After Jennifer S. Cheng 1: the sea captured in a glass 2: a homophone for having enough for leftovers, a synonym for abundance 3: the fish, who have already forgotten you. It’s not personal 4: where memory fails, there’s still imagining 5: you. Not as an ocean but outside 6: glass and/or acrylic
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The Arrest, in all its surreal narrative trappings, supercars, and Hollywood theatrics, wants to know if words can save us in a dystopia.
Winner of the EXTINCTION Essay Contest, selected by Lacy M. Johnson
CHARLES YU is the author of three books, including the novel How to
Allie Hoback is a poet from the Blue Ridge Mountains of Southwest Virginia. She earned her MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University. Her work has appeared in New
Apocalyptic Date Idea #1 What if we kissed for the first time and I tried to stop it—sprinting up the street, scraggly-bearded, soot-skinned, tearsacross my face, minutes until the portal to my
the water becomes a villagewhere the ghost of the boy you were first learned to swim. you remember full moonsthat lasted entire months, swans who thought they were sparrows,sparrows certain they were
Daily promise of blankness Scraping against whiteness Not loneliness but loneliness The house is not the room is not the bed is not the moment is not Cold nestling in after My
Child of my body, you are from me. I gave birth to you. Yet you are from another time,another place. My mother died when I was a toddler. My father remarried and
against the shed, my bike leans, rusting. i pick off my legs a handful of sand spurs. i save them in a jar. i save everything that cuts me, from paper to
When the Editor Asks if the Suicidal Ideation is a Persona in his rejection email I appreciate it honestlyI do but I wish he was right that that endless tunnel was just
it’s not the child
One empties and fills; the other trickles. Both keep me afloat.
War exists in beautiful places.In the arms of a galaxy, symbiotic stars swallow each otherand in the shallows of a reef, a four-armed sea star spreadsover a shell like a chromosome. Scarred,