by Bill Derry It is you, Carlos flashing your brilliant smile cruising your new bicycle sporting your black hoodie unabashedly you Yes, you, Carlos, innocent, eighteen, inquietante a spotless record already employed a consternation to your neighbors perturbador de la paz Yes, your Spanish-speaking, legal asylum–seeking, ideology-wreaking self,a palpable threat una verdadera amenaza So, of course, the early morning raid from ICE…
by Bill Derry It is you, Carlos flashing your brilliant smile cruising your new bicycle sporting your black hoodie unabashedly you Yes, you, Carlos, innocent, eighteen, inquietante a spotless record already employed a consternation to your neighbors perturbador de la paz Yes, your Spanish-speaking, legal asylum–seeking, ideology-wreaking self,a palpable threat una verdadera amenaza So, of course, the early morning raid from ICE…
by Redde Michaels Did you see Aurora take flight? I overheard there was no Southern coy, so long as you had a camera to capture her streaking. Such a hasty raving from the harbinger of dawn, though her escapade was largely unnoticed here, where the vibrancy was lost against the…
by Sonnet Mondal Sometimes we run into someone just for once in our lives and our bones refuse to fit inside the skin the same way. Plans proceed as waves and recede as doubts. A fleeting joy with gnawing pangs of apprehension the stretch between experience and fear seems like the time taken by a fish to…
by Benjamin Drueke “Near the end of the twentieth century, humankind unlocked the human genome. At the end of the twenty-first, prenatal genetic manipulation was regulated, and all genetic disorders had been eliminated. In 2130, we had a stable colony on Mars. Twenty years later, global warming claimed Earth and…
by Olivia Austin How sweet, the words we write- Under tinted sun of gray. Sons of sons, unborn but ready To tell us our crimes. A glancing breath, The total of self ellipses our tongue And dies. Water, undropped. Every word around is tightening, Crown worn at our throats. To be given empty life Is the truth we cannot accept. These words…
by Vern Fein In his poem “How To Be A Poet,” Wendell Berry tells me to sit down and be quiet. Let my mind breathe. He lists everything I might bring— affection, inspiration, patience, growing older—and says we should doubt any reader who likes our work. Write without air-conditioning. Communicate slowly—there are only sacred places, nothing unsacred, but some desecrated…
by Nancy Byrne Iannucci Jim, my neighbor, is the village Sam Elliot, hair as thick as a horse’s mane and gray like a January day. He doesn’t have a mustache, but his cigar replaces the vacancy, floating in white clouds above his mouth. Circles of sweet smoke travel distances like a Sioux medicine man. He can heal…
by Robert Parry And suddenly he was awake. He looked at the clock on his bedside. It read three forty-seven AM. Nothing new about that. Must have been over twenty years since he didn’t have to get up at some point in the night to take a piss. But this…
by James B. Nicola I heard my mother’s voice today. Thanksgiving weekend. Ten years this January. My nephew played a very loving voice mail message from her he has kept on his cell phone ten years. My brother said he has kept three such messages. My nephew said he had another one and wept awhile. It made…
by Adonis Diaz When your doctor tells you “It’s time to get back on an antidepressant” You begin to wonder What you did wrong You begin to ask yourself If you can remember a time Where you felt joy Or simply okay You wonder if there was ever a time that you didn’t hear a hollow symphony Of…