By Lauren Camp

Winter’s poor faults brought me here:
one quarter mile off Crocus,
where we talk about small birds and the jewels

By Lauren Camp

Trees gaze down through gauze of August.

I drive the thermal air on a narrow road rimmed

with orange barrels. Many dashes disappear beneath the car.

By Paula J. Lambert

a pecha kucha for Evelyn

i

All those times Insight broke like a fever and

I called it something Other than what it was.

Oh, Houston! Mission Control! Looking down

By Amy Wright

On film, technotopian trails
streak the air in soft neon waves —
synthetic Beamer Bees designed to replace
pollinators who fell

By Melanie Dunbar

Dear Grandpa,
You know by now I took the train. The smoke in my room was really steam and the train was a locomotive. I borrowed the mantle clock your father carried from the old country.

By Jennie Malboeuf

Within a week of seeing

seven stars in the moon’s

thick ring, it started to snow.

By Jennie Malboeuf

We step off the curb into

glass diamonds. Confetti

cuts our feet; the drunks

mistake the street

for a trash bin and we crunch

By Alex Rieser

I.

text as firm congeal
top of yaw. image pursue
within text. rapture and yaw

By Alex Rieser

I.

mass and ball of crystal excuse

under light. record quiet

out of beauty. learn below but brought

By M. A. Schaffner

Now, she says, with that little twitch of her hips.

You didn’t want to go there but you did.

It was the Marquesa de Pontejos, not her pug.

By Craig Martin Getz

If I were color blind, truly blind to color,

I would just see the cock, the heavy outline black,

the balls’ forest razored curve

coming out of chiaroscuro.

By Arkava Das

the room ballasted with sunset

sings

not everything troubles you as soon

as you forget it

By S.D. Lishan

Prelude:

Ah, here we are, wild puppy eyed in the far flung of us.

Like the others, I, too, fling me sad-eared to the one we talk to,

And asked for a healing wind in the once of my needs.

“Let me have a week, just one, of true-work,

By Madeline Vardell

Every Wednesday, before lunch and post-Algebra,

they wipe the red gloss from their lips and put

the Lord in their white socks and shiny black patent

Mary Janes: a billow of plaid-striped corduroy.

By Elizabeth Savage

a charmed life
let him keep it

& riches of love
suffering misses

let him
keep it

By Madeline Vardell>br/>

Rooted at her center life

unmoves but all

around swirling me

shrapnel , branches. Where

By Elizabeth Savage

Talk that Roman talk
When in October

scatter candy corn
no backward look

When roads divide

By Janice Worthen

We approach things at angles

because a direct approach is an insult.

An ear is a temple,

anger a bird pulling out its own feathers

on a branch consumed by fire,

By Chad Hanson

Jack bought a waterbed and filled it with a hose from
the front yard. Every two minutes he shut off the
water and added a bottle of whiskey

By Mark Jackley

Your silence and then the mild remark

about the weather brought to mind

how people close a door sometimes

using two hands —

one to carefully turn the knob,

By Chad Hanson

Since he retired, Ben has been making toys. He gives them to the kids in the family. This year, when she turned four, he gave a dollhouse to his granddaughter.

By Mark Jackley

No one but the bee,

and maybe not even him,

knows where he is going

as he zips, loops,

pauses to catch his breath.

By Darren C. Demaree

If this were an orchard
how lovely it would be
if Emily fell from a tree
as the mangos fall, roll

By Darren C. Demaree

If this were an orchard

how lovely it would be

if Emily fell from a tree

as the mangos fall, roll

By Chad Hanson

Myers works for a company. He understands the bargain that he struck. Most days a paycheck seems

By Elena Botts

she said,

are you happy. i don’t know that’s the sort of dream

i haven’t yet woken from.

and i said, do the cows in the pasture, do they pray

like we pray.

and i said, when i walk in the cold

By Arielle Greenberg

I really want you the dad I’m babysitting for

to fuck me or rather to want to

bringing me home in your turquoise sports car

babysitting dad will you get me in trouble

give me a story I can tell an afterschool special

By Arielle Greenberg

, the day of Phobias.
Children born on this day will be ugly & die.
You say three years can swallow one moment of a mother
throwing herself against a wall.
I don’t know. I have my doubts,

By Amy Woschek Schmidt

From the nectar I have forged, the hummingbird

is drawn to drink.

By Brian McCarty

We keep one eye to the sky, one fixed on parallel mounds

of tilled red loam. The blood knows

apocalypse, stirs as these new leaves stir

in the late spring breeze. The eye knows

the weather; the seasons become mantra.