after Daniella Toosie-Watson

One of these days, I will buy myself a god; and no, not a toy god, but the big kind. I will show my god off to my friends and brag about how big my god is. Say my god is bigger than yours; and when my god barks, I’ll say my god speaks the loudest; when god licks me I can say god loves me too and when god strolls too far, I can say my god has forsaken me. But I’ve been told that’s just pessimism; god can never leave me because every day I’ll pray to dog. Say dog, big dog, dog of mercy, I offer myself unto you. I used to have two gods before, named them Bonnie and Charlie. Bonnie was a sweetheart god. Mother of gods. Charlie was more devil than god—once tried to maul me to death. I ran from the angry god and cried to mother. God tried to kill me! Mother laughed. You do not run from your god. Bonnie and Charlie died many years ago, when I was younger, long before I understood gods. I thought gods never died. Mother cried for weeks. Cried, my gods! My gods! Dog! Why did you have to take my gods?

Erinola E. Daranijo (he/him) is a Nigerian writer. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Akéwì Magazine, and author of the micro-chapbooks An Epiphany of Roses (Konya Shamsrumi Press, 2024) and Every Path Leads to the Sea (Ghost City Press, 2024). He splits his time between the cities of Ibadan, Lagos, and Cape Town. Say hi on Twitter at @Layworks.

The man with the third ear lives on Canal Street and is used to curious stares, children pointing, and the occasional rude remark. He isn’t bothered in the least. He understands the blessings of a third ear, and his is a highly skilled worker. His third ear hears only truth. Growing up, he heard the truth of his mother’s love in that ear as she sent him off to school with a reminder—kindness above all else. He heard the bark of his best friend, Dog, who waited on the front lawn for his return. He heard his father’s late-night apology to his mother—another missed dinner—and he knew his dad was truly sorry. As the boy grew into a man, he still heard truth in his third ear, only less of it. He heard nothing in that ear when he watched the news, or when he traded fishing tales with his pals. He heard nothing from his wife, and while that saddened him, it made the divorce easier. She left him for a two-eared bartender. Now, the man with the third ear takes long walks in the jack pine forest and knows to stop and listen when he hears a Kirtland’s Warbler sing. A rare bird is worth waiting for.

Ann Weil is the author of Lifecycle of a Beautiful Woman (Yellow Arrow Publishing, 2023). Her work has been nominated for a Best of the Net and appears in Pedestal Magazine, New World Writing, Crab Creek Review, 3Elements Review, and elsewhere. A former special education teacher and professor, Ann writes at her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and on a deck boat off a sand bar in Key West, Florida. She is part fish, but won’t tell you which part. Visit www.annweilpoetry.com to read more of her work.

Your father teaches you to ride a bike by holding a handful of M&M’s and running ahead of you far down the long road beside the lake. If you catch him, you can have the M&M’s. It sets a precedent. One has to be hungry. How many syllables are there really in “Memory?” I believe it depends on how badly you want it. Don’t mis-take me: I am as afraid of ruining this as I have been of anything. I don’t know if I believe anymore that there are best words in their best order. There is only what one leaves behind.

Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller are the co-authors of There Is Only One Ghost In The World (Fiction Collective 2, 2023), winner of the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest. Their work also appears or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, Copper Nickel, Denver Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Puerto del Sol, Salamander, and elsewhere. Although they have been writing together for ten years, they have only met once.

I dance a little dance. I let the Jersey Devil talk me down. I listen for the sound of that big voice in my head and find it loud. I pray before the altar of see you laters. I scoop poison out of our rivers. I plant trees in our cities. I think it is no small thing to die and yet it’s also the most ordinary. And what of it. I click my heels and I’m in a smaller world again. One where fewer people who loved me as a child are still here to love me as a bigger child. It’s the vanishing I can’t stand. The sudden jolt of empty stair. The switchback to nowhere. All of it’s got to mean something. What if I told you I had an uncle once named Harry Tacelli? You don’t care. And why should you. I care tho. I’m gonna care until they finally get me. You know, the ones who get everybody, in the end.

