By BENJAMIN PALOFF   We said a prayer for the rats and fleas as the plague abated. We laid a wreath for Justinian. The streets of London were no longer smoke-choked, just smoking, and Rome started to smell more like Rome. At least whoever remembered “before” said as much. In the last days of the plague, the days that followed…

By MINDY MISENER Excerpted from Good Guys, out October 13 from Melville House.   Three times in my life I’ve called my sister for help. The first, I was at a motel almost an hour from Curtisville. Any closer, Gary said, and he might be recognized. Minutes earlier he’d left with his fake ID. When Georgie heard my voice, she…

By JEHANNE DUBROW  A new year of trees, and in the yard  the rosemary is trying to live again,   its spines broken, darkened from the frost.   I don’t know whether to water it  or leave the plant to fortune. Sometimes my love can drown a thing. When my mother lay convalescing  I wasn’t sure how to be a daughter,  if I should press another cup of tea…

By DAN BEACHY-QUICK  So simple is the soul   a house finch can haunt its innermost  ever, not for an hour, not for an era, but a   different kind of forever, as in, as in,   as in the dream of an infinite lever, & a lamb  lifts up a mountain by stepping on the end   of an endless branch propped beneath   the stone—. That dream—. Of the…

By PHILIP METRES    —after “Environment for Three Overweight Parakeets”  You thought you were seeking beauty   in that plain, little box. Fixed your face  to the aperture. Inside, a chaos  of swimming through stones, doll arms cocked  mid-crawl, poking above the ocean  of rubble seething beneath. Where were they  digging toward? What would we dig up?   Yes, it’s true, a…

By ROBERT CORDING After years without a single dream  of my dead son, he walks into  the living room where I am standing  at the window and holds me tightly  against himself. He feels exactly  as he felt in life—large shoulders  and round chest, thick forearms   and fingers. Even in the airiness  of my dream, he is solid and weighty,  all…

By ANNA HOGELAND The girl & I ate spaghetti  and carrot sticks  and we colored with crayons mazes & Pokémon & cats and rainbows & shooting stars and then I gave her a bath, which is the easiest way to  look at my phone while I’m on duty.  She played for twenty minutes with those little toys I listened as I scrolled…

By SHANE MORAN Hiding at Stolly’s in the Marais, I asked Sara, the Martinican bartender, for a Cheap Blonde in English. After a tap of glass on plastic, those six euros gone, I watched the Rams and the Panthers in the mirror cornered above the bar. The man beside me was from Denmark, and having heard my accent, his first…

By IDE AMARI THOMPSON my Grammy taught me right  from conception, her voice   iron & honey in my bones endless like the alto line of a Zion Convection Choir  full & bodied, darker than than the mouth of the sea   When you face your Goliath, don’t take no soft rock to he armor   get ya paring knife ann learn how to twis’ & jick it in,    she guiding my hand as   I moved the blade…

By ELVIS BEGO Brunch nearly over, talk getting punctuated by lulls, her mother, trim and elegant in her pastel widowhood, letting father go so easily, it seems to Josephine, now asks her if she is thinking about a child.   “No,” comes the answer, but too quick, too reflexive. It’s too late to take it back, but she makes the attempt anyway, and says, “Well, it occurs to me now and then, but Ismar, you know….” She…

By JOANNE DOMINIQUE DWYER        We had a quarrel, melee, detonation of hurt—  fisticuffs of invisible disfiguration in the countryside of Spain.  I slept that evening on a reclining lawn chair under the stadium of the sky.  You stayed in the bed, roof overhead. The next morning you left   in an economy red rental car for the village where you joined   a Catholic procession,…

By RIMA BRUSI Translated from the Spanish by JESSICA POWELL Excerpted from Phantoms   In January 1970, two months before my conception, John Lennon and Yoko Ono shaved their heads, and a few weeks later they released the single “Instant Karma!”  If this thing I’m writing were a script, my parents’ acid-filled days on New York’s Lower East Side would be accompanied by this…

