Shareen K. Murayama

We’d shout, GAJI!—and slap Gaji over the full moon, over crane and blood red sun, over irises and bridge, boar and umbrella man, over the red mud blanketing one of our uncles who returned early from war.

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L. Mari Harris

We try to outdo each other with the places we’ll move to one day: Bahamas or California, live on the beach; Montana, become fishing guides and live in big log cabins. Anywhere but here.

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Tommy Dean

His is a forlorn building in a neighborhood rarely visited, but keeping him alive feels essential. If you could remember what it felt like to be taken care of as an infant, a toddler, anything before kindergarten, you could do this with more gratitude. But like the girl’s cigarettes, we all do bad things to ourselves; knowing better doesn’t stop the consequences.

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Shelby Rice

maybe it’s the way his lifeless face is printed matte two-dimensional on flimsy posterpaper, how his arm props on cleaved chin, slicing connect-the-dots over exposed moles, how he makes me feel the lesser part of a collectible salt-and-pepper shaker set picked up at a roadside junk shop.

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Melanie Maggard

This was before the town flooded and marsh swallowed the baseball fields, before the beans  yellowed and freckled, before the mine closed and everyone got poorer and angrier;

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