Katarina Boudreaux

FALL AWAY

People fall away sometimes,
gently with haiku lips,
loudly on devil’s legs.

The fall strips them somehow,
the vines that shrivel around
fat and thin branches
shake and shiver as
the limbs fall wide.
The decimated trunk
– finger brittled with
worm tunnels—
is exposed to the sun and frost
while the bark shivers quickly,
ribbon like peels crinkling away
until the trunk [...]

John Bruce

The Wisdom Of The East

A line of workers stretched out on the lawn of what seemed to be an estate, using picks and shovels to open a ditch. They were digging for an old sprinkler line with the aim of replacing it. It was a Saturday morning, and the Southern [...]

Anne Champion

WORDS

1) Flirtation

We tossed them back and forth
like grade school dodge ball champs.
Every time I ducked beneath one
I watched it sprout dark feathers
and hover above us
like a vulture,
[...]

Catherine Daly

Multiple reductive copy machine cha cha

“dance forms today are designed to stimulate the lusts and affections of the flesh”

A woman in business clothes, slim skirt, heels, and hose,
can constrain her climb to the copier top, on her toes:
lower paper tray, upper paper tray,
document handler,
mangle, staple, fold,
legal, A4, or 11 x [...]

Kelly Davio

It Can Be Known

That he was a fat man. Gut
lapping the belt line, skin blue
where the weight of flesh
burst his veins. It can also
be known that he was a thin
man. His neck exposed sinews
where tendons set his skull
at the nape, a turn of head
rounding out the crabapple
in the throat. Beyond [...]

Richard Fellinger

They Hover Over Us

I married my best friend’s girlfriend. But he doesn’t know it. His name was Bud Metzger, and he’s been dead five years. He drank too much Jack Daniels and Coke, passed out, and dropped a cigarette that torched his apartment. I may have been the last person [...]

Laurie Junkins

Cloistered
listen to this poem

These once shallow furrows now fold
into fans across my brow, the spoils
of my lamentations clinging like rust
on blunt tools. I kiss your baby lips,
flaunt you, my starry opal,
as if I were a woman gutted
by a womb in stasis, biology foiled.
These languid days of ours,
playing, eating, drawing [...]

Jan LaPerle

Popovers
listen to this story

Eleanor was very heavy, but beautiful, rosy, sweet, and rolling with babies. She kept her triplet boys in the folds of her skin, all three at once, Edward, Dickey, and Tim, a little like kangaroos carry their young. She had a passion for popovers, and [...]

Chloé Leisure

Postpartum

I held it, my small horrid. It fit

in my lilypad palm. Beneath thin

grey skin, its moldy organs flapped and

fluttered. I found shelter in a book,

placed it upon the soft and yellowed

pages. At twilight it became restless

and the cradle’s paper wings snapped shut.

I wept for the flattened childthing,

fine [...]

D. Lifland

PLANS

In my pocket
are the places
we were supposed
to visit. It was
going to last
us decades,
until we were
old enough
to mostly
live off of memories
& storytelling,
our bodies
nearly consumed
by our old age.
You can
barely read
the names with all
the coffee stains.
They were listed
with the best
intentions.
New Zealand,
Antartica,
the Egyptian Pyramids,
the first hotel
we stayed at in Paris,
the one with the [...]

Anthony Madrid

IT IS THE FUNCTION OF NEW BRONZE TO SPARKLE

FOR my foyer sculpture, I shall incuse upon a monstrous bronze cone
An image of my hated father, clothed only in the spirals of his hair.

For it is the function of new bronze to sparkle, and of a young patriarch’s mane
To give luster [...]

Ravi Mangla

Ethics

I slept with my son’s Spanish teacher. Or I should clarify, slept next to her. We’d both had too much to drink and dozed off on the pull-out couch in her apartment. Had we not drank so much at dinner I imagine I would have slept with her for real.

This [...]

Mike Meginnis

Strange Fruit

In the last summer before he would be a man, Norman bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Florida. He bought it with his last handful of dollars. He had bought the dollars at a two percent loss with hundreds of rolled quarters. The quarters went as far back as [...]

Devin Murphy

Dr. John’s

We just passed the school girl outfits, and were moving onto the sex toys spanning down a long wall towards two thousand porno DVD’s, when the door opened and the bell went off. Meredith interrupted my tour and left me staring at the merchandise on the wall while [...]

Michael Strickland

Towards a Schizomythology of Ritual

An ichnology of antipathy, with bibliography and citations

Supposing truth is a woman, this tautology (and not—contra any falsifying conclusions your conditional curl of lip, your lapidary laugh or lift of brow, your dorsodominant shrug—dramatically dolorous—of collar may claim as full philoscoffical act of logical contradiction—and [...]

Joseph Wood

IT’S A SHAME

that this rake’s rusty teeth refuse to bend
back like new, that on the first November day leaves
shiver before they die, & that to live in autumn is to die
slowly while the children cartwheel on your front lawn
which begs you, just begs you, for a leaf blower.
It’s a shame [...]