After You Break the Ceiling for Elizabeth For a while, you fall upward. Gravity is weird and different, unpredictable without the constant weight of competition and comparison holding you in check. Your body feels light then heavy then light again. You wonder if you...
Issue Twenty Five
Gravity
A penny glued to the ground is no different than love. Each a kindergarten lesson in futility and persistence. Chinese finger traps between us, our pulling brings us only closer, the gravity of us two planets drawing more near unwavering from our collision course...
The Time Your GP Tries to Dissuade You from Getting Your Tubes Tied
“The Time Your GP Tries to Dissuade You from Getting Your Tubes Tied” By L. Soviero He calls you darling. Are you sure that’s what you want, darling? But more like, daaaaarling. And he’s not some old timer who’s been flinging darlings since Reagan. Or since comedians...
Cold call
God, I’m expecting to hear from youAny day now, something winged alighting upon me,A Rush of Cochineal —The terms of the visitation I leave to your discretion. Superposition helps, as well as love —Though you must already understand, as you do the whorlsOf shells and...
The Ethics of Keeping Your Ex’s Vibrator
I’ve been thinking about the things I lose and the things I’ve lost and the difference between the two. Things I lose can be regained. I lose my chapstick several times a day. Within a few hours, I come upon it folded into the fabric of my jacket pocket or behind the...
A Perfect Day in Köln
As we greet him—Guten Tag—in the lobby’s intercom, we don’t know yet that Artur barely speaks German himself. Our couch-surfing host is a foreign PhD student—a theoretical physicist—and he gives powerful hugs. He obviously works out. He shows us around. He does not...
The Slaughterhouse Next Door
It was a scorching summer night, which meant we had two choices: keep the window closed and fry in our own sweat, or open it and allow the stench of death and decay to wrap itself around us as we tried once again to make a baby. When we moved into our dream home at...
The Woke Bros of Shakespeare Take Manhattan
Twelve larger-than-life characters queue in the wings – masked and appropriately distanced, naturally. They’re ready to take the stage (pending enthusiastic consent from the stage) for a livestream ‘Broadway’s Back!’ performance/conversation entitled ‘21st...
Tell Billy To Do His Homework
You lose your virginity to the sweet, fast talking brunette girl from AP Calculus class, in the stacks of the high school library. You get married/break up. You lose your heart to the English Lit major who wrote her thesis on the importance of Precambrian quartzite...
Someday You’ll Ask About the Dog
You’ll approach me lanky-limbed and jaded, already wishing time would slow or stop, and I’ll suggest we pore over photos from when you were a baby. I’ll hand you my phone, and as you scroll through the years, you’ll pause over a series of images centered around a...