Peter Grandbois

the yellow jackets buzz about the yard
more and more I find it difficult to go on

my son hit their nest with the lawnmower
days churn through patterns of heat and dust

Valerie Coulton

My character never slept in the street by the Chinese gate.

My character had inconsistent handwriting and a scribbled signature, like a hieroglyph.

Valerie Coulton

red & red’s friends
walk into a bar
this was when bars were still open
you know
but that’s not really important
or maybe it’s kind of important

Kristin Fogdall

and I want to know
did she ever watch the gulls at Race Point hang
on nothing but invention,
moving a little up,
a little down,
strung on thread,

Edward Smallfield

a quantum
of color
season &
what little

Edward Smallfield

1 red cabbage sauerkraut with ginger on a hot dog at a ballgame

2 only the imagination is real

alyssa hanna

i heard the nazis studied the stars.
i heard they asked twin children
their favorite constellations
and they all picked gemini.
when they got bored they decided

Charlotte Pence

I. RE: The Last ‘War’ of the Old Men
If you should
be interested,
I could help
your side
a little bit

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.