CAL SHOOK
The shade had always been down, the room always dark, and Ellis had assumed without consciously thinking it that the apartment was vacant. But tonight there was a warm light on. There was a music stand dead center in the window, and after a moment there was also a musician.

RAJOSIK MITRA
Some mellow, yellow rays of the sun fall at an angle on the pavement. The air smells of wet grass, earth, and rain that has recently died. I am probably coming back from somewhere. My father is holding my hand, he says, “Look at that Neel, look at that gold-mottled footpath.”

BRIDGET A. LYONS
My customary visual bearings don’t seem to be serving me here in Alice’s Arctic Wonderland, where even the most fundamental rules of spatial arrangement have been upended. I see liquid lying over land, tundra hovering in midair, and chunks of ice floating several feet above the sea.

ESTHER RAMÓN
Two of those brief animals / that populated the branches / and the furniture made useless / by humidity and neglect. / They were separated / From time that burns as it passes, / from this insignificance, / from the feeding cycle, / my desires in the shredded remains

KEIJA PARSSINEN
Saudi Camp began as a thatch-hut slum abutting the ritzier “American Camp,” which was built for the white American executives of the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco) in the middle of the twentieth century, when Americans flooded in…

JULIAN ZABALBEASCOA
A slight wind picks up and moves over the lake, clinking rocks together in the wash. Salvador squints into the darkness. The way his fellow construction workers talked about America’s proximity, he’d half expected to sight the faintest outline of one of its cities’ skylines…

CARIN CLEVIDENCE
My mother cuts the outboard motor. Over the slap of waves on the boat’s black pontoon, I hear the fur seals barking. The cliffs are dotted with white albatross. Seals sprawl along the rocky shoreline.

RICHARD GWYN
Leaving behind the clamor of Mexico City, I catch a bus and cross the wide altiplano. Behind the tinted windows are strewn the blackened remains of trees and cactus, upon which perch large, dark birds. Half asleep on the silent bus, which plows like an ocean liner across the prairie.

NATASHA BURGE
An editor suggests I write about being an alien. This word I like, with its superabundance of meaning. It reminds me of visa stamps crowding an already full passport, of space shuttles and star dust and loneliness. It rings true.

OLIVE AMDUR
There were tomato plants on the windowsill of the loft where I slept, and at night, when all the lights were out, I could see stars through the screened glass. We stayed only a few days, for momentary distance from the city, heavy with humidity and grief.