Author: bukem reitmayer

CD Eskilson

I want to ask about the suit: whose skin she used and its construction. If gender’s something I can put on too.

Catch Business

trying to connect with you thru an album you mentioned to me the one day we got to
hang out

Chika Onyenezi

I had seen Arthur around for a while, at this particular station. Whenever I was coming back from work, at night, he stood there, smoking, and whistling through his trimmed moustache.

Chelsea Sutton

Yes, Audrey is wearing a graphic T-shirt with a depiction of Lake Arrowhead. After killing her, someone stuffed the earmuffs in her mouth and wrote #BroosterBabe in black sharpie on her right arm. Perhaps it has a meaning, perhaps not. Most things do not. Do not get lost in the details.

Charles Finn

It is rumored in his later years he would leave his apartment in the city and drive through the night to arrive before sun up.

Chad Miller

In the photo, I’m in profile on the ferry to the Statue of Liberty on a cold morning. I have on a toboggan and a black and white scarf with a pattern to clash with my red and tan plaid hunter’s jacket. I wear mirrored aviators. I have a full beard. The sun off my glasses or the skyscrapers resolute in the background or my being there, in that harbor, where crowds dared to dream, must be doing it for Mom because I’m heartbroken in the picture.

Cathy Ulrich

She has left instructions for you. Once you have memorized them, she wants you to eat them. You’d rather shred them into the garbage, but she wrote in big underlined letters: Don’t shred these and put them in the garbage.

Cheryl Collins Isaac

I didn’t know her name, but she had been my example of what I could look like some day

Christopher James

This is my new gf. She doesn’t like where I live. Is it because of the fairy lights? I ask. She doesn’t say, she never says much, but she likes it more if we stay at her place, which is miles away. We go there after work sometimes, past a field with horses on the way. ‘Horses,’ I say.

Christopher Gonzalez

In silence Xiomara removes the knife from his grip then grabs the can of whole coffee beans off the counter. She takes from it a handful, letting the beans roll from her palm onto a cutting board, and Marcos watches them like marbles circling each other, unsure if they are following or trying to outrun one another.

Christine Kandic Torres

Early in my relationship with Justin, back when we would cut whole days of ninth grade and spend them burrowing into each other underneath bedsheets of whichever friend’s parents weren’t home that day, he’d told me that Hector had taught him how to masturbate in the fifth grade.

Chris Lorraine

I see life lines and love lines like I’ve never seen them before. As I look, I know what they say. Suddenly I know how to read, like my daughter. This knowledge is no longer inaccessible to me.

Chris Ames

A bite on the line. He goes reeling. Happens faster the second time. The motion is so fluid, it appears as the fish is helping to swim through its own disassembly.

Chloe N. Clark

His date had neon pink shellacked fingernails. Lance couldn’t stop staring at them. The glare off them from the overhead lights was almost blinding. It reminded him of headlight beams bouncing off a rain-slicked road.

Chitralekha Basu

I had been here before – in this ‘Mecca’ of Calcutta’s street food as Shankar, my chaperon from the Embassy, puts it. Nice man, Shankar. Seems to have an intuitive sense of when he’s needed and for how long, knows exactly where he belongs in the scheme of things.

Cklara Moradian

When I write of alienation, I am speaking of a deep sense of estrangement, not just from land and home, but from my past, my present, from my own being, from my own body.

Chloé Cela

This Skank Woman is dirty. She’s so dirty she needs a lot of support to get anywhere.

Craig Ledoux

You may notice the boyfriend’s frustrated smile, a near-imperceptible curve, just before he dips into brief catatonia.

Courtney Sender

He asked me do I want children. Of course I want them. I want children named Yes and Sure and Always. I want children with dimples like his in their left cheeks. I want children like keys on a keychain, children to hold while I’m buying groceries.

Colter Ruland

Her name was Florida though she had never been there. Her mother really liked the name, the state too, the oranges and sunrays it conjured. One day you’re gonna visit for me and you’re gonna love it, her mother would say.

Clarence Harlan Orsi

Behind the old woman, next to the shelf of vagina puppets, was a set of hooks for coats, unoccupied since we’d all draped ours over our chairs. She put one damp bag on each hook, spreading it carefully so it would dry. I imagined her home, the knick-knacks she dusted but never really looked at, the cross above the mirror.

Dalia Staponkutė

The closest rings—the family circle, the first nurturers, the loved ones and dependants—are the tightest ones and cause the most pain when they crack.

Courtney Preiss

Reason with yourself: if you move to New York in February and live to thaw out in the spring, then you can love this city in the best and worst conditions.

