 I want to know what love is. There’s a place within me where sun grasses grow from damp wood, a small pocket of sunlight at the bottom of a marsh. I wander through sticky things, fluffy things floating around me in the heavy heat—dandelion seedlings, spider web threads, translucent wings flashing indigo, and monarchs fluttering low to the ground in search of fruity milkweed. But there’s also nightcrawlers burnt to a crisp. And poison hemlock clutching the shadows. And goldenrod being choked out by the guard rail. I step around smashed glass on the side of the road glinting like emeralds. I almost want to touch it, lick away the blood. The muggy air becomes laced with exhaust from a passing truck that pulls over to the side of this hometown road. The wind picks up. The air turns cooler. And a dark storm cloud inches its way across the sun, blotting out the heat, however briefly. I eye the truck, lingering by the curb. All I know is what love is not: a black snake, up ahead, coiled in silence.  Jenn Powers is a writer and artist born and raised in the woodsy hills of northeastern Connecticut. Her fields of study are creative writing, Gothic literature, and nature/environmental writing. She's a self-taught visual artist and photographer, which she's been involved with since she was a child in the '80s and '90s. Her work has been anthologized with Kasva Press (Israel), Running Wild Press (Los Angeles), and Scribes Valley Publishing (Tennessee), and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions.
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 The lake was always still on Sundays. Almost like God had commanded it, just in time for his baptisms (or so my father would say.) I didn’t like to watch. The Church left a bad taste in my mouth, even then. The grape juice stained my teeth, and the cracker felt stuck in my throat. I choked it down like I would the hymns I sang with my sisters. “How great is our God, sing to me how great is our God.” (In my experience, never that great.) The girl that day was tall and blonde and ready to be ruined. She didn’t know it yet, but she would be. Her white dress trailed the sand by the lake; I could see sand clinging to the hem, her ankles, working its way between her toes. My father led her there. He led all of them there. I wanted to scream or shout, but I left my voice behind in the pews. Instead, I stood there quietly. I didn’t like to watch, but I did. Someone had to. The girl smiled. She had the look of a lamb unknowingly climbing into a lion’s mouth. My father guided her into the lake. I imagined his hands felt like battery acid. She didn’t know. They never knew. He gently dragged her in, shoulders first. He pushed her down until she was in the lake up to her neck. Then, slowly, joyously, he shoved her face underneath. He didn’t stop until she was still. No one had ever survived a baptism.
 She walks down the road, numb, oblivious to the rasp of burnt grass against her skin. Who knows what happened at the old farmhouse far behind her, its windows like black eyes, watching her walk away? It could be a home she is walking away from, full of loving parents, family members who meant well but just didn’t understand her dreams, could be something worse, a childhood home, but full of dark memories that were all too easy to leave behind, could be a stranger’s house, some place she woke up in, abandoned in a basement or tied to a radiator, her captor off on errands for just long enough to craft an escape, it could be even worse: her own home, her husband, dead on the floor, either because she did something or something happened to him, a heart attack, a hammer to the back of his skull, an accidental fall down the stairs, a push. Is that blood on the hem of her calico knee-length dress, the thin cotton fabric catching and trapping the dried burrheads as she walks? Is that a knife in her hand, used to cut herself free from ropes with agonizingly slow and careful determination, used to strike out at her captor, her husband, her lover, with unexpected fury and force? Or is that just her purse, clenched tightly against her side, containing a single bus ticket with an unreadable destination, a handful of bills, a phone number and address scribbled on a wrinkled scrap of paper? Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal. She currently teaches classes at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis and Hugo House in Seattle.
 “Literary Mimesis; or Plagiarism Pays.” Karen Craft. Product Description: It’s only cheating if you get caught. We’ve never been caught. What we do is you. We do your style. You send us sample copies of papers you have actually written in the past. (We require a minimum of 5 papers and two weeks to plan our approach). Ideally, please and thank you, send us your packet four to six weeks in advance of your essay’s due date, adjusting accordingly for difficulty and length requirements. We charge 0.09 USD per word ($450 for a 5,000w. paper). Our employees are frustrated, MFA holding novelists sick of rejection on the open market who’ve made a nice living for themselves in this peculiar industry catering to lower-level undergraduates— those from money/of money/with money (to burn) at elite public and private American universities. These people, our “fixers,” possess an uncanny ability to sound like you, fast, getting you the grade you need while saving you valuable party time that would otherwise be wasted in writing papers. We scrupulously avoid even the hint of foul play, hiding all misbehavior from schoolmarmish professors. Disclaimer: We do not guarantee good grades, only authenticity. If you’re a D student, we will make you sound like a D student. We save you time writing papers you don’t want to write, WE ARE NOT MIRACLE WORKERS. Plus, consider, lowkey and just straight up FR: if you are a D student and we turn in an A paper for you that kind of, like, um, ya know, defeats the whole purpose of our service. It’s like some scumbag election fraud specialist who deserves all he gets in terms of fines and punishments and punitive reparatory measures measured out to the final inch and centimeter deciding to stuff six hundred fake ballots in one mailbox as if the people picking up the early voting would take this and nod, ‘sounds good, looks like 600 voters do live at this address.’ Idiot. We are not idiots. Here’s a two-pronged, AB sample from one of our best, ‘007,’ writing for the aforementioned D student on the following topic: The Secession Crisis during the American Civil War. Look and see for yourself how effortlessly 007 is able to sound like a student who barely passes via two distinct styles: first, the classic jackass frat moron and, in the B sample, the over-eager virtue signaling present-imprisoned speech puritan. *Option C included for the rarely ordered but elite-pricing ‘true F’ paper.
