Greg Sherl’s manuscript, I HAVE TOUCHED YOU, won our chapbook contest. Here’s a video of Mel Bosworth reading from it. And my goodness it’s good.

Another video from Mr. Bosworth. In today’s installment, Mel reads from Christy Crutchfield’s “The Benefits of Deer Hunting.”

The obscenely kind Mel Bosworth reads an excerpt from “What They Did with the Body,” a story by the obscenely talented Mike Meginnis.

All I Want To Do

by Chloe Caldwell

Pretending is ruining my life. I pretend I am Bukowski while cracking a beer and writing poems about sex and whiskey. I started to think maybe I could be Poe Ballantine so I’ve moved across the country to work a graveyard shift and be poor. I lift weights, channeling Sheryl Crow, trying to get those killer arms and then I drink a beer at noon on a Tuesday at a bar that faces a giant car wash. I am Henry Miller because friends give me furniture and books and often the bartenders buy my drinks and come back to my apartment. The reality of it is that I am a twenty something who doesn’t know what to be or where to live and I have been waking up in apartments with sounds and appliances, views and scenery that I don’t understand, isolated from the people that love me.

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Chloe Caldwell loves to take vitamins. She is excited about being forthcoming in http://bananafishmagazine.com and about the next time the sun will come out. It has been eleven days. You can email her at cocomonet@gmail.com, if you want to.

The Wives Are Turning Into Animals

by Amber Sparks

The husbands are almost sure of it. They have strong memories of an earlier time, of the wives with soft smooth faces and ten fingers and toes.

But lately, things have changed. Some of the wives have grown scaly patches, or sprouted thick pelts. Some wives have shrunk considerably. White, wide wings have unfolded, horns have appeared, tongues have grown longer and rougher and pinker, noses wetter and more sensitive than before.

The men have grown uneasy at night, listening to the wheezing and snorting of the wives as they sleep, as they embrace their husbands with tentacles and talons and long tails. The husbands aren’t sure what to do, whether to say something. They wonder if it would be rude to ask about the wives’ new appetites, their sudden hunger for mice and mealworms and raw, wriggling fish. They worry that they won’t be able to keep these ravenous wives fed. They worry that the neighbors will complain about the carcasses littering their lawns.

The husbands worry, most of all, that their wives will finally fly or crawl or swim away, untethered from the promises that only humans make or keep.

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Amber Sparks is pretty sure she’s human, though she does live with a husband and two beasts. She has work published or forthcoming in places like New York Tyrant, PANK, Wigleaf, Bust Down the Door and Eat All the Chickens, and the Collagist. She is the fiction editor at Emprise Review, and you can find her online at www.ambernoellesparks.com.