Hounded 

by David M Wallace

You are dreaming of that stag again. The one with two heads, antlers twisted like a birdcage. Like a temple. The one you chase through the slumbering forest. Your drizzling jowls. Your flanks twitching. Your feeble yelps as if you are far away among mossy tree trunks.

But you are here, curled at the foot of my bed. I’ll sail no ships and you will never sniff the pebbles on the shores of Ithaca. Tomorrow morning we will fasten our leashes to our collars and let the old routine tug us past shopkeepers sweeping their yearnings to the curb.

Trapped

by Ata Zargarof

A clammy July night; stars like broken glass on a driveway. The bedroom fills with eggshells as I use the words “space” and “change.” Her eyes grow large with fright—a doe’s lit up by high-beams. She swats my hand away, hyperventilating. Half an hour of honeyed consolations slows her breathing again. Pulling her to shore drains me of all my strength; my vision narrows, like I’ve just given blood. Her first sober thought is to ask me not to tell my friends. I press my nose to her scalp. Her scent blankets my fears like snow. 

My Obsessive-Compulsions, Chronicled 

by Cameron Wooley

Age 6: Cockroaches would lay eggs in my brain. I wrapped my head in a pillowcase.
9: Diseases. I washed my hands until they bled. They got infected.
12: Roaches, again. I stuck butterfly stitches across my groin, this time, to keep them from burrowing.
22: Babies. The butterfly stitches return. And washing. My hands, my everything. It bleeds.
24: Losing my son. I wrap him tightly, monitor his heart, wash him, dry him. I seldom sleep.
27: Losing my son: I send him to my mother, so I don’t smother him, scour him.

Save The Bees

by Lucia H. Miller

I had a dream about The Bees. They were silent and flightless, crawling around my bare feet by the thousands. With broken wings, they climbed over one another in desperation. I stood in the middle of them all, gently lifting my feet and trying to navigate around the dead and dying. I was so afraid of stepping on them, imagining that these tiny, helpless creatures would attach their stingers to my skin in a collective attempt to kill me. They crawled through the spaces between my toes, inviting me to hurt them, daring me to squash them to sticky bits.