By Colin Dodds

Crapping out two days’ liquor and fast food

in the perfunctory luxury of the resort hotel’s handicapped stall,

Spill-O admired the dark wood of the bathroom door

By Colin Dodds

The mirror shows Spill-O bloated and cross-eyed,

all his bluster revealed to be little else

Filled with a rock-solid down-and-out feeling,

familiar from the Fall to this fall, with the leaves

By Colin Dodds

Spill-O’s destination is a rueful interruption

after hours in a church whose confessional is a driver’s seat

and whose altar is the distance

By Laura Bernstein-Machlay

inevitable as poltergeists

in these old buildings

that go on existing despite gravity and entropy

and spontaneous combustion.

By Laura Bernstein-Machlay

On Cass, I think. Maybe 2nd
beside a boarded-up liquor store.
Underage us nuzzling each
a bottle of fizzy alcoholic something,

By Mary Carroll-Hackett

involves pilgrims, not the hand-turkey kind, not the brass-buckled blind bulletin board thieves, but travelers, proselytes, seekers, willing to walk over grassy plains, dry for more than thirty years with scant rain, drought forcing out this parade of the thirsty, stumbling due east across the Altiplano toward the blue white peaks of the Andes.

By Mary Carroll-Hackett

and dirty fingernails, angels, ten thousand of them, living in trailers, canned angels, holy meat, languishing in the Carolina heat, driving up from Kinston, and Shelby, and Bear Grass, and Calico, driving in the vans they bought second hand at Car Coop, headed to the ocean, to Buxton, to Avon, to Duck, for a day, for a week, seeking some sun, and some water.

By Mary Carroll-Hackett

As a child, she could make herself invisible, so wrapped she was in dreams of angels in the trees, and aliens in the cornfield, and becoming Houdini, tied up in sheets she shook free from the bed, begging her brother to bind her hands and feet, so she could show him how they would escape.

By Kathleen Jesme

Nothing of now has a future except in memory where it is washed, pressed,

hung and stored, first in the front closet and then, when that show

has closed, further and further back, so that over time

By Kathleen Jesme

The border was right there a river

another source a permeable frontier one without walls

a stone’s throw to a different country although I never threw

By Aaron Shurin

Tonight he is here, surrounded by wreaths of smoke, or he is a coil of smoke on the edge of dispersal, or I am a smoke machine and he is mine…

By Nels Hanson

I’ve read that every human family has

a smell but prefers the odors of other

families to its own. One butterfly in

By Nels Hanson

Nights, warm still summer Valley dark

unlit by wary farmers’ mercury lamps

touched so easily, supple second skin

By Gerard Sarnat

i. I dwell in an empty chair fantasy behind a barren desktop

except for vacant page after page on which nothing is unwritten.

After a good night kiss on my cot, I’d wish Father might leave the door

By Aaron Shurin

I could see calcium going up against the wind, from my desk at my bedroom window as the typewriter clacked like bones… “Bones,” it wrote, “I sound like bones.”

By Gerard Sarnat

A doc who ministers

to Silicon Valley and Stanford

outcasts,

By Sammy Greenspan

of sudden knowledge — you’re not dead after all —

but here among us, we the living, reading poems

into the night in a little café by the sea.

I turn to a friend: My god, Karen’s still alive after all,

but he tells me No, she’s dead, tilts his head

By Geraldine Connolly

Once I rode a one-eyed horse
To a tree house in the forest.

Once I was a child spreading
Tomorrow’s clean clothes

By Bryce Emley

Sometimes one feels the need of ordinary things

— Charles Wright

Sometimes a filled glass makes thirst exist,

By Bryce Emley

Having never met, this is what I’ve observed of you: you are not who you are, but a slant-rhymed chorus, a shared moment in a nightclub that doesn’t exist, a set of perfect bangs draped like a walrus fin across a Photoshopped forehead.

By Peter Burzynski

Yesterday, I breathed in

and spit out metropolis.

Each braided glob

of fermented poutine

By Christopher Kondrich

The past springs out of its helix and so overwhelms me

that I can hardly carve our names in water, which checks

itself for messages to deliver to the clouds.

By Christopher Kondrich

Running over affinities and the brittle — so close to little

that it’s dust — sheets of falling paper, I have a kind of conviction

measured in stichs, which, if we all go to our bibles, are empty

as a foot is empty until feet fill it,

Susan Carlson

I. Death

A bird in the house means it.
But when it slips through the vent
hides its new life on the other side of the closet wall –
its scratching and crying sounds

Kevin Leonard

From their fathers,
some people inherit mustaches,
beer bellies, rounded shoulders,
a pigeon-toed right foot,
some money, or a half-blind right eye,

Giorgia Sage

I write her a letter:

smile today
because birds have hatched in this sunlight
and they are beautiful in that they are alive
as are you on this day, in this sunlight

Jeff Gundy

Were we ever among the chosen? Did we seize on this place
too late, or too soon? Is all this temperate sunshine

a blessing or a threat? We all say aye when prompted, then
we mostly say nothing for a while except for the speaker,

By Jon Riccio

Dear Mom,

Swam 20 laps in the Elvis pool today, one for each sighting, my sequins-mimicking complete. Elvis Superior says my hair has girth. And I quote, “Damn Elvis-in-Training (EIT) 2, those sideburns deserve a marquee of their own. We’ll get you a dinner theater yet.”

By Jon Riccio

Now that you can leave the house in a mask

we’ve got some stealing up to do. Smaller items first: aspirins,

nutmeg, peppermint from a tin. Antibodies have nothing on anti-theft.

By Noah Falck

How isn’t the weather? The parking is more than a bitch, a cancerous mole. The water cooler is filled with holy water.