Category: VOLUME II

Shoreline, Yarden Salei   after C.D. Wright’s “Floating Lady Retablo”   When I left home   all the worries escaped From my chest   just gone, like that   crazy   how Some places   of a kind   become warped   twisted   how Family isn’t family   and peace craves the conscious mind Yet resides deep within   the white bone skull   Shut…

Sufi, Tamara Turk     In the desert we speak of aquifers, how they are the spaces between things, how they hold water to quench thousands.   All the cracks and crevices, the small places between stones and pebbles—   water for thousands.   If the spaces between bodies would leave me anything but parched,…

Better Things, Rebekah Chamberlain     If I said that our conversations have something to do with the way the creosote bush ravels itself into the barbed wire and around the sun-warped timbers of a cattle fence, would you know what I meant? Would the expression bring to light just the wire-rust in its color…

Untitled, Kristen Prosen     I. Two months before you leave in a Chicago gas station, you flash your brother’s ID and buy a twelve pack of Budweiser. Tins of Grizzly dip. Back in the car I open a bag of corn chips and fling them one by one out the window.   Kids sliding…

Infinity, Michael Chilcote     I. Pick some fruit, bruised purple. We did not plant this tree.   So we walked, so we stand, lakeside. The grey dock.   Wind breaks water into a rough sketch of sky, the circling forest.   The dogs will fetch ‘til after dusk, undercoats dripping mud, their grins a…

Figure Study IV, Michael Specht      a gloss after Elizabeth Gilbert Not all my prayers beseech you— on the widest nights I’ve tied   a wire to a tin can, swung for the neck of the nearest shining idol and howled   so proud. I needed answers right then and no, not you nor the…

Untitled, Andrea De Sa Trigger Warning: Child Death Mention; Depictions of Animal Death] To protect a vegetable garden from rabbits you must lay the chicken wire twenty-five centimeters into the soil. They can’t dig that deep. Eighteen meters of wire fencing, four sides of four and a half, iron stakes cornering the square, entrusted with strawberries,…

Gas Pump, Casey Eisenreich   Granny squints yonder on her sun flower field ’cause it’s the closest thing she’s got to roses. She named the Sycamore tree—the one that grips the river together— Gibraltar, because she read about the way the sun sets like a grease flash  off the coast of Andalusia. She says to…

Birthday, Lani DePonte [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Mental Illness; Eating Disorder] Anya, the temperature is dropping, and we’re not doing very well. At night we eat dinner in the cafeteria, and our friends watch every bite you put into your mouth. We smoke cigarettes on the patio beforehand, the uncomfortable outdoor furniture embedding diamond patterns…

Cast Iron Gut, Grace Weaver     A fiction-critique of prose-poetry   She will skip stones across this still water where I once tried to drown the jealous burning in my belly and throw away my underwear that still smelled like God even after the red had dried almost black. She will skip stones across…

The Lion Hunt, Lex Brown     I’m in the commode with all the other swinging dicks, and the drunkards queuing behind me, and the Global-Industrial-Dyson-Metallic-Silver-Airblade-Rapid-Hygienic-Digital-Motorized-Drying machines that sound like cloud-piercing X-1As trying to snap the sound barrier, and the one-and-a-half-story sound system vibrating the architecture, when all of a sudden I notice, in front…

Untitled, Jenny Nguyen [Trigger Warning: Sexual Assault of a Minor Mention; Depictions of Child Abandonment] The rainy days ended one night of December when Jemial arrived to dry the sky, leaving no trace of the torrential rain that, for three months, had fed the parched earth. I would have to wait for the next rains, for Iwa, to…

Sag, Marlies Staples [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Death] Jane is still mad that I killed the dog last year. My sister can be impossible in this way, and in many others. She won’t believe you when you say that Hitler had a love of animals, or that Nancy Reagan sold dime bags in college. She…

Geraldine, Tara Piscatelli [Trigger Warning: Racially Insensitive Language] People used to call my Pops a geep when he got old, which was, in a way, accurate. He used to wear the black socks all around the house. I don’t know where the term comes from: something with guinea, maybe the G-P of grandpa. I used…

Big Dave’s Meat Market, Lee Kraft [Trigger Warning: Depictions of Animal Cruelty/Animal Death] Based on Ben Folds’ and Nick Hornby’s “Your Dogs” from Lonely Avenue With a house that looks like this, at that price, we knew there had to be a catch. It’s 2:31 a.m. and this is it. Those dogs. Barking in Next Door’s backyard.…

Garden Walls, Sujin Lim     I think I’d like to keep bees— however much bees can be ‘kept.’ Like a kept woman maybe they could bring a sweet sharp pleasure with a constant stretching, sensuous ache of uncertainty. So I’d need an orchard where I could line their white boxes under the branches knotted like…

The Game, Jonathan Agee     All dirt trail and fish boot, straw in the lips, denim and oxcart, wrangler fish strung on a hook line, takes me by the waist, says sometimes everyone needs to be touched. Says it’s only a joke, I’m not really saying the things I mean about light and its…

Fish, Emma Conlon     Tasmanian bluegums molt, peeling back from their trunk-bones, calcifying up from the soil.   To the west, the creek spits and slaps. Sand on a beach at low tide: that’s how this bark looks. And decaying neck-ropes. And the strokes of Manet’s goldfish, all auburn and russet, all glaucomic blue.…

Istanbul Arches, Andrew Loth     There is a story in which snow is pushed cliff to cliff   with a brownbrush broom, a tree like an ache in glass, a space   to put oneself out like an ashtray, how sand and snow both blow. Say hello,   pluck your head off and replace…

Solitude, Melissa Ergo     I scribble a poem on torn sailcloth— The calm, cool face of the sea asked me for a kiss— then leap from the windward bulwarks early on dawn watch.   A splash rarely goes unnoticed on a night like tonight— wind blowing five knots, sailing under fore and afters and…

Untitled #6, Rebecca Jones     Mother, my sun-dried tomato, it’s Sunday, let us wake up and plant crocus bulbs in the frosted soil.   You have stopped growing altogether. Every word is a chip on the rim of your glass.   Why do we celebrate our suffering each year, orbit it, re-inhabit it? Why do…

Ocean View Drive, Rebekah Chamberlain     Open ocean falls closing into white past dark blue   where bound, in sand, in sun, blood, we lie unopened: five years   of love: still our cells run caught: blue divers falling   the volume under papyrus stretched, its inner face   bathed as in tea— you…