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Published on September 24, 2026 Punt means surrender, but that’s never enough, not in America, not among boys on Saturday afternoon behind the grade school. I can’t help myself. I run full speed, time my dive, launch myself like a missile. The football in my gut, the wind knocked out of me—what I now know is called phrenospasm. It’s a hollow feeling, not being able to breathe. It keeps me in line, still, whenever I can’t decide between glamour and grace.

Published on September 24, 2026 This year I listened only to jazz records from 1959. I found three hundred online, all free. Who says the world’s going to hell in a handbasket? My mother did. She knew the origin of that idiom too—miners being lowered into earth. It must have been like going back in time, descending into prehistoric darkness, the only sound a canary chirping a desperate version of Kind of Blue. Author Bio: Barry Peters lives in Durham, North Carolina.

I don’t know what duct tape is, but I know the sound of it ripped from a roll. That sound. It’s to the left of me. I know it as well as I know my head slumps to the right, my chin rests against my chest. As well as I know the soreness in my neck and the sharp pain at the end of my nose. The sound is deafening. Another is coming. What does that mean? Spiders wriggle in the pit of my stomach, replacing butterflies. They used to dance when I discovered new things. What are butterflies?

It doesn't matter why the trim, fifty-eight-year-old Sergei Viktorovich Krapchishin, in an elegant dark-gray suit, an ironed white shirt, and polished black leather shoes, unexpectedly found himself, on a spring morning in 2025, on a narrow, sunlit, straight, and quiet street, the houses on which were lost among the incredibly close acacias, maples, and tall bushes—that is, on the street that had run toward him from his childhood.

It was following the Great Divide that men and women stopped cohabitating. Men lived with men and women with women, and the sexes did not intermingle. Human sperm counts had dropped to a negligible level, and for many there now seemed little point to life as we had known it. The last baby to be born had died swiftly and without ceremony—cementing our doom—and so why continue the silly charade? Nuclear family nuked. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man—bullshit. And love?

Main menu Published on July 30, 2026 no water tastes quite right since leaving home— too soft not the right kind of hard I tried ice cold bottled plastic and glass hot with tea leaves Learned ‘tap water’ in a dozen languages never finding what would quench a nostalgia at the tip of my tongue not yet remembered maybe once I think away it fades in each move I drink sparkling so the bubbles will burst the disappointment on my immigrant tongue that has forgotten where the water tasted right I say...

Main menu Published on July 16, 2026 I dig for medicine ink blind in the dirt, no news past the next elbow of night, scooped hands carving a husk for incomplete skin. I’ve bent there rooting under daylight’s million feet, breath rebounding from the mudpack in a second heat, every corridor a vein map drawn to build out the body, tap a witnessing pulse and beg this clay tell me my shape, let me know and be known by a lower mother that broods me into form and finish me that I may recognize my earth.

Main menu Published on July 2, 2026 During La Mercè I wander the Gothic Quarter, the heat of bodies and 100% cotton brushing against the back of my palm. I pause to take a video of graffiti my cousins say is ugly. One says: I don’t understand how someone could deface architecture like that. Some graffiti is beautiful, I say. Another asks: How could graffiti be pretty?

It was hot when they finally arrived in Jakarta. It was the furthest they’d been from home together since their honeymoon thirty years ago. This time, Ellen and Joe were here to stay. Retire in paradise on Java’s pristine shores! Ellen had the brochure tucked into her purse; she’d carried it for the past nine months like a talisman. Their few belongings had been shipped ahead of time. Their grown son, Rock, the only thing left behind.

Sibley notices immediately that Arianne Hebert’s life story is scattered across her palm like a handful of freshly tossed pick-up sticks, she’d be easily misled, easily convinced. There is very little space between her thumb and life line, and the shallow heart line with the circles across it – like someone had pressed two pennies into her palm – indicate this woman has suffered.