By Joshua Escobar
As the pandemic began, I switched to being a travel nurse. Like all healthcare workers, I received the vaccine early but only after a hoe trip to LA. It was almost unbearable without it.
By Joanna Theiss
And Jenny can’t stop talking about it.
She tells me Lake Baikal
has frozen in July, and
uncountable hectares of soybeans have withered,
and the doomsday clock is set to twenty days.
By Sumitra Singam
After the embryo transfer, Mel and I go to dinner with Aroha. Aroha orders
sake. Mel has some. Nurse Annie had said Mel should go home and rest.
By Kirsten Kaschock
Maybe even the galaxy is holistic.
Then there’s the split between
beauty and reality. There’s the fault line
dividing them and threads that traverse it.
By Jean-Luc Raharimanana
Translated by Tom Tulloh
A sofa floating in the fog. Inside, declining, I sink in sweet softness. 6 a.m. Everything’s fine. A head chopped off by a machete. Pre-recorded. Unfortunate. Reeking trousers on the dirty black flesh, green flies on red blood.
By Adelheid Duvanel
Translated by Tyler Schroeder
On the radio, they broadcast the description of my missing sister: wears a rainbow-print coat, green with a red sheen or red with a green sheen—asks every day if someone will build her a castle in the garden behind the house.
By Tanya Žilinskas
I had met Minka once before, also at one of Aria and Hazel’s parties. Tim attended that previous get-together, a combination potluck and game of croquet held on a stretch of greenbelt along the man-made lake in our neighborhood.
By Arlene Tribbia
Professor Ginsberg seems to spend a lot of time at the beginning of class trying to get a poetry carpool going to Rocky Flats. Everyone—except for me—seems to know the reason for this mission. A weekend protest? A pop-up poetry vision quest? An off-campus meditation-on-the-landscape to open dormant horizons of our awareness?
By Addison Zeller
She says: Some skies just hang up there like cracked ice.
She says: It’s not like before. I know who I am. I don’t have doubts. Even asleep, I know who I am. But I hear things. Close or way off. A train rushes by and I wonder: Is it in my head? Is it real?
By Mehdi M. Kashani
Fresh snow carpets the road and glitters under the faint streetlights. Neighbors snuggle up in their homes, leaving the quiet roads a haven for strays.
By Katherine Elizabeth Seltzer
Amy Seltzer, you are leaking.
Snap. Filter. Delete. Make yourself new. You can see it all from your screen.
By Steve Castro
A man climbing up a steep mountain wielding a Claymore with a wild boar as a guard dog would not be considered strange during an apocalypse.
By Linda Wojtowick
At Sunday barbecue she sees him he fetching chairs
for the pastel dames in the shade. What a saint, she thinks.
He’s always been a baby-kisser. Shorthand for glazed.
By Linda Wojtowick
It’s like when someone fills a basket. It looks
good. It looks like the right thing. But that’s
how it happens. You won’t know the road.
Sometimes the largest fillers are the emptiest men.
By Linda Wojtowick
It’s an old story: everything was coming new. Layers on layers of new. New neighborhoods gridding out like dead stars. At new airports tequila was green, snacks vacuum-packed.
By Jane Snyder
I didn’t know when I would make my father mad. I’d tell him I liked a song on the radio or repeat a joke from school, and he’d go off. I never saw it coming.
By Charles O. Smith
Atop a hill at the westernmost point of the city stood an ancient fortress overlooking a rocky offshore archipelago inhabited by sea lions, gulls, and crustaceans.
By Ann Pedone
The day after Heinrich Scheimann discovered the ancient city of Troy, all the she-goats came down from the mountain and stated quite matter-of-factly that they refused to ever be inseminated again.
By Taro Williams
Now, sex is boring. No, sex is something more complicated; it’s neutral. It’s not stimulating, disgusting, or even a euphoric rush. It’s just something people do. It just exists.
Cover art by Arlene Tribbia.
By Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz
the month of april
in excess of march
obstinate as a foreign language
seemingly garrulous but suave