Author: bukem reitmayer

Alaisha Verdeflor

That they haven’t built a language from my name yet.

Next question?

Aidan Aragon

in this poem Jesus reads philosophy aloud and

Gabriel kisses the soft spot of his inner elbow

A.A. Scalfano

black out the windows
but the storm is in the house

A. R. Zarif

something that took so long to put to bed

& now a quieting

A. Mustafa

i know what you choose
kisses my feet goodbye

Aggie Zivaljevic

For ever so long, Iskren Syeveratz had watched over the island’s elders, who without their offspring were like oysters without pearls.

Abigail Oswald

I don’t remember their fights from my youth, only their aftermaths. That day I sat between them, the pew hard against my back, the air heavy, the atmosphere Baptist. When we all stood for the closing hymn, Dad’s mouth never shaped the words. He stood tight-lipped and stoic, his hand a weight that never left my shoulder. I caught Mom looking at him once, holding her stomach, like she was protecting something.

Aarti Monteiro

They sat at the dining table to eat, and she was glad for the conversation. It was as though no time had passed. Nilim looked older and more mature, and yet he was exactly the same as she remembered. The power went out with a crack as they finished dinner, and darkness flooded the apartment.

Adnan Mahmutović

Calendars. They screw you up. Not your parents, mind you, calendars.

Amalie Kwassman

still a song caught in her pancreas
of the men of her youth

Alison Kronstadt

& what good is perspective if the past is drowning? If all you can do is sink?

Ali Rachel Pearl

Today I drank the oldest lake so that I could recover the parts of myself that are lost to a time before I was ever here on this earth full of lakes.

Alexandra Martinez

“They put it on the stove and wrapped it up in a tortilla! Can you believe that shit?”

Amanda Oosthuizen

I find the white-eyed bird with the red beak halfway up a column of rock, and although he is dazed by the gathering heat of the day, I manage to coax him into the cage without difficulty. He is around a metre in height. He has grown since we last met and takes up most of the cage. I would like to feed him but I haven’t seen any mice for a while.

Amanda Boyle

Everything was dark for a really long time. Her mind tried to push through in the morning, but couldn’t even then. She finally woke up surrounded by red vomit, and considered herself lucky she’d fallen asleep sitting up on the couch. She said “lucky” one or two times before it became meaningless. She was chasing God.

Allison Pinkerton

My sister Evie said her week of rest was Biblical, pre-ordained, saintly. She’d gone diva after becoming a YouTube influencer famous for faith healing. Dealing with internet trolls for six months, she said, entitled her to a week of watching Buzzfeed Tasty videos on Instagram while wrapped in a fuzzy pink blanket.

Alice Maglio

She hates the locker-room shower stalls at the YMCA with the curtain that only covers most of you. She hates that someone could stand in just the right place and peek in. Like those ladies who walk around naked. Maybe they want her to be naked, too.

Ali Raz

Two boarding passes and I’m sitting on a sofa in this airport, waiting for a plane again. I feel my fear in the palm of my hand. The old exhaustion. Familiar churning in my gut. It’s time to leave. I can’t wait.

Alexandria Narae Young

As my mother poured Miyoung a glass of juice, my father turned on the television, and I saw the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.

Alexandra Itzi

The summer between high school and college I worked in dairies along the border between Texas and New Mexico. I was a milk tester with my sister. For three months I smelled like misery.

Alexander Carey

‘Nobody drives drunk,’ Joey’s dad said to the crowd through a children’s karaoke mic. He held some bowling trophy he’d won. ‘All keys come to the key-master.’ He passed his trophy-bowl around like the collection plate at church.

Angela F. Qian

Who knows how the body chooses to keep
and to discard.

Andrew Kahn

—It didn’t hurt much (like a shot from doctor) but feels a little weird physically now but that is probably definitely psychology

Angie Sijun Lou

Back in your bedroom there was still a snoutless rat and a dishwasher filled with styrofoam plates.

Angie Lee

The little dog clusters the sheep tightly around her master. Her eyes are perfect circles. She knows she’s done a good job.

Angela Barton

I still haven’t finished my screenplay, and I have to admit I don’t know how. Why is my life important enough to write a script about? Why is anyone’s?

Andrew Cothren

Almost the end of our first day out and no one’s looking for us, far as we know. If we ever went to school or went into town more than once a month or were allowed past The Fence, someone may have noticed.

Ananya Kumar Banerjee

A murder. In a town. Big enough to be entertaining but small enough that everyone knows either the perpetrator or the victim.

Analeah Loschiavo

As it happened: You were hired to attend to a dinner party held in a lakeside cabin on a foggy night. You arrived alone and were instructed to bring your own cleaning supplies. For this inconvenience, you will be reimbursed.

