Joseph De La Torre

Eleven years. It looks like your head got stretched lengthwise, all skinny. But the other pieces of you are still there. Your huge brown eyes, our mouths, close to identical but not quite, because our dad had a type and because my mom was popping everything but prenatals the first few months of pregnancy, so I have that cleft to one side . . .

Temperance Aghamohammadi

I go to no one, 
dark space, twilit 
speaking to no one. 

I travel to the coast, 
to an amphitheater of grayness. 
waves . . .

Mary Jo Bang

The many things we were told to do 
in the cut-off breeze of a slammed door—including what one shouldn’t wish for. 

In summer, I wished on the hill next to the house. Sitting there, in a static green sea, I spoke to myself . . .

Ben Ren

But illnesses have no minimum age requirement. Like befores and afters, they just happen, occur, transpire. We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Sometimes, when I couldn’t sleep, I would ponder this line by Joan Didion and try to recall the abandoned bedtime stories of my childhood . . .