Look mum it’s Ai
the number that escaped
the last of your sums, the figure
that doesn’t add up.
Poetry
Three Ai Poems
Standing at the Empty Mouth
by Abboud Aljabiri,
translated from the Arabic by Muntather Alsawad and Jeffrey Clapp
He was as calm as his family wanted,
managing a laugh each day of his life
and washing the traces away
with soap and water
drink yrself whole or corpse reviver #2
by nat raum
dry county: what hydrates more than
water? / whatever it is / will it bring back
feeling in your limbs / will it stay in your
stomach during the august photoshoot you
showed up to woefully hungover?
Aging, and Outside Again, and For Quite a While Laughing
by Steven Ostrowski
This morning he’d breathed
the death before death
that wakes us
Before Snow From a Blue Room
by Mary Moore
but it was only thought snow, and nothing
when it began, a thingless veil, a reign
of molecules, so we could overlook
the beauties and hazards of being
burdened and cold.
Two Poems by C.P. Cavafy
translated from the Greek by Constantine Contogenis
He said he banged into a wall… or fell down.
There was no doubt some other reason
for his wound, his bandaged shoulder.
AUBADE FOR AFGHANISTAN
by Benjamin Bellet
The pneumatic whine summed
to a roar of savior-engines, deafening.
We looked up at the contrails
through the quiet of our cigarette smoke.
heavyweight
by nat raum
the qualification to carry would appear
to be brute strength, as i’m praised
Danae Younge’s Melanin Sun (-) Blind Spots
Reviewed by Michaela Zelie
Danae Younge’s debut chapbook, Melanin Sun (-) Blind Spots grapples with the loss of her father, missing history, and identity as multiracial queer woman in a cis-white-heteropatriarchy. Younge’s chapbook is composed of ten poems that orbit the persistent requirement of identification in spaces that I, as white woman, have been able to move fluidly through. […]
SINGING
by Claire Scott
I hear him singing in the kitchen
as he stirs sugar into jasmine tea
