Mel Bosworth

Jonah Is Clean
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Jonah digs holes and buries things. Jonah digs holes and buries things. Jonah digs holes and buries things.

I ask Jonah, “What’s with all the holes and burying things?”

Jonah digs a hole and buries me.

I’m going to die. I’m going to die. I’m going to die.

I [...]

Matthew Burnside

Cautionary Notes on a Blood-Splashed Sneaker Sole, Size 6 ½

Christy Crutchfield

Little Thing
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Little Thing wants to know, “When is it our firework,” and Linda says, “Patience.”

Little Thing is planted hard on my lap and her bathing suit will leave wet butt prints on my dress.  I kept her busy for two hours, while they planned their poor failed [...]

Sarah Rose Etter

Tongue Party

I.

I’m getting ready for the Tongue Party like I always do when my father’s impatience erupts.  

I’m in the bathroom, in our house, and my father starts banging on the worn wooden door, pounding out a wartime beat.

“Come the hell on!’ my father bellows. “They’re [...]

Jess Glass

The Baby in the Bedroom
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The baby in the bedroom has veins as thin and fine as strands of hair leading to her heart, each muffled heartbeat a whisper, her blood pressure no more forceful than the drip from a leaky faucet.

The mother and father are out.   [...]

Molly Gaudry and Lily Hoang

The Fan Dancers

I.

Her name is Elizabeth and she sleeps in a room down the hall. Her room is always blasting: with prisms, sonic flares, her pores everywhere. Eliza , the prisms whisper, Beth, the sonic flares, Eliza, her pores.  Beth. Eliza sleeps in a room. Beth listens.

Sleeping unlistening,
listening unsleeping,

Robert Lunday

Faces:

excerpts from a prose-poem sequence

Whoever wants to get to know a man should leave him as quickly as possible. He is in the last place to be found there where he stands. All the time he silently moves away from himself by expressing himself in the world of things. [...]

Matthew McBrearty

Werewolf Americano

an American werewolf,
business casual,
cigarette,
five on Friday,
zips by on a clover-green Vespa
with a well-groomed bitch.

Larry’s poem

Larry McMurtry, sideward
on a misspelled draft-horsse,
constructing rudimentary
villanelles for Pearl Hart
who promises romance
at the Holiday Inn,
makes out a green-eyed
rabbit with impeccable hair
spinning its wheels between
the thing itself
and the thing itself.

Joshua McKinney

Near Song
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“The music is good and, each his own, all will make my song more pleasant.”
—Jaufra Rudel

I

Matinal

Imagine there is nothing
to be made up
for in the morning

“Some birds are poets”
good mentors singing
the imagination lonely

mindful freedom enduring
garden trouvaille o see
this my green author

how rapidly new
flowers [...]

Letitia Moffitt

Incognito

It’s easier than you think.   First you have to cut your hair, which is probably the hardest part.   You’ve always had long hair—at least since you were nine or ten, anyway.   Your mother always wanted to cut it short because she said she thought you looked so [...]

Elizabeth O’Brien

Kindness

She would tell me when to stop and then
roll over and go to sleep
selfish girl but
it was enough
I met her at a gas station

she stumbled like a colt
in the glare of twenty four hour
convenient lighting
her unblemished skin
a stiletto heel lobotomy

reeling and blinking
she teetered
twirling
one little cocktail umbrella in her fingers
“Give me [...]

Salvatore Pane

Love in the Large Hadron Collider
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New scientists were greeted with little fanfare inside the Large Hadron Collider, but Dr. Koltsov was assigned to the cubicle next to mine and thus became an object of my feminine curiosity. A pear shaped man with a graying goatee, he was [...]

Joseph Riippi

From The Orange Suitcase
“Something About Perfecting A Love”

We were sitting at the cafe on our third date. The waiter brought us our drinks: a cappuccino for me, loose-leaf tea for her. Monk’s Blend, it was called; she ordered it often thereafter. We fussed with the mugs and saucers for a [...]

Ben Segal

A Room That Is And Or Is Not Past Tense

In the felt room is a softer spot in the soft of the whole. There is there a slot for the cards that poke out
each morning and afternoon.

The morning card said Tongue Exercises.

So the morning was for flexing and stretching, for [...]

Feng Sun Chen

Concerning Action

To avoid self-destruction, hop. To hop, bend your legs at the knees and then push off. Take care not to bend too far, or too shallow, or you will not find the next stone. You [...]

Rone Shavers

CONSCIOUS KNOWLEDGE
(A Story of Artifice)

For CB and AH

“Yo, Base-in-your-face. Open the door, nigga. I got Moet’ and liquor.”

My cousin. No more odious, perfidious man ever walked the planet. To the world, he’s MC Flow Jizzton, a rapper known to champion the logical absurdity he calls “conscious knowledge.” To me, [...]

J.A. Tyler

The Rhinoceros

The rhinoceros I learn is called a black rhinoceros, and it does look dark, its skin a thick kind of sun-crusted hide.

Our neighbor’s tree is full of cherries this time of summer, and in the sun, when we are walking, I think of how good they [...]

Vallie Lynn Watson

Pocket

Maggie left a trail of panties in bar bathrooms across Chicago. Usually the more expensive, ugly pairs: flesh colored things made of dense polyester, meant to smooth, to flatten, to fool. It was when a hand found the curve of her ass that she knew she could get rid of [...]

Marcus Wicker

Oblivious Spring

Detroit, Michigan

Obtuse red bolts cranked at each corner of the lot. Shirtless kids slapping hydrant-spray at largemouth bass-grins. Thin strands of water nearly blind Eastern Market cement. My wife Joy and I, we’re in the thick of it, managing to overstep their runoff. Gum-popping teen lovers and elderly couples [...]