First line from a Tweet by @ASMRSuggestions There’s a Minotaur in this Ikea, and it’s ruminating something. You’re on a Formica counter wrapped up in your golden yarns, dreaming of where you’ll be, how you’ll live, who you’ll be friends with — when you get out. Each year, fourteen graduates fall into this […]
Poetry
ASMR: You are a Gen Z Theseus
SPITTING IMAGE: AN INTERVIEW WITH HEATHER C. SWEENEY
by Katherine Fallon
KATHERINE FALLON: I am here today with Heather Sweeney, she/her, who lives in San Diego where she writes, teaches and does visual art. Her chapbooks include Just Let Me Have This from Selcouth Station Press and Same Bitch, Different Era: The Real Housewives Poems from above/ground press. She is also the author of the […]
Evening Falls
by Michelle Bonczek
“The main point was to eliminate the difference between what is seen from outside the window and what is seen from inside”—Rene Magritte On one pane’s shard in the living room, the evening sun perfect as the evening sun made artful in the window frame. In our short-tempered house, the windows never broke […]
Black Friday Letter to Mom
by Kamal E. Kimball
Morning bangs on the door like sadness or a man falling down hungover halls. I wish I were a bastard, reared on jasmine and whistling in the bathroom, bright as Christmas satin. I’d rather lace, cold cream, wallpaper with lemons, high heels in the school’s hallway. You wiped my cheeks with […]
Toast with Existential Dread
by Kamal E. Kimball
Friend, come here and touch my hem. You be the wind, I’ll be the hollow thing singing. I’m falling in love with every arm hair on every rider on this machine. The man in tube socks, ball-capped, reminds me of my father. How someday I’ll miss the old bastard (who I look […]
Articulating the Inarticulable: An Interview with Kayleb Rae Candrilli on their latest collection WATER I WON’T TOUCH
by Robin Gow
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity. Robin Gow: One of the lines in the first poem really resonated with my own experience with gender and then understanding the complexities of gender for speakers in the book. You write, “I think I knew I was a boy / when the boy […]
Row J, #28
by Sean McNie
never be sorry for who you are you told me so I drove to your grave for the second time on your birth- day a half year after. I traced the margin of unmarked rows remembering the elm you- ‘re buried beneath from that uncanny summer before moving between the headstones treading lightly the edges […]
Cryptids
by Marcia Hurlow
Lucky has stopped barking at the squirrels. The sun just risen over the horizon, he’s no longer running across the field after the barn swallows who were diving at him, herding him away from their nests. Lucky has disappeared into the woods, silent except for the scrape and snap of cottonwood saplings, bird […]
The History of a Window Overlooking the Wetlands
by Kelly Gray
By the white tile of tub, water becomes the smell of ceanothus morning. Cow bellow mist slinks the soft hand of hill. Wood collects moisture, swells against steam. Drag your finger across glass. Below, a trellis of jasmine. A library, an owl beneath bell jar. A brick oven, built in burst of cala lily. A […]
I SEE THE ATTIC
by Charlene Fix
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. -Oscar Wilde It was the habitat of ghosts, and a black suitcase stenciled AKC for my mother, Anne Kobrinsky Cohen, who is a spirit now. There was writing on the walls, some ours, some scrawled before our parents ever […]
