Alice B. Fogel __________ Beautiful What if what you had will befrom a distance clear though it had beenup close indecipherableit could end …
Read MoreDidi Goldenhar __________ Rake How do you make a moral life? Sophiewrites, and later I head to the gardenwith ball of string to save my infant peashoots, tying them on rusty wrought iron.Thank blooming green tulips, thank cilantroand geraniums in cedar boxes.I’m stumped. Humility? Among my hunches—woman kneeling in dirt,…
Read MoreSummer, Corpus Christie Joddy Murray __________ These cobblestone foreheadspeppered in long genetic lines—like head ivy, like finger flowers—pocked in 7th grade and contended:now find a landing strip for my bicycleor throw once more the rusted hatchetinto unfinished garage walls. Sweatfills all these ridges, drips ontosage-green, plastic saladbowls used for corn…
Read MoreAmy Hassinger __________ When Asked to Clean Your Room “Come see my museum,” you say,and you lead me, a hand on my arm,to your window seat,where you have arranged your collection of treasures,each grouping labeled in careful ballpoint printon a folded piece of notebook paper. There are rose quartz and…
Read MoreSpark Jed Myers __________ Restless at night, I stepped outon the deck. High in the blackbetween a blink and the next, a brightorange speck streaked left-to-right on an earthward slant.It burned out before it could reachthe treetops, before I could thinktwo words for it—tiny torch, match struck and unlitso quick,…
Read MoreGirl Who Came Guns aBlazin’ Kennedy Dawn Stearns __________ Mama always said nothing made more of a ruckus than Kurt and I running down the tin steps leading up to her lone trailer with our canteens strapped to our belt loops knocking against our bodies. We were all bones then…
Read MoreBirds Without Music Christopher Locke __________ 5,000 red-winged blackbirdsrain unbidden from an Arkansassky like trench coats shot to pieces,streets and lawns ankle-deep in littlebodies. A white-crested laughingthrush bloated under a scrim of wastewater at the Miami Zoo, its blackstreak across the eyes like an homageto Annie Lennox until I reconsider,sure…
Read MoreNo Limits David Subacchi __________ What use dry stonesdug from hard soilto be piled one on another.Sheep pay little attention. They observe no limits.We mark wooland clip earsfor convenience. But they go where they willclambering overall obstructionson empty hillsides. Bleating their protestsweaker than birdsongor the humof passing traffic. Why speak…
Read MoreMy Plastic Dreams Mark Budman __________ Once, in the past or future, but definitely not in the present, I worked as a transportation minister for a friendly dictator, whose name was neither Hitler, nor Stalin, nor Kim Jong-Un, but whose mustache was toothbrush, whose smile was sardonic to the point…
Read MoreElegy for the Ignorance of Nudity Originally published in Bateau Literary Magazine Kristina Martino __________ To put things in perspective, the cosmos is commonplace,comprising a similar politics of implosions and cease-fires and expansion. As such, the earth is a placard that defaces the grandscale and I live there and so…
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