Peaches overflow the given bowl: a gift from two lovers no longer in love. One remarried a restaurant hostess. The other found new life in Connecticut. It’s cold for the first time this October. My coat fails my neck— I clutch its collar close and slip my fingers through the knit, […]
Poetry
What We Want
During These Unprecedented Times
by Nicole Steinberg
amidst my deadlines death circles closer / shifting from internet strangers to friends of friends / everyone is angry this week / the novelty of it all gone completely a thin impenetrable film of tension left behind / little things piss me off like why can’t I open a goddamn piece of […]
How Do You Celebrate Passover at a Time Like This
by Nicole Steinberg
years of immersion have taught me: there is nothing more jewish than to commemorate great suffering in a new era of great suffering / eating globs of horseradish as ritual so there’s a new and exciting reason / to break down in tears why is this night different from all other […]
When the Storytellers Found Me
by Catherine-Esther Cowie
Most nights I don’t think of it, the blood on my teeth, my white dress, stained with soot and wet grass, how the mud hugged my feet like bedroom slippers. I hid in the bush until the storytellers found me. They enjoy the music of split-open things, stretched my skin into […]
february: still definitely not thinking about you
by Mel Gross
I exhale fogged frost, trying to mimic the way smoke slid from your chapped lips. goosebumps rise like braille across my back. I look over my shoulder, as if you might have come back for me, as if we might be together once more— me; caught like a mouse between your arms, you; snapping your […]
Army Mail
by Chad Foret
1 We rented dentist chairs & got possessed. Listening to paratroopers suffocate, I was like a guesthouse swelling with performance artists, the skinny cigarettes, abyssal bathwater. Now I’m snarling in gyms, at Xerox servants. The secret to a super PAC: get a bigger ghost, hurl bourbon into an abyss. The campaign needed baubles, so […]
On Visiting Oscar Wilde’s Cell in Reading Prison
by Stephen Gibson
They sold at auction Wilde’s cellblock key, the one for C wing in Reading Gaol— Wilde’s name was his cell number: C.3.3. Wilde was convicted of “gross indecency,” got two years hard labor and the treadwheel— they got £15,000 for Wilde’s cellblock key. Wilde and (his lover), Lord Alfred Douglas (“Bosie”), would pick up “rent […]
Between Green and Winter Fade
by Laura A. Powers
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 this. […]
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 […]
