Sam Berman
A Searcher’s Guide to Finding Lost Boys
We lost the boy. We’d lost the boy. Dan Guerri’s boy to be exact, but if you lived in our town–where the clocktower rang twice a day, and the Apple Blossom queen had lost her hand when the Quimby kid turned over his truck after homecoming, and the moon often waited quietly above the wildcats, long into the following day…
Jemimah Wei
Ten Ways to Kill a Goldfish
A sure-fire way to assassinate a goldfish without suspicion is to hand it to a child.
Tamara Rogers
A Small Violence of Breath
The pieces of us ripple in the air, souls split like the seeds of a dandelion clock bursting in the breeze. The doorbell doesn’t ring because I took the batteries out of it before it ever had chance to chime.
Scott Garson
Peregrinations
We thought we were making a film about human silence. A shot, from memory: you with a cup of Moroccan mint tea, taking a look at the sunset through the window over the sink where we did our dishes. We thought we were trying to get at things that could not be seen. But who knows.
Christina Tang-Bernas
remember
we arrange soft white bao on a small plate and we bow before it, three times. my sister exclaims when we discover a bite missing, Grandmother has eaten our offering, and we laugh, sing songs arranged around the chilled newly-cleaned gravestone as if we too are bao, asking for Grandmother to consume our love as well.
Robyn Carter
From Fifty-One to Eleven
When you were five the sky looked so enormous it was invisible. Then your big-kid eyes grew in at nine and you saw its shortcomings in a documentary about the Apollo Missions. From space, it’s nothing really, just a webby membrane coating the world in a thin, blue hum. Back then you didn’t think about how it’s all that separates us from never-ending darkness.
Nathan Xie
Places We Don’t Go
I’m going on vacation with a lover for the first time. L’s my lover here. He’s driving, I’m sitting in the passenger seat, and we’re a few hours away from Montreal. I believe there’s magic in the province of Quebec, in everyone else speaking French, in the two of us not understanding a thing together.
Mileva Anastasiadou
When You Get Lost, I’ll Be Your Map
On New Year’s Eve I am the villain in mom’s story. I wouldn’t mind the villain part in anybody else’s story, but this hurts big time, like a huge rock has landed on my chest.
Teresa Milbrodt
Performances
My brother knew the train was coming because it made the ground vibrate in a certain way. We lived close enough to the tracks to feel it, a longer thrum than any other stream of boxcars. He said it was because of the special cargo, elephants and tigers, acrobats and clowns.
Joshua Jones Lofflin
We Have to Go Higher
Sydney: gone. Johannesburg, Miami. Obviously Venice and Amsterdam. Shanghai and Lagos and New York. Los Angeles. All within days of one another, some within hours. The satellite imagery plays over and over, the ice sheet tearing free, the waves visible from space.
Abby Manzella
Contact
My grandfather is momentarily stuck in the middle of his living room, the carpet thick beneath his slippered feet. He has become an awkward statue, a little hunched and leaning forward in a walking pose, like he is waiting for a camera’s click to catch the pretense of an action shot.
Merridawn Duckler
Endless
The only places that comforted me were the thrifts. Seconds, second hand, second thoughts. The store hours were hand-posted and usually wrong. Doors problematic, too sticky or didn’t close properly. You had to push hard or pull soft.
Annie Lampman
Three Lost Songs from an Enslaved Bitterroot Crossing
They climb forever upward, leaving the rivers behind—the Lochsa, Selway, Clearwater. Each step higher into these Idaho mountains makes Sacagawea’s heart thrum the coming home song.
David Luntz
A Defiance of Juxtapositions
Uncle Kev often licked the tip of his index finger and stuck it up in the air when searching for a particular word or phrase. So, after I tell him, “Fuck college, I’m going to make music,” that’s when the damp digit went up and he said…