You’d pull a jackknife from your / shirt pocket and shave the bark, shallow then deep
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Shock, Honey by Megan Goss
Mother tries to talk, to reassure her eighteen-month-old daughter, but she can’t get her voice loud enough. Baby’s wails keep cutting out.
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Contrition is possibly for fools by Mercedes Lawry
Nothing is better / than sleep, where you’re anchored. / Otherwise, you tell yourself little / spoonfuls of facts about this life.
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Siento By Sarah Capdeville
I forgot, when it came down to it, that I existed.
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1989 by Lee Ware
My mother always says: I wish you would have known your father before the accident.
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Eclogue Domestica by Samuel Piccone
I don’t tell you how much it hurts when you finally open / your blouse and speak of tiny bones—
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Three Poems by Rick Bursky
We take turns dying. / Goddamn it, I think to myself, goddamn it.
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Just Waiting on a Dude by Michael McAllister
He pats the bed and you slide in. You follow his lead—you always will.
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JAC by Joseph Rakowski
There isn’t a code to yell when a 12-year-old tries to commit suicide in his cell. You just yell help.
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Two Poems by Emma Murray
People who talk shit about trailer parks / have never listened to the Titanic sound- / track in a double wide—
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A Man To Occupy My Mind by Elizabeth Morgan
I call them my grown-up friends because these women have translated all of that A-Honor-Roll energy into successful careers as lawyers, engineers, and doctors, while I recently ate more slices of deep dish pizza than my brother and dad combined.
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Josh & Rach 4ever by Rachel Ratner
Perhaps their bodies sensed the heartache ahead, the disappointment that waited—that they couldn’t hold onto this version of reality. So they let go of it. All over the theater floor.
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Sara Conjures The Devil by Leyna Krow
Sara wished her brother dead. She wished old Pastor Brookes dead as well.
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The Height of My Apex by Alex Sagona
Someone shit in the men’s sauna again, and now the entirety of Apex Fitness smells like the aftermath of a ruptured septic tank.
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Sings Herself The Rubble by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
my heart a greeting / leaves me a stranger
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Constellation of Memory: An Interview with C.G. Hanzlicek by Christopher Buckley
No emotion recollected in tranquility; it was all heat of the moment.
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Of Places and Passports by Shazia Rahman
Let me pledge allegiance to the planet. Let me list all the places I love on a passport that actually represents my sense of belonging and identity.
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He Was a Friend of Mine by Munib Khan
Murad’s gaze meets Saad’s. Two dozen feet between them. There is no hatred in Murad’s eyes, only pity and kindness, if boys can possess pity and kindness, certainly not desire, and it is not an unforgiving gaze, but that is how Saad will remember it later. He will remember it often, at will, give himself shivers, like reciting a beloved poem. It was love, he will say.
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Love Nest by Marshall Howell
Lynn met me at the airport, and we took a yellow taxi into Boston and pulled up in front of this dilapidated building on Boylston Street and walked up five flights of stairs. She put a key in the lock and opened the door. “How do you like it?” I put my hands in my pockets so she couldn’t see them trembling and gazed into the tiny room.
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Daddy by Alex Ebel
Pacing the halls of my house in a pair of penny loafers so dusty they might have been robbed from a grave, I counted on trembling fingers all the ways my night could unfold.
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