WINTER LESSONS
MAX SHOHAM
In winter, I learned about grown-ups.
The first lesson I learned was of their dim-witted cruelty, always intended as an act of public service but, in the most grown-up kind of way, mutated to become its own grotesque opposite.
HOT SINGLES IN YOUR AREA
MAXWELL NORMAN
So basically I had to go to a dating event in this rented-out bar in Poughkeepsie, NY since my shitass liberal arts school doesn’t like me or think I’m hot anymore.
CONCUSSION
KAT MULLIGAN
She is trying to remind me of sins I committed before this concussion made me holy. I haven’t even seen her in two years and now she is prodding me with her weird beagle and stopping me from sleeping for three days like a vampire.
KENNY'S DESKTOP
PIP MORRISON
Kenny set his screensaver to a photo of that chimpanzee in the (North) Korea Central Zoo that smokes a pack a day. His tabs are miraculously still open.
THREE CAR CRASHES
CHARLIE ZACKS
When I got my driver’s license my mom gave me her old Cadillac Escalade, the extended size version. Black. The thing looked like the car a president would be shot in and it drove like a school bus.
BAD FIRST DATES
BRENDAN LINDSAY
In my experience, when you’ve given up on a prospective partner, the consolation prize for lack of love is an opportunity for narcissism.
FALL
VARIOUS
“I asked Kat, Amalia, Maxwell, Max, Jack, Johnny, Alana, and August to write a poem about Autumn. These are the poems. This is best read on desktop. Mobile phones will fuck up the text formatting. Do as you wish. Godbless.”
BREAKUP SUMMER
AMALIA MAIRET
Maybe it was a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I felt like his ability to be realistic about the inevitable shift that awaited us, especially when I could not yet, was an incredible mercy. Even if we were to hold on, the thing itself would change in our hands as we clutched it.
POETRY DEBATE
ELIS MONTEVERDE BURRAU + CHARLIE ZACKS
The smartest dressed man in the room wears a zoot suit. He says something or another about the end of art.
THE SEER
THE SEER
The First Seer saw his family before him, seeing him before what was behind him, standing. This was how beauty first came into being.
tractor fucker
ALANA DUNLOP
Everyone knows I am working on a short story about a woman who fucks a tractor. As of now, it is half-complete, the ending still missing, and this empty space is grating on me—it is a story that feels impossible to resolve.
ARRIVING. SLEEPS FOR HOURS
ALI ALONZO
Walking around through shafts of trees across the water down to Ica (swedish grocery store)
Ate dinner in a small town named Tindered. Saw the fat stupid seal
live baby gators
MAXWELL NORMAN
The hot gloopy weather of Southern summers makes it hard for me to feel sexy, and I never liked working up a sweat with that atmosphere waiting beyond the window, even if the AC’s on inside. The two things I don’t ever do these days but feel like I should be doing: praying and fucking.
BRANCA AUTHENTICITY
JACKSON DUNNIGAN
If you've ever itched the inkling of patchwork desire to feel like a real Piece Of Shit you may already know this one... the classic test of Branca Authenticity!
RED 40
ROWAN MCSHERRY
This afternoon, I will dive into the lake. Before I jump, I will imagine hitting the bottom; knocked unconscious, maybe a spinal injury. I would float up like William Holden in Sunset Boulevard.
RAUNCHY NEWMAN
JEANNIE ERASER
After my grandpa died, I inherited his iPad. In his notes app was his entire life story. He was totaled but still a funny guy.
These are the sections I found most entertaining…
ALI ALONZO NEWSLETTER
ALI ALONZO
I’m not really sure
how the genre: newsletter
operates
LIVELEAK SUMMER
CHARLIE ZACKS
I remember watching the life drained from her eyes and then crying probably because I was maybe a year from LiveLeak, a few months from Reddit, and just a couple weeks from ISIS beheadings.
plateau fuck
KAT MULLIGAN
As he combs his hair at the vanity, a few strands fall onto his collarbones, onto the straps of his wifebeater. You see it in him as he talks. You see him sing Chet Baker as he irons his shirt.
WHO YOU ARE IN A HOTEL BATHROOM
AMALIA MAIRET
You are somebody else, your life planned and set in motion by a ghost that does not live in your hotel room but whose lipstick is on the counter.