By DAVID SERAFINO Gustavo’s cinder block bungalow has no windows, so he’s surprised when he steps out at half past dawn to find a man in an olive uniform digging post holes for a semi-assembled fence scattered in the dusty yard. The soldier stands, puffs his chest, and dusts off his brass buttons. He is young, tall, and handsome—some proud…

By MATTHEW LIPPMAN I gotta buy a cake for my kid.   Some kind of ice cream jamboree from J.P. Licks down in West Roxbury.   She’s gonna be 20.   When you are a parent, you just keep buying cakes for your kids.   You could be 80 and she’s 60   and still you head on out to Carvel in New Rochelle, Webster Avenue,   and get…

By ANNA HOGELAND 1910 Ida Smith lived on a large farm near the south shore of Lake Erie, a lake she believed was the ocean when she was very young, because the shore was sand and all she could see was water and water and she didn’t yet know the sea smelled like salt.  They hardly ever went to the…

By JOHN POCH   I try to wish the best for him, our rival. His lines which really amount to nothing, the phrases that his readers fawn over, “I’m here for it” or “What a time” or even single words he uses as lines like “Fair” or “Same” or “Cheers”… I shouldn’t let them get to me. He even rhymes Halloween/Thirteen…

By SHARON DOLIN                        —after Rilke  Yours, still the hardest face to see— even the mirror lies, with your image in reverse. To see into your life   you must look into the life of things:   take this brass candelabra shaped  into a circular set of stairs that,  when lit, sees into…

By DIANE MEHTA You can’t risk too much Jenga in a lift but when you leave her, put your foot down, exit to the steady earth we merely balance on— you risk collapse, your knife-edge youth retracts while you are full of spirit and mistakes. I didn’t realize lifts were not unconditional. My drunk idea about who you are, who…

By KAS BERNAYS  her voice crackled like a distress signal interrupted as she told me how in the bright haze halfway between borders and their certainties the engine’s faltering stutter had drowned under her daughters’ wails and all desperation had coiled into the kick of her unborn son they had arrived surging an avenging current to puncture the water’s indifferent…

By CAMPBELL MCGRATH We wanted to say goodbye to the world we knew  so we drove the coastline north from Miami   as far as we could go. It was a farewell tour,  sure, but farewell to what? Not the ocean,   looming daily out the right-hand window,   not the water but what the water would erase.   Farewell to Florida, nipped in…

By PETER FILKINS bird song laced the particulate air  wind emptied the pines of their whistle  a cloud roamed aimless arriving somewhere  the creek lapped away at its trestles  church bells dormant hung in their towers  avenues basked in the neutral light  clock hands frozen implored the heavens  train tracks departed for nowhere on time  far off the mountains shed their glaciers  while farther yet the tides churned on  beneath a night sky punctured by stars …

By NATALIE BAVAR  I don’t know what this means.  It’s just before 8, and my darling cat pounced behind the recycling mound  and emerged with a mouse. She carried  it up to my room to begin her dirty work, the quest to kill without wounding,   to inflict a fear so mortal that the small mouse body could not contain it. I called my father.   I am…

By TINA CANE Today’s lively experiment was supposed to be about the virtues of olive oil   and the simple yet sumptuous lifestyle of Italian nonnas maximizing their wellness   by just being themselves    but no sooner had I embraced the integrity of handmade   bucatini and a schmatta than did my mind migrate towards questions about the source   of self-regard and whether there really are any self-evident…

By KAROLINA LETUNOVA                                                        It’s minus forty outside, and on Baba Lena’s glassed-in balcony the towels have dried stiff and I stand them up on the couch like snow cranes flying north and breathe…

By KERRY JAMES EVANS             —after “My Husband and I Fight about Robots” by Sara Burge  Mother’s on her way back from the Fayette waterpark,  where the kids don’t know how to be lazy in the lazy river. Mother’s trying to float in her tube,   and they’re knocking into me like we’re bumper cars.  In the background, Tom Petty’s “Free Fallin’.”   Here, I’m holed up with the dog,   reading…

