by Jeanne-Marie Fleming Shamblen Studios Scott pops a wheelie in the schoolyard. And another. We watch until Marky rides up, ridiculous, on a tricycle. We circle Marky and cheer. I like them — the boys, their jerky moves. Even Sal, who speaks Italian, and broke all of our pencils. In the classroom, he holds air till he’s purple. Girls smack his cheeks to pop the air out. Frank makes cartoon flipbooks at his desk and sells them. It’s like watching television. I want one. My fr

by Molly Thapviwat Aron Visuals I mailed my voice to the wrong decade / it came back wearing bell-bottoms and asking for my father / who at that time was still a question mark in my grandmother’s uterus / the letter opened itself and read: dear misremembered self, you left the stove on in every lifetime / I took this as a threat / or an invitation / depends on the weather of your guilt / a goat showed up on my porch and claimed to be my therapist / she chewed through my insur

by Sage Tyrtle Isabel Neuffer It’s a quiet time for the children, while the caterpillars are building their chrysalides, attached to the stomach walls. In the towns, in the cities, the children stop their running. Their yelling. They stop asking for food, for another drink of water, they stop asking and their parents lie down on the carpet like children themselves, relieved beyond measure. As the caterpillars busy themselves inside the children’s stomachs, the children like t

by Mandira Pattnaik UX Gun/Unsplash The full picture can never be understood. There are images, social media and narratives. It is not just about the women at the frontlines — two women in uniform were chosen to make the press briefing — but there are mothers and children and people left behind. A witness is unreliable in this context. There is our present, our today, in which there is so little of everything. Scarcity stares at opulence. We have stopped caring to regather; w

Jeswin Thomas Reviewed by Scott Neuffer Tolu Oloruntoba’s new poetry collection, Unravel (McClelland & Stewart), offers something strangely mesmerizing — a deconstructed mind tethered to what it haunts. It’s a dynamic collection impossible to pin down but about which I can provide some descriptions that hopefully point to certain forces of a groundbreaking work. Oloruntoba, a trampset contributor, describes himself on his website as a lapsed physician. He practiced medicine i

by James Kangas Luca Bravo This brown ceramic rooster, this mottled arc, ceaselessly crowing of its imminent fall from the bric-a-brac mantle to a headlong, unfeathered oblivion; the liquid calm of this hand’s idle arrangement on its startled throat, could spark the trick of flying blind to a streaked light, to a grand poetic dawn. This postcard from Rhode Island of the morning room’s heavy doors, the damask grouping rosy before the fireplace, the faceless mirror, the massive

by Robin Wilder Adam Mathieu He wanted to be a paleontologist. Unearth fossils jutting from Montana sediment, all the femurs and mandibles of dragon lizards he learned were more like breeds of cockatrice than Jurassic Park attractions. Those dozens of dinosaur figurines migrating across his walls, the shelves housing ancient bedrock secrets, each one anatomically incorrect. He imagined them with feathers, the pillow-stuffed down of ducks and swans, thought maybe scaly monstro

by Eric Pankey Europeana At the pace roots grow, I make a descent into the depths but with no exit plan. If there is a hell to harrow, so be it. If in digging, magma is released, and lava flows downward to the sea, so be it. If the shades will not be coaxed forward by sacrifice or bribe, so be it. Downward to darkness, like a drowned man with stones in his pockets. : : Was it night fears or fever that embodied me, burned a thousand scriptures onto my retina, that dull gray sl

by Glenn Orgias Piper Alpha during the 1988 disaster. Photo courtesy Cullen Inquiry. July 6, 1988. — Karen: This is all I know. Andre had taken to visiting the helideck of the Piper Alpha oil rig, looking from there out at the fog over the North Sea. He once told me that the sound of the foghorn on Piper Alpha was the sound loneliness would make if given a voice. 200 miles from Aberdeen it was. 170 feet below deck, the ocean smashed up against the pylons. A fall from the heli

by Alicia Potee Listen. I was born from a plastic bag, pimped to life by a long pump of mechanical breath. Like you, but go ahead and think you’re better — than this rubber body, these double-dip breasts, vinyl hips and dummy thighs, banana sundae split, lips two fat cherries on top. Look how you’re stooped over slab, streetlight autopsists, snapping shots for laughs. Whose husband left you like this? My sapphire spider eyes won’t snitch. If names are punchlines, just know th

by Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez Magnus Andersson I love Brooklyn because most people I love are here. I’m trying to be more present — smoking at different intervals on assorted elevations, making eye contact in the elevator. Late one night someone banged on my door. I was itching for some action, after five days I finally swallowed. I pulled a back muscle. There is something wrong with my body. On the internet I find the prettiest doctor in Greenpoint. She says I am very stressed.

