FICTION:

Julia Ballerini • Ultimatum

Her babies, now in their fifties, have issued an ultimatum: live-in aide or retirement home. The two of them sat right there on her new sofa, looked her in the eye. Your choice, Mom.

Sarah Freligh • The Absence of Gravity

Man is about to walk on the moon for the first time and Susan is bent over the toilet in Annie’s bathroom, throwing up the Coke she’s been drinking to keep from being sick to her stomach.

Catharine Leggett • The Melancholia Vine

One of the boys hovers over her and points down at the box. “There a bomb in there or somethin’?” His head blocks out the light and his face comes into view, his beautiful blue eyes fringed with long lashes, though his skin is badly broken out.

Emma Wunsch • Airplanes

Matty is thinking about pot. He’s staring at his math homework, a set of differentiation formulas, and imagining pounds of weed, Ziploc bags stuffed with it like on TV, all crammed in his backpack so at lunch when Jacob and Tyler are all like hey man got that weed, he could be like yeah and then dump it, pound after pound of it, right on the table.

NONFICTION:

Grant Price • On Leave

When my father returned home from exercise, peacekeeping or (twice) war, two people walked through the front door. One was Dad, the man who built spaceships out of Lego for my younger brother and me and taught us how to wire a plug and took us running with him. The other was the Sergeant. We were scared of the Sergeant. He was unpredictable, mean, mocking, aggressive. He could erupt like a bottle of fizzy drink kicked across a playground.

POETRY:

Lynne Burnett • Vanishing Point

all his accomplishments, his suit
of armour falls away, he’s at the mercy

of a titanic amoeba camped on his liver
and the relentless crawl of a pen across paper ...

Robin Carey • Howard Prairie

I saw a yellowed photo once of this same oak
brought from a dove-tailed drawer,
six gutted bucks hanging at dawn
and the old man's hand that held it
almost fleshless over the bone.

POETRY:

Linda Ferguson • O Pioneer

She turned the coffee pot over
in his lap and left, the screen door
slamming shut so hard
the tails of her bright
apron bow flapped
like a gesture, a
thumbing of the nose ...

                            • First Impressions
It's my mother's third time, and she says her labor
just feels like cramps or the indigestion she gets
from a bowl of popcorn and a bottle of orange soda
    pop.

Donna Isaac • Roasting Vegetables

Once, briefly in Bruges, I sampled crispy fries
served with mayo and tried waffles with whipped
    cream.
I remember castles, rocky walls, cold rain.

                        • The Golden Ratio
Spiraling depression was given as the cause
          in the obituary about the lonely boy
                    who finally gave in.

                        • Entrepreneur Sans Wall
Alma and her son make a nightly raid
into El Paso to buy dozens of Krispy Kreme
donuts and then go back to sell
them from the trunk of her coche
to citizens who like plain glazed.

Catherine Montague • Fire Followers

... dreaming for years about the next fire
each Emmenanthe seed, flat, wide-elliptic,
brown, surface honeycombed,
holding the memory of the landscape.

Jonathan Travelstead • god Particle

... The solution to the next riddle yields
spider silk glimmering between all things. How perilous
     it is  
learning this world ...

                                           • Contact
Astral dogs, baying my name from the colossus crane
I motored past, amniotic with grease. Twenty-stories tall,

the dragline's boom tent-poled the sky, its pool-sized
     bucket
barely holding the earth down. Common monsters calling
    me through
oxide, through clay.

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