Cornelia Barber

People always say time heals, but at first time colludes in further injury…two weeks, six months, and it’s still not over. He is still dead.

Corinna Chong

It’s a man’s voice. I’ve missed his name and his reason for being on the radio, but his voice is enough. I let him tell me a story.

Claire Fallon

I ate shit less than five seconds after the shove over the edge of the hill.

Derick Mattern

never mind who    dropped it    who slipped up there’s yogurt slopped all over

David Ehmcke

Lucifer’s mistress / Bitch boy / Twisted vixen /
who boasts / a woman’s walk /

Dāshaun Washington

I often find myself thinking of the abuses
you could’ve spared if I weren’t blackmaled

Derek Mascarenhas

Four days in Goa nearly killed me. It started the morning my bus arrived in Mapusa and I didn’t see my uncle Quinton waiting for me. A swarm of rickshaw drivers had crowded the bus doors when I got off.

David Laidlaw

Recently something happened to me. That is, I saw something happen and I think that by seeing it I somehow became involved in it.

Danielle Lea Buchanan

Morcella is her name and we’re twelve in Miss Conway’s science class talking kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species of the kangaroo.

Elisa Luna-Ady

and if i save that dog / from drowning / maybe i won’t feel so empty / anymore / so i do

Elias Lowe

the undoing of heart-brains
happens quick with avalanches

Elana Lev Friedland

break their legs chokehold them down
in the night keep them up I’m screaming YES YES YES.

Edward Salem

The Eighth Intifada wasn’t the dumpster fire we thought it would be.

E.B. Schnepp

there aren’t such things as witch hunts now [or at least not by that name anyway]

E.B. Schnepp

fall out boy, early 2000’s pop punk, accidental gods in ripped jeans wondering what love was

Dylan Carpenter

Once I loved the white hide of winter once I forgot once I was glad I really was

Ekaterina Taratuta

One’s sight is never sated by the spectacle of a cathedral, since a cathedral never ceases to speak to man. And no matter how frightful certain words are, as long as we can still hear them the worst has not yet come to pass.

Drew Johnson

After a time, the figure settled back down into his former place, became one of the bodies on the floor, unable on the one hand to discern a path in the jigsaw, unable on the other to force what will he did possess upon them. Then again, perhaps he had been afraid his warm gap on the floor would close.

Dominic Wright

Leaving the cinematic pictures of myself next to the vacant face of somebody that I used to idolize.

Enshia Li

Consider the way snow fell on the Western Front: feathered &
indecisive, droplets sprung flat like parachutes

Emma Miao

My Chinese hides in the crevices

of my mind

Emory Harkins

Dad smiles, shows us the wrong side of his face in this wide grin we haven’t experienced yet. I pat his back and feel guilty for not doing the same for Mom.

Emma Sheinbaum

My dream is to be the funniest person someone has ever met. Maybe I am that something to someone. I talk to my therapist about my competing thoughts and resolute feelings. The friction gives me migraines. Can I be both rock and hard place? What is that phrase even trying to mean? I only want to see all angles of everything is that so much to ask for, so much to try for.

Emma Cohen

I haven’t prayed in years, since high school when I prayed for a date to prom. When I used to pray I could feel a presence hanging above me, a great translucent presence high above, gooey, like a puddle of jello. I decide to try it out again.

Emily Flamm

From his window seat on the plane he looks out over the ocean, which looks like a tangle of lines in this light. The light makes the water look alive. He can’t solve what time it is where he is, because he’s not sure where he is, precisely

Em Meller

An alternative theory: now we mostly live in cities, and the lights are all on, we have a predator void. This accounts for our instinctive fear of the dark – even though predators, in the traditional lion-stalking-prey sense, are no longer hiding there. The void could make us collectively, completely paranoid, if we let it.

Emma Wang

As a child, I collected stories like shiny pennies. I held the words in my tiny fists, grasped them, and didn’t let go.

Emma Ensley

I’m playing Candyland with Ambrose on the floor of her family’s playroom. Her and her sister are only allowed 30 minutes of TV a day and I foolishly let them use it all before 9 a.m. I am partially paying attention to the game and mostly scrolling through instagram waiting for the coffee I stole from the bottom of the pot downstairs to kick in.

Emily Siegenthaler

One of us claims to know the actors, would say hello if it didn’t mean getting in the way. When doesn’t it?

Elsa Valmidiano

I remember why I traveled so far to fill the space in my body that needed a certain promise I couldn’t find anywhere else.