by Amorak Huey William Bout My favorite shirt when I was 18 said “Panama City Beach Shark Hunters Club” & had a bite-shaped hole at the side & I imagined my girlfriend sliding her hand in against my ribs but she broke up with me pretty early that summer, we were a bad match & anyway it was my favorite shirt mostly because I bought it in Florida during Senior Week during which I imagined hooking up with a girl from Atlanta, say, or Charlotte, & certainly many people hooked up

by Amrita Noor Jen Theodore silence, and incense shoots an arrow straight through. angel & i sit in the sweet -grass, searching for signs of life: birdsong, maybe. a swollen teat for suckling. here, palms suckle on the sun while we sleep; organs burst from bodies lest the knife escape questioning. of knives, Shahid writes, on knives. his Urdu balmed then bloodied. at its end, a gazelle cried to the Lord above &| for its piety was granted the curse of poetry. the official acco

by Tex Gresham Slava Taukachou Where are you going? You are up here, the pressure of the air out there is in your bones. The bodies around you and you, all moving from where you were to where you are going. A destination connected by the air at 30,000 feet. You have to obey the laws at 30,000 feet. Sit still and just sit. Forfeit yourself at the cabin door and become a child at the whim of an absentee parent who’s not against treating you like the child they never wanted. Bec

by Mandira Pattnaik Marcos Paulo Prado Besides FOMO. And besides being, well and truly, envious. There’s no Fiction Month. Nowhere in the world. The closest is National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a yearly event where writers aim to write a 50,000-word novel in November. Is NaNoWriMo even comparable to Poetry Month? The answer is — no. For one, National Poetry Month is not just about poets aiming to write poetry — although a huge chunk of them do write poems, some commit

by Paul Chuks Femi Ogunlana During the mass transfer of 2008 — an occasional ritual where the government takes civil servants from one end of the country to another — your mother was transferred from Sagamu to a place where the sun mistook itself for an angry mother-hen and burned harsher than it did elsewhere in the country: Ogbomosho. The season there in January was as though God had frozen the atmosphere in the previous year and released it with the new year. The road was

by Suze Kay Cherry Laithang is also lost. He stumbles on an english garden, likes the ramble rose. He also likes that darker bloom of gun smoke in his name. He damns a woman who killed her child but first He said yes when she read proverbs 23:13. it’s all for Him, He thinks. His algorithm makes it so. it shows Him a french horse nosing into hospice rooms, a crying man whose wife will die. what the hell, He thinks, tosses $5 to their fundraiser, does the same for cats enferale

by Nate Hirschtick Wesley Tingey Well one time we walked and walked and walked we must have walked a thousand miles it was nighttime all night we walked through the park up DeKalb and down Norstrand I took the G train home after I thought of you the whole way the way you had your books stacked on your dresser it was one on top of the other it was so impractical but you made it work so beautifully they were next to an antique lamp that your grandma gave you cool grandma I thou

by Mihir Bellamkonda Akhilesh Sharma For L.H. Who are we? We are the people by the water in the morning — Where did we come from? — we came from close by, those small cabins, there — What is this rock called? — that’s quartz, you can see from the color, white or goldish white — Can I throw it into the water? — yes, but be careful, don’t hurt the sleeping birds — Why should we be careful? — we should be careful with beautiful things, young things sleeping — And what is beautif

by Brett Biebel Denis Shchigolev We’re still married, but my wife hasn’t forgiven me for Michigan City. I left her in an Airbnb. She was five months pregnant. My phone rang and rang, and I let it go, and she sat on the floor and cried, worried sick. The place we were staying didn’t have Wi-Fi. It was more like glamping than anything, just a two-room shack with a kitchenette and a TV with a DVD player and a digital antenna, plus a monster king-size bed. You could tell all the