Pork Pie by Rhoads Stevens

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“I’d like a pork pie,” I said to the old man behind the counter.

“We don’t have any more today,” he said. “We have chicken now. That’s it.”

“Then I will sit here until you have pork pie,” I said.

“We are closing in fifteen minutes,” he said.

I looked at [...]

What Happens by Ross McMeekin

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I’ll give her this: the black lipstick really enhances her sneer. But it’s all the further she’ll go, the sneer, at least this time. If I didn’t have something she wanted – the keys to the Civic – she’d make it a hat trick by giving me [...]

George by Kejt Walsh

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The two threads of your lips push together, then jump to meet the pinpricks dotting your pupils, dancing above the luminous shirt as soft as your skin as soft as the hair on your arms, your ears perfect like little spoons opening, onto the white wall that [...]

Anthem by Emma Smith-Stevens

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There are the boys and girls with India ink tattoos. There are the boys and girls who wear black. There are the boys who swim in city pools during heat-waves, pools with names like Italian gangsters, watched by the girls who suck on sour-apple [...]

Five Poems by Michael Lupi

These poems are presented in PDF format in order to retain the author’s intended formatting.

Spaces We Can’t Live In by Becky Kaiser

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The summer Mikey Cotter moved into his uncle’s house we built a fairy city out of mouse bones. We put twenty traps in the woods with cheese and peanut butter and caught nineteen mice. We hid the mice up on a high shelf in the storage closet [...]

Dead Girl by Owen Duffy

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Late that fall, a young woman was killed on her bicycle outside Lola’s apartment while riding in the rain. Lola was buying coffee across the street when it happened, saw the grimy dump truck and heard the screaming. And that night in the hallway, her neighbors surrounding [...]

Fever Dream by Kimberly Bunker

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I. Fever

Pastel streaks bristle thick and harsh behind eyelid veils, where everything spangles red, kinetic static. It is drawing shapes and they revolve. The heat radiates both away from and towards her. It would be pleasing if she could find a position from which to endure it. [...]

Four Poems by Christopher Shipman

The Movie My Murderer Makes
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My murderer has stalked me my entire life. He stood beside the basinet the day I was brought home from the hospital. And there he was again at my first birthday party. My parents must have thought he was a distant cousin they [...]

Two Poems by Jacob Victorine

What We Bury
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After she left the second time
I spent my nights
in front of a glowing screen
watching women undress
down to her shoulders,
her breasts,
her hipbones,
crying and pulling
at my cock, hoping
to sever her sex.

                                        And when this did not work
                                        their shoulders
                                        broadened, their breasts
                                        shrank, their hipbones
                                        became like mine,
                                        and I watched men
                                        pull at [...]

Getting There by Jen Knox

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Jenna stared at the fading orange and black tattoo on her ankle. It was poorly done with too-thick lines, and people often thought it was a bee, not a butterfly. The monarchs that inspired the tattoo had arrived thirty years before, on her fourteenth birthday. Jenna’s mother [...]

Methode Champenoise by Quinn Wolff-Wilczynski

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This poem is presented as a PDF in order to preserve the formatting.

Running Late by Ben Tanzer

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You are running late, always running late to pick up the older one at daycare, and it is five dollars for every minute passed 6:00pm. Which is already late enough as it is, but there you are again, trying to do one last thing in the office, [...]

Two Poems by Jane Otto

HELP WANTED

Packed in a girdle
like a sausage in casing,
I’m not “showing.”
In the window of a store
where I purchase pickles and pork rinds,
a Help Wanted sign leans-
dog-eared as the has-been bouffant
checking groceries.

Clutched with nausea,
I grip a clipboard-
dot i’s with open circles,
check the box next to “Miss,”
spell out Boulevard
so the manager
will [...]

Bitches by Rion Amilcar Scott

It was once said by a man that the gears of the machine can be stopped with enough human bodies resting atop of them. In the end, women’s bodies are always the first to be sacrificed. And how did it happen that we women were the only ones brave enough [...]

The Vivarium Monarchs by Emily Howorth

Years ago, for a spell that lasted only a few days, figurative speech confused Gretchen. The first time she noticed it, she was at the Museum of Natural History with her friend Mary. They had gone there to see the Butterfly Conservatory.

As they stood in the vivarium, Mary, yanking at [...]

Crime is Down All Over by Amy Benson

My father says it’s time to lay in provisions.  At least a month’s worth.  His voice has traveled out of the woods a long way.  The way, he has said on other occasions, we must travel if anything happens: bomb, drone, wave, fire, a great poisoning of the well. Humans [...]

Two Poems by Ruth Baumann

Excuse

What happened is the thing grew tired as snow &
like all good blood, stopped.

What I am trying to tell you is my excuse.

I don’t mean to mine any bones but there is no leaving without taking & naming without
the way my head felt when I said language should be violence [...]