David Huddle’s poem expands from the age-old automobile scene featuring unruly kids and a weary mother.

Shann Ray remembers a moment in his friend Shel McLain’s life that gave dignity to the world.

Gemini: I suppose you remember what your mother told you about Geminis…

Lidia: Yup. She said, in a thick southern drawl, “Well, you know, being with a Gemini is like being in a room with 50 people.”

Gemini: So which you are you today?

Lidia: The Lidia that just picked her kid up from school on her way to the grocery store before she washes clothes.

Gemini: Ah. The domestic Lidia.

Lidia: Correct.

Gemini: She’s fucking boring.

Lidia: Gee, thanks. But you are dead wrong.

Mark Sutz’s favorite childhood snack was toast, buttered and bothered, delivered with love.

Gloria Harrison wants her Obi-Wan Kenobi.

Matthew Gavin Frank daydreams about the sexy boarder who lived downstairs when he was a child.

As Alison Aucoin left her father’s funeral she found herself face to face with an incredibly foul gas station bathroom, an old black man with a cane as the personification of the lingering trauma of the Jim Crow South, the ghost of her father’s ridiculously antiquated and twisted version of chivalry, and fresh unexpected grief.

More than innocence is lost in this 1970s coming-of-age tale in which boys from a tough neighborhood attend a graduation party .

What if you were certain that you’d processed all of the trauma from an experience, and one day you found out you were wrong? That instead of freaking out, you had to take care of your child and behave normally in public? Alison Aucoin finds a PTSD trigger from Hurricane Katrina in an unexpected place: an aquarium.