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To Dance With My Father
by Golden for Tilden Avery Golden boy untitled. stomach splitter. my son. I forgotmy dreams. when you were born I filled you inthe blank everyday. oxygen & ink. my back spasms from all I seed.I carry my clots home to your mom. I would live there if I couldafford our freedom. my first brother knows…
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Postpartum April
by Anna Meister baby fights throughpainful growth newunderstanding worldexpanding like a capsule-turned-foam-horse-in-wateragain he settleson a sleepless weo so symbiotico wonder week shushed but not savedin the blue-black roomwe relocatei picture my eyes scooped outwith a melon ballerthe thought comforts me now halfway throughmy hours i teeterjust this side of dangerouscould never say aloudall of what the brain…
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Drought
by Jane Morton There was the time I drove the car into the creek.And then the time I was the creek and almostdrowned. There was a year that turned the creek tostone. It wound its way through woods that aren’tquite woods. Trees too pale and nervous to be trees,and grass that reached up taller than …
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My Therapist Asks Why I Think I Didn’t Deserve the Assault
by Anthony Aguero Night breezes seem to whisper, “I love you”There is a soft kiss that is easily mistaken for a whisper and the night dragging along like abody in the middle of some desert I no longer belong to. Dream a little dream of meI no longer belong to. I shut my eyes and sharp blades of…
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The Inscrutable Illness of Things
by Satya Dash My grandmother often in bouts of angerturned stone pink in silence, quietlyremarking: it’s impossible to silencesilence. It took me years to understandmy awe for the way she could deal a nounits own verb. I think about the last yearsshe spent paralyzed, a body washed slowby warm cods of light, preparing for deaththe…
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Elegy: to the boys of before
by Marie Baléo After nailing a dead rose to the wall, she puts down her hammerand wrings her hands, shipwrecked; speaks of her father,how he once shot a boy in the head. The child had seen whathe shouldn’t have, she says. He was bound to betray them, menof the maquis who spent nights scheming by…
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Days of Candy
by Caleb Nichols Of course the oranges you picked tasted like candy.I tasted them days later,days later thought of you,how we wrote the new moon,spoke it; how the fire refusedto be put out. A green flame—boron burning you said,a green flame, then blue,how does a blue flame taste?How the sky tastes at sunset—softpinks, orange creams—the…
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A Bedtime Story about the Heart
by Laura Villareal The only thing sensible about the heart is its shoes. When the heart is sent away from home it only takes a small brown suitcase filled with air— the reason is unclear, but like I said, the only thing sensible about the heart is its little white sneakers. Every heart starts out like this—with pristine shoes…
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Rain teaches us
by Aleš Šteger, translated by Brian Henry Rain teaches us:Don’t search, place yourself in the rain. It teaches us, rain, how to scatterThe clouds inside us.For whom does it rain from a clear sky? Rain tells us:Every correction is a detour.They are only approximations of large storms. It secretly confided in me:For others, I will…
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Mail-Order Groom
by Lisa Low after Ali Wong I flip through a catalog of mail-order grooms. I want one from a colonizing country, the whiter the better. I want the hair & disposition of a golden retriever. I want money sprouting from his follicles like Rapunzel. I want him strong & soft as a rope of hair. Like toilet paper. I want his last name changed to…