Ana Crouch Ureña

We should have known Eduardo would be the type to tattle. He was a hyperactive, annoying child with a tendency to boss us around, although at 8 he was younger than me by a year and had been held back in school.

Ana Maria Jomolca

But I am tired, he has exhausted me and I understand now how parents just give in and buy their kids bad ideas and feed them sugar and let strangers watch them while mommy ducks into the local pub at high noon for a quick shot of numb. And it’s in the sale bin for $5.88.

Anna Meister

Oh, let me sleep. Home is
the sound of your breathing.

Anna Kelley

After the second bomb, the trees came to life

Annabel Graham

Lola always drives. She likes to be in control. I let her have this.

Annabel Graham

It is a grey day and the fog creeps over the mountains like cotton stuffing spilling from a couch a bad animal has scratched.

Ani Tatintsyan

I walked past him and he complimented my purse. I was carrying a box-like silver Ivanka Trump purse, I smiled and thanked him for the compliment. He said the purse looked like a briefcase and that I reminded him of a beautiful government spy, (I fell for it and him, then and there). In letters he would write me years later, he would mention the Ivanka Trump purse as a moment of importance in our relationship and by the time Donald Trump became president I wished that I never bought the bag and never met Ray.

Angie Sijun Lou

The sun feels like it’s raining pin pricks down all over my face. And overhead, the clouds are like tired panther gods reclining in the sky.

Angie Sijun Lou

Some muffled auditory convulsion comes from the adjacent window, shades drawn shut and Christmas lights lit up just to ignore the summer.

Anne Rasmussen

Correct him, even when he yells at you. He’s always been absent-minded, but this is different. Stand your ground when he denies it. It really happened. You were there. He was there, just last week. Last Monday, to be exact. Show him where you wrote it on the calendar.

Annabel Lang

The other dyke was talking to the father of the bride. I put myself at his elbow, turning my face towards him and my body towards her. He paused their conversation to introduce us. “Annabel, have you met my niece Other Dyke?”

Anna Linetskaya

Unlike me, she never felt like she was meddling when she spent hours on the phone and, later, on various video-chats, trying to keep abreast with the life in our hometown.

Anna Kaye-Rogers

If she was a color, she would be lavender and the sky at dusk. She does not contrast with the dusky oranges and sun-streaked pink tones. She compliments them.

Asdrubal Quintero

The first thing we admit to ourselves as human beings
is that we have no idea how the world is going to end.

Asa Drake

I stopped complaining,
and it was agony.

Arseny Tarkovsky

I wouldn’t envy what someone else had.
And I would never—really—come back home.

Arriel Vinson

Our own kind of hot-as-hell, beautiful, brown home.

Antonio Lopez

with an adobe shell that quietly endures
the heat of this dunya

antmen pimentel mendoza

grindr tells me how far i need to ride my bike to a top 
emoji eggplant emoji eyeballs emoji peach emoji but

Arielle Bernstein

The day before I found out we had ordered Chinese, which we ate out of plastic cartons, with plastic forks and knives, so that cleaning up was easy and that when we were finished enjoying our food we could just throw everything away.

Ariel Saramandi

Elise shook her head in reply. ‘You know, maybe I was a coward before. But now,’ she smiled, knowing how irritating her next phrase would be, and pleased she had come up with it, ‘but now I feel like my feelings have been cut away.’

Aram Mrjoian

Our fear, then, was that all the swag came with an expectation of high quality. We couldn’t rely on improvisation forever. So on that fourth day, Sanders cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled out to the crowd, “Does anyone have any screenwriting experience?”

Ashely Adams

Meaning, in space, sound starves without touch. You could wail and wail into the empty black of space until your spit froze to your throat, but no one would ever hear it. Silence is golden. Silence is fundamental—gravity, entropy, quiet.

Ashley Miranda

we only know the night by sound. i can’t speak for the aspects that have been diagnosed
as un normal_

Ashley Lopez

When the doors of the Downtown A slide open, college couples exit—ping pong balls of intoxication bouncing into the night. You squeeze into the only vacant seat next to a man with his knees pressed together, oxforded feet crossed. He resides in the middle of a three-seat bench. His navy-slacked thighs press you into the partition.

Ashira Shirali

At arranged weddings as a child, she’d seen potatoey complexions, sagging jowls, mashed plums for noses under sehras, and shivered to think of the day when she’d be on that red velvet stage.

Asha Thanki

I fill my lungs with flavored nicotine and imagine them turning brown and black inside my body – fleshy and soft and shit-brown. I am not good at fantasizing beautiful things. “Someone in my class says there’s going to be a curfew.”

