by Anita Pan
We’re here! The world is our oyster. The air is fresh and cool and we can see little bits of light dance through the trees. And if you take one more step, we can see past the hilltop.
Read Moreby Ambreen Hai
No screams, no tears, no pleas could avail. She had lost her baby as surely, as heartlessly, as the cat deprived of its kittens, the ewe of its lamb, the cow of its calf.
Read Moreby Libby Copa
as children he would sneak behind trees in the woods and turn over rocks, watch the mealworms and
centipedes he found underneath scurry for a new place to hide
by Kelly Ann Jacobson
Has she read these tomes—
these tombs
of what’s been lost…
…and what you’ve taken?
by Claire Schultz
He’d followed her down that same long, dark path, crushed under the waves past the center of the earth, and he hadn’t died. Maybe he was lucky. Maybe their love was fated, cosmic, too strong to be broken by something as mundane as death. Maybe the shadows down here had known.
Read Moreby Samuel Clark
I know that I’m in an inside-outside place because that’s where the boy comes from. The real inside. He splits the doors down the middle and steps out with his watering can, a dusty blue, and pours water into the dirt packed inside me for the flower inside me. He holds one of our leaves and says, “You’re my favorite,” and I don’t hear him say it to any of the other pots or any of their flowers, so I know that he’s telling the truth.
“You’re my favorite too,” I say, which is also the truth, but the boy says nothing back. This is the tragedy of our relationship—that he cannot hear me, but that I can hear him.