I am afraid / no one understands // the gentle mind of someone / living like a hermit
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3 Poems
I Lines
by Bobby Crace
The words surrounding an “I” form sentences that can be referred to as “I Lines.” A person knows how to be an “I” before they know what an “I” is.
Jig
by Robert Lunday
Make me / a lily, paint my petals neon, toss them on the dance floor / one by one. Give me a frilly shirt, too-tight shoes, / glitter-brows and girls who call me Girl.
Sellouts 1985: Patrick Süskind’s Perfume
by Brianna Di Monda
By co-opting the style and tropes of the Romantics and applying them to an ironic magical realism story, Süskind created a postmodern text liberated from the delusion of originality.
half-life of a different country
by John Sibley Williams
the father they invent // every day to give themselves something / to look up to must still be here : inside me // a half-believed-in faith that for every / action an equal & opposite : that the un- //stable core of us decays a bit less violently / than it used to :
Index of Unfinished Things
by John Sibley Williams
a nation that isn’t broken but simply unfinished — Amanda Gorman, “The Hill We Climb” not far off / a refinery flares methane. targets scatter at a rifle’s clap & clamor. another empty silo at dusk & nothing / to be done about it. tonight the night dismantles / into its constitutional elements. white […]
from Leafmold
by F. Daniel Rzicznek
Blue jays peel out their autumn / tongues for you. Juncos plunge from winter feeders just to / crack their wings in your presence. The bodies show no / bruises yet are broken all the same.
Grief
by Andrew Vogel
Even knowing the falls are out there somewhere in the woods, patiently hewing the gorge open, a walker could mistake its grind for the shred of the wind through old timber; might forget the heft of the stair-cased rock and the sheets and mists steadily spalling these hills down to a fat delta; would invite […]
A Footprint in the Ashes of Time
by Dmitry Blizniuk, translated from the Russian by Sergey Gerasimov
If it wasn’t for our inborn optimism –
we drop coins into the sea, plant pear trees that are going to grow for centuries –
understanding of reality would burn us
like a match may burn poplar fluff
Without Barricades There Is No Proof of Intrusion
by Craig Foltz
“Dispossession is not the word you were thinking about. There is a moment before/ the moment before the moment. That’s the moment your body morphs into another. You think, There’s no place like it.”