By ANDREW STEINER   It was March 2023, and I was alone in Wellington. The creative writing class I’d traveled there to teach had ended. Antipodean summer was ending too, night falling earlier, rain dripping from the lemonwood trees, the gray surface of the harbor whipped and wrinkled by a wind that roared ceaselessly through the Cook Strait. I spent…

By JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ I denounced abstract expressionism. I became a realist and portrait painter. I started paying my taxes. I flossed my teeth with regularity. I tied my shoes with punctuality. I wore dress shoes for that matter. I no longer sang in the shower. I stopped skateboarding on the weekend. I threw away my Neil Young & Crazy Horse albums. I tipped my waiter…

By TINA CANE  Like yesterday                               I could have cried with relief driving around    this little city running errands with mariachi rancheras blasting   on my radio making the everyday feel extravagant like being   in a film about running errands     or some other earlier version   of myself listening to a mariachi band in Garibaldi Square   coveting the mariachero’s spangled pants as…

By JUDITH BAUMEL Who can know my despair  at the ones who talk too much.  The ones who don’t speak at all.  The ones who qualify and over-qualify.  The ones who can’t say this without first saying that.  Make them like stubble driven by the wind. Happy is the one who sees rescue  in this wrapped robe of light;  the big sky spread like…

By HANNAH GERSEN On a rainy morning in late August last year, I stood beneath a wedding-sized tent to observe the Sixth Opening Convocation of the West Virginia School of Home Economics. It was a humid day, and the smell of wet, freshly cut grass mingled with the perfumes of the young women who surrounded me. I was a guest…

By DANIELLE V. SCHOON For Ana María Alonso  It was late October, and my half-sister, Nikki, and I walked arm in arm with our stepmother through the streets of Caracas. The sweet metallic smell of gasoline, ever-present in the city, mixed with the acrid sourness of tropical flowers decaying at the end of the rainy season to create a pungent…

By M. B. MCCLATCHEY It was a gold-seal ruse. A double-  dealing so sublime the gods ordained  it. Settled into their stadium seats,  they wagered on their favorites. Helen,   the imposter bride, circling and circling   the gifted horse. Her Central Casting   lines to the shadows inside. The numbing   non-reply. War-weary, she fastened her   hair in gold and dressed for a city   ablaze. Nothing to…

By ALLYSON NOMAN Things have taken a strange turn since my husband uprooted our family. First I quit my job. Then I stopped eating. And now I’ve begun to receive messages from the dead. Four months ago, we moved from rural, pastoral Northern California, a place I loved, to southwest Virginia. Over the summer, smoke from the West Coast wildfires…

By KAREN CHASE my body and  in the morning, it  returns. To exist fully, it  needs more than my body, so  up it goes into the stars, for  sustenance. I open   my eyes and pray—   You have returned within me, my  soul with compassion.  Modah ani lefaneka melechai   chai vekayam shehehezarta    I get out of bed,  join the revolution.    [Purchase…

By AMIYA MORETTA  I wouldn’t be here. Or not like this? Grandma’s blonde ringlets had gone bald, her teeth missing slots, her eyes— gray-blue rime. My Umatilla grandfather who had one leg, lived down the road, hobbled to her heroin loyally. That’s how my mom and dad, neighbors whose parents were good friends and fellow addicts, met as kids, played…

By SAMUEL KỌ́LÁWỌLÉ 1 The hyena boys came to Bonaventure, which was serendipitous, because he was used to avoiding the world before the world spurned him. For one, his white albino skin flecked with dark spots made him a regular target of mockery. When Bonaventure was younger and his father was around and could barely afford to send him to…

By JAMES K. BOYCE With photos by TIANNE STROMBECK Sitting on a boulder one morning on a little island in northwestern Ontario, I watched a loon fishing about fifty yards offshore. The air and water were dead calm, the lake surface mirroring the clouds above and the trees along the shoreline.   The loon dove without a splash, and I…