A pile of skulls.
The vacuum was the wakeup call. It must have started itself in the middle of the night. Smart appliance: great with space, awful with time. Keeping an inhuman schedule. It woke up, overworked, slurped me out from under my topsheet like a tablecloth trick. Left the bed perfectly made. Cascaded into feedback around me. Crosshatch patterns of the basest wavelengths ciliated the carpet, plus intake…
The snowplow operator arrives at the county garage before the storm starts. In the parking lot the sky is grey and angry, and his breath swirls around him in the wind like smoke. Inside, and after making coffee in the little ancient coffee machine, he takes a folding chair out of the closet and sets it next to the window. There is some pride in being the only one awake. The referendum passed to…
By the time I’m home from work, the longest stuffed monkey in the world is hanging its head in my apartment complex dumpster. Seven feet of monkey, beautiful almond fur, four-foot legs dangling with its throat crushed against the rim. “Rough night?” I ask, and pull the car into a spot. Lately we’ve been getting emails from our apartment complex, subject line TEENAGERS, that…
– North & Ashland, Chicago IL Reggie’s alone tonight. She’s sucking on a sucker that she got at this diner, the one her father took her to as a kid, the mural of Elvis Presley and Mickey and all the all-Americans kissing and chewing on french fries, stenching it up with their fat ugly overfed mugs. She’s on less drugs than she’d like to be. Chicago’s where Bill…
Sliced my thumb cutting an onion while liver burns on the stove If it’s not one thing it’s the whole universe All the Band-Aids are kid-sized I put them in a memorable place Same drawer as therapy receipts delinquent student loans The payment plan for the discounted pool with scattergun marks Things are safer without water The kids could spend all day down at the bottom Watching…
I dream of giving up on working hard for a living and instead finding a passion project like designing hats that bring hats back into style for real which will probably never happen because people want to be free and not held down especially on top of the head what they want I think is freedom on a large scale and freedom on a small scale but they also want to be in love which means you are not…
Barbara, [1] It’s stupid to spend my summer drinking beer and knitting wool, warped humidity held, we’re outside and my lemon yellow friend climbs the pergola, her fingers tendril trellis. Wisteria, too, its roots are grounded, the art critic says of allover painting (lattice, nets, rows), in vernacular practices, previously feminized domesticity, non-sexist. [2]…
Take care, stay safe, see you soon, be good, thank you, may your sleepless nights haunt every person who enabled this if not in this life but the next, appreciate you, don’t worry about it, next time, next time. Brian Oliu lives and writes in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Naz Reid is from a collection of works written during the federal occupation of the Twin Cities in 2026.
How an animal might strike when fearing for its life How you can hold disaster in the cup of your hand A bullet, a pill, a resolution How men once tried to navigate the arctic Even their boats no better than splinters The cold a match for everything How when a man searched for lost bodies He found them by imagining how they got lost Following a path yields less than following fear or foolishness…
jellyfish in tanks their tentacles tangled like our lives retired palm reader ashamed of his past claims we make our future massage parlor does happy endings i'm actually sore Cletus Crow is mostly a poet. His latest chapbook, Flying High, is out from New Ritual Press.
I saw a bus run over a man in Chicago. First, the bus jumped the curb. Then the bus squished the man. I remember blood squirted out of the man from a few different places. Then the bus driver stopped the bus. He got out of the bus and looked around at the blood. He seemed confused that there was so much blood. He looked at the blood pooling on the sidewalk and dripping down the curb into the…
At first it was just height, like making sure the basketball hoop where I practice my windmill dunks sits at a relatively impressive twenty-four ribs, or pledging not to date anyone shorter than the national average of just over sixteen ribs tall. But lately I’ve started using ribs to measure everything. When I bought my truck I made the dealer pinky promise it had horsepower equivalent to…
I need you to know I get anxious making phone calls & need a fair amount of warning before social events My biggest hobby is walking my cat & I’m terrified of highways I usually only own one pair of shoes at a time & I’m really bad at keeping herbs alive It’s much too late for me to become anyone else. Sean Cho A. asks you to double tap, comment, and share to give him the small…
to reach my mother’s hometown from my hometown, it takes 2.5 hours by car on a crooked highway carved out of sprawling shale by carved, I mean blown apart with dynamite look closely and you’ll see the hillsides shudder you’ll know you are there when you see shore butting up against a muddy river my grandfather once swam across the river I do not know how old he was, or whether he…
Hidden Movements for Sho Language wants to grow up to be color and color wants to grow up to be sound. When it was a child, politics wanted to grow up to be a firefighter but ended up being fires. When it was a child, fire wanted to be alone in its room away from its terrible father. Everything becomes many of itself as though the world were breaking the mirror of you before trying to put it back…
In the middle of the room is a big hole you and I have been working smooth. We put things in the hole to see how they interact with each other. Dana Chiueh (b. 2001) is calling on you to support the liberation of the Palestinian people. She lives in Minneapolis, where she is a beginner at knowing things and advanced at thinking.
