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.
Poetry
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Last Week The Sun Died
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.
Damn!
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.
Pishtaco
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.
Rubric
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.
Basket Filler
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.
from: The Oyster
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.
some gifted
By Gerónimo Sarmiento Cruz
the month of april
in excess of march
obstinate as a foreign language
seemingly garrulous but suave
happy
William Aarnes
“Having to talk doesn’t make her happy.
She feels put on the spot, doesn’t like
the pitch of her voice, can’t ignore the way
her left hand waves about unless she focuses”
i really love the little things that go unnoticed
Philip Jason
“The first thing I want you to know is that I love
the circle you drew in the sand
with your finger. It has one
too many corners, but it is a thing of you”
College
Jeffrey Kingman
“On Mt. Kilimanjaro
we sat, our first date.
The cat took a bath.
We licked each other’s”
The Desert Inn
Betsy Martin
“the walls
are heat
and bird calls”
I am writing the dream
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”
and the night begins
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“whistling at the door — frost
frost
: at other times the seagull
the filth of the gray dawns”
and finally, life emerging
Stella Vinitchi Radulescu
Translated by Domnica Radulescu
“from its shell the golden sand—
what rapacious
dream
troubles my solitary
cold”
Letter to the Soil
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.”
A Flight
Adam Day
“They are perfecting
the pillow with which
you are being suffocated;
now it sings to you”
The World
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”
What We Held in Common
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,”
The Shame of Loving Another Poet
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,”
How to Keep Going
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.”
How to Lose Your Fear of Death
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.”
How to Paint the Sky
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.”
Eternal Life
Cletus Crow
“Methuselah died
at nine hundred
and sixty-nine, which
is enough if
only to get to know you.”
Hyde Lake, Memphis
Ellis Elliott
“I want to tell you about the flock
of starlings, pinpricks like pixels,
shifting direction against the grid”
Buy the Buoy
Evan Nicholls
“‘Buy the buoy,’ said the salesman.
‘No,’ said the person back.”
A Sudden Set of Stairs
Evan Nicholls
“Nobody asked for it, but there it is. In the way of honking cars and bighorn sheep and clementine oranges. People yelling for it to get out of the way, and watch out.”
Listen to This
David Wojciechowski
Not the sound of a real cricket, but an electric one. That’s what I’m hearing. The stone against stone.
Big Tragedies, Little Tragedies
David Wojciechowski
“The candlemaker has a secret. He walks it through the darkness. He places it on the ground. Runs away from it.”
every woman is a perfect gorgeous angel and every man is just some guy
Sophie Bebeau
“every woman is a fossiled fern limestone impression
made of threads that backstitch the first moon
and this moon together”