Before Advent | Grace Yannotta

"Here, the swellings of hormones and the snarling of menstruation and the growling insecurities have written blatantly into my syntax; and yet, joy too, in mourning and in family and in a simplistic autumn daze..."

The Worms | K. James D’Agostino

"The garden was nothing if not a lesson in death. Brown spots immediately appeared on the leaves of the pepper plants, outpacing even the blooming of the marigolds and reducing half her hopes to diseased compost..."

The Art of Haiku | Ewa Mazierska

"As a teenager Jack suffered from what Freud called ‘the narcissism of small differences’ in relation to his brother. He blew these differences up in search of his path out of Jim’s shadow until he discovered that the differences were in fact huge..."

The Alchemy of the Eye | Ian Goodale

"He felt as if his soul had been seized hold of, gripped tight by the ivory fingers and wrung dry until he fell headlong into the grave, limp and defeated by the obsession inspired by this thing the woman had shown him..."

The Sorrows of the Pelican | Matthew Harder

"I have always dreamed of being a writer and, whether it was a midlife crisis or my destiny knocking, I recently picked up my pen and began to write again..."

TNT | Donald Anderson

"The blast rattled my teeth and rib cage. It pushed on the air in my lungs. In the time it took for the concussed dust to settle, I worried I’d loosened the grid..."