From "The Love Of A Moss Gardener" by Cormac Badger, CQR #43: "It came to my attention that a famous gardener had settled near Tapiŝo. I was between jobs and ready to believe anything." Cormac Badger lives and writes in Kansas City.

From "Sex House 29" by Priyam Goel, CQR #43: "Our sex house is a modern sex house. It is a walnut three-story building whose steel roof has been painted and repainted green. There are twenty-nine windows with bone-white windowsills, one for each bedroom."

From "The Love Of A Moss Gardener" by Cormac Badger, CQR #43: "It came to my attention that a famous gardener had settled near Tapiŝo. I was between jobs and ready to believe anything. It’s said that the gardens of Tapiŝo are fastidious." Cormac Badger lives and writes in Kansas City.

From "The Zipper" by Sonya Schneider, CQR #43: "June at the Del Mar Fair – burnt husks of buttered corn, people shouting & some boy lost in the pig pen. Lisa & I wait in line for the Zipper. Mom stands in the shade of a palm tree, leaning on my brother’s wheelchair."

From "This Un/Familiar Place" by Sara Marinelli, CQR #43: "On a street stall in Naples, there are cockroaches for sale. One euro apiece."

From "One Bright Pearl" by Mimi Kawahara, CQR #43: "As Jasper rolls off you, his black locks grazing your face, you lift your legs toward the ceiling because you heard that would help the sperm reach the egg, and you hold them there like a happy baby, hoping to make one."

From "As Is" by Bill Glose, CQR #43: "Given up trying to impress others. I’m all comfort, not style. Stopped reading the list of books everyone should read before they die. Dive instead into pot boilers and sci-fi, the kind with aliens trying to take over Earth and turn us into mindless puppets."

From "The Brig" by Ed Park, CQR #43: "Who was she? Increasingly, the question floated up in that sliver between dream and waking. The answer was amusingly hard to produce."

From "Couvade" by Alida Dean, CQR #42: "When did I first notice him copying me? Was it the first time we went out to eat, at the ramen place, when he waited for me to order, then ordered the exact same thing: tantanmen ramen with an extra egg, ginger tea? No, it was before that."

From "Long Pond Road" by Craig Cotter, CQR #42: "The first time I waited at the new bus stop on Long Pond Road by Lake Ontario a boy I thought beautiful around my age jeans, leather jacket, long dark wavy hair. I only looked at him." #poetry

From "The Serious Business Of Pajamas And Scurvy" by Thomas Wawzenek, CQR #42: "There was a time when my grandmother would come to our house a couple of evenings a week to make dinner for myself and my two younger siblings."

From Black Calf" by Matt Poindexter, CQR #42: "The black calf bawled beside its mother’s knobby body, pausing just to nuzzle at her empty udder, then go on lowing."

From "Blindsided By Birth: The Power And Impact Of The Next Generation" by Chuck Kramer, CQR #42: "At the end of March in 1995, I sat at my computer, working on a young adult novel in my bedroom office."

From "Brethren" by Rogers Worthington, CQR #42: "Someone was knocking on the door to his room. The sweet pull of sleep let him ignore it, even as the knocks grew from knuckles to a fist. But when they escalated to an open hand slamming, he could ignore them no longer."

From "Journeys" by John Robinson, CQR #42: "On the island of Capri, I stood at a cliff’s edge overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea and considered leaping to my death. The fall was more than a hundred feet, ending where large rocks lay scattered on the beach below."

From "Baby Bird" by Ken Wuetcher, CQR #42: "One of my sisters Found this baby bird Abandoned in our backyard She brought it into the house Made a little cage For it out of a cardboard box Put wood chips at the bottom Made a little swing for it" #poetry

From "Who Pays The Piper Picks The Dance" (After The Madonna and the Serpent by Michelangelo Caravaggio, aka The Madonna of the Papal Grooms) by Barbara Saunier, CQR #42: "If we don’t turn a corner on this snake thing, my son will keep us both awake nights — jackal-headed dragon of bad dreams."

From "The Pointillist's Daughter" by Rudy Yamaguchi, CQR #42: "When Yitami arrived in Boston, the summer semester was just starting at Massachusetts College of Art. On a whim, he decided to take a drawing class that met twice a week."

From "White, Texas" by Tamara MC, CQR #42: "Smack dab between Austin and the River Walk— a white town living up to its Spanish name. The average customer at the corner store: white skin, freckles, red hair, cowboy hat."

From "Bake Sale" by Derin Emre, CQR #42: "It’s nine thirty on a Friday night in January at the YMCA, in a residential neighbourhood far from downtown. The last dance class of the day ended two hours ago. The pool has just closed and will be cleaned until midnight to be ready for the early risers."

From "The Sentence" by Rick Bursky, CQR #42: "He waited for hours, days, weeks; occasionally he got up from his chair to see if things changed. The dust was dependable, as was the sofa and the television’s blank face."

From "The Mind Cure" by Ben Perkins, CQR #42: "After my parents learned from the neighbors that I might’ve been molested by their son, and after my parents took that news with a grain of salt, and after they covered it all back up by turning mum, my parents started taking me to church more often."

From "Ode To Pie" by Jennifer A Sutherland, CQR #42: "I love you, pie. I love your luxury, your commodities, the way you aren’t satisfied with good enough."

From "Fool's Gold" by Max Ufberg, CQR #42: "It took Tom a month to hatch the plan—figuring out where we’d buy the boat and giving himself a crash course on internet virality."

From "Daddy" by Tim Stobierski, CQR #42: "sucked on nails and stripped wire with his teeth had palms like sackcloth from working tools day in day out" #poetry

From "Love In The Time Of Bots [from The God Machine (in progress)]," by Umberto Tosi, CQR #42: "My stomach swerves with the ambulance, siren yowling. The steering wheel has a mind of its own. No sense my white-knuckling it. I try to focus on this being the final run of a long day with Bot Geoff."