Bella Moses

To hide is different,
takes some puzzling out.

Aya Satoh

now I shoulder the intoxication
the razor elegant

Austin Araujo

K & I ball surrounded by trees
& the faint huff of lightning bolts.

Ben Rawluk

The Lord of the Flies was a different person from Stanley. He wasn’t interested in repeating arguments with Angela. He wanted to prove the scope of his genius; transforming himself into a monster made him feel decades younger and he wasn’t going to stop there.

Belinda Hermawan

I tore up the paper. Coughed to cover the sound. Opened up my phone and played a video on YouTube of two service dogs chasing each other. The ad that played after was for cough drops.

Bailey Pittenger

I think about what a happy vagina might look like, or what it would take to get an answer from someone about vaginal expression that isn’t based on irritation, indecisiveness, or weariness. I say, I wonder when vaginas look happy. No one responds. So I think about a list of physical attributes that are important to me in terms of sexual appeal. Balanced frame, comes to mind.

Ava Wolf

My palms were slick with sweat. I smudged pencil lead across the linoleum, destroying the church, although now it really seemed more like an amalgam of haphazard shapes. There were now two things I couldn’t draw, I decided: cars and churches.

Asiya Gaildon

As a child, I often felt as if my body was sinking. I don’t get this so much anymore, but then, it was real bad. I’d sit on the couch, and my heart would drop, my stomach would drop, and my feet would grow cold. My parents thought that American sensibilities made me an anxious child; perhaps the luxuries of sugary cereal and school clubs were detrimental.

Ayden LeRoux

I never slept in this bed, though at one time I longed to. Instead it was left unconsummated.

Audrey Deng

In a childhood game, one of those outrageously cruel yet absurdly innocent games that only children are capable of, my mother would crush snails to death.

Brittany Adames

Often, when my mother leafs through large, clustered stacks of paper and
prepares them for the shredder, I imagine skin.

Brittany Adames

At night, the thing that sees me in all this
rawness is the forgiveness I do not lend

myself.

Bonnie Chau

Any Chinese character will do, preferably one with lots of tiny strokes and dots.

Bertrand Bickersteth

I know these rivers that flow past me
I’ve peered over their banks and know you do not see me

Brittany Bronson

My mother designed my costume at her nursing home three weeks before Safari Night, and it took her all that time to do the intricate detailing on the removable snout. Yet, best costume went to the guy with an elephant mask tied to his belt. The trunk fell just past his knees. Women leashed him around by it all evening, which most people found hilarious.

Brittany Ackerman

I was writing a movie script. I was taking calls about plotlines and character development in between shifts at the restaurant and singing hymns at Bible study. I was all in, as they say. I was all caught up, as it were. He wanted me to have a good time. When we walked into the lobby, a girl gave us waters with orange peels.

Bridget Brewer

What was family, even? What were friends? Their names, so close together? Moths battered the windowpanes.

Brianna Johnson

Her mom’s idea of good music was Kirk Franklin and Beyoncé. More than once Kenzi found her mother in the living room stumbling along as she tried to “get in formation” or convince Fat Dave to put a ring on it. She even had a shrine to the singer in her bedroom, photos taped along her dresser for “inspiration.”

Blake Sanz

Memorable as that was, he forgot about it after witnessing a stranger dressed in a purple wife-beater and black parachute pants who’d walked straight to him in a café and said, “You never did pay me, but if you still want it, I got that boot in the back of my van.”

Carrie George

“Grandma, I lied
when I asked to help you
make your famous chocolate cake”

Caroline Chavatel

the constellations, how they will expire
one day like curdled milk.

C. Kubasta

I cannot describe the perfect bruises and bite marks on your arm, but Elizabeth Bishop could.

Carson Faust

I was born in Ridgeville, South Carolina, in the house that my mother was raised in, but there were never any pictures of her on the walls. Grandma took them all down when my mama walked out on us. Grandma said she burned them all too, but I don’t know if I believed that. She must have kept a picture of her only daughter. I never looked for it though.

Carly Rosalie Vandergriendt

An ambulance siren moans. Red beams zigzag across the walls of my room, like I’m back at one of the dances my high school used to put on. The ones my mother warned me I’d get pregnant for going to. Now that I am probably carrying Gary’s baby, it seems safe to say that nobody is getting pregnant at those dances.

Cara Lang

I pick a blister off the bottom of my foot and he doesn’t even blink. Maybe I want to be owned. Or maybe that’s the only way I’ve been conditioned to understand desire.

Cassia Hameline

When we were younger, we told time by our favorite television shows.