by Edward Sage

“…don’t think I’ve forgotten how sad you were leaving that mountain house.  That old cabin gave you solace.  It was yours and there never was much in this world that was just yours.  (Not even your grave!  But that’s another story..”

by Claire Cooper

“There’s a graveyard in him and in the people who remember him, too. He’s scattering dead versions of himself like sawdust, like vertebrae, across the miles.”

by Shome Dasgupta

“Metaphorical in mind—the Doppler effected owl, the sonar rings of the red bird in morning solar shields, the mobile housed turtle along the banks of fallen mossed ponds, and a majestic magnetic egret, shining white in carved air…”

by Emma Atkins

“My dad, a couple of months shy of a single-digit birthday, sat in the back, looking like a kidnapping in progress: bleary-eyed and still in his pyjamas.”

by Zary Fekete

“She told me car rides helped. Something to do with how her center of gravity shifted when the car rounded corners; her spine had to compensate… I looked at her in her chair and thought about all the other ways she had fought to stay upright.”

by Tutt Stapp-McKiernan

“The chill and roiling whiteness touched my face like a cool hand the moment I stepped outside, and I wondered briefly if this was how sleepwalkers felt—drawn forward, almost against their will, into a murky world that would fully evaporate in the light of their waking day.”

by Zary Fekete

“Gyula said his father used to read to him from the Bible at night. He said he had nostalgic memories about the book’s smell: dust and candle wax.”

by Erica Noble

“I look out at the snowflakes that softly fall in the backyard, cloaking the bare tree with its weight.”

by Kevin Bain

“Mount Trashmore had, over the decades, been a number of things to a number of people…To us …an imaginary playground... Now, as adults, it’s possible that Mount Trashmore was a killer.”

by Fatima Okhuosami

“This man loves me. So, I do what a prey must never do. I giggle. And in that giggle, I seal my fate.”

by Barbara Krasner

“I write. I enter ekphrastic writing challenges every two weeks. I look forward to the new images offered. I try my hand at pantoum, sestina, sonnet. I have nothing to lose.”

by Ellen Murray

“This is not a story about Iceland. I’m sorry if you thought it was…but the story escaped from me.”

by Mykyta Ryzhykh

“Often the cat eats: food from the bowl, bugs, grass. Sometimes he vomits on the walkway…I don’t blame my cat: I myself have vomited a couple of times in the last year from what’s going on around me.”

by Mitzi Dorton

“The trees stood with arms, like a woman who had lost a child, reaching, weeping and wailing to the Lord. At least that was how Norita’s life seemed in Beech Fork, bleak and without hope.”

by Jack Coldicott

“Securing a major deal often takes years of relentless effort honing out craft, readying everything and reading deeply, submitting work, facing rejections, and, for poets especially, enduring even more rejection. Yet, the landscape is shifting.”

by Robert Allen

“I borrowed one from a stranger in the street, asked for a light, pulled in my breath, and my mind opened like a dusky flower.”