... think. By day he’d wear us into onionskin. At night, he’d flee to the driveway where he lived in unkempt hair. He was the phantom weeping powdery tears into the ashtray. He tattooed legal pads with a furious manuscript about the world’s petty campaign to...

... could move Dad from Wednesday to Fri- day, add wheels. Some days he’d offer to make me a sandwich, his talons poked holes in the bread but it became a better, latticed bread and the tomatoes shined through like Swiss glass. Dad had skills, could work any saber or orbital tool. On a full moon he’d...

... child rapist arrested down the road in Monument Park,   who twice a week sits nervous & cross-legged in wire-rim glasses, glancing up the hallway, down at his watch, tapping his feet until Vickie shows up, takes him back to the office to talk. He’d called it a ringing in the ears, the...

... problem with homosexuals —​just ’cause he’s got the right to language, free speech. How he’d show me his hunting knives and the bleached skulls of boars. His cocaine. The blank threat of everything left to violate. My security deposit. His daily looting. My shit job as a...

... better than letting digested meat rot in his insides? & Buddy Holly,   would we love him as much if he’d stabbed himself in the heart? Would we love more? For a kid, dead at 22, who sang of love & the day he’d die, it’s not about just getting out. It’s about staying out. It’s about being in...

...Bradley Harrison © 2013 Bradley Harrison 2013 Bradley Harrison Miniature Horse Gorilla man choked my brother in the pantry. For clinking a spoon on his teeth. Every day Blarney killed a coon and carried it up. To the deck where he’d ripped Adam’s leg to the marrow. Polaroids milky his...

... flour. We’d roll out the dough together, and he’d dab butter onto its surface, let me spread it like finger paint, before he spread globs of applesauce with the back of a spoon, then helped me wash the grease from my hands, and maybe he worried one day I’d be left...

... case be stronger if we detected the spectral movements of residents who lived there, the quotidian contrails of their transitory to's and fro's? Or if he'd painted figures on the glass, say, a doorman, an old woman and her Pekinese? Would we then see art, not as...

... my stepfather’s ears with a Q-tip, to be allowed to stay up until eleven on a school night. Sometimes he’d make it twelve, if I threw in a shoulder rub. Was it the black curly hairs covering his back? The shame of exploitation? Shame isn’t so much a colorful...

..., someone to hold my hand across a candlelit table —​ a soft French song I wouldn’t understand until after, in bed, when he’d translate by touch. Katie, this is just another lonely night in Indiana and I’m not going to find something so florid and quietly alive at some suddenly queer sports bar...

...Liz Robbins Liz Robbins Medium Security Prison The orange jumpsuit works to make us all the same, but I’ve always viewed myself as lesser than those around me. Next door, Alisha stuck her man with a ten-inch blade when she heard he’d played blackjack...

..., that his ears were small. Once, he’d scooped a spoonful of bacon lard from the pan and eaten it, thinking it would help thicken his chest and arms. Eliot rubbed his hands together, pulled the blanket off his brother. “What in the Sam Hill?” Hilton sat up, anger sharpening his face. There...

... hands in her hair, how he’d like to spend a few years making sandwiches for her in a kitchen, the quaint linoleum kind. How he’ll lovingly wash and shake-dry her lettuce, slice the bread into cat’s ears every day. A baby crow out the window, Daddy Crow waiting for...

... fingerprints against her skin, how they run under the hem of her shirt and disappear to God knows where. Sometimes she pretends to feel them to piss him off. She gives them names he’d recognize, and says why not? find someone that treats her right when they are in the...

... (2013) DOI 10.1215/00265667-2331859  © 2013 Jacob Newberry 54 Newberry  55 no point in shouting. A few of the other times it had happened he’d apologized to me, but this time he didn’t. I knew the drill. He drove up to the emergency room, and I ran...

... that dress, red lipstick to pucker your lips for that kiss you should give him, even after you learned he’d enlist. Did you see each ticket had a snide remark etched on the back: what clothes mean to women, what women mean to men. I wish I’d known you back then, I...

... already in a single night, then retched the saliva he’d swal- lowed in his sleep, the blood he’d just taken in. It pooled in a foamy reddish mass and floated away. Fish, crappie and bluegill, came up to the blob and took it apart, their ovoid mouths hungry and probing. Without thinking, John...

... Mana thought she was auditing him. They could be sitting in a restaurant or a coffee shop in one of those pauses when the conversation died, and Mana would start looking around at the other diners, wondering about their lives, and then glance back to find Ting quietly watching him. He’d...

... to help her but thinks back on the time she stole their cat, and on the time she called the cops on him for drinking on his own front lawn, and on the time she gypped him on the paint job he’d done on her house, which is why her fence is still corroded and splintering flakes of off-white...

.... In lieu of all horizon —​as if anyone can take it in, in its entirety —​ he’d see a swath of bright, bright green, white flowers in the summer, rosy berries in the fall —​pardes, I think, alongside sky, the empty infinite, the end- lessness his property entitles him...