Thinking myself a nurturer of wonder and awe, I never summoned the simplest truth. This was the Tooth Fairy. This was Santa. Like amassing a grotesque ball of knotted tangled twine, I stretched and contorted tales beneath a guise of creating a magical childhood.
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Loss Leader by Stacey Resnikoff
I have no discernable personality. Is that harsh? I don’t think so. My prescription makes me incapable of harsh, even to myself. I’ve been worn down smooth, plus a shave extra—less steadying than reversal.
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Red House by Lauren D. Woods
There was a last time, of course, inside the little red house, like a last time for everything, except most of the time you don’t know it will be the last, which is why you don’t remember it, only the accumulation of trains rumbling just outside...
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Roadkill by Lisa Lopez Smith
...witnessing the necessary work / of decomposing, composting, nature cycling, / until one day...
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Geothermal by Denise S. Robbins
We came to learn how to heat up the earth to cool down the sky. On the first hot day of a scorching summer, we drove in two vans, eight PhD candidates and two professors from the University of Illinois, two hours south of campus to the enhanced geothermal testing system at the research institute outside Flat Rock, Illinois.
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Boys Least Likely To by Colin Rafferty
Out of the three of us, I am the only one who wasn't wrapped in cardboard. The only one who didn't join the books in the furnace. The only one forgotten, except by the few who take solace in my unknowableness.
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A Normal Interview with Dustin Prestridge, Kimiko Hahn, and Marisol Baca by Kirk Alvaro Lua
Poets are all of us — poet and not poet — building a bridge of poems with our hearts and minds and hands and languages.
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Two Poems by Collin Van Son
Ten degrees and it’s night, painted stars/ adorning my flask.
A Name Is a Haunting by Sage Ravenwood
The sound splices my lips in bitten denial
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A 360° Photograph of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach by Dimiter Kenarov
Giddy, I spin the landscape around myself until I feel again like a child.
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Southside Buddhist by Ira Sukrungruang
The Southside me is like the Southside neighborhoods with the cracked and weedy sidewalks, the eroding brown-brick buildings, the abandoned factories. The Southside resists any type of change, unless it’s for the worse.
Two Poems by Leah Claire Kaminski
Now that I’ve stopped, I have more time to think about things like rocks, slightly less for thinking about self-loathing.
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Ovary-Acting by Melinda Scully
The metal tube growls around you like a mechanical dragon with an empty belly. A voice over the intercom reminds you not to shiver as you’re being digested.
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Sowing Ground by Elliot Alpern
Can you believe it’s been five years? It’s still so vivid to me. But look, just look, everything changes. Regrows, right? Like it was yesterday and a hundred years ago.
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Soulcraft by Larry Flynn
She wonders if the dead still think of the living. She knows the living are fixated on the dead.
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Memory Like Form Filling Void by Eli Coyle
Where do things go when in their leaving, /when they're uprooted and carried/ somewhere else?
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The Back of the Cereal Box by Jennifer Fliss
At the bottom of the box, amidst the impossibly small pearls of sugar and sharp crumbs, you will never find what you are looking for. Nothing will make you see things differently. But you will never stop searching.
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Two Poems by Michael Battisto
I wear/ my drab green gown and listen/ to the insecurities of the nurses.
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Two Poems by Kathryne David Gargano
a trembling/ of finches, for example: flung down/ a coal mine/ if she returns to me/ i am safe to remain
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Father Francisco Makes a Friend by Charles Haddox
Amid the maize and sugarcane fields, the village looked like a collection of cupboards painted white and left out to dry in the wind. Barking echoed over cactus and discarded glass bottles. Sunday mornings in San Juan Camotlán were usually quiet as a broken-down motorbike.
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