I think part of writing into myth and folklore is that there’s this kind of cosmic presence, this feeling that people are people, but they’re also more than people in a way. There’s something about them that is incredibly ancient and powerful.
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A Cement Mother by Elizabeth Brus
On the toilet, a new mother discovers her head is full of cement. She drips red and yellow, squirts herself with water and lidocaine, and feels the wet cement chunks coating her throat and lapping the backs of her eye sockets.
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You Think Mom Would Like It? by Steve Chang
We both know how our mom feels about us bringing things home, things we find. Strange things, she calls them. Once, I showed her this quarter I’d picked up at school. I found it in the lunchroom. I said, Look! And, gasping hard, she slapped it from my hand.
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Elegy / Eulogy / Ode by Lacey N. Dunham
For months now, you have not been able to walk through the daily din into the madness, and your life has felt more textured, your days fuller, though you will not admit that you might be happier this way.
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Reasons to Teach Another Year by Adam Patric Miller
Because you remember your teachers, one with wild eyes who wore a cross over his tie, who made algebraic equations turn and spin in your head, who gave you a graduation gift of Genesis in Space and Time…
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Missing by Rick Andrews
You are still learning the subways and have to ask someone which way is south once you exit the train at Lafayette; the dot on your phone is being difficult.
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Two Poems by Kelly R. Samuels
How industrious and cheerful we appear, opening/ the water back up to the sky,
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Sometimes Love Looks Like by Edie Meade
It's love in a silent spell/ tinkering in separate rooms
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The Liar by J Brooke
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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