Poetry

by Jeffrey Hermann...You can squeeze a human brain into the same container, she added, but you won’t see anything remarkable. Now you’re looking into a mirror. Lay down your weapons and kill an idea of yourself up close. Face to face. Stop practicing taxidermy.

by Atar Hadari...People on the subway catch your eye and blow away like sparks striking the hay alight flown out before the barn’s in flames.

by Lucia Lu...In the rheumy distance, a muzzy landform pulses at the edges. I don’t know that we are waiting for anything to happen. The snakegrass, sagebrush, and I. So the sun rises.

by Elisa Luna Ady...We held the light at the wrong slant, the cousins and I, like forgetting to floss our teeth or close the faucet. Someone dear to us had gone. It was the Anthropocene. A bit of light went a long way in Southern California.

by Debmalya Bandyopadhyay... It was the Adam’s apple of the night: all we heard was an ad jingle, floating from open window to open window. The distant fox.

by Ridwan Fasasi...Somewhere, a fruit ripened from a dying tree. The tree forgives itself for too much love. A forest of desires is sprouting under it. A boy proposes his love to his lover. Somewhere else, a wife proposes her agony to her husband.

by Michaella Thornton... I am the moss cushioning her bare feet as she steals kisses from a clandestine lover on a shadowed stone staircase. I am the rosemary that brightens the fingerling potatoes.

by Sara Quinn Rivara...I was so scared back then. I was incandescent. I held his hand in every snowy lakewood, I held him on my shoulders in Lake Michigan. We speed down the mountain,

by Genaro Emiliano Aguilar Saucillo...Endings are as simple as this, cynical, like the full stop after every lavish gasp. In my mind, I had left the phone on, waiting for my call to be returned. Irony settled in when I realized my first call had been rejected.

by Nathaniel Julien Brame....These soft owl wings: you can’t even hear them until you’re already being carried, incredulous, into the bloodied electric night air.

by Seth Hagen...Once we were so stricken with the dream of each other, mornings came on like a sickness. In your convalescence, it rained robins and worms.

by Litong Nie...my mother named me in a smoke stack, in sordid puffs that meander past the pacific, past bays that burn ochre at dusk.

by Kanda Zinguri Rockwell Branding Agency/Unsplash after Chris Abani how cool they looked, the boys who could afford them —  safari boots, tight denim, those funny hats, hard boy brooklyn bridge stance. by now they had started smoking, had girlfriends (wives), would soon be teenage fathers —  they’d join a gang, kill for the fake silver chains around their necks, later afford cotton nappies for their kids. the early age of khat and big g’s and chain links, menthols, sportsman

by Theodore Heil Joao Prates Camera means chamber, as in shot through with light. In dreams, pasts of my mother appear and the she-wound remains. I crush Tylenol with a spoon — stir into coffee, never finish. On the train, I sit after her face winning over mine. I place my hands over the heat off of license plates, thinking, like a baby bird, it’s her. In the dreams, I am young and my mother opens her fist of iron, a flower blooming at the center of her palm. I reach for it —

by Clifton Gachagua Lee SH when the beluga shows up and offers me her child first i have to learn the sign language for no and sonar for madness and some ottoman script for sadness, anthropocene, debilitate, how the sand on the beach is now only fine glass, each one an illumination of what it means to be, and how, now that i am in the company of a whale, polishing its bones, dawn to dusk, the monsoon on our backs, sailing through the estuary and into mauritius, learning creol

by Oladosu Michael Emerald Nishaan ahmed after Nikita Gill Because the sky still hangs its blue between the bombs. Because your mother’s voice is a compass needle trembling north. Because the taste of mangoes clings to your teeth like a hymn. Because the boy on the bus folded his laughter into a paper crane & left it on your seat. Because the moon, even shattered, stitches its light into the cracks of your ribs. Because your father’s hands, calloused & whiskey-stung, once cra

by Justin Karcher Trude Jonsson Stangel and squeeze into it in the fitting room. Walking out I feel like a better man everyone rubbing my stomach in praise. At the register the cashier exclaims it’s a special day where dashed dreams cost nothing at all. They glue an umbilical cord of wilted lotus flowers onto my belly button and then I’m pulled back into reality. In the parking lot the country is falling apart. This old woman is scooping up snow with a dustpan. I can hear her

by Ace Boggess Gabriela Fechet Snowing again. Today, we enter our third week of uncertainty. A herd of deer slide-steps down the hillock of our yard, five Gene Kellys dancing, not in rain, not singing. How do they keep hoofing it without falling? I walk outside, & cold fluff kisses my ears, caresses my neck. I flinch as if having made slightest contact easing past a stranger in the doorway: disconcerted & delighted, keeping that sensation private. Quiet? Quite. Exhale. Ace Bo

by Gordon Taylor Harvest Fields in Westerham, Kent, 1880–1910 by Helen Allingham The science was sound. Loam alone wasn’t enough, but when mixed with saline and injected, the effect answered every question. Every shout, sharp as a birthday candle flame biting a finger. Felt. Every cancer cell switched back to love, a Valentine’s Day card. No more — is the path to survival pretending not to be queasy. No more — what is the difference between illness and leaving. Between intrav

by Sabyasachi Roy Michael Dziedzic They wove my hair into wires —  a twisted halo that sings in static. My scalp hums lullabies in 8-bit, the sleep-code of orphaned machines. I used to spin silk from moonlight. Now I splice circuits, map longing onto logic gates. Memory has teeth. It bites. The venom is sweet —  thick as syrup bled from old sins. I see through one eye: fractured glass, each shard a version of me buried under passwords. My mane stays long —  a relic of mammal,