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
NEW ORLEANS IS FORSAKEN THIS TIME OF YEAR a cartoon cigar smoking a cartoon cigarette with a look of rancid terror on its filter-face. you good? i’m good. nails bitten down low
He comes into the Pluckers—hot.He hugs me, lifts me off the ground.Swaps out his Aviators & tac glovesfor a paper bib. This freshly minted Alamo Ranger?He’s buying.Right now, he’s on dogwatch—the shit
The chalk creaks in agony on the blackboard.We hate this double English. Still not evenmidway into the first period that happensonly on Tuesdays. The minutes grind onlike stilt walkers on my new
my dad and i spit the same blood. thunderstorms roll to the sound of our bodiescontracting television fevers. my family goes to church the same way, hair greasy, spines stooped, iphones frying
dollar store sonnet i’m a five-below tree frog bitch so i can’t tellthe difference between the tree, the general, family$1. usually there’s a section where thingsare 8 times $1, so after i
To Sleep The pink sun has fledto its bedchamber, leaving my hands darkened—wrapping‘round the sleeping beast his prayers, shadows and starshinehis hooves, bent toward the bloody moon begging for forgivenessas my fingers
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