Fargo Tbakhi

think i’d like to kiss a colonizer boy/
send my tongue like a settler

Faizan Syed

think i’d like a boy with burnt fingers.

Ethan Luk

I am sculpted with my lips apart,
as if to sing.

Esther Sun

On my neck, blue treason
of lapis lazuli, dark cheek
of the moon.

Fergus P Egan

What has happened to the feared North Cork Flying Column 22 that was the scourge of Ireland just a few weeks ago?

Eva Dunsky

Sunny gets mad at me because I assume all of the children will die. She likes to remind me that there must be some like us, grave but no fatal cases. I concede that she has a point.

Ethan Feuer

She picked the laptop up and pressed her ear to the keyboard. No eeee now. eeee in hiding. She had paid a friend to disable the fan awhile back—the noise had been awful—so all she heard now usually was a weak prickling sound. 

Eshani Surya

So personal, the way he doesn’t stroke her hair as the ambulance wails.

Erin Kirsh

I search for a good sleeping posture as night edges closer to business hours. I lay on my side, then on my stomach. I hang an arm off the bed. I flip the pillow to the cool side and back. I think about Adrienne, how soft the blankets on her bed are. I try and try, but I can’t get comfortable.

Erica Peplin

Their Christmas cards always came with a photo of them smiling, their arms wrapped around each other’s waists. One year they were rock climbing in Fiji, another they were skiing in Switzerland.

Eric Fershtman

That’s my entire point, says the psychopathologist. Because this is collective obsessional behavior. And it does tend to peter out after a while. It’s all I came to say. Dear World: please stop overreacting.

Greta Moran

I wish I did not negotiate
my body like a capitalist

Greg Parker

I have swallowed more victory than I could handle

Gia Marr

I am trying to love
the queerest body
I’ve ever been.

Gabrielle Ralambo-Rajerison

I have been the beautiful man whispering his secrets into a ruined wall and I have been the echo his hands filled with mud.

Greta Wilensky

Cory’s mom loves couponing and thrifting and God. You can tell.

Gregory Sullivan

15 had reportedly been roaming the streets, resting at times beneath the shady dogwoods of the neighborhood lawns, showing little fear of humans, even when the summer’s fireworks were being shot off, which was what really stunned the concerned locals.

Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes

The woman who gave birth and some life to Frankie came at the beginning of a storm. Later it was said that she brought the storm. Frankie says she is the storm.

Fraylie Nord

We had storage units, ex-wives, and unpaid parking tickets down in the city, but we had since quit our jobs that tethered us to those lives. We knew how to tear things down and build them back up. We were in the business of predicting what people wanted, how, and when. We were doers and makers, bored to death by the pedigree we had earned in the trenches below.

Frances Ray

Mothers liked me. I was prim, with straight hair. They delighted in how I didn’t need wrinkles or children to make me bitter, as I already was, and had been for a long time. I was smart for this, they ascertained, precocious. They went on to appreciate the neutral palette of my clothes, and then my culinary preference for thin soups and fresh meats, and then the precision of my parallel park. I was a serious woman, they deduced. I’d protect their sons. I’d keep them warm.

Fortunato Salazar

I’m sniffing and sniffing and my keen senses are closing in on…I’m not sure what. It’s just like when Dad took me to a bento joint in Los Feliz and said, “Zelda, here’s one that will stump you” and let me sip his tea. Anyway, I know I know that odor, but I’m distracted because the caryatid feeds me a chunk of her quiche (bacon!) and begins to tell Dad her story. Corn!

Gabriela Gonzales

My grandpa is a strange little Colombian man who eats fish eyes and bone marrow and everyone told me stories about the time he held down my Tia Lyat and pulled her first tooth out of her mouth.

Inam Kang

[me, hugging him from behind; him, a smile sprouting in surprise]

hazel avery

i like when there’s a fire—even if it’s mine

Hannah Watts

chat to your medium roast about identity crises

Hannah Beresford

Is it about a boy? Maddy asked—
bleed-grazed and let—Is it about a girl?

Indira Chanrasekhar

Have you seen a doctor?’ I pointed at her hand. Girija shook her head. ‘Ratni brought some herb oil from the village. She applies it for me every day.’ The thick, green-brown fluid in the re-used Old Monk bottle near the stove looked foul.

Ilana Masad

Charlie wasn’t a dumper, nor a dumpee. Things were pretty equal on that front. Charlie knew not to question the past, and did it anyway.  With Evvie, it was always xx. Babes. That was the worst. Charlie wasn’t a babe, didn’t deserve the kisses.