That I’ll recognize you in the coffee shop after all these years, that you’ll see my long scraggly mop and pierced nose as the bell chimes over the door knowing it’s me, and you’ll stand from the loveseat and open your arms. That we’ll refill our mugs until our fingers jitter, our hearts race, until the baristas side-eye us near closing, two women on the wrong side of…
Well , well , someone says. Well, well, well, someone else replies. Well, well, well, well, here we are, someone’s dad inevitably continues. It goes like this for hours. We forget we came here alone with our empty buckets. We forget that we came here hoping to be healed. Sarah Carson 's writing has appeared in The Rumpus, The Slowdown, Electric Literature, HAD , and elsewhere. You can read…
I like to ghost watch as I nurse my scotch. It's funny, scotch made me cough and sputter when I was a person but the burn is nice now—the warmth makes you feel alive. The bar is crowded tonight. Hit & Run Victim is arm wrestling Bungee Jump Splat (he tried to be known as Thrill Seeker but we were all too hung up on the splat.) Choked on a Chicken Wing While Living Alone is sitting at the…
If the book I’ve been eyeing is unexploded ordnance, and if Peter and I are doing tequila shots at Flaming Saddles, and if Kaylee from work tells me that my openness makes her feel safe, and if I remember watching Almodóvar that Easter with Bob O, and if I’m working the golf fundraiser in rainbow nails, and if the gay cousins outnumber the straight ones, and if everyone in Ptown…
We moved in February, left all the cars parked along on E 11th street, lumps under Manhattan snow. Rented a McMansion in the ‘burbs, filling the carpeted bedrooms up with unauthorized subletting roommates. Jake joined a band, which played covers of John Mayer songs and Wagon Wheel at bars in Austin and Shreveport. Jake, who played cello and didn’t love me anymore. None of us had jobs.…
Two boys run through the backyard, climbing over the steel fence, their hands on the rusted beam, the clang bruising their knees. The first one inside gets a prize. Two boys run on the sidewalk, near the high school, sweating through their tank tops and shorts, trying to be All-American. One more race to graduation. One more letter to get out of this narrow town. Two boys run on the subway…
But he watched the whole thing. Michael Pershan lives in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife and three beautiful kids and some beautiful books and a recently purchased bag of cashews.
I A Poem from the Perspective of the Carolina Wren Who Just Left My Window, and Had Been Making Alarm Calls Directly at Me for like Five Straight Minutes While I Lay Down on The Floor yeah that’s right eat dirt, guy get outta here, you sad nerd I hate you II A Poem from the Perspective of the Carolina Wren Who Just Left My Window, and Had Been Making Alarm Calls Directly at Me for like Five…
Zuexius, a Greek painter, died of laughter. The Bluebeard of Gambais was killed by guillotine. Joseph Haydn, the famous classical musician, died after a long illness but his head was stolen by two men who bribed his gravedigger and has not since been found. William Wallace—a Scottish knight who lived in the 13 th century—was hanged, drawn and quartered. However tantalizing it may be to…
Can you call my mother? Can you lie to her? I would do it myself but she knows me inside out—she could have been a detective in another life, the way she used to catch my lies (sometimes still does) when I was younger. I hated it. I could never understand how she did it. I hated how she saw through me. I told her I scored an A+ but she did not buy it for one second. I told her I liked coming…
So She’s mad because He drinks too much well not just that he drinks too much but that he lies about it. When she asked what happened to the tequila in the fridge he stood there looking for it like he didn’t know exactly where it went. This is how Haley catches me up anyway since I dozed off watching. We’re at either end of the couch we bought together years ago. It’s linen…
The pigeon is back and I have named him Gerald which my therapist says is a form of attachment and I said yes that is correct I am attached to Gerald he has information. He has the look of someone who has been sent. I have started leaving bread on the sill not as an offering exactly but as a gesture of good faith, a way of saying I am open to whatever this is, I am a reasonable person who is…
To lie in the mud first in childhood and later, eternally To watch a former love grow old from behind a dog's Instagram account To buy the bottle for its label and laugh at the first sip To divorce your pain from your personality and find that nothing remains To speak kindly to yourself (but only out of spite) To manage expectations and still say, I love you To envision a future held by arms…
Theo Nguyen is a video game archivist, librarian, and unaspiring poet. His work appears on Waffle House receipts and the occasional sticky note. He begrudgingly lives in Atlanta.