Defense Mechanism 3, Elizabeth Ellenwood Watch her barefoot in cotton— not high heels and silk— enough skin to grip the surface, but not enough to make you think this is for anyone  but her. Watch her pace like a lynx around the pole, swoop like a snowy owl, suspend herself  upside-down, mane brushing the floor while…

Say a Prayer, Mikaela Rae Atiogue After Neil Hilborn I ate nothing but apple slices & eggs, hard-boiled, lightly salted. It was the summer of forgetting. The summer of scrubbing my tongue until it bled. Trying to get that taste out of my mouth. I can’t remember if this was the summer I spent every night…

We Sleep the Same, Kate Drakulic Your name is a splinter, an ice-breaker a loop of pearly fog.  Your nineteen are kill notches  scratched with an accurate slope on a buttstock, a perfect shooting range for Cupid. I’m slightly in love with you. A timid grace of a kitten playing in the grass. Small ears…

Study of Myself, Bella Pozo Every time you kissed me you left bacteria in between the crevices of my teeth But it’s funny how whenever I got sick we both seemed to blame the weather  Instead of the virus attached to your tongue I had to stop going outside because my mother became sick of buying…

Girl, Azure Arnot When the note is so high that it shatters thick glass And the smile so hard that it hurts  And the tower so tall that it topples and crashes And crushes all lovers on earth When your laugh is so hard that tears roll down your cheeks And your feet ache from…

Nature Administers a Rorschach Test, Margaret May i watch lovers on the street kiss with more tongue than fang and call them pathetic for their forked bittersweet longings before peeling off my skin and leaving it at the front door  slithering over the  threshold to pull the slivers of your name through my teeth like…

For Sale, Jess Mezzi is a womanizer / which is to say its victims are born / between itching crosshairs. this feminine inheritance: / to be prey from birth. / at the bodega on West 42nd, / I bear witness to its everyday violence. / the summer hums slow & thick / & I watch…

Flickering Strings of Love, Paul Knight Constellations mapped across her face Space matter and nebulas rest under two blue moons Stars mark a trail over a happy nose A spray outdone only by the up twist of her lips Swimming only to drown in the ocean of her eyes The calm currents swallow my beating…

Rise, Meg Jenson Because, even if we meet, I’ll have no idea how to bring this up in conversation. And you’ve started doing it with some regularity. Sometimes once, sometimes even twice a week I’ll hear the high-pitched whine of your shower faucet at some ungodly hour. And, boy howdy, is it a whine. A—is he…

Seven Sundays, Azure Arnot autumn The night I was born, my mother clawed up the tiles in the kitchen floor and buried her deciduous heart  beneath the mortar.  Concrete-stained fingertips leave her more  cement than girl:  she weaves glass and steel into the strands of her shadow-dark hair, building a greenhouse in her chest that…

The Grass is Never Greener, Vinnie Hagar To the children of Operation Pedro Pan They did not sail above sandy shores dripping salt. Their banners and flags grappled onto their simmered clothes like bodies scrambling for spines. It was January of 1962.  Fourteen-thousand slept on wings that sliced through orange clouds. Swollen eyes like mangos,…

The Battle of Antietam in Technicolor, Alexandra Moleski I shaved the back of my head on a whim at 2 o’clock on a Thursday afternoon. There was a gap between classes. I wear it in two braids  down my back and the fuzzy shaved bit peeks out. My dad ran his palm over it when he…