Each docked boat
is tattooed across its bow:

Cinnamon Girl, Hazel B,
Lady Lou, Miner’s Debt.

Low mountains
encircle the marina, the rock

And snow of each peak
patched like molting caribou.

VANESSA VILCHES NORAT
Last night, as I was waiting for him, I poked my head into the hole and saw a puddle. I hadn’t noticed it before. I decided to clean it up, so I took a broom to the stagnant water. Snails and moss had taken over the tunnel walls. A swarm of mosquitoes inhabited the pond.

I think it’s right to talk about it this way, that such stories keep a kind of territory, and you have to come into that territory to have them. They extend outward, too, beyond both place and time, the places and times such stories are made.

After the wind, a man named Chuck died lying on the ice next to the fuel pump at the Phillips 66 off I-80 on the east side of Rawlins, Wyoming.

Coming down the mountain from the McDonald Observatory under a hail of starshine and black night—the darkest sky in the lower 48 states—the universe went on expanding around us, my companion and me.

Stand here, traveler. You have come a long way. Beyond this fence, something happened.

DAISY ATTERBURY
Growing up in the Southwest, the landscape already felt informed by projection, the language used to describe it extraterrestrial. It’s not that I imagine I’ve literally been to the moon, but that I came of age in a place where the imaginary and the material continually displaced one another.

TEJU COLE
I really believe in the novel as an innovative form. Yet I didn’t want novelty for its own sake. There had to be something necessary in how I approached the narrating. For me, this was a puzzle to be solved, this work of arriving at the many different ways a character might give an account of what it means to be in the world. 

ALLISON FUNK
You must leave everything you’ve carried / to enter the tomb, says the guide / pointing to the passage grave / mounded / with earth. From outside, / the tumulus all but obscures / death’s reach, / also its fruitfulness…

REBECCA WORBY
Red, red blood, not the dark red of a period. I know this immediately even though I have only just had my first period in years, and as alarm bells go off in my mind, I begin to sweat, my heart suddenly clanging. It’s only day twelve of my cycle, as far as I’ve calculated, so it’s clear that something is wrong. I don’t know what the wrong thing is, but one possibility surfaces even as I try to push it down.