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,

by Rowan Tate BHLNZ - Biodiversity Heritage Library NZ The world may end with a poppy blooming between my toes. Its ripe red face splitting open from roots made from my skin. It knows. Mother, forgive me for I have pluck-pulled petals from their stems, swept dirt beneath the altar steps, let the bees drown in a glass of sugared tea. I walked without looking, past the face of a trembling bird, trampling moss that was still learning to breathe. I have turned my back on a callin

by Snehal Bhadani Max Griss Steel bars crosshatch the sky into trembling cells of light. Below, the taxicabs glint in emerald so sharp it stings my eyes. The fruit-seller’s cart spills overripe melon: sweet, gangrenous. Little black plums crowd like wet beetles. The train’s horn guts the air, bellowing the arrival of the traveler. The elderly shuffle in slow arithmetic. Children dart with expertise, like minnows through the throng. In one hand a newspaper, and in the other, c

by Sarp Sozdinler Max Fleischmann Someone’s shadow stalks me on a rainy day. Asks me out on a candlelit dinner with saffron rice. Folds herself into the steam rising off my tea. Twists my bedsheets into folds. The shadow knows I’m obsessed with Patti Smith’s Horses. Shouts DANCE LIKE YOU MEAN IT. Bounces on the couch like a kid. The shadow calls me her oversized mermaid. Orders bánh mì a little too spicy for my taste. Tips in fives and tens. Parties past dawn. Blows in my ear

by LC Gutierrez Sami Salim To whom this may concern We are writing to confirm that LC’s mother, xxxx xxxxxxxxx, was admitted on xx/xx/xxxx. She maintains a beauty tendered like that of a felled tree consumed already from beneath. Her fragility reminds one of a keepsake stored in crumbling tissue. He hesitates to touch. We know that you need him —  but he is ours for now. He sits still bedside studying 9 Traits That Make a Decent Man. Encased in shadowed memory and half-forgiv

by Spencer Eckart No Revisions/Unsplash They held a parade in your honor, but you hadn’t vanished yet. You were still wolfing hummus, still putting on one odd sock. Everyone kept applauding anyway. They mistook your doubt for performance art. The mayor read a speech about how brave it is to disappear. Later, someone said you were just hiding in the crawlspace beneath yourself. They brought blankets. They waited all year. Spencer Eckart is a hybrid poet with work published or

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 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 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 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 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 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 B. Montemayor David Pupăză let it be of mangoes. of hearts cast in stone. or else, inanimate objects with a hairpin’s mortality. i want to be the patron saint of women trapped in flea market paintings, their knowing gaze a mirrored stillness. perhaps a mise en abyme, an artistic abyss. the kind of death i’ll only get to know when i am canonized for my trivial deeds. let me be the patron saint of lost, defunct websites whose links wormhole into a 404 Error, where poetry in

by Abhinav Andréas BRUN It was late in the night, too late. Anyone who had a place in the world was already in it. Everyone else was shifting, in one queue or another. The train like a coil shifting in the dark, the dark of the earth shifting against vacant space, the space shifting in its own vacancy. Like memory shifts every time it’s wrenched into language. The platform a rectangular slab of white light, silhouettes slicing it drown in crumbs and murmurs. I was arguing on

by Shiyang Su Will Turner When Odysseus woke from an ancient dream and didn’t recognize Ithaca, he limped along the loud, ashen sea, sobbing. In another translation, it was a whispering surf-line that he sealed his cries in. Odysseus, oblivious now to the lexicon of his homeland, grieved in the rhythm of the sea. The low wails lapping the shore, the tearing of rocks near the dark estuary —  Desire fluctuated between harpaleon (gentle) and argaleon (hard) by night and day. Eve

by Taylor Hamann Los NCI I an imaginary monster compounded of incongruous parts Doctor Moreau, are you proud? I stitched it together myself. Collected specimens & scalpels. Placed lavender bundles around its head so it could believe it was beautiful — & it was even as it shrilled in surrender, the sound both sweet & chilling. The echoes still reverberate through my chest, bouncing from bone to bone & leaving hairline fractures behind. You see, vultures pick through bodies, bu

by Matthew Thomas Bernell I like the idea that, really, there is only one poem, and it is the song we all sing to ourselves, not as ourselves, necessarily, but as each other. Don’t you remember the story, now? The one about the beautiful singer who strutted into a river, singing, and drowned? And it was you. You were the singer and the river and everything else, too, even those moths that punctuated swampy darkness. But how did that one end? Tell me again. Wasn’t it a while a

