The day before the world was supposed to end, Kasumi woke up in the morning and slipped into her school uniform as usual. She had nothing else to do. Besides, she didn’t dislike school. On the other hand, her best friend, Tomo-chan, had left for a trip a few days earlier, saying she would spend time with her boyfriend. By this time, she would have lost her virginity.
It is in this bed, after all, our bed, that I have most exposed myself, that I have been both sick and happy: secure, protected, and yet in the next moment, utterly, existentially alone. In a real dark night of the soul, Fitzgerald writes, it is always three o’clock in the morning, day after day.
“The Paris of the Americas”
“Obligatorium”
“Monsoon Season: Morenci AZ”
“Plucked”
“Memory as Diary”
It all seemed too much to successfully handle, but there was nothing else to do.
Ruth couldn’t quite forget that her husband, David, had slept with Diana before he slept…
It isn’t genteel to point out, but spit can be beautiful. It’s an ordinary beauty—the parabola, the clearly practiced skill.
“Free Solo Climbing”
“A Beautiful Fiasco”
There’s a telephone. Three syllables, telephone, so it’s the kind with the handle—you could bring it from room to room only with the help of long cords, like a medical attachment of saline. Its speaking and listening parts imitated your own. Meeting in a kind of lonely kiss: plastic, teeth, cartilage, bone.
“Black people often comment on the fact that when you see some person’s name trending on Twitter among your circles, someone Black who you’ve never heard of, your first thought is, ‘My God, someone has been murdered again,'” Eve Ewing tells ACM poetry editor Tara Betts.
In 2010 life changed in Bear’s Corner. Outsiders know the place as Komi. That was the year the bears came to eat us.
“Make/Shift drops the reader and characters into worlds, time, and the mind itself. In this debut collection of eleven short stories with three ‘commercial breaks’ between stories, author Joe Sacksteder hypnotizes you with his imagination, beckoning you to join him down the rabbit hole,” Michael Gawdzik writes.
You won’t find much radical analysis in contemporary fiction: Trump is stupid, rude, a racist and a misogynist; his election was a completely unsuspected usurpation of both a deserving candidate and the norms that bound an imperfect but fundamentally good country together. Now it falls to the few good people left to struggle against him, like Dumbledore’s Army, like District 13, like The Fellowship of the Ring. It must be done, and it must be done now, but it must be done in a kind, hopeful, affirming way, or we will be no better than he is.
“Each inch of the park is designed to trick visitors into thinking they’ve left New York for a Parisian garden, the Catskills, Wonderland, or that they are themselves Henry Hudson discovering Manhattan…,” David Andrew Stoler writes of Stephen Wolf’s book on Central Park.
“Love Letter 16. Ring of Fifths”
“Love Letter 18. Words Are Wind in Shut Spaces”
“Growing Up With Brothers Meant Machines–”
“My Grandmother’s Candy Jar”
“Leaves”
“Ticket Thrown Away Before Not Leaving”
“To The Hunters”
“There Are Women Who Know”
“Prayer”
“Kaleidoscope”
“Elegy”
“Lineage”
“Optic Principle”
“Jeremy T. Wilson shares Victoria Patterson’s gift for creating empathy for initially unlikable characters whose destructive and compulsive behaviors hurt themselves and those closest to them,” Laura Johanna Waltje writes.
Religious, you say? What’s religious? And when there are so many shades, so many tones and semi-tones of religious, who really qualifies as merely religious and who, as a nut job?
Addressing one of the US’s true emergencies, five former mayors told Chicago how they had reduced the murder rate in their cities.
Welcome to ACM issue #56! This is our second online issue, and the second and last issue where we release all the genres at the same time. After this, we will send out individual pieces into the world.
