My friends and I play scrabble once a year by Kabir Mehra

We play scrabble once a year
It’s always the best day of the year
We do simple best, but we choose complicated lives
For the chance that we might get it right– this next time.

How easy is it?
To stop.
To put some silken tofu
In the oven
And talk to each other
While it slowly hardens

Sometimes, I watch them slowly harden
As we dry up in conversation
Things that they would say freely to me a week ago
Are now barricaded by brand new reservations.
Let’s push each other away, it’s so much easier.

Until the next year we play scrabble,
And we’re soft again, like the tofu
That is not yet subject to heat, or hardening.

To miss someone is to speak into a vacuum by Ryan Yim

It’s to tumble
like an asteroid across the cosmos,
gravitating toward your body,
but grazing past your skin,
against my will.

It’s to orbit,
to be locked in a dance of near and then far;
to be pulled so effortlessly in and,
by the same force,
flung back out.

It’s to wait,
and watch,
and wane,
because the distance between us does get smaller;
just never enough.

It’s to avoid
catastrophe, collision. Which is
to say missing can be choice or circumstance. Which is
to say missing doesn’t mean lost. Which is
to say sometimes
I look for you.

It’s to analogize
(fumble awkwardly):
to say what I mean, but not really;
to be who I mean, but not truly,
hoping
you understand.

Because to miss you
is to speak into a vacuum,
to mouth the words while choking
on the indomitable space
between us,
hoping

that if you also
really,
truly
miss me,
I understand.

The Stopinator by Scott Sorenson

Ahh, Perry the Platypus,
We meet again.
You should see your face!
Every time this happens,
You act like we haven’t done it for the last fifteen years running.
What a show!
What a life!
Anyways,
You’re probably wondering why I’ve trapped you here.
You see,
Vanessa made me go to therapy because I’m an absentee father,
Borderline schizophrenic and high on mushrooms for the majority of my waking hours,
But I’ve been journaling and going on long walks
And I’ve figured out that if I just freeze everything right here,
Nothing can possibly get worse!
You see, Perry,
Vanessa’s graduating next year,
This show has been running for 17 years now
And a normal platypus’s lifespan is 20.
Do the math, Perry!
Pretty soon we won’t have these moments,
These strange little B plots,
And I’ll have to put on a suit and stop making inators and take up accounting or
something!
What’ll I do with all this evil energy?
I could take up pottery,
But my hands aren’t soft enough for that!
Behold,
The STOPinator!
Once I press this button,
Everything on Earth will stop what it’s doing forever
And stay exactly the way it is!
Pretty cool, right?

My therapist says I need to heal my childhood trauma,
But we’ve had a pretty good run so far,
Haven’t we?
Sure, I covered the East Coast in tinfoil
Melted 84 chocolate shops
And turned my building into a killer robot,
But things always wrap up pretty neatly
At the end of every episode.
Everyone’s okay,
Right Perry?
I haven’t sinned?
I mean,
You forgive me, right?

Anyways,
Enough of the touchy feely stuff.
With the pull of this lever, Perry,
We’ll stay like this forever!
You’ll keep fighting me
And the boys’ll keep cleaning up my messes
And Vanessa can stay angry but still present
When I come home covered in nondescript goo at the end of every episode.
I can stay broken,
Perry.
I don’t have to change.
Give me one reason I shouldn’t flip this switch, you bastardized mammal.

I knew it.
You’re scared too.

Remembering (unless you don't want me to) by Payton Weiner

I told you I would drive to DC for you because
the distance is just gas stations and exit signs,
and there are things to worry about in between
the traffic lights, like long division and kissing
trees and first times and third grade, and I won’t
count the hours, and I will forget about the weeks,
I don’t think time is meant to be synthesized, but
I would buy a clock for you and dance in Times
Square on New Years Eve, like we did at Reagan’s
house in 9th grade, with your dad’s vodka in a water
bottle and our love in a second floor bathroom against
the sink, and we walked out in front of everyone and
laughed about everything. I wish you said bye on the
night you took the train, and even if it was a lie, I wish
you said you missed me, but I heard that cities can do that—
steal your purses and your past—that they can teach you
how to own the loneliness, at the bar, against the glass,
next to strangers tangled in bedsheets, that they can make
suffering a party, out until 4am, until you unlearn the sadness,
until you can’t cry because you’ve collapsed. What I mean to
say is I drove to DC because the distance is just replaying
our memories, and there are things to worry about in
between the traffic lights, like trigonometry and drifting
planes and grandma’s dog and if you don’t remember me.

