she has disconnected / from earth, and is not responsible / for me. / She is shrinking / but too hard to lift.
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Seams by Rachael Inciarte
i am obsessed with things in pieces / forever finding my fingers inside the seams / ripping into them because they beg to be open ed up
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Birds of Prey by John Sibley Williams
Just another slow-moving dawn / & birds of prey break it like bones
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Much Too Real To Ever Disappear: Sound Affects @ 40 by Joe Bonomo
Sound Affects has never left my head. When I listen, the music washes over me in sensations, in snatches of images and phrases, singsong/singalong melodies competing against slashing guitars.
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Chicory by Pascha Sotolongo
My father can be very beguiling. I don’t want to get too drawn into his bizarre world. I feel weird enough as it is, without the chicory: Cuban in a town with no other Cubans, gangly, smart, hairy, socially awkward, and I’m never bored.
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Make a Wish by Jean Synodinos
Words carved with an urgent affection that seems everlasting but always fades when stripped and sanded to dust by a nameless janitor over summer vacation. Words like these: Julie, I wish this was enough. All the love I’ve left in this world is yours.
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Invasive Species by Sara Moore Wagner
And there they are, our little / babies in the pond moss wetland / of the yard, all blonde amidst / the fallen limbs, the jagged lines / of timber.
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A Normal Interview with torrin a. greathouse, by Angel Gonzales
I often know — or think I know — that I have found the right language for relating an experience when the act of speaking a poem out loud makes me shake.
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Hairy Govinda by Kathy Anderson
This old yoga lady next to me throws her legs up in the air and farts. That’s okay by me.
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The Funeral by Billy Hallal
I’d never been alone with a girl in the house (or anywhere, really)—I was pretty sure it was against some parental rule. But so was getting drunk at a wake. And besides, Celeste was my cousin. No cause for suspicion there.
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The Overview Effect by Lindsey Drager
Put every person on earth into space. This way they’ll see our orb for what it is, a brittle particle in a vast and infinite blank nothing. We’ll send one person at a time. Everything has more meaning when you’re alone.
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Some Theories of Time Travel by Malka Gould
I’m not sure when I lost the barriers I had so carefully cultivated, when I found myself like some kind of throbbing nerve in city after city. Kissing strangers and looking for friends, and answers, and places to sleep.
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Point of Origin by Rose Lopez
People say Bob Dylan can’t sing, but if you’ve ever heard his first album, or Nashville Skyline, you know that’s not true. My husband’s family says he cannot sing. But if you’ve ever heard him sing a song about the father who’s not there, you know that’s not true either.
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I Hate Tomatoes (and 83 other thoughts on loss) by Lauren Mauldin
Black shows I am mysterious as all get out. I sit on my back porch, watching lighting bugs with my black nails wrapped around a cigarette and don’t know what the fuck I’m doing with my life as I smoke under the starless sky.
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A World Without (Women) by Emma Burcart
We know we must use our bodies while we can, train them for a chance at escape. The farmers don’t bother with raising us to be docile. 'That’s what the needle is for,' they say.
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Two Poems by Susan Kelly-DeWitt
Already it's mostly over: the ruler / laid down, the line drawn, the years penciled in / inches. One yellow smear / of highlighter for where I am right now, a dot / in space.
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As You Are by Kelsey Lepperd
You are afraid you’re not strong enough for her to lie to you. You are afraid that if you cannot trust your mother, you won’t know how to love her, and you are trying so hard to let love in.
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Where We Stay by Suzanne Manizza Roszak
One night I dreamed that my mother was pulling favors for me in a version of the afterlife that seemed more carnivalesque than majestic. There were arcade games and she was playing them on my behalf, racking up points and prizes to barter for my survival in a world of lost, dissolving girls and insistent, concrete things.
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Hypoxic Euphoria by Ellee Achten
I watched sound escape me in wobbling circles of air, my body moving farther from my voice and from the surface where my calls popped without being heard.
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Two Poems by Anne Barngrover
Gaze upon my glowing dress, / ever spooled and spiraled. Trail my creeping rootstock / back to where I first learned the definition of grace / and how it always seemed like blackmail.
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