208 pages.

Issue No. 102 offers for your enjoyment more of the country’s finest stories, poetry, essays, and visual art:

Michael Jaime-Becerra’s “Omer, March 1987”: A boy out skateboarding stumbles upon his mother’s affair.

Melissa Yancy’s “Dog Years”: A scientist must make time for her family, her career, and, somewhere in there, cure one son of his devastating disease.

Laura Esther Wolfson’s “Infelicities of Style”: In the hinterlands, a young dance critic experiences the complications of art. (Best American Essays 2015 Notable)

Octavio Solis’s “Retablos”: How may times has El Paso lamed him? Yet how many times has he walked back to his past walked away?

Plus, fiction from Josh Emmons (a slacker in France takes in her American cousin), J. Malcolm Garcia (a social service agency for homeless serves as a predator’s lair), Kate Petersen (a young woman returns to England and a love eluded), A. Nicole Kelly, Kathleen Alcott, and Jeffrey Moskowitz.

Also, work from artist Julio Cesar Morales’s series We Are the Dead, and poetry from Chuck Carlise, Lucille Lang Day, Rae Gouirand, Andrew David King, Joshua McKinney, Suzanne Roszak, and First Time in Print poet Andrew Gavin Murphy.