Category: Poetry

Volatile, Anna Koeferl     I once read that an eye could be removed from its socket, the optic nerve still attached and functioning. Can you imagine such a careful operation? I imagine a white coat surgeon— a doctor, perhaps, steady hands lovingly twisting the scalpel and pin, circles onto circles onto circles, lens onto iris onto pupil,…

A Better World is Possible, Ernest Volynec   Paint rollers on sale today, thankfully. Which color suggests my walls will not miss the pale space where your painting used to hang?     About the Author Katherine Tison · University of Florida Katherine Tison graduated summa cum laude from the University of Florida with a B.S.…

Interlocked, Roma Parikh     Everyone I want to love is knuckle-distance away on a map the size of my hand. We are fingertips on opposite sides of glass, telephonic voices in adjacent time zones— it’s all too far for me. The airplane leaves a trail of chalk in the sky. In seat A, my arm…

Throwback, Abigail Jackson     When she turned seventy, my grandmother stopped pretending to quit smoking.   Though her days consisted mostly of coughing and burning holes   in the tablecloth, she never parted with her Salems. “I’m ready to go,”   she used to say, as the rising smoke yellowed the ceiling in patches.  …

Small House Near Nowhere, Emily Hill     Friday, Kristin cuts vegetables into finer things, searches the weekly chicken like a dead body. The bones are boiling away for soup—   six o’clock and the house is Catholic for the day. The walls are warm ochre, but Kristin shivers, trying not to think of her parents’…

Wish You Were Here, Nia Owen     After Rainer Maria Rilke Sometimes a claims adjuster stands up during an HR meeting and walks out of the office, drives away and keeps on driving, because of a glacial tarn somewhere in the Rockies. His co-workers talk about him as though he’s committed suicide. And another adjuster,…

Popcorn, Karlen Lambert     My father’s calloused hands force sugarcane broken as he pulls leaves clean from stalks. This dusty town fills our lungs with stifled coughs. The wind writhes between fingers clamped across mouths. The sun thrashes like a hooked trout. I stop and bite a clean stalk and taste faint honey and dirt.…

War is Over, by Ernest Volynec     For what we knew to be our second date We went to go see some spoken word poet the campus had brought in. For the most part, she talked about the female experience and being queer. I felt confident enough to hold your hand in public but still…

Dreamscape II, Meagan Dwyer [Trigger Warning: Depiction of death] “if a man cannot drown in his struggles, at least he can float for a while” black folk be boat be shipwrecked be sinking be [w]hole in bottom be covered in water  be sinking black folk be  swallowing sorrow today and tomorrow be dreaming of days…

Blue, Linnea Shurig       I watch her cracked, leather hands dig deep in distilled earth soft from water long gone her voice softer still   ‘fiel es el Senor’ faithful is the lord she hums silently, bending her hunched back over Creation smiling through aches   grandmother, sending praises up as she digs deeper…

Conch Shell, Alessandra Leo   Folded into you, ardent asymmetry. What harmonious origami of bare skin and paper-white bed sheets. Our pages such jigsaw canvases, smoothed-over here, crumpled there, our ripped edges in union- such indulgent dichotomies.   All creases and delicate synchronization, warmth and earnest loving- a testament to miracles to be so crisply perforated…

Overloading, Qintong Li     When the old man brought his payment in dimes and hard candies, she hesitated. Peering into his mackerel-blue eyes,   she suggested an installment plan. The firm’s policy was to collect up front. It was the nature of her business: taking   what little was left of her clients—like this man,…

Suffocating Nature, Camelia Rojas     For a time I believed in the longevity of a dew-swept skyscape, how the sun-drop suspended itself over hazy blue hills like in my dream of catching fireflies on thistles, of cupping the laurel-webbed fragrance of orchards into a spoon, lilt and scatter, fingertips dripping with the memory of return,…

nuns still teach abstinence in school, written on the blackboard in thick block letters. “Kissing is bad, too,” they tell the sixth graders, who like neither themselves nor each other. On the first day of summer, the kids run nude through the sprinklers escaping heat and God, together. Somewhere, nuns fan themselves with pages from…