by Meredith Jelbart

This cabinet, which I gift to you, my child, has ten rows of ten small drawers. Standing flat against the wall, it takes up little space. It is beautifully crafted; dark wood of the drawer front meets the lighter interior wood in dove-tailed joinery, a dark tail interlocked with a lighter one, a darker, then a lighter and so on.

It has come down in our family, from a great-uncle’s garage, to my study. To wherever you may choose to keep it.

You could say it’s an heirloom.

by B. Luke Wilson

mezzotint by M. Rapine, curtesy of The Public Domain Review

Heat That Smells Like Drowning 

I drew a perfect tesseract on my son’s old Etch-A-Sketch seconds before the bomb fell. Nobody ever saw it, or how beautiful the shape was. The tremors began light as the air under the muscles of a dancer—and grew until their shaking dissolved my perfect symmetry into the toy’s memoryless sands. Everything flashed to red, and the heat smelled like drowning.

My wife Sarah was a master locksmith.

art: "Spirits Can Feel You" by Katie Frank

by Irina Varina

When you are feeling joy, don’t forget to breathe.
I breathe and I circulate. It flows through my entire body. Full body orgasm.
“At any point I can choose to be a part of any story,” I write.

Oh. A friend had just brought me a refreshing drink. And I chose to switch from the story of me thinking him thinking:“Why doesn’t she stop writing, she is so not interesting and boring compared to other friends on this medicine journey.” to: “She is so beautiful in doing what she has chosen to do.

photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

by Cole Swensen

Sunlight

is audible when it strikes on a slant, its chant determined by a number of factors, for instance, its rhythm is determined by the time of day, its pitch, by the time of year, and as for tone, it’s the weather—say a cloud bank breaks up too quickly, and there’s the sun, suddenly undone by its own light.

Or sunlight is substance poured out on, is a saint strolling unbound; the sun dissolves everything it rolls across, though it sometimes takes millennia—mountains,

by Hannah Dow

He was workshopping a bit about the ellipsis that materializes when someone is drafting you an iMessage. The joke had something to do with knowing someone is thinking about you on the other end, and the anxiety of wondering what they’ll say, if anything at all. I don’t know if he ever finished the joke, but that night he kept laughing and repeating three dots! in his goofy, deadpan voice, and that alone was enough to make us laugh too.

The first time I saw your father, we played “Jeopardy!” It’s not what you think,

art by Stefanie Becker

by Georgia San-Li

Container
 

            Peckish she pecks to find Beauty

                        her Romanesque nose

                        her Helen

            Infusing Her with her soul

                        her clay long-fingered hands, her hips in

            such grinding agony, endured

            to form and wrench his children,

            with her power of catastrophe over

                        that object

                        that creature

                        that enemy

                        that human life

containing the workings of

her organs

her plasma

her monster

the umbilical cord of

            her two daughters,