By: Lora Kinkade this week my mother took a class on watercolor from a childhood friend who taught a strategy of layering— a feature of accrual i heard through the grapevine about her disorder how she brought fruit for them to render how the peaches bruised visibly as they painted freshly pulled from their truckloads of ethylene gas after we eat you pick at the fish’s spine as if you’ve never seen one whole— never lifted the flesh from the bone like that i fed you each a chee

By: Emily Rankin The desperation of necessity, the precipice of doubt, that astounding needed thing— Trying to know where you are in time and space, Trying to feel your body trying to disappear. Feel your feet weighed to the planet— You’ve been here before. You’ve been here many times before. A moment in the tremendous energy of the infinite universe. Offer the body, Offer your silence. But the self ungrounded, that desperate need to cut away to the deeper complex forms— Ther

By: Shaomei Yu I know, eventually That tall, skinny palm tree Is going to fall— On a rainy summer day When the wind rushes in With the destined rainstorm As though it happened in my dream The loose palm leaves Struggled, groaned before falling To the edge of the dusk— Buried deep in the wind No one heard Only the crescent moon Gazed in the shadow Wavering— With its silver hook But too late— It couldn’t save Not even a leaf Shaomei Yu is an imaginative and evocative poet with

By: Haley J. Martin-Sherman Shaky fingers struggle 
To unfasten
the first button
in vulnerability strip poker.
 How long do I wait? Is it still the third date? 

When do I say my nervous system’s calculator’s broken-- reads unsafe in the hands of every man who tries to hold it? 
How many cards
Do I deal out
At one time? 
Just pull the card On the top?
Emotionless clinical diagnosis-- --Poker-face. Domestic violence. But isn’t this dating game
supposed to be fun? 
Dealers choi

By: Yvonne Morris Her voice on the phone whispers, Tell me. And from the other side of day, he sleuths through the wake of all they’ve been. He spies a loose thread on her forgotten scarf, this tiny clue like a tired aviator in strident flight, the drink cart bumping down the aisle over roiling engines. He imagines her fingers on a keyboard, self-possessed as the stratosphere. When she was a girl, her mother warned her, You look at the world through rose-colored glasses. How

By: Esther Sadoff She says we are hungry, we are tired. When my father gets a coffee, she says, I’ll share my coffee with you, even though she ordered orange juice. And maybe she means orange juice, or maybe she means what’s mine is mine, what’s yours is mine, and what’s mine belongs to all of us. Whatever my mother eats, my father eats it too, so much so that now my husband and I also declare we are hungry, we are tired, announcing for the collective what must be true. My mo

By: Jess Martini An orange isn’t a lemon by some other name; it’s a seed bearing flesh passed from hand to hand across conquests. Still sweet, its juice is acidic and cleansing; its oil dilates the nostrils, uplifts the face, and brightens the heart. The orange tree is the gem of the garden, the beauty of its fruit depicted as early as the Song Dynasty. The bright orb’s birth in literature is older still, named by Qu Yuan in an ode: “the orange (桔) came and settled here.” Cam

By: Sıla Mertöz “Zephyr,” is the name I would give to my lover, As I, standing before you, am the pianist and he, Is my tailor, the dress he made is on me. Adjusting my dress his hands will hover Over my legs like a gentle breeze, He can look up to me and breathe Out, as he finishes the dress for his lover. You see and hear both of our art and only call me An artist, I do not think this is fair, since He cuts through the fabric just for me, like no other. As you can see, in y

By: Hillary Phan You think I don’t know But I can see it in your eyes When you look at me, When you smile, All I see is teeth I am bared Before you Even when I have barr- Icaded my door against you You look at me now Like i am your least favorite Cup of tea Gone cold. Fluorescent lights overhead, I was a child in a grocery store And dad, I think you have lost me Hillary Phan is a Vietnamese-American poet and high school senior in Scottsdale, Arizona. She has been featured as

By: Leslie Young Hissing rocks play Nerves like silk or poison Pulled back on themselves By breaking rage of old days. Such a cold, cold mother Whose kiss sucks away foundations, Whose earnest breath can kill. The ocean Is my home, my own, my owed rest, Love to gulls feet, agony To mine. Cold stabs, penetrates. As I go deeper my womb cramps: Promises are broken, words erased. The sky lends its color to her skin. Chameleon, We bend, find sand dollar skeletons, carapace Of crab

By: Megan Cartwright Cinematic: the casket. Slow-motion slide. Static flock of black umbrellas, patter-pitter of soil on the coffin top. The shock, a stomach’s pneumatic drop. Time is tissue-thin. Obituaries are fictions; in grief, truth is a prison. Megan Cartwright is an Australian poet and Literature teacher. Her writing has featured in Contemporary Verse 2, Island Magazine and Verandah Literary and Art Journal, among others.

