Poetry

by Sarah Carey Aedrian Salazar Where black-arrowed hands ticked predictably for years, a house’s beating heart, a still, round space. Its yellow face had faded, like our tourbillon of hope against life’s gravity, within the silenced chimes —  no wing, no prayer, a generation, or a few, passing in seconds. We’d long since stopped holding time like a hostage between us, ransoming the old betrayals —  all we counted on to kill that elephant of remembrance to which we finally s

by L. Acadia Guillermo Ferla We took Chaco for his rabies vaccine a sign at the taco bar catty-corner reads, “save the Earth: it’s the only planet with tacos” appealing immensely to me since I’ve been pondering Black Holes, today I saw a young boy tenderly carrying a 3-ft long plastic T-Rex with a movable jaw, I pondered Dinosaurs’ appeal to kids, feeling powerless, as opposed to guns’ appeal to weak people. I imagine turning kids onto gravity in Black Holes, the universe’s m

by Saheed Sunday Riccardo Lo Re sometimes, our keyboards know us better than our heads do. the time i knew living comes first before loving was when my autocorrect changed my “i love this world” to “i live this world”. meaning, you learn to live first before you learn to love. meaning, both don’t co-occur in one sentence. meaning, it is either you leave to love or you love to live. the end result is that the choice is always yours to make. it is the same way every chicken tha

by Dan Alter Chris Chow Had they split his throat like Moses’ rock so his singing would break that way? Back in Black bled from Peter Fischer’s boom box, shouldered, its solo blistered all the way to the meet. They had no-one else as slight, so I handed my body over. Peter a weight class above me wore his anger like a helmet, picked out blond fro floating around broken-out face. What Black were we Back in? Locker rooms, hard edges of guitars buzzed through the dim days. Week

by Fred Johnson CHRSNDRSN/Unsplash The radio comes on at once and you say “What is it darling — ?” My, just all-day game shows — your favourites too, like Where Are My Fucking Keys? and God, Sandra, Is That You, Switch Off the Light, Don’t Look at Me — and you don’t, darling, you never do. We’ve filled the toaster with bread and forks —  real arrogance, and all those pretty faces pressed against the glass. It’s nothing, I say, nothing I’m not used to. Look here at my pastim

by Sydney Vance Pablo/Unsplash House party high, the humid Oklahoma July lurched us into someone else’s one AM dark, some driveway full of cars, echo of empty sound. My menthol cigarette in flame at the wrong end. You handed me another —  the first I ever smoked the whole way. And we talked like friends talk when they smoke anything together outside, in someone’s parents’ garage, backyard, or broken porch swing. My boyfriend doesn’t like me, I confessed bemoaning my own gulli

by Claire Scott Andrei Slobtsov The corporation planted poison ivy in my yard last night five plants, five feet apart along with twenty pink flamingos you know the tacky kind you see on cheap lawns not the nicer ones with solar lights I called the police but Laura (they are all named Laura) is tired of hearing from me and tells me to see a doctor or simply hangs up or doesn’t bother to answer when she sees my name I have a doctor who thinks I am just fine although she has sug

by Chris McCann Kyle Cleveland Your car won’t start in Council Bluffs and it just turned cold, November like a whisper you overhear through the thin walls of light. Could snow soon, they say, but you know how they are, with their wrenches and their twisted saplings. They think they can fix the things the world ignores. You turn the key again, again, but you’re not scared of fires, even in summer when the smoke curls up from under doors, slinking into houses like boys out too

by Dom Fonce Viktor Forgacs May we slice? May we sit at the table? May we stare at each other? May we sip bowls of me? A black eye separates here and gone. Somewhere, a girl spins in a green field like a top. Dress fanned out. Hair wild. See her from a down-looking view. Fall into her. Closer. Closer. Into her pupil. This is my name. Patricia. Put it in your mouth. Swallow. On the shelf goes a doll. In the cellar goes a doll. In the attic goes a doll. You will forget each. Yo

by Sam Moe Sorin Gheorghita 1. You arrive at the greenhouse past midnight to purchase vegetables for the confit. The day hasn’t begun, you bear a lantern in one hand, emptied seafood bin in the other. The nursery smells sweet, the only sound your hands hooking light to the wall, hair falling in front of your right eye, hush of cotton pants creasing as you bend to pluck mustard greens. Too soon night will end, you’ll appear, bleary-eyed and covered in soot, ready for the menu.