Coup by Alison Blake

Too early in November to make us give thanks,
a wild turkey squeezed through the gap in the fence,
waddled out in front of the swingset slide
my sister and I thought we reigned over.
Thank god I had the sense not to wheeee straight into his path.
The turkey was larger than I’d imagined his species,
his feathers, shabby as they were, swelling his size
past what I’d seen Dad slice every Thanksgiving.
We had years to go till we hit our growth spurts, sure,
but even from below the swingset, from below the slide,
our homely trespasser loomed over us. It felt that way,
at least, so we ran to the oak tree and behind its trunk,
so fat and knobby and well-climbed that we pressed our backs
against the bark, clasped our hands together, and declared safety.
How presumptuous.
Too slow to make us shriek and spook the neighbors
but ugly enough to make me hate his bulbous neck, his snood,
his bald head and the way its skin turned bright red
at the base, as if to go HA. GOTCHA!
he crept around the tree without hooking his talons on the roots,
the motherfucker. So much for claiming a backyard
for all eight years of your life. A one-time intruder can conquer
it in three minutes flat, we learned that day.
We had to surrender.
3, 2, 1. RUN and we fled inside,
dodging the victorious creature I’d so grossly underestimated.
Before dinner I peered out the window,
found him perched on the front stoop, our front stoop,
surely plotting his annexation of the indoors too.

That night I dreamed he and his red-headed,
full-feathered forest clan stormed our living room
to hold all of us captive.
And even after Dad fixed the fence
I never wheeed down the slide the same,
never opened the front door
without checking the windows first.
You never know with turkeys.

At 3 AM, Riding on the Back of an Uber Moto Feels Like Flying by Brooke Nind

When you’ve decided to order an Uber Moto
as your form of transport home, you have no choice
but to get on. A stranger hands you a helmet
and gestures to the handlebars behind you, waiting
for you to find your balance. Before you know it,
you are indeed flying. The road stretches into darkness
as the driver weaves between cars, speeding up
at every opportunity. You can’t tell whether it is more
or less dangerous that it is the middle of the night
and so few people are on the road. The buildings
are rushing past, the traffic lights are rushing past,
the city is rushing past, and you are still
on a random man’s motorcycle. You laugh about the fact
that your Spanish and his English are equally bad.
You laugh about how horrified your mom would be
at this whole situation. He asks if he’s going too fast
and when you say no, he speeds up even more.
You fly all the way home, awaiting a hard stop.

Girls Overheard from Tree Branches by Eliza Dunn

after Mary Szybist

It’s so green up here.
The branches are holding me
like great big hands.
It’s almost comfortable enough to sleep.
Last night, you were in my dream.
You were at school in a yellow ball gown
and you had wings. Then you flew all the way to Spain.
Why was I so dressed up? I wish
I could fly to Spain! Maybe they have trees
we could sleep in. Look down there,
that’s the path we walked to get here. 
It looks so far away from all the way up here!
Don’t you think that cloud looks like a body?
But my hips don’t look like that.
Let’s pretend. I’m a famous moviestar.
And I want to be the president.
Okay, you’re the first lady president
and you have your own plane.
I’d rather have wings. 
Oh yeah, we have big wings that fly us
all the way to Spain. 
What kind of trees do they have there?
Beautiful ones with flowers and oranges
and leaves so big you can sit on them.
Like the ones we saw in that movie.
Except we haven’t been shrunk
and it’s me and you, in real life.
Do you believe in magic?
I believe in mermaids. And God,
but only because my grandmother
tells me to. I’m climbing up higher.
Are we still going to Spain?
Come up here. You can see everything, 
all the way to the ocean. I wish 
I had a photographic memory. I do too. 
I’d remember every single thing I saw. 
Take a memory of me now. Okay, smile. 
Click! I can’t show it to you, but you can imagine.
Way up here, you look like you’re flying.
Everything around you is green
and leafy and fluttering like so many birds.

bring a bouquet to the graveyard by Ally Burg

finally
the flowers bloomed.
overnight the buds
became petals,
and we became alive
and radiant and full and brilliantly pink.
I doodled lilacs
on our grocery lists,
and you tucked
my hair behind my ear
to replace it with a daisy.
we were lighter
than dandelions in the wind
and sweeter than honeysuckles.

so
I did what was sensible.
I packed up
my camera and my sunglasses
and my postcards and all my clothes.
I fit my entire world
into a 22 x 11 suitcase
and I checked it away
on that Amtrak.

I fled
while we were still pretty.
I gazed out the window
and watched the lush trees
turn to barren sticks,
the green meadows
become miles of snow.
I could already remember us
as something
I once carefully picked to
display on my nightstand
in my grandmother’s purple vase.
something fragile
and cared for and bright.

I couldn’t stand to watch
another one
of my flowers wilt,
to witness something
that pretty
die.

I wonder
if that’s why
we bring flowers
to a funeral,
to remember
that before death
there was once
something beautiful.