“Today is the fourteenth of February. My favourite day of the year. Christmas is a good one too, and New Year’s Eve is usually reliable, but there’s nothing quite so powerful as loneliness magnified by a day of cards, flowers, and displays of affection, all partaken in by other people.” New fiction by Anton Rose.
“Will take up very little space in your home./Good cook. Does own dishes. Will write you/sweet notes, at first. No recommendations.” From “Want Ad,” one of two new poems by Andrew J Khaled Madigan.
“These are the dreams I pretend we have,/not the ones where I’m walking down our street/at night, something crying in the woods/& I’m scared & you’re nowhere.” New poetry by Scott Sherman.
Welcome Letter Dear [employee’s name]: Welcome and congratulations on your decision to join the Gotham City Taxi LLC team! We are delighted to have you representing our company in one of the most exciting locations in the world. As you are well aware, it is vital that taxi drivers remain neither seen nor heard, and…
“No matter how torturous it was in Panama, those six weeks pale in comparison to Survival School. They do things to you there to prove just how machine-like you really are. They starve you of sleep for seventy-two hours, as you chant enthusiastically: I am an American Airman, my mission is to fly, fight, and win.” New fiction by Elliott Scott.
Vomit gazpacho with poached gopher liver topped with a salad of freshly cut grass and catnip One problem I have with this dish is that there’s so much grass in the vomit itself, there’s no need to throw more grass on there! That salad was overkill. And the catnip just overpowers everything. And the gazpacho…
Steve Regal pressed his palm to the copy machine glass. The heat and smell of toner comforted him. The day before, at the dentist, he’d read in a two-year-old National Geographic a feature on bullfighting in Seville. He’d been waiting for that article for thirty-two years, though he hadn’t known he’d been waiting until he’d…
“A meat packing plant smells like rotted meat. A rendering plant takes the foulest olfactory notes of bovine death and transforms them into a symphony.” Andrew Kanago on what led him to leave Lexington, Nebraska.
“All this pronto staccato they call talking/Has me wishing for closed captioning/So I can scroll through or follow /A bouncing ball to keep up.” A new poem by Abe Rexrode.
Dear Ben, I totally respect that your particular religion requires you to abstain from sports on Sundays. But Sunday is our 3rd grade championship game, and the fact is we can’t win without your son, Jonah. We have seven boys who are fair-to-middling at best, and then my son Coop who can’t dribble twice without…