by Jason Grant The entire king-sized bed is mine now, but I can’t seem to move from the left side to the right because on the nights you were here—laying there—if I dared move from my side to yours in the middle of the night it was like I-was-crossing-some-boundary you-needed…
by Robert Steward Lisbon, Portugal 2003 “Um bilhete de volta para Cacém, se faz favor,” I said to the man in the railway station ticket office. “Cacém?” he asked, tapping away on his computer. He had a Benfica football badge on the lapel of his blue jacket. “Sim,” I replied. Next…
by Khristy L. Knudtson I spend five days of my seven educating teenagers pretending I’m not an emotional delinquent with the same “mommy issues” as the boy with the overgrown yellow hair in the back row with the newly minted scars. He radiates pain like a nuclear bomb everywhere he…
by Natalie King For two days straight, I watched yoga YouTubes and smoked a lot of pot. I burned a Krishna Das CD for fifty minutes of music. If you’ve never done yoga, and out of the blue you and your soft butt start doing bizarre contortions for five hours…
by Craig Fishbane Before Enrique was deported last month—if he did, in fact, get deported—I liked to joke that he was my one student who did his best work when he was not on Earth. I remember how during his last day in school, he leaned across his desk, gawking…
by Maureen Aitken That summer, when the lawns burst into flames, I packed some clothes and my Irish mythology books and rented a room from a farmer’s daughter in Jackson, Michigan. I was hired as an intern at a newspaper, where I wrote stories about a drought that scalded crops…