Cuffing Season in Your 40s

By Michaella Thornton

No one ever tells the young that sex gets better with age, that what you give up in effortless flexibility and perky breasts and firm skin and endless erections are replaced with humans who finally know what they’re doing in bed, who growl in guttural pleasure, who take their time as they whisper hot, heavy secrets into your ear as they encircle the burning demands of your desire in the fat folds of your flesh—that one day you’ll be humming The Cars’ “Just What I Needed” while you season wild-caught salmon and roast potatoes in a hot oven with olive oil and fresh thyme and kosher salt and cracked black pepper, or that you no longer care about your pleated forehead or the grey at your temples or how your bare feet are so very calloused despite pedicures and miracle creams and moisture-trapping socks you never want to wear to bed again: there is a softness in you yet, and he is coming over and kissing you in the kitchen like he’s back from war, like you wrote to him every single day for a year, and there is no rush, no need to meet the parents, to make this official, to bow to the sad grind of obligation; there are his hands on your hips and your palms on his chest, and the slow dance of two middle-aged bodies across the floor.

Michaella Thornton writes her best work in bed or on the couch, but her back reminds her this is not a great idea; you can find her dreaming and procrastinating @kellathornton and read more of her writing at https://www.michaellathornton.com.

Art by Laurie Marshall.

Time Capsule

By Dustin Parsons

Dustin Parsons is the author of Exploded View: Essays on Fatherhood, with Diagrams and teaches at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford, Mississippi, where he lives with his wife, the author Aimee Nezhukumatathil, their sons, and Haiku, their dog.

Every Night, I Wake in the Witching Hour

By Kristin Entler

After "Large Blue Anthropometry [ANT 105]" by Yves Klein, 1960

Thin blue plumes of smoke float above the surface of the water; in my stomach, I feel a shame bubbling up from some deep panic blanched canvas-white, so I measure the wingspan of my emotions as if I don’t know I will end up overwhelmed, choking on feathers when all I see is dwindling lung capacity in fog waiting, an inhaler always on the edge of the bed.

Kristin Entler was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis at 6 months old, and diabetes at 12, several years before coming out as LGBT+; her work has appeared in The Bitter Southerner, storySouth, Gulf Stream Literary Magazine, and Hobart among others.

Art by Kristin Entler.