by Oisin Farriage Artyom Korshunov balance the image: strung out, haggard. latched in a gas station bathroom. the brutal master flesh at (house, not home) etched these yellow-purple glyphs in (skin, not bone). erosion in the low valley of your cheeks, eye to jaw. needle pierced points illumined under anti-intravenous beams, conceal where black tar permeates rhizomatous feeds; see ephemerides of childhood dreams slowly inching up your arm, infecting the brain, fleeting through

by Dani Putney Justin Shen “Piss yourself.” — Sign in Seattle Reader, I did. We were at Queer/Bar, aptly named for being a queer bar. My friend Max was too wasted, too messy. A French Canadian woman lost her phone down the street. We helped her while she yelled at random dudes —  she knew how to fight, I’ve been a stripper for seven years. Don’t let me mention the leather-daddy bar the three of us found ourselves in half-past 2 AM. We walked home in the rain. The stripper did

by Chel Campbell Yang Shuo Sometimes I unfix my gaze in the bathroom mirror to see double, push grinning lightbulbs beyond their fragile containers. I want to perform the same magic with my tongue, crack myself open like a pistachio, tell a stranger everything just to have someone really know me no matter the cost. A few weeks ago, I stole a tube of chapstick, considered selling feet pics, got a tattoo of a gravestone that reads meh above my ankle. Yesterday was the greyest S

by Ariel Machell Frankie Lopez for Collin That night, at midnight, young and wild, we ran naked across the golf course beneath the moldering mountain lit by resort lamps in Palm Springs, and we looked at each other’s impressionable bodies and said, Let’s pray, not because we believed in anything in particular, but because the warm night air was caressing our exposed flesh in such a way that we felt we had to worship something in return. We had been so loud and it was time to

by Leigh Chadwick Brett Jordan I like to grow tomatoes, so I go into the backyard & plant a bottle of ketchup. That night I dream I grow gills & wade into the Atlantic & then I am swimming & swimming & swimming until I come across an octopus. I ask the octopus, If you lost one of your hearts, would you be happier? The octopus doesn’t answer because it’s an octopus. When I wake up, I check on the ketchup bottle I planted in the backyard. I run my hand over the soil. I’m gettin

by Letitia Jiju Lenstravelier/Unsplash for Goofy Say they didn’t freeze light. Say the first beam didn’t stumble out of a frizz of electron, heady as a black pearl on an oyster’s tongue. Say the lattice didn’t hunger back or long to be strewn shingle as I, asleep, that whole summer on your shoulder’s flint shore. Did you know the oyster has a small heart? Like a wounded sock. I stitched mine into muscle. Loved you fitfully. Sleep bent on my star-jagged dream needled to poem b

by Nicholas Barnes Matt Hoffman cower from your gothic rockabilly mind. be horrified by those judging, stranger stares. hold it back when letting it out is all that counts. be unwilling to disco dance on the blacktop. push it all down. stifle tears at the movies. avoid getting cat hair on your clothes even if it means purring and whiskers. fear the planes soaring overhead as if they’re bearing nukes. reject what meets your gaze in a stormy puddle’s machinations. be terrified

by Ignatius Valentine Aloysius Ricardo Gomez Angel That fringe hour welcoming sunlight so bright is the quietest of fall’s weekend. A murmur slips by now and then, worshipping quieted machines that would otherwise be sopranos’ shrill sounds or flutes drilling through the genesis of night- buried thrums, while I’d slept with fingers bent tight and hands beating away my ghosts. Now within the walls something drops with a scrape and thud, so I turn my head, listening, curious, d

by Chinedu Gospel Edgar Moran This water has fathered my sorrow. For that, I have mastered every skill involved in the science of floatation. I am learning to unweight myself. Oceanus, teach me to remember how to forget. How to trample on water & swim in sand dunes. Because this is the first law of survival. Maybe we cannot own what the world gives to us. & some may say it’s God’s role in ecology. But, I contest. Because, the last time God cast his hand into the earth to take

by Akhila Pingali Jr Korpa The evening arrives early on moth-wings, crisp and shaded. We occupy the last dregs of light. You, sunk in your pages, and I, motioning in the dawn beyond your dipped head. It washes in, the pink of beetroot stains, of your eyes following a timeline not of here. I flick a parsimonious evening breeze off my cheek. It turns a page and out of the cuckoo’s mouth the morning crescendos. Echoes in your story wrap your figure black against the reeling d