From "Snow In July" by Kimberly Ann Priest, CQR #42: "I was two years old you tell me in a text, Dad, and the randomness of your communication about our camping trip in Iron County in 1979, makes me worry because you are getting old now"

From "Letter Of Complaint To My Grandmother's Mortician" by Guava Yun, CQR #42: "There are very few things I am certain of in this world after my grandmother’s death, but this I can say with confidence: you should not be doing anyone’s makeup."

From "Thirteen Ways Of Looking At Cinderella" by Alison Stone, CQR #42: "1. The Devil makes work for idle hands. Therefore, Cinderella is holy. 2. This holiness resembles oppression."

From "Sumpthin" by Stephen Pett, CQR #42: "On a late-May Saturday morning at Prairie Dream Kennels outside Faribault, a new arrival, an eleven-month-old breeder, a champion-pedigreed brindle boxer female in her first heat, tail and ears intact, is coaxed with Milk-Bones..."

From "Owwwwww Mnn" by Paula C. Brancato, CQR #42: "Every day I ask my assistant Jiani to buy tissues and cashews. Every day Jiani says she will but every day something else happens and no tissues and cashews appear. Buying tissues and cashews means..."

From "The Family Queer" by Beverly Burch, CQR #42: "My mother would have liked a daring life, but she wanted home, family, more. Raised in South Carolina and Georgia, she moved to Florida to teach school and live at the beach."

From "Mother Tongue" by Deborrah Corr, CQR #42: "My mother was Arkansas in our small Oregon town. Arkansas in how she washed the clothes, the way she worked the soil. Arkansas in her voice, in the food she put on the table." #poetry

From "Psychopomp" by Shelby Kinney-Lang, CQE #42: "No matter how many times I’ve asked her to say again what happened that evening, to tell me precisely, it’s like she fades a little, becomes not quite real, though I have no reason to doubt my mother has done what she says she has done."

From "West Elk Creek" by Alyse Carlson, CQR #42: "The fishing isn’t as good now, my parents say as fifty years ago, the willows too thick for a back-cast to arc in the sky the turquoise pools too shallow for the Big One..." #poetry

From "The Venice of Brooklyn" by Marie Scarles, CQR #42: "My husband and I rented our Gowanus apartment in large part for its light. Our south-facing unit sits at the top of a four-story building in a low-rise industrial area, so the sky is visible from every window: north, east, and south."

From "Mom" by Hee-June Choi, CQR 42 "Mom stepped off the plane in San Francisco, a letter strung around her neck: my contact information, her diagnosis. The cabin crew said she’d speak only in Japanese– her one foreign language. My three kids greeted her with 'Hello Grandma' in broken Korean."

From "Porcelain Bunnies" by Taylor Cook, CQR #42: "No warning, just a sharp pain and then I’m pissing my lunch through my own ass. I can feel the foulness escaping my shorts, ruining them. It gets worse. The smell. A criminally sour and putrid funk that belongs to me."

From "The Body Is Ink In The Earth" by Malina Infante, CQR #42: "and in ukrainian tradition the soul stays / near the body for three days / my grandfather / orthodox and catholic / wasn’t cremated until after / the funeral / after the wake / open casket / six days after his death / just in case /"

From "Time To Go" by Nandini Bhattacharya, CQR #42: "Shonali turned forty. Her relatives considered her spinsterhood set in stone. Then, a few days after her birthday, Shonali got an unexpected call from her cousin Piya’s husband, Shubhash."

From "The Bike, The Branch, And The Tick" by Gary Pedler, CQR #42: "One matter I turned over in my mind was whether a connection existed among three apparently disparate things: the bike, the branch, and the tick."

From "My Grandmother Comes Back To Tell Me" by Sara Blazevic, CQR #42: "I am trying to translate. We are filling out forms at the doctor’s together She has a cough. She is back from somewhere, keeps saying everyone says she looks old, is wearing a big coat." #poetry

From "The School Of Anecdotal Medicine" by Jacob M. Appel, CQR #42: "...—desperate times being the breeding grounds of quackery— I found myself one forlorn autumn afternoon in the office of Dr. A. B. Majesterio of the School of Anecdotal Medicine." #fiction

From "Dead And Buried" by Soo J. Hong, CQR #42: "Willow Rosen, the first, last, and only white girl Liza’s brother dated, was shot in the stomach on the way home from her after-school job." #fiction

From "Light Leaves" by Jeffery Allen Tobin, CQR #42: "The barn door swings loose in the evening wind, hinges creaking like something alive, like something remembering the weight of hands, the press of footsteps soft as dust."

From "Worry Journal" by Benjamin Niespodziany, CQR #42: "Last night, when going over our worries, I wrote down much more than you." #poetry

From "Native Speaker" by Bruce Benway, CQR #42: "For a brief time in graduate school I worked for a gentleman from the other side of the world who was writing a book on American English idioms."

From "Accommodation" by Allisa Cherry, CQr #42: "As a teenager, you spend a season in the fields plucking mating grasshoppers off of alfalfa stalks and crushing them under your boot for a dollar-fifty an hour." #poetry

From "Gower Gulch" by Lou Mathews, CQR #42: "I like the power breakfast at Denny’s. About two in the afternoon, when the heavy hitters are gone and it’s just me and the philosophers."

From "The Artist's Arm," Valerie Hegarty, CQR #42: "The artist residency was notable in creative circles for many things: the cabins in the sprawling acreage of meadow and woodland, the solitude and privacy afforded by the landscape, the uninterrupted long hours each day for a creative deep dive..."