by Ophelia Knight In every ghetto there is a being nicknamed SEXY ________ @ 8:30am they rise mixing Florida water and watching as the rhinestones fall from thrifted applebottom jeans they have grandmothers that kneel in church pews & call on their singular version of Jehovah taking baths in milk clouded with lavender bubble bath tendrils of kanekalon dyed…
by Ophelia Knight In every ghetto there is a being nicknamed SEXY ________ @ 8:30am they rise mixing Florida water and watching as the rhinestones fall from thrifted applebottom jeans they have grandmothers that kneel in church pews & call on their singular version of Jehovah taking baths in milk clouded with lavender bubble bath tendrils of kanekalon dyed…
by Michael Cooney We talked of a single bird, so early that only the shape of her face was visible to my fingers.Not one, but several, were calling. The darkness was too brief.The glass of water was untouched beside the bed.Did we sleep at all on solstice night? Later, hours later,…
by Samuel Goldsmith Best stuff wads of cotton isolation into syncopated caverns so the sound of honey can’t drip through and glue together memories. Such sweet mortar to lick a pyramid a monument for mourn. Mummified remains of muses who once clasped voices like hands. Those without ears can’t yearn for songs past. Instead they hear the lullaby of fear the sound…
by Hayley Russell I come from the hush of cold mornings, the kind where silence grows like frost along the edges of windows thin, breakable, waiting for light. My mother’s voice cracked open rooms, a stormfront gathering in the doorframe, yet she’d pause, let the hinges breathe, and show me how to listen for smaller truths: the house exhaling after…
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 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…