Editors’ Choice: Fred Yannantuono

Emerging Poet So the shithead stays up drinking all night since he thinks he’s Dylan Thomas, and he’s so drunk he can’t begin to read, and now he wants to be backlit. He doesn’t even wait for that, but, turning his back on the audience, begins to bleat how sad he is, how gay he [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Corey Ginsberg

My Quarterlife Crisis I can’t decide what the worst part about my job is. Maybe it’s cleaning the caked, orange urine stains from the inside of the Fabi’s toilet bowl rim. Maybe it’s being hungover from drinking cheap vodka out of a You’re #1 mug alone in my apartment last night while I ignored term [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Bryan Estes

Love is Nothing Like a Rose except that it seems like a good idea at the time, when the back yard is dead and gray, to step out of the dim kitchen into the cold rain, to claw at some mud and bury a few mangled bulbs among the worms, having trivialized (again)   the [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Susan Calvillo

His Secret Garden Mistress Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? With silver bells, and cockle shells And marigolds all in a row. the boy had been trying to pluck me out from underneath the bed, where I hid and refused him he came daily and poked his head down to stare at me [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Sam Lane

Don’t Make Fun of the Deaf A deaf man once told me, with such angry hands—his signals loudly gnashing— I speak in sound asshole listen to me Sam Lane is an English major in Georgia who has been published in The Odredek and On Tap.

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Editors’ Choice: Mira Martin-Parker

As It Is and Ought To Be —Immanuel Kant It must have been painful seeing Truth sprawled out on the page without her dress and powder. She must have looked so undone— under bright lights dissected, examined with cold fingers. In your eyes I had ravaged the maiden and you kicked and screamed like a [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Judy Swann

The Jones Girl Went to Russia Dresser drawers gape like gap-tooth slatterns spilling over with trouser legs, T-shirts, socks. One ear open to the world, the other crammed with an earbud, the conduit of culture. Her cable swings jauntily. In twenty years, she’ll move thirty-six times then like a weed, take root and multiply. In [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Robert McNamara

Anecdote for Fathers Thunk against the patio doors like a furtive acorn saying, I’m here — a sparrow, fallen, shuddered, fell still. Like broken glass, I held it as you stroked it, saying fly birdi, fly. I said, it’s like sleep, as we dug a grave beneath cramped azaleas with two kitchen spoons— like burying [...]

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Editors’ Choice: J.P. Dancing Bear

The Countess no sooner than you don the dress: do the rose petals begin to break away from your hair: for clouds and ship sails: the milk maiden winds: cheeks puffed out: fill them: all the goblins leave their markets: vowed to pursue the ribbons of your hair: rivers, rivers: eddy and swirl: your keepsake [...]

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Editors’ Choice: Jon Sindell

Fig Tree Gazing Morton Vickery needed a friend. Not a wifely friend, he had one of those, nor a soft-handed friend for discussing the market, there were columns of those in his accountancy firm. What Morton dreamed of, as he stared in the mirror and pressed palms together to make his pecs quicken like tiny [...]

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