Apples

by Mollie Hawkins

1. When he started his job at the organic grocery store, Produce Man brings me apples with names like poems: Pink Lady. Ambrosia. Gala. American Beauty. He brings me the sweet ones he knows I will like.

2. I know three kinds of apples: Red Delicious, the mouth-puckering Granny Smith, and whatever bitter kind grows on my grandmother’s trees in the Alabama woods.

3. Produce Man and I don’t feel like grownups. We slip in and out of college, like we are window shopping at a luxury department store. Work schedules and school schedules do not overlap on our Venn diagrams. Continue reading

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On Being

by Phillip Barron

Come home tired walk in legs sore hungry
fold a sandwich and get one episode
deeper into the show I tell
no one I watch then scroll
and tap and read and when
I uncross one foot Continue reading

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Roadkill

by Jean-Luke Swanepoel

When I was five and fretful, my uncle was the kindest man I knew. Until I watched him run over a dead raccoon on that road to the mall on the outskirts of town. During summer it was a road through a field of green stalks, but it was winter and the fields were barren. He swerved firmly to make contact with the pile of blood and bones which passed like a hiccup beneath the wheels.

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Labor Day

by Tom Laichas

No other creature
inks its skin
with song lyrics
or studies stars. Continue reading

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Floaters

by Karen Regen Tuero

Johnny helped me move out of our apartment, the one I’d found us two years and one month earlier. It was a decent-sized studio on Bleeker before it hits the Bowery, affordable only if shared, at nine hundred a month, if you can believe rents were ever that cheap. New bamboo floors, high ivory ceilings, potted snake plants in the lobby where an elevator conveyed noiselessly.

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Filed under Fiction