shut / off the lights climb back / into bed place a pillow / under your knees ask / forgiveness
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The Students by Harrison Cook
At recess we didn’t move our feet on the playground. What was the point? Some of us rubbed the tattoo under our arms like chimps, or rubbed the spot just above the belt line, scratched the back of our shoulders where wings would grow.
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Two Poems by Lily Rose Kosmicki
A satisfied end eludes me / The hysteria of locution becomes me / Charred brain crowded and crowned / with fleshy angles feeding / of the mouthparts, crazed
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Hot Shit by Amy Kiger-Williams
We walked around the neighborhood like the queens that we were. We licked our fingers and touched our asses. Our fingertips sizzled the moment they hit the denim. We smoked cigarettes behind the shed, then took long showers and brushed our teeth, even our tongues, to get the smell off.
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Orange Beach by J.A. Bernstein
It catches me, the smell: this ocean drift, tinged with salt. Pungent as seaweed. Sulfurous, perhaps. And for a moment I’m brought back in time: the smell of Galt Drive, Fort Lauderdale, 1983, and the cream-colored pants that my grandfather wore to his chest.
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The Shark Catchers by Margaret Redmond Whitehead
The men believed they were the shark. They saw it as a mirror: on one side, power taut behind silvery skin; on the other side, hard teeth inside predator’s mouths. Their incisors were remnants of a shark-life. The slick of their lips were meant for water.
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Banished to a World Without Magic by Annie Tupek
Gone. The farm was gone, too. And the castle. All that remained were his vague memories of that other life and his magical self that had lived it. That missing self knew his fairy godmother.
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The Playground at Night by Nick Story
They had never had a playground like that. They had had to work from a young age and played with rocks and sharp pieces of wood. Their lives had been hard, and it was difficult to see children whose lives were so lucky.
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Thera by Kristian Macaron
I know I am not empty -- life inside me / is grit and blood and a light buried in / sinew which has made me this star
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We Had A Superhero by Brian Druckenmiller
He stood tall. His posture and leotards emphasized incredible physicality, as if his muscles’ muscles had muscles. With his hair slicked back and chin held high, he oscillated, projecting zero visible confusion—the antithesis of our expression.
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A Normal Interview with Andrés Cerpa by Rebeca Abidail Flores
Constructing the book is a device for me as a writer to enter it more fully. I like to drop myself in. If I’m there mid-sentence, mid-story, if everything is kind of jumbled, then maybe I can catch the momentum that I had previously and continue on riffing.
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Mornings Are The Hardest by Sarah Terez Rosenblum
Does the girl’s desperation feed the thing’s obstinance? Years ago someone (one of the experts?) told the girl that she’s in control; she has choices. But how can that be when occasionally , no matter which button the girl pushes, the thing takes actions paradoxical and perverse?
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Echoes and Ecotone by Maya Jewel Zeller
When I think of ethnopoetics and the poem as a house, I am immediately drawn to ecopoetics, the ecotone, the edge-things, the house that moves, the shape of something inhabited, like a shell, empty, then full. Too full. Sometimes binding, if it isn’t time to be bound.
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Ghosts-4-Hire by Michael Colbert
I found the flyer outside the grocery store. Feeling lonely? Ghosts for hire! I would’ve thought it was a prank if I hadn’t been seeing ghost children helping the elderly check expiration dates on bagged granola or deceased personal trainers floating alongside runners, cheering them on.
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