-
·
Fading
Hands, Katherine Rogers Shannon wipes her hands down the front of her apron. She has nine rooms left on this floor, and she’s supposed to be off work in two hours. She pushes her cleaning cart out of room 311 and knocks on 312 across the hall. “Housekeeping.” No reply. Shannon sticks her master key through…
-
·
Discovering the Erotic Creature After Sheila Kelley’s TED Talk
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…
-
·
It Was the Summer
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…
-
·
Blue Magic and Black Rubber Bands
Illuminated, Ava Fojtik In the summer, I would sit on my porch under the cherry tree in my backyard, as my grandmother and mother tried to tame my hair with Blue Magic and black rubber bands. Those days smelled of fresh-cut grass, blooming cherry florets and coconut oil. My fist clenched and my eyes squinted…
-
·
Your Name is a Splinter
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…
-
·
Listerine Bones
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…
-
·
Penthouse Serenade
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…
-
·
growing pains
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…
-
·
Adam’s Gun
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…
-
·
A.R.
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…
-
·
unsent letter to my upstairs neighbor who’s taking a shower at 3:42 a.m. on a thursday
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…
-
·
Prairie Rust, Strawberry Lips
The Battle of Antietam in Technicolor, Alexandra Moleski Annie smears pink paint onto the apple of my cheek with her index finger, raising it up to my cheekbone and then dragging it down the side of my face. I try not to laugh at the cold tickling my skin, sitting on the roof of her station…
-
·
Facts and Figures
Element of Speech, Bethany Dudek There are 206 bones in the human body. This is a fact. The first time it heard it, my sister Shauna was mocking, “there is no neck bone, stupid.” There are actually seven bones which make up the neck. C1 through C7, or cervical vertebra. No one bothered to specify…
-
·
Perennials
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…
-
·
Little Havana, Miami
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,…
-
·
Half of One
Warped, Rachel Donohue my mother never made me blackberry pie, she wanted me to know how to make it myself, so that i could quench my own thirst as i licked my lips, and learned that half a dozen eggs, was the same as six. the blackberries i pick from my aunt’s yard stain my…
-
·
Then and There
The Grass is Never Greener, Vinnie Hagar Mom used to tell me kindness is always the answer. At my Lutheran Elementary school we used to watch videos of starving children in Africa and be handed small purple boxes to collect change in. I still don’t think I understand how to eat meditatively. Oprah talks about how…
-
·
Old Dog Can Almost Hear the Worms Sigh
I Believe in Laundry, Julia Tasho When Vera had got litters before she had been in the woods and she had made little canopies out of leaves with her snout to keep the pups safe and hid in the dirt and wet. But she didn’t have any leaves here, just piss rags and towels barbed with…
-
·
Seed-Pod-Head
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…
-
·
The Bones of St. Valentine
Untitled, Jessica Ram I walked through a church with an unholy mouth gazed upon this love ghost, this dead thing with sacrilegious eyes (they were looking for God, they were looking for you) Marble walls nothing without your back against them Here, honesty does not pray clean or bless politely. Here, honesty drips your sweat…
-
·
Fragile Bones
ano nakikita Mo?, harana 1948 Scientist Alfred Kinsey concludes that 37% of men have enjoyed homosexual activities at least once. 2002 – 54 years later – In the third grade, someone accused me of being it for the first time. The class was divided on whether I was or was not. Of course, I was…
-
·
clenched fist and honeycomb
World’s Finest, Chloe Hiu See Tsang my girl sits in the garden like eve on her knees and i bite her shoulders in the milk white dusk leaving half cleaved marks of my sore teeth on her skin. we sit on our haunches like dogs in the afternoon, red faced semi-nymphs begging for something to…