When I told you I didn’t mean to ruin everything, all you said was it’s fine. I’m really quite mad at you for that, because I already thought that I had really fucked it this time but to know that you thought that, too, was just, like, enough to make me willingly institutionalize myself. For like three whole months I never asked you what this was because I already knew: this was your dentist tongue and how it straightened my teeth one by one and reminded me to floss when we were finished and this was your doctor fingers around my muscles and you made them pop like cereal and this was how you never drop anything you hold but when I dropped my ice cream cone on the floor of your car you let me share yours, instead of getting mad, and usually you’d be mad but that day, you were just like, you idiot, and I was like, that’s me, I’m the idiot, I literally would have gotten the word idiot tattooed on myself. When you sucked the rum raisin out of the tiny triangle left of your cone, you told me that you had a cold and didn’t want to kiss that cold into me, and I was like yeah, it might look weird if we were both sick and I didn’t kiss you even though I wanted to drain the rum raisin out of your tongue like we were reversing a vaccine. I told the nurses at the clinic about how I want to get my teeth into every part of you. They had pitiful eyes and they were like, He sounds lovely, and then they were like, You have chlamydia.  Melissa Boberg writes fiction and poetry. She is from the tri-state area and currently works for Boston and Philadelphia Magazines. You can keep up with her at: www.melissaboberg.com
 Photo by Lennart Heim on Unsplash You straighten your tie. Tap your fingers on your leg, breathing in the scent of basketballs, sweat, and a mix of aerosol antiperspirants. When you step on stage, you still have to remind yourself to feel your feet, look at a point just above their heads, reach into your own chest to gather your voice. You still begin with this seasick belly, after so many years. After all these years the kids are still rocking their chairs back, balancing on two legs. The kids are still chewing gum. The girls still wear their skirts too short and their shirts too low. You have given this talk so many times that, once begun, you only notice half the words. Responsibility. The Reputation of the School. Call their behaviour “appalling” because that word tastes so round and sour. List the recent breaches. It no longer matters if the breaches are recent or not, list them anyway, using your stare to tip those chairs down to four legs, to silence those whispers and to stop those insolent jaws, gum under their tongues. Now you have their attention, turn to Consequences. Your eyes roam the room. There—those girls. The dark haired one with a dragon charm on a string tucked beneath her collar. She flicked her fingers, opened her hand. You have had her in your office three times this week already. Watch. The golden haired girl beside her, feigning attention. Uniform correct, shirt buttoned all the way, skirt of appropriate length. The quiet one. The one called upon when a good influence is required to show a new student around the school. Your speech doesn’t pause as you watch her stealthily tear a page from her book. You allow her to fold it, using her nails to form sharp, precise creases. You wait. You watch her hand reach across, into the dark-haired girl’s lap, linger just moments too long. That precise moment when hand on hand enfolds that paper—crack her name like a whip from your mouth. She jumps, blushes, panic across her face. Name the dark-haired one, too, call both forward for public reprimand. One saunters, one creeps. One glares back defiant as you rant, the other stares at your shoes. See how close they stand. Sometimes as they fidget the backs of their hands touch. Demand that crisply folded paper. Unseal it. Two hands have written—you have your proof, your weapon. Return the note with a demand: Read. Read it aloud. Before the whole school. Now. Read your confession of love, your intimate betrayal, your plans to crash the weekend party. Read. Golden-hair first. You hand back the paper—too late, notice her hand grasp the other girl’s as they turn. Too late notice her chin rise and her feet turn roots. Too late notice they smile, the energy surging, not from one to the other but summoned by both-- A deep inhale. Parted lips and eyes that rest closed, then-- dust motes dance in sunlight, turn to fairies that war for gossamer thrones, chalk dust deserts quenched by teardrop rains flow rivers pigmented, pink, blue, yellow, acorns thrown in gutters sprout, root, crack open these halls and the crows that feast on lunch scraps gather to sing… Your hand is at your tie, rocking it loose. You cannot breathe and swallow this magic, you cannot speak to stop them. Dark-hair takes the page, grips her charm, reads: and the forest is filled with bears and fish that climb out of the stream and sing, mushrooms rise from the rich, dark loam bearing gifts for the butterfly king, a storm arises, raining stardust and snowflakes that catch in the canopy… They pause, breathe. Only then do you notice the sobs of weeping schoolboys. You have melted to your knees, your tie discarded. and the sea carves mermaids and kelpies from rock, and driftwood forms bones and seaweed makes flesh, these scarecrows make fire and dance with the tide-- You have kicked off your shoes, you notice now your mismatched socks, your sleeves rolled askew, you notice yourself swoon… still they go on: silver gulls cry: your sadness, your sadness-- summon you inward, call your soul deep… Your mismatched socks, your abandoned tie. Your jacket strangely scented with salt. Your flesh surrendered to a faraway sea.  Kathryn Reese lives in Adelaide, South Australia. She works in medical science. Her writing explores themes of nature, spirituality, myth and the possibility of shape shift. Her poems are published in Neoperennial Press Heroines Anthology, Hayden’s Ferry Review and Yellow Arrow Journal.
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