Oedipus Complex, or “You Smell Like My Mother”
Brittany Harmon
I prefer whiskey, but my friend only had vodka, which we drank copiously while seeing how many times we could say copiously and lamented about our bedroom frustrations, but when I came home you kept close to my breath as we undressed and had sex, the best in a while, so I stopped drinking whiskey and started buying more vodka.
She Gets Starry Eyed When We Make Love
Justin Brouckaert
“What’s to keep us from just floating away into space,” she asks, her lips both light and heavy at the same time, and I think, Only your hand on my chest.
Sentenced to Death
Pamela Gay
In the morning as was her ritual, she carried a cup of espresso and her MacBook Air to the old oak library table next to a sunlit window of plants ever-reaching higher-higher, causing one visitor to exclaim “I like your trees,” when lo & behold, just as she was about to land her MacBook Air, there lay a fly, a sight that caused her eyebrows to rise and her sleek laptop to fall fast&furious, crushing the fly, and it was then after that heightened instantaneous moment of being that she heard some echoes: her yoga teacher starting class with some sentence about how we must respect every living creature, which echoed varieties of this commandment by Buddhists, which then made her think of the story Buddhist nun Pema Chodron told about how she once spent four hours of her day trying to help a bug out the door, and then she remembered asking her yoga teacher at the end of class if fleas were included, as her Maine coon cat had recently suffered a flea attack and she admittedly had been drowning fleas one-by-one in hot, soapy water, which she would not have done with this fly, and then she began thinking about the national debate about whether the death penalty should be banned as a form of punishment, which led her to ask herself what had this fly done except lived its life as a fly, and then she thought she’d better get on with her day, that thinking about sentencing had gone on too long– like this sentence.
The Education of a Self-Actualized Slacker (i.e. Poet)
Eugenio Volpe
He disarmed their lectures by doodling Necker Cubes and yin yangs on book covers made of brown paper bags, seeing himself as an impossible object both hard and soft with light and dark thoughts always written in pencil.
Awakening
Emily Dawson
When the neon lights faded and her fingers delighted my breasts, I knew.
