing is the sweetest I’ve ever heard.”
By Cecilia Kennedy
“In that moment we were our own anomaly, / a fashion week of withering kindling. / We lay in bed daytime California wildfires, / two deviled eggs and a double entendre.”
By Casey Aimer
“It’s always cabbages, fields upon menacing fields of them. The stench / of their leaves sweating in the sun makes a little bit of sick claw its way up. I swallow / it back, just like I always do, and it’s fine because everything tastes better with watermelon.”
By Betsie Flynn
“Letters and words carry energy because they are signposts to greater meaning. Courtland had a way of drawing me closer to the law, eventually testing my strength as a vulnerable witness in the courtroom.”
By Victoria Heartwood
“Because how many more years can we go, really, before the fudge kitchen closes, the “WELCOME TO THE GUN SHOW” muscle tanks disappear, the ocean chokes in plastic, or we’re all too old to love it anymore?”
By Lucy Levin
“His secretary tells me in her querulous voice that it’s entirely up to me which one I want. I don’t believe her: it’s entirely not up to me. We unwittingly do what has been prescribed for us. We never have a choice in the matter, just the vaguely comforting illusion that we do.”
By Brian Coughlan
“And now I’m still going. I tread on down this endless highway with only my feet to guide me, as the stars above me grow unsteady. They tremble every so often, as the moon fades out and loosens its grip on the skies.”
By Ainara Ibarrondo
“On the farm, / she has me place / the yellow flower / on my timid, / city slicked tongue. /
It is delicate and sweet. / Are you eating squash blossoms or stars?”
By Abby Bland
“A lifetime ago, before the earth tiptoed around the sun, I sat by the fire with a book in my hands. It was a book
about oceans, salt, and old gods reaching their hands into the new world.”
By Alyson Tait
“After so much stalking, / after so much waiting, my body’s secrets traverse the sky. / I shiver with the
lightness / of lost lies, wanting more, a bird nest untangled.”
By Lynn Finger
“we dance around the words for weeks, / sidestepping goodbye in the hallway / because i still run into you in the kitchen every morning / and watch you making toast. / you cross your arms as the bread darkens, / morning sunlight stitched into your ponytail.”
By Zoe Cunniffe
“if butterflies were / climatologists, we would have solved global warming by now. if we too sensed everything in the / air around us, if we let the earth move our bodies instead of changing the ground beneath our / feet, we would be a planet of beautiful things”
By Maia Joy
“He runs his hands down braille arms, rests his fingers inside hand-painted indents stretching taut against my hips.
You’re so beautiful, he says, why haven’t we done this before?”
By Magi Sumpter
“My mothers side of the closet empty, the shoulders swallow sympathy for the living. I hate / talking... the palm tree watches me as it suffocates with smoke. Does the rain know it / evaporates? I hope they don’t let me die at my funeral.”
By Tanya Castro
We group all our writing by the month in which they were published;
to view work from previous months, check out our archives page.
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