Poetry by Edgar Kunz and Leigh Lucas, and short stories by Mary Grimm, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Bennett Sims

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He was like tissue paper
coming apart in water.
—From Fixer, a collection of poetry by Edgar Kunz (Ecco, 2023). These lines are from "Fixer" [I held him together], which was first published (as "Piano") in The New Yorker (November 7, 2022), p. 41. It appears on pages 46-47 of the paperback. 

All that week, Bob Lilly was working on the gas tank of his car, which had to be replaced. He was doing it in my driveway because he lived with his sister, and she wouldn't let him do it at her house. He was the smartest person I had ever met, which didn't mean that he was in any way a success in life or had as much sense as my cat. 
—From "Fate and Ruin," a short story by Mary Grimm, One Story, Issue 265 (May 15, 2020).

Buchi woke to the thwack-thwack of the machete in the grass and the offended clucks of the chicken who took issue with the noise. Every few moments a ping would echo as the blade struck the stucco of the house. She counted on the sharp sound to wake her daughters.  
—From What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, a collection of short stories by Lesley Nneka Arimah (Riverhead Books, 2017). This section is from "Buchi's Girls," which begins on page 123 of the hardcover. This particular story originally appeared in Five Points (Vol. 16, No. 3).

The boy begs his mother to buy him a balloon. As they leave the grocery store and cross the parking lot, he holds the balloon by a string in his hand. It is round and red, and it bobs a few feet above him. Suddenly his mother looks down and orders him not to release the balloon. Her voice is stern. She says that if he loses it, she will not buy him another. The boy tightens his grip on the string. He had no intention of releasing the balloon. 
—From "Fables," a short story published in White Dialogues: Stories by Bennett Sims (Two Dollar Radio, 2017), pp. 127-139 in the paperback. "Fables" was previously published in Conjunctions and Subtropics (as "The Balloon"), and anthologized in the Pushcart Prize XXXIX. I mentioned a couple of stories from one of his other books, Other Minds and Other Stories (2023), in a blog post from 2024.

I empty my pockets of odd little flyers and tear-off numbers
for pest solutions and local handymen. I save them; some
may prove critical at the end of the world.
—From "I empty my pockets of odd little flyers," a poem published in Landsickness, a chapbook of poetry by Leigh Lucas (Tupelo Press, 2024, p. 9). This poem was first published in The Tusculum Review. 

Fiction by Ayşegül Savaş and Camille Bordas, and poetry by Chloe Honum

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I'd been at the apartment for two months when Agnes wrote that she was coming. 
          I heard her from the bedroom late one evening. The door in the hallway opened and closed. She didn't call out to me before going up to the studio. 
          The following day as I was leaving for the library, I ran into her on the building stairs. She was tall and pleasingly thin. Her dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. She was dressed in a crisp white shirt, opening up into an elegant ruffle on one side of her waist, at once striking and casual. Her shoes resembled royal slippers and were the same soft shade of green as her trousers. She may have been on her way to the opera or to a bookshop and would have been comfortable in either place. She wore no ornaments, except for a rectangular gray stone ring on one finger, which I noticed when she extended her hand. 
          "You must be our tenant," she said. "Finally, we meet." 
          She enunciated each word, as if she were reading aloud from a book. 
—From White on White, a novel by Ayşegül Savaş (Riverhead Books, 2021). This section is from page 14 of the hardcover.

This is not a rewrite of that story in which plants and animals and people keep winding up dead over the course of a school year, but it starts the same, and it feels odd not to acknowledge, so I will. I just did. Things kept dying. My father first, in June, then the puppy my ex-wife had adopted to help the children get over their grandpa, and then the school janitor, Lane. Right after Halloween, Lane had died during lunchtime in the cafeteria, in front of the kids. Heart attack. A few weeks later, my son, Ernest, came home from school and told me that he hoped there was no afterlife.
          "I hope there’s no afterlife," he said. We were in the living room, looking through the window, waiting to see if the rain would turn to snow. "I hope he's not watching over me."
          I asked who he meant. I thought maybe he was talking about my father, but perhaps it was Lane on his mind. I didn't think it could be the dog.
—From "One Sun Only," a short story by Camille Bordas, The New Yorker (March 7, 2022), pp. 58-64.

Nightly, the smoke from the neighbor's incinerator pawed the air
          in our garden. Black flecks of newspaper settled
across the violets. . . .
—From "Nightfall in Spring," a poem by Chloe Honum, from her collection The Lantern Room (Tupelo Press, 2022), p. 9. My other favorite from this collection of poems was the one that inspired me to buy the book in the first place: "At a Days Inn in Barstow, California" (Poem-a-Day, May 15, 2019, Academy of American Poets). It appeared on page 46 of The Lantern Room. Many of the poems from this book previously appeared in her chapbook Then Winter (Bull City Press, 2017). Honum is also the author of The Tulip-Flame (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2014). That book's cover, which I find really astonishing, features a photograph of this piece of artwork: Bust (Impression), life size: 17" x 21.5" x 13", 2005, cast glass, by Karen LaMonte.