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

By: Jonathan Davies Oily, drenched, this is how to fall as birds do – a mess of old feathers and avian noises, creaking and groaning like classical birdsong. They learn as we did, by recitation and reading aloud. It’s the fall that makes noise. Air swoosh-ing perpendicular to crook’d wings the way piano strings are bent out of shape by the hammer. Left hand and right hand in motion – contrapuntal, music crossed at the wrist. This is the kind of movement that makes heat by tou

By: MCS Thompson Small children Bleeding to death From no one coming. To help them, To shield them From high-speed bullets Savagely pulsing. No one obeying The protocol That could save them From desperately pulsing. No one overriding The flawed assessment To spare them From painfully pulsing. Whispering children Pleading for help Trusting, waiting, For rescue. No one taking the risks They had vowed to That could relieve Their agonized pulsing. Instead, preventing Their parent

By: Mayrim Vega Don’t spare me a glance. Let my face and shape blur in the crowd. Allow the memories to fade like the tattoos on your skin. My name to be a figment of imagination. Bury me in a casket with sunflowers that lay on my colorless body. Don’t visit my grave. Walk past me, the way a stranger would. Mayrim Vega is a latina woman, who currently studies at Portland Community College. She writes poetry in English and Spanish. She also enjoys writing short stories.

By: Lina Buividavičiūtė Translated from Lithuanian to English by Irma Šlekytė. I likely stepped into the world on the wrong foot. I still don’t know which foot is the right one, I still don’t know if there is a right one – what do I know what do I know what do I know – one somehow becomes a woman with a downturned mouth, with a Shar Pei face, a woman with the sparkle no longer effervescent in her eyes, with faulty inner thermometers, a lukewarm woman, with loneliness dripping

By: Michael Karpati thrashing yourself for clashing ideas; conflict stunts your growth, you see. dunce, you call yourself in pain; please, release me, you beg yourself in vain. your body is foreign to the space it inhabits, as are we all when it comes down to it; you lose your love, you live your death; cloying colors make it all worth it in the end. Michael is an aspiring author graduated from the creative writing program at York University. His work centers on anxi-ety, dep

By: Ally Campanozzi The snow flurries and ice chunks pelt against the lodge windows. Blinds half-slit, some frightened faces still yearn to see more of Weather doing its best to sound off frantic alarms and stark choruses of hysterical, relentless sirens. The low clouds and mist look like birthday streamers when you’re celebrating the mark defining climbs, treks, chair lifts heading toward tops of ancient hills. It’s far too quiet for car engine hums. Too stone cold for jogge

By: Joanne Grumet sculpted Ice Buddha melts in the Kyichu River water to water Joanne Grumet’s chapbook Garden of Eve was published in 2020 by Finishing Line Press. Her work also appears online and in print in journals and anthologies and in the archives of the Brooklyn Museum. In addition, her poetry and songs have been featured on the cable tv show “The Song” out of South Deerfield, Massachusetts.

By: Richard Widerkehr - after reading your email, You Are My High School Memory, I receive external beam radiation under a Calypso 4D Localization System I can’t tell you much about this table—a scanner shows the Calypso tech where to beam Xray slices. You won’t glow, said the nurse. Just don’t go through airport security. The margins of sunlight, of stories? Your surgical margins negative, that’s a plus. My mother said you had cat eyes, a Day-Glo green almost feral, skittish

By: Adela M. Brito Like a mockingbird you nested nearby, and there you remained for three sweet seasons. Chirping, giggling, caring. Then as winter stripped colors trauma hit you. Again. Hurt & ire resurfaced. But the source of your wounds was absent, her mind elsewhere. Between one sundown and the next, the pendulum swung and pointed at me. After all – Don’t we hurt the ones we love? Aggressions & tantrums: your coping defenses. And when the cockatoo tattled, you raged

By: Nancy Knowles wax me, oh glorious Chapstick for your nectar foments uprising your cherry scent like all the days spent in sunlight your name the balm primes every gasp every harsh no wonder the maidens love you let us hurry oh wicked candle let me smear your crushed jewels on my thirsty let me, darkened by summer and just as lovely, swivel your tube so long i have tended vineyards not my own let me, my love bathe myself. in your carmine perfume Nancy Knowle

By: Alicia Swain The weeds beneath my feet, vibrant as the basil and greens stirred gently into the savory sauce we stirred for supper to serve for friends we never knew we had. My lips vibrate, and yet, not a soul could see what such small sounds do for me and my sanity. As the birds chirp, I feel their hearts beat and move my toes to the beat — forcing a rustle like a deer closing in upon me, the sweet sound of robins communicating to companions with every tweet as a I sit,

By : Ryan Diaz We’re waiting for the last bell, that inevitable Rattling ring that signals the beginning of summer. Of course, now at the end, the clock Decides to take its time, as if our Collective anticipation Grinds it’s gears to a stuttering halt— The second hand, for all its speed, Crawling on its belly, dragging Itself across the white face Of a ten-dollar clock. I wish I knew then what I know now, That time only picks up after twenty. One moment you’re waiting for sum

By: Lina Buividavičiūtė By: Ruth Mota Red lights flashing. Ambulance in our driveway. Two men slide my father out its back door on a stretcher and mother’s fingers tighten ‘round my hand. My father lies covered in a sheet; his forehead wound in white. This is my first memory. On the bush beside me, crimson berries pop from dry stems – berries that return in dreams, along with father’s eyes below the bandage focused on me, full of tenderness veiled in pain. Our collie, Shek, s