A Conversation

by Maung Htike Aung

You’re broken like me, a windowpane said. That’s true, but we are different, I said, looking outside. It was a fine evening, people walking their dogs. I have a life to live. I have a soul to talk to. We both went quiet again. 

6S

Maung Htike Aung is a Burma-based writer. His poems and stories have appeared in Portside Review, Wasafiri, Mekong Review, SUSPECT, and elsewhere.

Various Forms of Self-Expression

by John Harrison

Everyone else was asleep. I sat down quietly and draped a bath towel over my head. I was instantly transformed into all the TV monsters that I loved. When I took the towel away, I went back to being the monster I had become. My parents don’t know this yet, but they will. Soon.

6S

John Harrison studied cultural anthropology to PhD level at Oxford University. New to writing, he has had a number of poems and stories published in magazines and books, including Hollow Point Books, The Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Samizdat.

Before There Was ASMR

by Amy Lerman

I can’t study anymore. Even If I do, I won’t be able to explain ideal marriage in Faulkner when my professor asks during tomorrow’s exam. I walk to campus town, the one department store that still uses the pneumatic tubes from when it was a bank. I find a register’s corner. There, I anticipate patrons depositing their credit cards. A moment of silence until my eyes involuntarily close, each transactional suction like a dusty metronome’s steadying ticks.

6S

Amy Lerman, by way of Florida, Illinois, England, and Kansas, lives with her husband and very spoiled cats in the Arizona desert where she is residential English Faculty at Mesa Community College. Her chapbook, Orbital Debris (Choeofpleirn Press) won the Jonathan Holden Poetry Chapbook Contest, she has been a Pushcart nominee, and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Scapegoat, The Queen's Review, Atticus Review, Solstice, Prime Number, Radar Poetry, Slippery Elm, Rattle, Smartish Pace, and other publications.