By Justin Favela
“We are all in this together.”
I lay in bed trying to go to sleep but my mind won’t stop racing. I wait patiently as YouTube plays another car commercial. I just want to zone out, escape, and rest.

My bedtime video starts playing, and I watch my favorite drag queen transform a vintage Dolly Parton wig from 1990s fashion mullet to a fun 1960s bubble bouffant. When she puts that hair on she is going to be serving you “administrative assistant a-gogo realn…”

By Claire McCully
The cat meows in his carrier
For nearly all twenty minutes
Of our drive to the animal ER.
When he finally falls silent,
I worry that he’s already dead.

In the waiting room, my nine year old son
Points to a glossy magazine picture,
A cat like our own, but one that’s healthy
And playful. My boy plays Scheherazade
To my heart, tells a story
Of miracles, of a cat that survives
His faith in living things
Is full of boyish defiance,
Forevers-and-evers.
He hasn’t spilled a drop
Of his endless summer.

By Jonathan Cummins
In 1938, the Federal Government adopted the Small Tract Act. As a Homestead Era policy, the Small Tract Act was intended to encourage settlement in the West. The one requirement to secure a 5-acre tract of free land was to live on it permanently. By the 1950s, hundreds of small tracts north of Reno, Nevada were settled temporarily before changing hands again. The Bureau of Land Management had allowed settlers to use trailers to establish residency. Speculators bought up small tracts and subdivided the place into lots with a simple formula: dig a well, a septic tank, install a trailer. And with that, Sun Valley was born.

By Erica Vital-Lazare
Removed from our works
the iron core taken into our mouths
the sweet clay feeding the belly
through our wounds, we are stripped
and stripping conduits, conductors burned loose
where we travel, we are pushed through the ore—