Introduction / Bill Henderson -- Human snowball / Davy Rothbart -- Enlightenment / Natasha Trethewey -- Corn maze / Pam Houston -- Ming / Jill McDonough -- A full-service shelter / Amy Hempel -- During a break from feeling / Mary Ruefle -- Thirst / Taymiya R. Zaman -- Blues in five/four, the violence in Chicago / Afaa Michael Weaver -- What happens in hell / Charles Baxter -- After suicide / Matt Rasmussen -- Teen culture / Elizabeth Ellen -- Last call / Saeed Jones -- The healing power of the western oystercatcher / Howard Norman -- Cranes, mafiosos and a Polaroid camera / Natalie Diaz -- God of ducks / Tina Louise Blevins -- The ultrasound / David Hornibrook -- Lorry raja / Madhuri Vijay -- Origin / Sarah Lindsay -- The dead / Stephen Dixon -- From That once were beautiful children / Claudia Rankine -- Touch / Steve Adams -- Late oracle sonnet / David St. John -- Wings / Lorrie Moore -- Self-portrait with exit wounds / Ocean Vuong -- Reliquaries / Paul Zimmer -- Listening to Virginia / Jeffrey Harrison -- Iconography / Ays̜e Papatya Bucak -- Tallahatchie / Susan B.A. Somers-Willett -- Father of disorder / Jessica Wilbanks -- Your body down in gold / Carl Phillips -- The piece need not be built / Andrew Zolot -- The monster: classifications and explanations / Susan Slaviero -- Don't let them catch you / Molly Patterson -- The separaton/retention / Kwame Dawes -- Writing & publishing a memoir: what the hell have I done? / Andre Dubus III -- A summer garden / Louise Glück -- Donate! / Jack Livings -- Things to think about / Scott Beal -- The field museum / Roger Reeves -- A portrait of the writer as a rabbit / Sabine Heinlein -- There were such things / W.S. Di Piero -- Likable / Deb Olin Unferth -- The story / B.H. Fairchild -- Consequence / Eric Fair -- The lit cloud / Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge -- The reader / Robert Coover -- Islands / Yusef Komunyakaa -- Confessions of a recovering environmentalist / Paul Kingsnorth -- Ways to begin a poem / Rachel Rose -- In Colorado my father scoured and stacked dishes / Eduardo C. Corral -- Housebreaking / Sarah Frisch -- W.C. Fields takes a walk / Paisley Rekdal -- Out of date: the joys of obsolescence / Hal Crowther -- My neighbor's body / Beckian Fritz Goldberg -- Philanthropy / Suzanne Rivecca -- Interrupting aubade ending in epiphany / Marcus Wicker -- Painting the summer palace of the queen / Philip Kelly -- Villon's epitaph (ballade of the hanged men) / François Villon -- If the man took / Joanna Ruocco -- All-American / David Hernandez -- The waste land app / Tess Taylor -- Akhmatova / Matthew Dickman -- Cadiz, Missouri / Robert Long Foreman -- Getting by / Bob Hicok -- Imagination / Sigrid Nunez -- The earth itself / Timothy Donnelly -- Love like that / Jude Nutter -- The gentleman's library, a nowaday redux / Bill Cotter -- Self-portrait as Superman (alternate take) / Jake Adam York.