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  …

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—  …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.…

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…