By: Hope Fischbach after Andy Warhol’s “Love is a Pink Cake” Pittsburgh, PA It is the first day of autumn, September breathing into his skin and my prism fingers curled in denim and disquiet. Twilight snakes through steel frames, our hollow bones; I want to lean into him, stiffened spine to the cold grey lines, the rust, the factory noise. Gaze at the cross-armed sky as she holds forth a downpour sure to come; fluorescent office windows, eye

By: Shou Jie Eng Lay like whale over a course of salt wear coats of oil, lay warm latitudes raise gardens of ice where posterior and up lie uneasy. Unwind over deck coats of oil, worn latitudes belaying triple strands, laid hemp ends unwinding over deck. Lie uneasily in quarters, pitching, fingers unstranding where laid hemp took their triple ends knowing that, far from home, the body lies in quarters, pitching, slowly unstranding the line between body, body, and water knowin

By: Durell Carter You look down at the cockroach from your bar stool That isn't afraid to acknowledge you Because it knows there's a hole That will hide them/ hide us From the light of their trespassing gods' eyes And you wonder how they/how we are going to survive a world That will require them to learn how to fly further than their/ than our limitations While you inhale cigarette ash And listen to the music played in iconic 80s movies with zero dance montages Vibrating

By: Mary Paulson Some small black bird with a yellow beak like a toothpick knife jabs restlessly in the grass. He stops, glares at me and I’m struck with the thought that I should know his name. You would have known it and all about the green shimmer of his top feathers, about the song he sings, the females he likes, the carry of his wings on air. I remember you at our kitchen table with your bird books. Mary, you would say, pointing at the large bay window, see the Tit Mouse

By: Lori Starling I shouldn’t be Someone You could take or leave—I know I’m Cracked, Chipped, Broken in All of the Places— Normally thrown out pottery— You know, I was ART once! So, take the Time to pick up My Pieces, and mend Me with gold like I’m fucking royal! Loving me is Wanting to put it all together, And embrace My broken, beautiful, and boundless flaws, And cheer for me when they shine. Lori Starling is an author, academic, and poet. They have their MFA in Creative Wr

By: A. Pikovsky \/ it’s a disruption of peace, wilting in the whirl now, i’m ironing in the settle, no. i’m settling in the web of (f)ears i did not \/ could not weave. it’s a collection of repentance collapsing into the purpose you painted for me, to serve for the living where thoughts summon the monster i can’t shake off me— looming in the stale air of hurt spaces calling it whatever it is not no. it’s a separation of scent i am dusted & \/

By: George Burns Driving into the low morning sun, I cannot see, so drive slow and on hope. Like the sun, the traffic on Sunset, Temescal, PCH and the 10 is just beginning and it’s easy to go with the flow and, in the garage, I have my choice of parking places and even have time to finish listening to the podcast, there is a great ambiguity at the end of the world, which I’m mis-r emembering, but not in a huge way. It’s close to 8 o’clock and the approaching hour is drawing m

By: Donald Guadagni The mirror that is life and that which is myself, I quietly reflect as to the truth and meaning of my heart. This is not passion nor aberration that passes silently as I touch the mirrored surface of my soul. Even the mirage of existence that shimmers upon us all cannot touch the true meaning of that which is the soul. The vision of the true heart seeks only that that provides balance and serenity. Quintessential and sublime being becomes elusive as rip

By: Terry Jude Miller darkness approaches the eye retreats to back seats of the theater the world obscures leaves wind song and the ghost of blooming night flowers in its wake people who know better or nothing—sleep—while the broken wait out the night in half-dream and opaque images try to memorize the words sung by the wind Terry Jude Miller is a Pushcart Prize nominated poet from Houston. He received the 2018 Catherine Case Lubbe Manuscript Prize for his book, The Drawn C

By: Carol Lynn Stevenson Grellas I wanted to write you a letter filling you in on all that’s gone on over the years, but according to your sister, who emailed me last week, you’re dead. I’ve been searching for you so long with no word back, I wasn’t surprised, yet I have to say I began to imagine in a hopeful way that you might be alive somewhere, lying on a sandy beach sipping margaritas, too high on alcohol to answer back. I’ve been wanting to tell you how much I miss our o

By: Will Neuenfeldt God hums white when sinners sleep as not one shadow repents inside his parking pews. Pothole holy water remains blessed and full until he lets strays have a sip. Between tinier cracks grow crabgrass and dandelions before his followers spray what they call weeds away, but tonight God rains and Jesus takes his break to shower out back while his post glows brighter without a set of headlights in sight. Will Neuenfeldt studied English at Gustavus Adolphus Coll

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: 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