by Cainhurst As a kid I cultivated the habit of reading the same poem every morning before going to school. The other kids remained unimpressed by the lines that fell from the burning tip of my tongue, they were only a bit dazzled by my aggressive utterance, they didn’t even know what a poem was. I started then to relish the high solitude poetry seemed to give…
by Valerie Logel The day after my twenty-first birthday, I was driving home from a family dinner with the man who would later become my abusive ex in the passenger seat. The radio played softly, and we were talking about plans for the rest of my birthday celebration. It was supposed to…
by Anna Elizabeth These foothills are too steep For someone like me to climb. And so I lock the doors, And I throw the key away. Let the world spin Without me for a while. Let me cower Under these sheets. Let me learn to breathe When I am suffocating. Exile me to lands Where the speechless speak. Maybe then, I…
by Raymond Brunell Leah placed the plastic divider after the cereal boxes. The customer’s hand followed, setting down milk, bread, and chicken thighs in foam and cellophane. Tuesday afternoon, register three, the fluorescents making everyone look sick. She scanned the cereal. The beep felt wrong in her wrist. For a second she…
by Carmella T. Penny He looks like trees in wintertime; cold and tall, slim— and hard. He smells like leaves and winter pine, spicy, crisp-clean backyard. He sounds like caves at twilight time, rumbling deep, soft— and dark. He feels like breeze, the fresh sublime; light hugs, Fall gray— but scarred.
by Christopher Stolle We’re too constrained already,but we’ll do what we can. We sing this hymn to praise you,but we’ve forgotten words. We sit at your chinin this sweet lotus position. Drop your wisdom on uslike petals floating upstream. Tell about supermarketsand howling censorship. We, your staunch disciples,adhere to each…
by Zach Jones My baby’s favorite book is television. Cheap porn is the best thing she’s ever read. Like me, she was raised on the best diet: Bullshit, booze, and Wonder Bread. Her hair is supernatural. A smile of ultra bleach. When we get lucky, the neighborhood knows, ’Cause we paint the town with my bloody nose. I feel commercial. I feel hardcore. I feel American. Drive-thru parasite. Supermarket sloth.
by Mohit Saini We wander in the margins of a book, where footnotes bloom like untamed vines, each asterisk a door left slightly ajar— a breath of elsewhere. The spine cracks, and the chapters rebel, plotting detours in the subtext. We follow the scent of ink, lured by digressions dressed as roads. The author’s hand hesitates, then…
by Matt Zambito One day, someone’s gonna get an itch they can’t scratch without their trigger finger’s help and push the button they will. All the governments with known nukes already ready to turn the world to rubble remain part of an international mutually assured destruction pact, and I don’t even trust my next-door neighbor Ned won’t heave his whippet’s waste into my yard. Even if Heaven is an absolute blast, I don’t wanna end time on Earth just because nations are bad fictions. Radio- active annihilation sounds awful as awful could be: and it…
by Christopher Stolle Everyone here is in the middle of something. We’ve come from different places and we’re headed somewhere after this. People talk incessantly, voices blending into hummingbird murmurs. They reminisce about previous trips and decide how to get to their hotels and discuss how best to solve myriad conundrums— an existential exercise in folly and futility. But these imperfect strangers find commonality in this singular activity. They converse politely despite knowing they’ll never see each…