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.

By Maureen Alsop

They were those who carried light through the house — ghost-less aftereffects. I stayed silent on the telephone, and heard their voices lean against a drugstore wall(somewhere west, perhaps from Eau Claire).

By Noah Falck

The dark feels its way through the crowd, shows up after the hit & run on Main Street. Those out of breath/out of work build a river outside our window. We watch it move.

By Arisa White

We are stupid, meaning amazed. We are assholes, meaning we are free

to let go, away. We are jerks, meaning this movement isn’t allowed.

Body languages, coincidences are neither heads nor tails.

By Christopher Hennessy

Each day was an archipelago

of awkward hours, nothing ours,

a glass boat of only oars.

The waters in between, slow

By Arisa White

Here the neighbor screams for Frankie

to get the TV out of her mind.

Here is your fear and anxiety in everything you offer.

By Arisa White

I’m waiting for you like waiting

for all the bottles to simultaneously

burst on the bottle tree. Together like

By Gillian Conoley

Where the page was, do we walk

into the blown

door frame

By Lisa Williams

The wind is not your companion.

Nor is it whispering anything to you.

Nor is it not whispering.

By Lisa Williams

I can grow in shadow as in light.

I can grow in shadow, I promise you.

As in light. Only the dark minds those little
fingers. Only