by Karyna Saifudinova

“Empires will want to keep you small and docile, to make you believe what they taught you is all you are, but there’s hardly anything quite as satisfying as sticking the middle finger to your abuser and saying — I’ll take it from here, see you never, goodbye.”

by Miles Miller

“We can only trust when our eyes are closed. / Even if “you wish to see.”

by Kirby Michael Wright

“The air smells metallic. This is practice murder for Iran, Cuba, and parts unknown. Who will die? Parents and children. Marines will teach lessons to refugees starving in tents.”

by Nicholas Schmidt

“So much flailing at the abyss. So much strife. Replaying the incident, I see the wounds: What fire rages in his head. That hate in his spit.”

by Hazel McCorriston

“The flowers wilted their heads in shame. They could never have lasted long enough for my father to see them that day. But every year before that, when new bluebells came to our garden as winter eased, he pointed them out so I could see how beautiful they were.”

by Erica Anderson

“Middle school boys are gross. Rule number one: keep your hands to yourself.”

by Marc Frazier

“Transplants from a less open region, my ancestors could not fathom such endlessness…I’ve known a land of corn and soybeans stretching up mile after mile, a land of horizon where someone must prove the world is not flat.

by Eric Roller

“It’s a Thursday evening. I am a stranger standing beside a hospital bed, watching a friend’s father suffocate from late-stage lung cancer…He begs the nurse not to honor his Do Not Resuscitate order.

by G.L. Bacchetta

“Miniature skeletons sprawl across our kitchen table: an Italian Caproni, a Flying Tiger, a Wright Flyer, a Short Sunderland. Sinewy, steely little planes, they take surgical fingers and caring hands to come to life.”

by Seth Frame

“Along the fence were rows of wild black-caps, their fruits falling away at a touch. They are tart and their seeds crunch between my teeth.”

by Shannon McNicholas

“…after spending summer in the Sierra Nevadas as a camp counselor, I had been experiencing recurring dreams of blood dripping down my wrists and my body slowly becoming light, as if I were floating off to heaven.”

by Molly Higgins

‘When you are young, you see women, beautiful women, all over the pages of magazines, on the television, illustrated in your favorite cartoons…With your small, gnarled hand and stumped arm, you wonder if you’ll ever slow dance in a partner’s embrace.

by John RC Potter

“Since I was a young adult, I have travelled whenever possible. However, what became abundantly clear to me after I moved overseas is that travelling to a country as a tourist is far removed from what it is like to live there. The experiences are vastly different.”

by Christopher Russell

“I remembered her words from months ago. The same words every other doctor said. “There’s nothing we can do.”

by Sai Pradhan

“The woman patted her dog’s silken head fondly. Despite his history and his unknown future, he was now simply present. She reveled in his being.