Stories by Bennett Sims, Jared Hanson, Saïd Sayrafiezadeh, and André Alexis, and a prose poem by Joni Wallace

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The client turned out to be an older man, a lawyer nearing retirement.
          I met him at his office downtown, where he gestured for me to sit across the desk from him, as though I were the client and his were the services we were there to discuss.
—From "The Postcard," a short story by Bennett Sims, Socrates on the Beach, Issue 7. It was included in his collection Other Minds and Other Stories (Two Dollar Radio, 2023). My other favorite from the collection was "Unknown," which originally appeared in The Kenyon Review. 

At the end of the summer of 1995, I had finished all my credits for high school and my father handed me twenty dollars. That's the last you're getting from me, he said. Either I had to enroll in the community college or start paying him rent. No, he said, let me rephrase that: you're going to pay me rent and I'll pay your tuition at the community college.
—From "My Life on the Streets," a short story by Jared Hanson, Bodega, Issue 134 (March 2024).

It's around six months or so after society has begun changing, mainly for the worse, when Lizzy and I decide to take that trip we've been talking about for so long, and which, only in hindsight, is probably our biggest mistake, i.e., not knowing what we're getting ourselves into.
—From American Estrangement, a short story collection by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh (W. W. Norton, 2021). This segment is from "Scenic Route." Please note: the sixth/next-to-last story in this collection, the one with the metaphor in the title, contains an uncomfortable subplot that may not be for everyone.

Math was tricky ground for him: it could be useful, but was often frivolous. He saw math as the thin edge of the entertainment wedge, as if, once you engaged with Fermat's Last Theorem, reality TV was not far behind. 
—From "Houyhnhnm," a short story by André Alexis, The New Yorker (June 20, 2022), pp. 52-58.

Starlings chitter up in dawn-light. Slip-of-a-dog, a languid coyote, steals between houses,
—From "Clockwork," a prose poem by Joni Wallace, Rhino (2024). 

Four poems and two short stories

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The daughter wakes to a world
encased in ice--
the pine trees stiff with it.
--From "Still," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, from her collection Once (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 85-87.

It is a green landscape, houses stalwart
as circus ponies, American houses, wet
kids moving through them in Spandex bathing suits; 
inside, sandwiches with crusts cut off, 
windows flung open and striped awnings rolled out; 
family portraits on the walls and generic
medicines in the cabinet: the middle classes.
--From "Twenty-first Century Fireworks," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, first published in The Kenyon Review and reprinted in her collection Once (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 17-18.

Who will remember us
when the light breaks
over the western valley 

and the trash stirs, 
the flood having come
with its red waters

and washed our graves away?
I was a person, 

once, I believe. . . .
--From "Churchyard," a poem by Meghan O'Rourke, first published in Tin House (Issue number 49, Fall 2011) and reprinted in her collection Once (W. W. Norton & Company, 2011), pp. 45-46.

There was once a young wife, the apple of her husband's eye.  She was beautiful and charming and intelligent, and had been to college as well, a rare achievement for women in those days.
--From "The Maid Servant's Story," a short story by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, from her collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1995), pp. 109-168.

Did you folks have a quarrel, asked the policeman, looking up from his notepad with a frown, and the husband looked directly back into his eyes and said, No, of course we didn't.  
--From "The Disappearance," a short story by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, from her collection Arranged Marriage (Anchor Books/Doubleday, 1995), pp. 169-181.

I am staying at a house with a screened-in back porch.  
--From "This Is Classy Because I Say So," a poem by Meg Johnson, published in Bear Review (Volume 2, Issue 1), p. 10.