Maggie Blake Bailey

Everyone knows the saint, that is how saints work.
The dancer makes space around herself,
flutters her hands open to glass and ice.

Maggie Blake Bailey

Orbits are overrated.
The idea we should trace a path,
turn like a wheel, like a gear.

gigi bella

maybe we keep waking up in the same day/
nameless & unassuming /melatonin sleep
in drool dried pillows/o the soft jello’d hours
when we are awake/ a melted magma disco ball

Genevieve Kaplan

I thought to shelve, I thought to put away, to notice and to ask for
and observe. I’m most of the time usually fine
with others talking
like that, and keeping up with their pleasures or certain

Steven Seidenberg

One clings to trivialities—to one’s trifling indiscretions—not to abjure the consequential, but to confront it. Nothing so deflating as the pettiness of absence—of what one had presumed would prove the majesty of the void…

Megin Jimenez

I needed secrets as a child. I endowed plastic trinkets with totemic significance I vowed not to reveal. The loss of them would be disastrous.

Megin Jimenez

They will total
the money I’ve spent
digital receipts
money I’ve wasted
money over time
as the sum of my life

Melanie Figg

Her younger self was at the wheel. Way before
the turnoff she knows something is not right.
No houses in peripheral vision, the road like a movie reel, unraveling.

Andrea Abi-Karam

PART I

ribs pop off/out
fast
NOT like prison
bars raising more like
that fast flash of
blue light when a
fuse blew @ LGA

Alan Chazaro

The process in which a cloud of interstellar gas and dust collapses to form a new star. This can only happen in a gaseous nebulae but who really knows WTF a gaseous nebulae is? In middle school, I’d wanted a Terrell Owens 49ers jersey.

Erin Slaughter

I wish I was the grieved body of a hare

body that sweetbox of dirt I do not believe in

I would like to be memorialized as sheets of topaz
melting in the weeds in front of you

Renée Ashley

The gate to sleep does not fly open but the fence around it falls away and you have never dreamed like this before. A year from your life dropped like a page from a sheaf.

Renée Ashley

[So you try to remake a life] after what you’ve been told:
Not one word signified. A word is a sound is a sign
denoting nothing. Would you want more of that same?
You’d say lonely if it had meaning. You’d say done.

Larry D. Thacker

Can I shoot a round
into the sky high enough

for it to fall
back to earth and burn

Larry D. Thacker

Do they feel you hinting around
as they gather up for photos.
At the wedding reception.
The family reunion. After cleaning
the graves on Memorial Day.

Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou
Translated by Siavash Saadlou

I am the last seeping of the rain,
hanging from a dried leave,
from the bare woman of the tree,
rolling on the floor.

Zachary Schomburg

Like a wild swan with a blue shadow, I know not where I’ve swum. I bow down my head deep in the dark ripple. I honk there deep into the darkness.

Zachary Schomburg

I was busy eating a butterscotch candy next to my pony when my tote bag was found. “Your tote bag!” shouted someone named Land of the Free. “I found it.”

Zachary Schomburg

My father was on top of my brother, his knees on my brother’s arms. He looked like a toppling house on top of another house just starting to topple.

Karla Marrufo
Translated by Allison A. deFreese

we arrived at midday,
with our luggage in hand

the sun a cement square
stretching out beneath our feet,
the sky a sharp blow to the face—

Amy Forstadt

The day before Christmas I take my son/ to the planetarium. “It’ll be fun,” I say./ Really, I want to escape/ my new in-laws, their holiday

Bijan Najdi
Translated by Parisa Saranj

Half the rocks, cliffs and the mountains/ with their canyons and cups of milk/ I leave to my son. For the other half, / make a donation to a charity/ in the name of rain.

Carl-Christian Elze
Translated by Caroline Wilcox Reul

pull the key from/
the switch just/
after ignition/
the key to your/
mind and travel on without/

Talal Alyan

in us always the monorail circling a dark skyline,/an old synth/ rings in rings in rings aloud more/
siren than song in each and in us all the quiet/hours too/ letting the elevator lift us with strangers/ to apartments we will never share.

Talal Alyan

the miracle is there are/ none. sixty feet and rising/ over a Dakota that has/ gone to bed, she likes to tell/ herself the miracle is