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Birthday - by Kim Goldberg

I was born in 1969—Year of the Rooster, of Woodstock, of electric Kool-Aid, of Country Joe booming There’s three hundred thousand of you fuckers out there, I don’t know how you ever expect to stop the war if you can’t sing any better than that!, of Captain America getting shotgunned off his hog at the end of Easy Rider,pile of sunnysideup fragments left to sizzle on the skillet of some hate-filled southern highway – or rice paddy (no, those movies came later, we were still living it then), I was born on the day I quit high school, on my fifteenth birthday, crashed out the vacuous double-doored vagina of Marshfield Senior High in Coos Bay, Oregon, take your stinkin’ hall pass and shove it you dork-face fascists, the fucked-up world needs me today not after graduation, I’m my own teacher now, if I meet the Buddha on the road I’ll be killing that self-righteous little prick (but I just ended up shooting a bunch of drugs and swiping various TVs and a car or two, which somehow seemed revolutionary at the time, but it worked out okay because it gives me something to write about in my twilight years)...more

Slow Freeze - by Laurah Norton Raines

It was the same all summer long. We sat in our apartment because we couldn’t afford to go out. We didn't like to do the same things anyhow. You liked pot and video games, and I liked punk-rock shows. You wouldn't take me to see bands because you said the music was too loud. Really, you were afraid you'd get beaten up. So we stayed home...more

Farewell - by Laura Didyk

Good-bye to the pink sun I saw rise that night over a field in Freedom, Indiana.
Good-bye to the pink sun I took a square of and dropped under my tongue.
Good-bye to believing everything is made of leaves and sickness and fire.
Good-bye to boxes of wine, to 40s, to joints saved for a week in a playing card box until the exact perfect moment...

Little Orange Bottles - by Jeremy Rice

1.

My girlfriend and I are leaving the university at around five in the afternoon. We’re tired, stressed about homework, already thinking about dinner, when the cell phone jumps and squeals in my lap. It’s my older brother, Kyle, his voice loud, filling my head. “Jeremy. Do you know about Mom?” My blood freezes. Kyle tells me how he went to visit her the day before, drove the hour and a half from his apartment in Hendersonville, North Carolina, to our parents’ isolated cabin on the Tennessee border. She wasn’t expecting him; they have no phone connected, so he couldn’t call beforehand. She was alone. Our father was working a sixteen-hour shift at a group home for the developmentally disabled. “She was going to OD, man,” Kyle says, voice cold and clear. “I came in and she had the pills all lined up on the table. Said she’d been planning it for days.” ...more

Rara Avis: How to Tell a True Bird Story - by Jackson Connor

Part I: Rara Avis

I have seen hawks dive and rise with field rodents. I have seen white-faced hornets snatch houseflies out of the air. I have seen robins pull worms from the ground, woodpeckers force insects from bark, herons stand for hours on one leg. I have never seen a bald eagle hunt, though I have seen them scavenge for food. On the river. In the fields where I grew up...

Hold Your Horses The Elephants Are Coming - by Christopher Higgs

In the first coliseum it was people killing people, animals killing animals, animals killing people, and people eating people.

Remember Juvenal, "Two things only the people anxiously desire—bread and circuses."
Not bread alone.

It was the fifth king of Rome, not of the republic nor the empire, but the kingdom, Tarquinius Priscus, who waged war on a neighboring village, massacred everyone, and in honor of the victory built the Circus Maximus. Later, Pompey held a rhinoceros fight in the arena, the railing broke, and the rhinoceroses proceeded to stomp two dozen children, to the delight of countless onlookers. Shortly thereafter Caesar added a moat to ensure a safer distance for the audience, but then Nero filled it back in—he, of course, rather enjoyed the titillating possibility of collateral damage...