art by Jacelyn Yap

by Katie Harms

Johnny grew up in a tin can trailer with a father who wasn’t a preacher. But his father still preached, and he drove a van hand-painted with God’s Greatest Miracle, the unborn fetus. Johnny was tall and wiry, and his skin was bad—red all over in these great rough patches that peeled away from themselves as if the skin itself didn’t belong on his tired and stretched-out body. And maybe it didn’t; it itched and broke and across his cheeks beneath his eyes were pustules that should’ve been freckles.

art by Alessandro Avondo

by Alice Russell

One.

Downstairs, parallel grooves are worn into wood floor, kitchen chairs dragged out, pushed back. Between the taxidermized heads of a buck and doe, above the fireplace cold with plywood, a garland of red and gold letters spells MERRY. In the corner, Granny’s portrait as a young woman faces a mirror. And at the mantle, a dusty collection of palm-sized birds’ nests, snakeskins, cobwebbed candlesticks, a newly dead bird soft and small. 

From her studio upstairs, my mother is screaming: “I can’t hear a word you’re saying.” 

"All As We Wish" art by Edward Lee

by Aaron Sandberg

In the driveway, your brother will be burning ants—magnifying glass a tool he will choose to use in other ways than good. He will not come in peace. You’ll read your book on the couch in numbness wishing the universe would nudge you. You’ll wish for wanting. You’ll get your wish.

Above the skyline, a mothership will eclipse the sun, focus a beam, explode the little living things beneath. Some will be spared and abducted. Irony will not be lost.

“The Blue New York Botanical Garden” art by Yuko Kyutoku

by Jessica Payne

	Nothing tastes sweeter than that of the earth, you convinced me, as we stood bent at the hips in the garden that summer. We opened our mouths wide and waited for the stalks to thrust from the soil. We lusted for the taste of tomatoes, eaten raw and ruthless like apples, their red juice running down our arms to show insides reversed. We spent hours there, balanced in different positions, our eyes straining for evidence that the ground had broken and a seed was indeed sprouting from within.

"The Libertine" painting by JoAnneh Nagler

by Stephen Tuttle

Short-Term Planning

Once upon a time, a man looked into the future and saw that it didn’t include him. He wasn’t old, except by the standards of the very young, and had planned on many more years of good health. When he told the woman sitting at the kitchen table with him, she nodded solemnly to indicate that she already knew. He asked: What should I do, now that I have so little time to do it?

"Listen" collage by Tiffany Dugan

by Wendy BooydeGraaff

The morning of my thirty-ninth birthday, my fingertips looked hazy, as if I suddenly needed glasses. When I took off my socks (I always slept in socks, even in summer) my toes, too, were strangely abnormal. Transparent. The toes came back for a few hours on my fortieth birthday, but the day after the obligatory party, other parts of me began to fade in a spotty sort of way. My tailbone, then my left shoulder, the side I slept on. Strange, the sensation of being on the shoulder but appearing to hover above the bed.