By Sharon Coleman

she shed words like her sister’s hand-me-down anger mis-sewn
dress

she folded into slow july streams, tall dry grasses over warm granite

of a coast they were moved up and down too many times she slept

By Michelle Lewis

Now trees have shaken in the wind where there is

no wind and you must clutch yourself.

You must toggle on your heelbone and become it.

By Michelle Lewis

The thing about my mother is I don’t think

you understand cramhole, I don’t think you understand back into.

The thing is take the scissors to bed.

By Michelle Lewis

Will tonight be every night?

Outside the kick-out door

saying if the dark

By Gray Tolhurst

bridge to bring the language together

(Babylon)

divided the channels

By Emile DeWeaver

We play

chicken where the brave

stay the course. Frames will twist,

By Juan Carlos Flores

Translated by Kristin Dykstra

The skater of death flies across the avenue, between the cars and the passersby, today I just want to look, at the skater of death or the skatedeath of door, rustic pig’s eyes, there’s a boy looking, there’s a boy whose name is Rachiel.

By Juan Carlos Flores
Translated by Kristin Dykstra

She’s singing old boleros, this isolated person, according to medical files, is on the edge, and if the men of the new stone age approach, it’s only to unload their obscure packages

By Juan Carlos Flores
Translated by Kristin Dykstra

Don’t cry for me if the police arrest me, breaker of the law, that was before I knew Jah.

By Juan Carlos Flores
Translated by Kristin Dykstra

Coin-swallowing machines, though in his palms no lines appear, his
future can’t be read, he’s a good person, he should speak here

By Pedro de Jesús
Translated by Dick Cluster

Feldspar. Tiger. Meekness. Scaffold.

With words at his disposal, a poet

can play fast and loose, ape dementia,

By Chris Campanioni

She was rising, bird-like

On the first page, the first

Letter I read, the first line

But we never cut the other kites

By Chris Campanioni

My father learned English

On the radio—

Sing-song Santiago Spanish

“Rocks Off,” The Rolling Stones

By Fina García Marruz
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen

There’s no time to start from the beginning, everything
in order, shamelessly, in the elemental, candid blue.
There’s no possible lucidity, the circle’s closed off
its horizon where humble paradises swaggered.

By Anton Arrufat

Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen

What do you think of the word metal?
Do you like it?
If I say,
the metal of your voice,
do you like it?

By Víctor Rodríguez Núñez
Translated by Katherine M. Hedeen

1 [158 Campanario Street]

first and foremost to scrape
everything you see
the homeland’s in the claves
the city rooster waking up traffic

By Jo Reyes-Boitel

a lot of our history is gone, let’s be honest –
when your family has been in four countries in three generations
the nonessential is quickly cast off

By Jo Reyes-Boitel

here I am: grafted from the resilience of a 4’7” matriarch traveling 46 hundred miles to freedom
island sensibilities moated by Texas deserts mud pies and dark nights scented in pine
cold Minnesota Septembers

By Satoshi Iwai

I stole a giraffe from the public zoo and hid it in the kitchen of my apartment. The kitchen was so small that the giraffe had to stick its head out of the window.

By Satoshi Iwai

I love her like a pretty chick, but she dumps me like a rotten egg. She tells me that she is going to marry a young and rich anaconda. After her departure, I watch “Anaconda Mating” on YouTube.

By Satoshi Iwai

Don’t tell me anything about rainbows, because every rainbow belongs to someone else’s summer. All I have is one afternoon and seven cigarette burns on my bare stomach.

By Jessica Murray

To drive north, alone, toward the ghost
of the Laurentide Icesheet retreating
through boreal forests, the long miles
spending themselves

By Theodore Worozbyt

stepped onto the sloop Velveteen, where nightly

coffee rounds gray into buttered wood

and the glares are both less and more

accurate than the sum of my fingerprint:

By Evan Hansen

Birds silently froth the hills

In a dream or film about how

Life is beautiful in some near

Elsewhere. At work all day

By Evan Hansen

Market forces of evening. I place the infant

in a vibrating chair purchased at Target.

Plush monkeys encircle her. A tinny song plays.

I tell her welcome to Monkey Island.

By Scott Beal

they didn’t know my last thought

was thank god they weren’t in the car

that I thought of the times I’d cut off a Buick

with their bodies buckled in the backseat and seen EMTs

By Scott Beal

were they relieved that my suffering was over
had I told them my one great fear
was being unable to remember or think
in the way that was mine

By Scott Beal

they had to go on doing algebra

and taking out the trash

there was no patch they could point to

and say that’s where he lies

By Simon Perchik

With your mouth closed
swallow though this rain
is already rain and further on

By Jen Schalliol

Or so she says. The poem’s a lie

of green, an assurance of a clean

bill of health, a hope to carry on