art by Loralee Clark

by Foster Gareau

DE FRAGILITATE EXPERTORUM: A MAD LIB TOWARD THE CLASSIFICATION OF MAN

FIELD FORM / DO NOT ARCHIVE INCORRECTLY

STEP 1 — SELECT DESCRIPTORS (CHOOSE EXACTLY TWO):

porcelain / brittle / fragile / performative / ceramic / hollow / porous / breakable / calcified / tender / cracked / thin / heterosexual / caucasian

(write both in the first blank)

STEP 2 — SELECT SPECIES (CHOOSE EXACTLY ONE):

homo didacticus / scholaris grandiloquus / expertus maximus / eruditio absurdus / professorius pompatus / doctorus loquacius / homo masculus

(write in the second blank)

STEP 3 — COMPLETE THE SPECIMEN:

(                                                        

art by Loralee Clark

by Reagan Davis

Most people have abandoned the old gods, but not my family. We understood that all we had come from our patron’s protection; to deny it was to defy common sense, to abandon reality. As a young girl, I embraced His salvation with such rigidity that even now, so many years later, He follows me everywhere I go. His teachings are branded on my bones and His voice continues to whisper in my ear whenever I feel alone.

My stepmother was a gifted prophet.

art by Gretchen Gales

by Lila-Josey James

Content warning: LGBTQ murder

I’m not dead yet, and the drive is beautiful. We’re on a bright country road. A horse trail really. As children, my Mother told us four to be safe back here! Our county’s roads are ancient Powhatan paths, which themselves were once simple deer trails. Now, there are large gravel rocks where pavement might be in a decade or two.

Great dust clouds kick up behind Randy’s tires.

image courtesy of the Public Domain Review

by Andrea Rehani-Estes

I was born where the map ran out of patience — first breath taken on a sidewalk that owes nothing to Ashur, in a country that mangles my name into something it can pronounce without effort.

My mother calls me in her mother’s language and I answer in a third language neither of us chose.

This is the country I was born in. This is not the country I am from. I have been trying to say this my whole life in a grammatical construction that does not exist in either tongue.