By: Alex Wells Shapiro In the next yard over, honeybees swarm and their sound is huge. I mistook the drone for road work until they organized in the shape of a face. Its kind eyes coax a smile from me as dawn reflects off the Public Storage sign and catches its vibrous brow just right. Buzzing wafts thru my apt; one attracted to the Splenda clumped at the bottom of a mug or candy melting in my bag. They sting only under threat, but how can I signal passivity? At our statures

By: Amy Claire Massingale He was very nearly gone from this world, And still the nurse Called for an enema. I put a stop to that shit. Just as I put a stop to forced feedings And the drinking of juice, When he shook his head furiously, No. His digestive system was Shrinking slowly, A dry leaf in autumn, Curling in on itself. To abstain was either choice, Or a forgotten skill. It was also His right. We feasted on love. I sat at his bedside and his eyes, So luminous in his gaun

By: M. Shayne Bell Sparrows drop, tumble down the air as if some strength leaned on in flight fails them: they dive, roll— catch themselves before the ground. In swirls of leaves, they rise up. M. SHAYNE BELL received a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1991). Bell’s haiku have been published in Blithe Spirit: Journal of the British Haiku Society, Frogpond: Journal of the Haiku Society of America, Haikuniverse, The Heron’s Nest, Mainichi Ja

By: C. Henry Smith The night is the least round thing Moon faced Cancerians, Gomorrah lights fading I consider a black hole, I consider a void still linearly A place for the angels in all the tired this Bathsheba in the bathtub, queen mother on the horizon We start the black miracle out as an ovum To stand, equation-balanced; to last in sin immemorial Monuments grey as an ass’ dreams, ashen as an ass dreams of turnips The turn of celestial bodies is unlike any turn of my own

By: Ed Wade A girl contemplates her breath as it fogs the school bus window on a winter morning. She makes cloud after cloud, and watches them evaporate. In one, she draws a circle. In another, she draws a square. Only to watch them slowly disappear. She feels the shadowy blue bodies of her oceans as another cloud forms from her lips. She draws a rectangle, and feels the moon pull it back. She creates the storm, then the calm. The silence. Then the thunder collapses back into

By: Kelly Easton I don’t really care how intimate the breeze over this slanted lake that carries seed and song and breath of summer; summer’s short, in the north and southward, pearls lay thick in the depths, embedded fathoms you can’t escape for a summer’s lapse of fate Autumn waits, its ginkgos ready to burst into winter’s crackling fires, late. Icy fjorded schisms melt into spring’s forgotten lakes, winged tidings of late, late, late Summer sighs, over bent horizons cricke

By: Dick Altman Northern New Mexico Four days into winter – and I languish/ yearn for spring – Rage/grieve to start over – plead the fates not to burn/drown/desiccate high country – as they did last year – leaving behind vast/storied ruins – Skies billow yet with vacant promises – Winds leap our ridge – never lingering long enough to treasure us – however little – their cargo of rain/snow – gifted – or so it seems – always to the valley blooming next to mine Indian Country th

By: Holly Eva Allen I knock over one of those saccharine, smiling cereal faces and the box tumbles down the aisle into the February air. So, then I say it and my aunt replies with “God doesn’t appreciate his name being used in vain.”, her George-Creel-tongue eager blubbering, her Rex-Stout-teeth critical-white. So, God is like Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, I think in my chapel-lobe of happy echoes where Leopold goes all red in the face over “masochism” even as his detestable dar

By: Judith Mikesch-McKenzie “A table without bread is not a table but bread is a table on its own.” Scottish/Gaelic Proverb Just down the street is a bar where we gleefully joined up with a wake for some guy’s cat - Around six or seven long tables pulled together, singing, drinking, telling stories about cats with men and women we didn’t know at all. Not you-and-me “we” but the “we” that I built my life around before it dissolved like sugar in water. Blocks away (or

By: Valyntina Grenier. forgotten burgers/ lost theatre tickets our least fortunes last laugh to dis to leap a human genus/ genius wittingly advancing life too devoted to semper fie population never never grant it had Diana ocean or pursuit in a hydroponic closet exactly heaven broke free halcyon still like some kind of broccoli party pushing scientists to garden wildness Consciousness doesn’t take the desire between give-in-and-take-out the dialectical intoxicating survival o

By: Harry Bauld Yesterday is not ours to recover. –LBJ, Thanksgiving Address, 1963 No turkey, this or any year. An Italian house, for god’s sake, an Italian neighborhood, as-yet-unhyphenated Americans. First as always two platters of antipasto big as manhole covers with provolone sharp enough to make you bark. A lake of escarole soup. Then the deep casserole like the blue catholic bathtub in the postage stamp of a front yard, the Virgin of Lasagna. In the ricotta

By: Julie Benesh Freezing today, and I’m a little numb looking out the window at billows of steam that keep my body warm, but not so much the rest. I have a to-do list but it’s not written down and I’m not the type to write things down just for the satisfaction of crossing them off. I’d rather make a not-do list, but hoo-boy, that’d take a while. Some say winter is not, contrary to popular belief the season of repose; that under the snow is a gathering, even an orgy. I see po