by Kimmy Chang Matheus Ferreira i blame the erratic pulse of social media. a wondrously flashy line of dialogue. the man whispered it from the master closet, where he lay on the linoleum beside his wife’s pink poof. starved, folded in some forgotten sock —  i sat in silence. he rubbed his toes together, then crossed his legs. sweet lily, i have only you to talk to. the man rattles through his to-dos —  spray herbicide, buy butcher steak —  all of it circles back to the sweet

by Gbolahan Badmus Sinval Carvalho — Lagos, May 2022 You considered death as an antidote to hiding, but your silly friends proposed life instead. They carry you on the back of the city, past streets bent like clenched fists — ready to strike or extend a handshake, to a lounge seated by the Atlantic. Through the clouds of shisha and cigarette smoke, the sea unfurls in waves, swaying to the wind. Your body cannot match the fluidity of water. You ferry away their pleas to mingle

by Scott T. Hutchison Stephen Poore You slip, right into it, on a low moment’s non-notice. Mysteries of bottle, but no glass. You survive on scant: stolen watermelon sugar, a trespassed swimming hole with rocky falls to lie in. Underwater. Eyes open. Counting how long the breath holds. The world bubbles and froths cleanly above you. Angelic separation. The flow changes with Not-so-Fun-House mirror distortion. Worthless would be too much of a compliment; less is the better,

by Ziqr Peehu Chris Curry I When the jawbone stumbles into my dream, I shriek first and greet later. It doesn’t introduce itself — just leans its 2.8 million years against my bed frame till it’s acknowledged. I stare at it. It stares back, its sockets are empty & the silence is prolepsis. The jawbone gets annoyed. It calls itself orbit — (says 3bodyproblem — says solveit) but it’s a drunk stumbling through zero gravity, teeth foaming at the gums, a rabid dog chasing itself. I

by Mary Simmons Melody Zimmerman In the summer, in the woods behind Mary’s house, the woods not owned by Mary’s parents, we searched, without her parents, for snakes. When we searched for snakes, we were jungle explorers, and one of us would always die, though we never found any snakes, and sometimes we would touch dead birds, study their dark eyes, touch our lips, take turns laying in the grass. When we laid in the grass, we were no better than the snakes we never found in t

by Meredith MacLeod Davidson Thom Milkovic Elaborate sprawl of heartache you are memory carrion rattling a tin of shiny things over residual iMessages. Symbolist jewels lost among an Olympic verve where last season’s blizzard still eclipses the trails. When the parallelograms settle across my chest I know I’ve invited a Secondhand News sort of curse. A Never Going Back Again string pattern of tea glyphage yielding small broken pieces unrelated over a lapsed Instagram irony. T

by Quinn Rennerfeldt mana5280/Unsplash I explain the dream to my therapist: I found a large, purple chrysalis affixed to a suitcase, abandoned on the sidewalk. She says it is a container for my gender transformation. The chrysalis, not the suitcase. When I hear container, I think tupperware. Less sexy than the sleeve in which a caterpillar melts and resolidifies into a winged thing. But sturdier. A container that women share. Tupperware parties, saving food we made for the ne

by Jeffrey Hermann NASA An old friend moves home but I don’t reach out. Months pass. I look around for him when I’m in a crowd. Nothing yet. Some people keep diaries, some watch history documentaries, and some think the past can fuck right off. I know myself well enough to only read self-help books halfway through. Tomorrow can be a better day but the day after that there will be a hurricane. A journalist stands on the beach and says winds will exceed 80 MPH. She explains the

by Nicole Fegan Simon Sun what i am looking for in love is shelter — from the rain, from myself, and even from the sun. our home is inhospitable. woodpecker trellis; evergreen tree. i complain. this we know —  laughter over cold toes, winter heat, the crack of light between our doors. and i storm; i storm. i cannot build the vernal dam. wherever i am rock i blame the river for erosion. i want to vacation in your life. soft, fragile kisses far beyond our view. let me build up

by Brandon Shane frame harirak In the hideout scurrying for things to do, as rain hits dirt, trees sway and leaves become leaflets storming the old stone of a city upon a hill, the worms have done their part, but I’m struggling to find a reason to exist, and last summer I saw a stray dog watching cars beside a highway, as the sun swept hope on a six-hour interval like tides in Brittany, or certain blocks in Los Angeles, where two-by-fours strike at the same rate they build. M