By: Ken Kent He walks gravely upon gravel To a skin-colored skyscraper In which dusty Lisa Will whirl and warble For him once more In an inflatable wheelchair In a neat Apartment on the topmost floor. Ken Kent lives in Sweden. He has a de Chirico perspective on all things considered.

By: Kyle Brogmus Westbound wandering peoples ploughed these plenteous fields; tilling bones crushed beneath expansion, like Celitic corpses fertilising ample Alps; a death enriching slough furrowed with war’s wreckage where raging echoes rattle off a languid durge. Bodies buried bloat atop their mass mulled over lost to memory, and I lay down upon their grass to gaze on frothing clouds that pass; a plume of peace, a movement that is still. Kyle Brogmus is a writer and perform

By: Kelly Vance In defiance of better judgment In memory of too many condolences In nightgowns and ball gowns On the terry cloth edge of apathy’s bathrobe On the wagon on a well-beaten path to anywhere else On the eve of future regrets Like a thirsty supplicant succulent empty of stores Like a whale, bloated and drying on the beach Like hummingbirds from the red death trough When the sky grows close and vocal When the grass screams blades-up below the mower When you aren’t he

By: Blake Auden In which you offer forgiveness and I spill for it, destroy for it. In which the dark roads between the houses crawl together, writhing an epitaph against the dirt. In which our voices grind – animal bones in the receiver. In which we are a landlocked current, the stones of the riverbed calling the earth to move. Blake Auden is a poet and author based in Brighton, UK. He has been featured in Forbes, Metro, The Bookseller, Book Riot, The Economic Times, Susse

By: Hunter Hazelton Does he blame the orange for its unpeeling? There’s no scream as he thumbs the thing. The orange receives what’s not asked for like a good victim. It perspires—sweaty & citric, spilling its guts upon my lover’s lips. Devoured. Then there’s me, voyeur, transfixed by his: cocked head— open the great throat of Cronus. Almost pornographic. Common violence. His nails impale skin, unwelcoming as daybreak. He leaves the carcass atop the duvet. What a banal death,

By: Darren C. Demaree sometimes the wound cannot fathom that you must press the number one when you dial out from the free phone & god dammit what if my hands are evil hands & if i dial the number another man another wrong man might show up & end all beauty & burn the house of heaven in her throat & pour more concrete in her eyes so the knife so the cool sharp knife instead of the ringing & a clean exit where once light was swallowed Darren C. Demaree is the author of eightee

By: Hannah Cole an octopus climbs like a ladder, while angelfish flutter in the seaplants. Above your body, coral towers cast shadows. Fish wheel in a cloud. Nearer to the shore, an underwater insect navigates the stony floor on stick-like legs. A squid is piling his head with rocks. That’s because I’m here. A quilt drifts down through the seaweed forest, tracing an x axis while I swim the y. You threw it there yourself, making sure it caught the wind, then put clothes on ove

By: Jason Gabbert It makes me sad, what you’ve become. You stained thick the outside of your irises. You bent over broken feathers on the side of the street. That’s the first time I stop seeing you. A boy playing in gutter rapids near 15th and Brazee: He makes the handheld space pod fly. I seem more concerned than his mother: On her phone. He’s back inside now. Someone said they didn’t have many friends. We read an article about life rife with loneliness, like smoking fifteen

By: Helen Gu we begin as unwanted children, executed before opening our eyes, pleading guilty before we hear our mothers’ voices. when a country cannot carry all their children whole, no one wants a daughter. in our dreams we remember the voices of the unseen, cities of stillborn girls with still-shut eyes, girls who never cried but say forgive me / mama / for wanting to open / my eyes / to be yours / until I belong / to someone / wanted … in our world we are taught to be afr