unpublished writers: results 1–10 of 10

No one knew who was coming to train us. I had a strange buzzing in my limbs so I had to keep moving around. At the time I didn't know the difference between nerves and excitement. My stomach was either in knots or it wasn't. I was either playing basketball or I was thinking about it. I was either waiting for Jenny or she was there.

I sprinted towards the doors, without hesitation; Ian and Kate close behind me, pushing and shoving—propelling me forward. Once at the door, I crept in slowly, excited and relieved to feel the warm, humid air—mingled with the thick smell of chlorine. On the opposite end of the Olympic size pool, was our school motto, painted in large, sweeping, chirographic strokes: Scientia Auget Vires (Knowledge Increases Strength).

"Is anyone else in the building today?" I wondered aloud, suddenly nervous.

They were unlikely friends. Toni didn't settle for rough around the edges. She went for jagged. She was a junior and had friends that would never waste their time with someone like Theo, a sophomore, nondescript loner-jock type who always did his homework on time and ate Sunday dinner with Mom and Dad. Toni's friends wore black clothes and eyeliner and chains. Like them, Toni's take on life was dark, and he wasn't sure why she liked him enough to put up with his middle-class, white-washed way of seeing the world. Except that he was gay. Maybe that qualified him weird enough to be her friend.

the nerves keep 'em shaking, and so

if you take a shovel and split the body, bi-

furcate him, trifurcate him, his little teeth still spit…

When door of death

yawns, dress me pink.

I-resounding,

Earth-sequestered-

Paint me six

feet with stilettos…

When Kev came home from walking Ruffo, the Shar-Pei, he noticed the sofa and easy chair were gone.

"I'm having them reupholstered," Tiffany told him.

The Oriental carpet was also missing. "Being cleaned," she said.

some women lose more than me,

the uterus, the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, it's good

he says that it was caught early enough. he speaks

with the ease that implies that the body is nothing

more complex than the limbless, trapdoored models

that decorate biology classrooms…

Maps are never skin. I know

that you're only a guide but

I prefer to pretend otherwise.

Here, a closeness is lost in our morning rituals.

Some type of forgetfulness concerning

the risks we take, the casual violence inherent

to the most mundane of acts. That's what she liked,

I think. The rough slide of the blade.

The writers included in this month may not have yet been published elsewhere but their writing shows the same promise as any of the other writers we publish. The same attention to craft, to character. To line, and to voice. But I also found in these works a sincerity, an earnestness even, that extended through the brasher, wilder styles of chaotic energy just as into the more conservative voices. This sincerity seemed to me proof that these poems and stories were not so much created to be poems and stories but to be vehicles for emotion and meaning.