Regina smoked a borrowed Kool. She was tired, hot, feeling all the weight the Mississippi late June sky gave. Peter was back in jail, so it was just her and the kids, and now as she smoked every bit of her cigarette, she watched Johnny, Tammy, Rosedale, and Lil Pete play in the red dirt. Maybe if she was inside, not smoking, the two Cadillacs and cargo van would have kept driving. But she was outside, watching the kids clump around in the Mississippi clay, holding mentholated smoke in her mouth as long as she could before exhaling it into the still air that hung over everything.

They are recalling my baby. I explain this with a sardonic head wag when my boss asks why I need to leave early. He is faulty.

On Tuesday, my 4-year-old son came home from school with bite marks—three red, swollen crescent moons trailing up his arm like animal tracks.

Deirdre has no idea how to stop this. Could just say ‘stop’, she reminds herself, but no, look: Lisa’s already dimming the lights and everyone’s already setting aside their yellow squares of cake, preparing to summon the dead. The group of five women gather about Heather’s round, glass-top table, clearing it of balled wrapping paper and plastic champagne coups, bedazzled dick-shaped water guns and stray giftbags.

I know I am approaching burnout because when the crows land in our front yard, it reminds me of what it was like to be young and drunk. To be buried in a mess of limbs, slick with glitter. To be carried by the music, by girls you knew and girls you didn’t, everything blurry and iridescent.

An olfactory smorgasbord, guest edited by students in Temple University’s Writers at Work Class.

Before the vet’s house call

My tears perfumed your fur—

My wet dog remembering the river run

Your legs are too weak for today.

Leave it to the gay guys

who, like John Waters,

have a knack for making

even the trashy playful.

When I said yes to men, and I did, in the way of pulling loose the fog,

Disheveled, rangy, I could climb

the apple tree that bloomed obsessively

when days warmed and as summer cooled

dropped small bug-eaten fruit

Unholy union of convection and

convenience: Microwave Cookery.

A love letter to the 1980s.

‘Sour Cream Cherry Cake’, page 43,

it was part of your life for so long, you never realized it was supposed to be disgusting

it was never disgusting to you. it is not disgusting now.

Mama says, “Punk is what you got between your toes. It creeps in when your feet get hot and can’t breathe, like when you keep your shoes and socks on for too long and your feet get clammy. It’s their way of saying, ‘Give me some air.’”

Toxoplasma gondii is one of the most successful parasites in nature. It attacks the brains of many hosts: cats, dogs, bears, sheep, cattle, chickens, goats, pigs, rats, mice, and humans. Its characteristic effect is to promote restless, incautious behaviors. These may play into the hands of predators and prove fatal. If the host animal dies, and another creature eats it, the latter will likely be infected with toxo.

The nurse was being extremely tactful.

“I think,” she offered tentatively, “that the oxygenation in the room would really be improved if you opened the door to the main hall.”

“Your hair's a rat’s nest,” the woman said, her imitation silk kimono gaping to reveal a bony chest and the inner edges of small, torpedo-shaped breasts. She held an ashtray in one hand and a gold-tipped cigarette in the other. The child ran a hand through her halo of dark hair.

Every few months Mom made a trip to Kam Man Market to restock the pantry essentials: bottles of fish sauce that stunk like Bruce’s football socks, shrimp paste that smelled of sweet fermentation, among an abundance of other condiments that would make all my classmates pinch their noses.

Fire crackles, short and cuppin’ heat in curled hands. Room is warm, is small and tired, and sittin’ crouched by open hearth is Daddy, sleepin' at baby’s side—both tucked away by the fire-place, tryna suck in that warmth.

Latine Monsters, edited by Ofelia Montelongo