The Review 

Putting Out What You Might Put Away A crib and changing table are quietly dismantled but all the socks are paired confetti, and the hats and the layettes grown dusty in the drawers, hidden like teeth of a woman who will not smile with an entire smile. Eventually, the indents of where everything stood will vacuum flat. There will be no little sister this year. Everything was almost new, so we put it all in a box marked “another,” not foolish enough, this time, to sharpie “Hope

By Rob Cook Each brick of the hospital attacks each brick next to it. The fighting itself casts a shade that lengthens over the parking lot, the incurable, pampered vehicles. The sky, a vast blockage, stays cemented to each curtain-lidded room— (A flock of side effects keeps it there, prohibits the slightest blade of wind.) The doctor gazes down at his many empty patients, an accumulation of bricks and disordered questions: “Will I get my stomach back if it still doesn’t work

By Cade Leebron Call me Curly-Q for the swirled snake IV line spiraling out of my upper arm. Nothing perfect ever ends, or that’s a lie I’m okay hanging out with. It’s late here in Middletown, it’s unspecific. His hands tap fake drum beats to get the drip rate just right, love tastes like prednisone. In the hospital a trainee makes me waterfall all over the room. Gore is a biohazard, and he misses the best parts. I tell it to him after, like: you should have seen her fa

By Nicole Storey I was a blackbird for Halloween when those shapeshifters came out of the terraforming colony and explained that destiny is only a mile away from the gas station where you lost your virginity and my best friend’s mother still cries alone at night because the children don’t come home I eat a peach and think about the nature of things, you take apart the television again, we hold hands sing songs, paint curse words onto the windows of abandoned ice cream

until doctors determine whether you’ll need more surgery, you’re going to crave big hunks of bread with butter, going to want to rip sticky meat from ribs, even though you haven’t eaten gluten or meat in years; you’re going to want to get taffy stuck between your teeth, get corn on the cob stuck between your teeth, your teeth that will feel so empty even though they’ll be coated, like your tongue, with a thick sour film. Nurses will give you swabs that smell of lemo