Poetry

by Claire Lee...The word bubbles under his skin, then pops, dissipating into his blood like soap, air. Brother’s tongue is dry as desert, doesn’t feel the slow, heavy heartbeat need to wet it.

by Ben Starr...Until he could fall asleep while he was already sleeping, burying sleep deep inside pockets fast asleep, tucked away like the hand-painted nesting dolls my grandmother brought with her when she swam the Atlantic.

by Ewen Glass...is not a pub, it’s a stream, meandering black circles halved by footbridge. Kids rhyme their way past skulking little duckies

by Jason Davidson...and I thought I heard glass breaking and wondered if I would ever eat chocolate again and wondered if I would remember the language of this compromise

by Lorrie Ness...She spread newspapers atop the bed & let the ads bleed onto her damp thighs until a Liquidation Sale tattoo blazed across her skin.

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