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The Museum of Whales You Will Never See

A. Kendra Greene

‘The Icelandic Phallological Museum is smaller than you’d think. The domestic collection of 212 specimens fits in one room.’ 

The Celebration

Cathy Sweeney

‘I had just come home from boarding school when Father took me aside and told me that Mother was up to her old antics, letting the whole family down, and that if she continued, we’d have to act.’

This Compost: Erotics of Rot

Elvia Wilk

‘Mushrooms sprout from the bathtub grout; disintegrating apples overflow from the trash can. Insects circle. The decomposition is lively and sensorially overwhelming.’

Mother-Wit

Jeffery Renard Allen

‘It would be many years before I understood that around my mother’s sober acceptance of the status quo was a whole culture she had developed for our subsistence and well-being.’

Bonsai

Guadalupe Nettel

‘Bonsai have always prompted a kind of fear in me, or at least a puzzling discomfort.’

Mr A

Stephanie Soileau

‘At the front of the line, Jabowen and Mr A are talking. Or, more than talking, really. Julie has noticed this before – it’s impossible to miss – but today it worries her more deeply than she can quite admit.’

Interview with B. Tape II

Rachel Long

‘The contrast! − my angel face / against the camo.’

Children in Tactical Gear

Peter Mishler

‘we watched the last / very colorful weapons / coming ashore’

Seeing Things

Emily LaBarge

‘The City of the city is jagged and spiky, tangled, twisted – burned down, paved over, rebuilt, unruly with wealth and poverty side by side, as they have always been.’

Feeling Bullish: On My Great-Uncle, Gay Matador and Friend of Hemingway

Rafael Frumkin

‘In his suit, with his pigtail and his montera, he was pure potential: he could be masculine vanquisher or gold-embroidered fairy. He was both, actually, at all times, and nobody who came to see him fight thought any less of him for it.’

The Poetry Vaccine

Peter Pomerantsev

‘The quarantine and the closure of borders was giving my father Cold War flashbacks. And while Covid-19 was reducing life and death to statistics, father was using literature to affirm individuality.’

The Art of Waving

Andrea E. Macleod

‘I was only nine when I took to practicing the art of not waving. I felt an exhilarating power surge inside me and I ran all the way home, punching the air as I went.’

Whatever Happened to Queer Happiness?

Kevin Brazil

‘You never can wholly control the things you cling to. But you can figure out what has made you the surface you are.’

The Great Indian Tee and Snakes

Kritika Pandey

Kritika Pandey’s ‘The Great Indian Tee and Snakes’ is the overall winner of the 2020 Commonwealth Short Story Prize as well as the regional winner from Asia.