Once, in May, a tractor near where the teacher lived in Western New York vanished beneath the earth when a farmer drove too early into the onion fields. The teacher, a month from finishing his first year of instructing teenagers,
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Gary Fincke ~ Tractors
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J. Alan Nelson ~ Hat on a peg
This life splits you apart like a fortune cookie. Bear with me while I have this Proustian moment the year I was twelve and live on Martha Avenue with a fire down the street. Fire trucks and fire men.
The house was once a small lending
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Sophie Panzer ~ Estate Planning
My friends and I are talking about what comes after we die. Nothing about souls or the afterlife – the only one who believes in that stuff is Cassie, and we all know that’s her Pisces moon talking – but we are concerned about our bodies. Burial,
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Dan Shiffman ~ Marginal Comments from My English Teacher During Covid
Avoid sentence fragments.
My school days are not fragments, they are one big blur. The too-early–in-the-morning garbage trucks that sound like dying whales. My mother’s bowls of healthy, tasteless oatmeal. Which
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R. B. Miner ~ Soldiers Don’t Need Therapy
For a while, deployments were fifteen months long instead of twelve. Some guys went a little bit nuts. A lot of the time, it happened around month thirteen or fourteen. They made it through a whole year of chaos and danger
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Amy Stuber ~ The Garden of Eden
Two philosophers walk into a bar. They wear robes, maybe some Grecian textile that’s musty from long-term entombment or maybe some clearance sheets from Bed Bath and Beyond.
“I’ll have a G & T,” the first philosopher
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Bart Edelman ~ Five Poems
What If?
What if what you thought you saw
Had not even occurred?
As though there was a magic act—
Some sleight of hand at work—
To deem you an accomplice,
But you never remotely knew
Why the plan was devised for you.What if they took you on a ride
In -
Pavle Radonic ~ Crisis Central
Judging by the voice the girl might have been early twenties, perhaps still in her teens. She was coming in loud and clear from out front. Greg lived one off the front of his block. The place opposite had to be fully forty metres away.
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Allan Peterson ~ Five Poems
RESISTANCE
A paper cut from the map was inoculation
All night the slick machine of the river
polished shad and Frances the geographer
noticed the earth starting to slope down
to oxbows now eyebrows and resortsWe ran a slight fever to adapt
We passed through
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Lydia Gwyn ~ Two Flashes
Head in the Sky
My mother named the pines, each pine that came to mind. Pitch and shortleaf. White and loblolly. Spruce, red, table mountain.
Our beagle came back after weeks away. It wasn’t the first time she’d run off. She arrived on our
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Susan Nordmark ~ Four Short Pieces
Tracks
You’re the wayward one, aren’t you, said the teacher. I was sitting on my yoga mat, distracted by a magazine. I think everyone in this room is offering you respect, I said to her. I meant to give it. In a Little Free Library
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Eleanor Levine ~ Not Like Your Foot Is Amputated
I am suffering from post-traumatic sinkhole syndrome.
I was awakened at 3:30 am last Thursday.
My brother said that my Audi 2013 was under water—in a sinkhole, where I had parked, in front of our house.
We went outside.
I was
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Nicolette Daskalakis ~ there is a house on fire (and other poems)
there is a house on fire
there is a house on fire
don’t worry,
it is not your houseit is not
your housea beautiful house
a beautiful firea beautiful house
and a beautiful firea beautiful house on fire
so beautiful
look
keep looking
it is beautiful, isn’t it?
so beautiful
and
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Louise Phillips ~ Museo
Monumento a Velázquez
Aniceto Marinas (statue) Vicente Lampérez (pedestal), 1899
The celebrity fell in love with the Prado Museum. His spirits had soared when he spotted the first ‘museo’ sign. He’d been ready for it: Rubens, The Three Graces, El
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Steve Gergley ~ Three Flash Fictions
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The Really Big Heart
Me and Kyoko drive to Rochester and check into a hotel behind a diner. Dangling above the bathtub we find a human heart the size of a person. Slick with a shimmering, oily liquid, and beating with an irregular, staccato rhythm, the heart connects to
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Gerard Sarnat ~ Over My Stoned Cold
1. 77‑Y.O’s New [Perhaps Clichéd] Organizing Principle
Understanding
Life’s entropy
State
After
Making trek
Higher up into
Age’s
Himalayas
Where near air gets -
Kyle Seibel ~ Cullen
As a defensive measure, Cullen had taped garbage bags to his windows. Black ones. Double layered. He’d been awake since Tuesday. Hadn’t left the house since Friday.
He told me all this in a calm voice. Maybe a little amused
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Robert L. Penick ~ Three Poems
After the Plague
Dandelions rocketed up
from sidewalk cracks,
joyous, unrestrained,
seeds of sunlight in
fields of quiet.And the fish multiplied
exponentially, like
God promised in some
irrational book
of ancient fiction.~
Encouragement
A message for the horse-faced boys and girls
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Marisa Cadena ~ My Guardian Angel
I missed the bus to Tapachula by 15 minutes. There wouldn’t be another until the following morning, the robotic woman at the ticket counter told me. I was trying to cross before dark, remembering the frightening scene at
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Robert Shapard ~ Best Boy
I was just off my valet shift, 3 a.m., and I’d gone to a pancake house. This was in L.A., forty years ago. An old man landed in my booth, ka-thud.
He was one of the most famous movie actors of all time.
I didn’t