Alyssandra Tobin is the author of PUT EYES ON ME NOT LIKE A CURSE published by Quarterly West in 2022. Her poetry can be found in Poetry Northwest, Bennington Review, Puerto del Sol, and elsewhere.

sometimes I like to go on real estate sites & look at apartments for sale in cities other than my own & imagine the kind of person I’d be if I lived there like if I lived in Stockholm I’d have a red bicycle with a silver bell & short hair bleached white-blonde & I’d have a terrace to grow berry bushes & Queen Anne’s lace on & I’d either only smile or frown I haven’t decided which yet & if I lived in Berlin I’d have a neck tattoo & would sleep under a skylight always at the mercy of the weather always at the mercy of something bigger than myself & I wouldn’t think twice about the number of calories in a pint of beer but I’d still be so thin & god you’d be so jealous & if I lived in Paris I’d smoke Gauloises on an ivy-covered balcony & I’d look like some tragic heroine in a novel rated 3.7 stars by people on the internet who don’t know the difference between a prose poem & a lyric essay & I’d have a study full of philosophical books in languages I don’t speak & never will & I’d wear glasses even though I have 20/20 vision & if I lived in Porto I’d drink black coffee standing up in my kitchen tiled with the white & azure azulejos that I stole from the Porto São Bento railway station in the cover of night just me & a chisel & a masonic hammer under the star-needled sky I think I could hear the ocean if I stopped the clash of metal to ceramic long enough to really listen only I’m never quiet enough to hear the waves heed the warnings just skating by on whispered promises & maybe tomorrows mustering up just enough strength to see myself through each acrid dawn

Arielle McManus is a dual Swedish-American citizen, learning as she goes and writing from a tiny, sunlit room in Brooklyn. She is an assistant editor at Atlas & Alice, and her writing has been published by a variety of literary publications including Passages North, Entropy Magazine, and Cabinet of Heed, among others.

It’s not you, it’s me. It’s not that I don’t feel this, it’s that how I feel doesn’t matter. It’s not that I don’t like you, didn’t want this to happen, didn’t plan to get that drunk and sit in your lap and, okay, maul you in a Burger King booth in front of that family with their four small children. It’s that I really am too old to do those things and also I have two small children of my own and a husband and I can still taste the fry oil in the back of my throat and it, and you, are giving me heartburn. It’s not that me sleeping with you was symbolic of who I used to be and the way I used to act, it’s that I’ve been trying desperately to not turn into something symbolic, something comfortable, something that fits easily on a key chain, something that everyone recognizes when they see it, something sticker-like and shiny, but not too shiny, like maybe a puffy little pink heart sticker on the back of a Mother’s Day card. It’s not that me sleeping next to you wouldn’t remind me of uncomfortable, brave, unrecognizable experiences and feelings, it’s that I don’t get to do uncomfortable, brave, unrecognizable things anymore. It’s not that you aren’t pretty, because you’re so pretty, so pretty I scooted next to you on that bench and asked for one of your fries, the only vegan thing on the menu, which was why we went there in the first place, and I’d been making fun of you all night for being vegan, but actually I find it so appealing, so beautiful that someone cares that much about anything anymore. It’s not that I wouldn’t cast this all away in a minute, because I would cast this all away in a minute, in a second, so fast my entire life would be an intertwined blur of the past rapidly decomposing and you and me driving down the highway in my runaway minivan, Indigo Girls and Dar Williams and KD Lang on your shitty old iPod shuffle, your hand on the back of my neck, my hand on your knee, above your knee, the part of your knee that tickles if I squeeze even a little. My hand on your knee and my heart in my throat.

Hannah Grieco is a writer and editor in Washington, D.C. You can find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on Twitter @writesloud.

I met Octavio Paz on the planet Jupiter last fall. He said he’d been living there since his death. Myself, I was on vacation with my family. When I first saw Paz, I paused and asked myself, “Should I go up to him, he’s won the Nobel Prize?” I did. I introduced myself as a comic book writer and illustrator and that it was a pleasure to meet him. We shook hands. I didn’t want to talk about writing with him, so I asked his favorite soccer team. “Pumas,” he said. Later, he asked me what was the name of my most famous comic book so he could get a copy. “The Magician,” I told him. It was getting cold on Jupiter, so we called it a night after that. I never forgot his calmness, though, his class and elegance.

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). He has been a finalist for the Andres Montoya Poetry Prize, the Colorado Poetry Prize, and the National Poetry Series. He lives in Los Angeles County where he is an educator and editor.