James Nulick
“What are you looking at? my sister asked in the loudest voice possible, the abruptness of it as shocking as hearing the metal-on-metal screech of ghetto brakes when one is entering a crosswalk. Jesus Christ, Nicole!?”
Mary Burger
“Story is, you come up over the rise and the coastal meadow spreads out in front of you all the way to the cliff, the grass bends in waves and the water beyond it is a steely rippling sheet.”
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“I am printing on paper in golden letters
the flights
the passing of hours
the growing grass and the secret”
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“whistling at the door — frost
frost
: at other times the seagull
the filth of the gray dawns”
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“from its shell the golden sand—
what rapacious
dream
troubles my solitary
cold”
Denis Tricoche
“When me and Papi get home, Leo is half asleep waiting for us. He says, Veronica came by to give you something, but she told me I should only give it to you when you’re at your lowest. Not yet, I tell him.”
Yuliia Iliukha
Translated by Hanna Leliv
“A woman who learned how to live in the homes of strangers lost her own home twice. It all started in 2014. Weird thugs with tricolors; mad old women with golden teeth, tugging her clothes and spitting on her. She quickly wiped their spit away as if it could seep through her skin and poison her.”
Skye Gilkerson
“Back then you were the surface, the floorboards beneath carpets of sage and bluestem, a row of graphite scratches at the bottom of the drawing.”
Adam Day
“They are perfecting
the pillow with which
you are being suffocated;
now it sings to you”
John Gu
“When the offensive came, I was reminded of Mahmiin Andeyin’s words to me the previous winter: ‘Before the summer comes, they will start bombing again.’”
Iliana Vargas
Translated by Lena Greenberg and Michelle Mirabella
“‘Stop talking to me in French, Lucille, as if you had no clue who I was, or what’s going on. You’re the one who went to get me from the convent. You’re the one who paid for all the damage the Mother Superior and her following say I caused, even when you knew it wasn’t true.'”
Ariana Den Bleyker
“A new day is forming in the kind
of sky or ocean or plain
where you can see the edge
of a dream in all directions
& it opens to you, & you let it in”
Kelly Krumrie
“I recorded them in the kitchen, changing clothes, washing their hands, played the sound back, and they’d write it down somehow, rerecord it. The echoes under there had to be god.”
Juan José Saer
Translated by Will Noah
“In its essence, toponymy represents the first verbal constellation to spread over the tortuous surface of the universe, verbal projectiles that are launched by man’s codified breath and become lodged not in places themselves but in the maps that serve as their emblems.”
Justin Vicari
“Some people, by mere overlap of luck,
Guessed at parts of your soul by looking
Into your eyes, so you thought and sought
To hand them back a key. “Open me up,”
Justin Vicari
“I gather his drafts to read in bed.
His language is sexy but cannot be
Held like a man.
Lately, his heart, too,”
Afsana Begum
Translated by Rifat Munim
“Had anyone ever heard of the spirit of a discontented ghost wandering through the packed streets of an old book market when there were so many other places to haunt people? Just like there were bookworms, there were book ghosts, too.”
Rebecca Macijeski
“Let me tell you again. A new day is a new world is a new mind. There are a few constants: cerebral cortex, Irish breakfast tea, the way window light makes wavering star maps across the too-tired skin of my hands.”
Rebecca Macijeski
“Perhaps I’ll eat everything. Perhaps I eat everything and the hunger remains. What then? What more can I put in my body put in my mind put in my heart before next thing I know I’ll want the whole town on a bed of lettuce, my family tree deep fried.”
Rebecca Macijeski
“Why is the sky blue, but the clouds have so many different colors? It’s a signal question. When a child asks why is the sky blue what she means is suddenly I see the bigness of the world all around me like a thicket of knowledge I can’t get to the center of.”
Michael Loyd Gray
“He’d come nosing around on Saturday afternoons, this tall, red-headed warden, because he’d taken a shine to my mother and pretended to recruit me for the conservation service. Even then, I suspected that was a front, but my mother and I were dazzled by his grin and jutting chin, a man full of the outward confidence a smart green uniform and holstered pistol on his hip bestowed.”
William M. McIntosh
“I know it was a long time ago and I know we don’t see each other or speak anymore, although we could, and I know you’ve got a lot in your life and so do I, and I know this sort of drifting apart thing is rather common and forgivable, but do you remember me? Do you think about your old life while you’re possessing my current one?”
Cletus Crow
“Methuselah died
at nine hundred
and sixty-nine, which
is enough if
only to get to know you.”
Laura Zapico
“Micah called my name as I climbed the steps to the Oasis and he ran to catch up, sweating, his checked flannel shirt billowing behind him. I recognized him from my last rehab, the one with the low-rent organic meals and nonstop mindful meditation. We’d barely spoken there, but I’d felt his eyes on me in the dining hall and during Tai Chi, and I remembered how it thrilled me when I felt like a lonesome tumbleweed pinned against a rusted fence, blown and battered, miles from home.”
Ayshia Müezzin a.k.a [ a y s h ] b.1986 is a British-Cypriot Intermedia artist who grew up in Cyprus where she attended high school and began her artistic career.