By: Cameron Atlas Chiovitti When astronauts cry in the sky, Their tears turn to Jell-O. Stardust is only unwished powder. My synthetic orange tongue anchors me in the sky. I don’t know if anyone’s wished me better. Only romantics tend to stargaze, And it’s been years since we camped out on the fire escape. When was the last time you promised someone the moon? I’m gelatinizing with every cosmic chasm in my chest. Can you hear this from your lovers’ arms? Or are you sleepily ma

By: Lane Dever I am using a polaroid of us standing in front of a hotcake house in Northern Michigan as a bookmark. I am pinning it to my wall when I have nothing new to read. There is a leak in this house. It flows in a single straight line, ceiling to floor. I am doing everything I can to fix it, but the night I’m out on the first date with her— the girl who tells me about these queer kids on rollerblades who play pickup hockey in the downtown mall parking garage, and how w

By: John Dos Passos Coggin Rigid as Notre-Dame. Queening. Cruel. Stradivarius, you pilloried the joy of my youth. You and my instructor who climbed out of your crypts to judge my music with gargoyle smiles. Stradivarius, I wanted to hack you to your last toothpick. Hang you by your quivering strings before a medieval mob. Throw you into the crackling hearth at Christmas and invite the neighbors to admire the musical yule log. Until I saw Sandy restring the violin’s anachronis

By: Josh Anthony down the rubble path of Peaceful Valley’s locked bridge we scramble and land to exchange ink like altar candles. it’s not the naming of things left dead but the name left to die. i watch the Spokane hide what heavy metals drudged up this life. you lay on your back and undo your jacket. see the dust accumulate like carpet on the concrete underway. we hear voices above it all thinking they’re alone to the world’s ear. Josh Anthony holds (precariously) an MFA fr

By: Kira Stevens and invite him over. She was ready to receive her last holy communion. Later it was 5 PM and she woke from her nap insisting she needed to get herself ready—and then after, she fell back asleep with her church clothes still on and make-up done. I think she wanted to make sure she looks her best when she dies. Today the priest came and she was so anxious. Through her barely opened mouth she kept murmuring I’m not presentable, I’m not presentable—so the priest

By: Ryan M. W. Mom had those Varicose veins. Rivers of life ran Her arms from Elbow to knuckle, Knee to toe, Crossing under, Weaving over each other. A perfect network, Life’s corridors, Her essence. Whatever God She believed in Must have adored His handiwork, Because he took it back. I asked What it’s like To be cremated. Mom didn’t like surprises. After they told me, I felt shaken Like a soda can, Or at least a lonely, oblong, Imperfect bubble inside Waiting for the crack o

By: David W. Berner It is on a walk that I encounter her “What a gift of a day,” she says Her smile is true her stride is deliberate allowing for wonder “It is,” I say and return a smile. Winter had forgotten herself confused, she was. Certainly, it cannot always be this way glorious sun in a season of gray. On the walk home I discover a field mouse, gray and stiff, upon the concrete sidewalk With tenderness, I slide the body to the nearby grass and dirt, a more fitting buria

By: Jasmine Marshall Armstrong A Father Holding his Dead Daughter’s Hand Crushed Beneath Their Home After the Turkish Quake The way he slipped his hand in hers, you knew He’d done it a thousand nights—no more— Countless times after she woke among the boulders of blue dark nightmares. So many times, her thin fingers unfurled In his own, shy ferns that find peace in the night air, when every living being grows or regenerates, cells dividing, carrying the familial map, the way e

By: Kristin Marie The winter light fights through dirty windows A mattress propped against the wall becomes a steep slide My siblings and I whoop and scream, slide and climb, pausing to wipe tears— a knee too close to the nose, a twisted ankle The other side of the mattress has a hole the size of a large pizza Mom fell asleep while smoking a cigarette What if she hadn’t woken up? We slide and climb, climb and slide The sky outside darkens Mom’s not home right now We stop and

By: Charise M. Hoge I swim with dragonflies skittering the surface of this spring fed pond at one with my immersion, reversing a situational gravity of immense abiding heat and the claustrophobia suburbia imparts, a body in a body of water in a bowl of earth in a country that has forsaken the my of body, for the body politic. Another hot July without air conditioning I sit in front of the fan abandoning shirt for red bandeau ready-made from a headband stretched across my nine

By: David Zaza The car flies through time as much as it does the sky toward the house The house remembers it burned only after the car came crashing in The landscape disappears as so many landscapes do to smears of coal Though not possible there are no people in the car nor in the house From here the light is light and the shadows harsh in stark contrast From now on time is still even though the car flies and house burns Sun burns too up in its sky as earth burns too here on

By: Benjamin Rose Your rotten fretboard withering away In little craters cries, “all wood must fail”; Strrings smeared with grime and blackened in decay May howl no more, nor below out a tale Of lust and woe, resounding to the beat That plastic clipped against the cutting steel Which carved deep rows of calluses in feet The heathen heroes numbered for a deal. Yet I, who never offered up a soul At Witching Hours to Powers of the Air In days unmetered, pay away the toll Demande