Poetry

by Lucas Reilly...Remember, the three things to remember are death, taxes, and I will forget my wallet and/or my keys.

by Lydia Buzzard...A missile soaring in a flock’s V formation is no gosling and yet they both seek heat.

by Liz Berkstresser...When the floor stops moving, they take us off the truck. There’s a trail of blood leading to an open space with a green velvet floor.

by Zebulon Huset...There’s always a seed crystal ready to replicate itself. The mother-soup bags. It’s not like the bags of bags were precious, but I dreamed better when I knew they were safe.

by William Taylor Jr. ... Me and my 5 dollars worth of sad songs on the jukebox heart, my Lost Highway heart, my Richard Brautigan San Francisco Heart, my Brothers Karamazov heart, my one last drink at 3 a.m. heart,

by Julieanne Larick...if you think our legs are green pears in a bowl if you think there’s merit to wearing a leotard in the dark take us home tonight and fistfeed us chex-mix by the bucketful

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.