Barren wheat-fields are quite exquisite in winter— just one clear night the wind slants the snow to smooth blue—another morning rises. Clipped long to disused skis, I carve rickety tracks, like fontanelles, over and across subnivean layers where lower-animals—a mouse, a vole— can only survive and not deliciously live such a winter as […]
Poetry
Between Green and Winter Fade
Hoping Gloria’s Nepantla Stuff is Real
by J.M. Hall
Nearing affective death, imagination builds, like Lantern’s ring, two grappling hooks. It fires one to the past’s islands of misfit toys, where joshua was winged king leonine. Fires the other to a future where atoms still dream of collisions to lift spray of waterfalls on new islands, new misfit configurations. […]
Manifesto of the Spring
by James Capozzi
You do not have to choose. At least not in any ultimate way. If I unpack the poisonous black seeds wine, menthols humming in their tray in the dark it has grown late. If we are sitting at a kitchen table waiting, talking our one life deeper into evening. If we broadcast […]
Clear Skies, Unseasonably Cold
by Jackie Craven
The day Challenger launched, we watched CNN from the bar at Canaveral Pier. Mist rose from icy water. Tourists sipped Piña Coladas with pineapple and paper flags. Giddy voices chanted time in reverse: Twenty-one seconds till liftoff. Or—Did the announcer say we’re down to twelve? My husband’s lips turned blue in the uncertain morning light. […]
Sasha Velour as Joan of Arc
by Meg Johnson
Her drawn on eyebrows will stay put with setting powder until the blaze crawls up her body. She had drawn herself with flames at her feet in her sketchbook many times. She first knew danger as a child. She wore it like a stolen dress. Precocious children are often alone. Margaret […]
Instagram Envy
by Meg Johnson
Women with platinum blonde hair, cream colored sweaters, light tan pants, lie on beds with white sheets, no blankets. Brunettes wear thong bikinis, have their nails done, do handstands. The redheads are slim with large breasts. 1 in 4 people are vacationing in Bali. It’s been five years. You overslept again. Style an overhead […]
The Apartment
by Darius Atefat-Peckham
I guess there is ecstasy here. The rhythmic hammers echoing through slick marble and tall ceilings. The song of men thumping their feet all the way up. On the rooftop garden, a fire once blackened and charred. My God, how did they ever get out. If I cup my hands over my ears, curl into […]
Celebration: Norooz
by Darius Atefat-Peckham
What a shitty life. Papa says. And lifts himself, crooked, like the balloons we set free after the celebration. We scrawled messages, crude tattoos on their bodies. Bibi tells me they will reach my mother and brother, orders me to watch carefully else we should lose them in the fog. They don’t visit me in […]
Directions
by Barry Silesky
Outside is the rain half the world waits for as much as we hate it at times; it gives us whatever we can gather from the energy that is frozen and makes up the world I swore I’d never live in. But like everything else it passes on its way to teaching me which way […]
Spring Time Dream
by Barry Silesky
It’s getting worse than I thought it would, as I fade into the old man with the cane and bedroom slippers. This one is stuck in the history he can’t let go, while trying to clear the streets in the city he’s still lost in. I’ve spent my life imagining the next city or the […]
