Month: April 2022

Callisto applied classics I woke up brilliant in a forest chock full of new intelligences the woven nets of scent dragged me miles from myself Dizzying in the same way trying to grasp the horizon makes a person feel sick & giddy Suddenly the thought I have a bank account lands like a lash of… Continue reading Jen Jabaily-Blackburn

Sleep Paralysis A blob has neither form nor content and for every head of lettuce there’s a natural basket so to rotate on two axes at the same time is its wish. You know that you exist when if you flip a switch what changes changes for the better. God said order in the court… Continue reading Heikki Huotari

Devil in the Window Long swath of green she used to mow, Aunt Billie raking behind. She has just stood on the back steps gripping the rail. Repeating objects. Sunsets. Hand clippers. Georgette Heyer. The Antique Road Show/tv trundled back to its closet home. Who no longer dusts. Who no longer climbs the basement stairs.… Continue reading Susan Grimm

[Where art thou, Muse, that thou forget’st so long] glutton eats the marrow—to huge, to hush (softer, ghostlike)—thaw thigh hotly—camp: festive heat or wondrous seethe—oh nymphs (sly tufts) / tongs (brass, length to pluck)—night reined joy, bedsweat, the deer—gut me (transfigural sternum)—red of embers tempts neon lust—in yielding i tend—amethyst teeth sheath—astrology: a moving glyph—tans… Continue reading Trevor Ketner

Counting on A Spark to Save Me with lines from Amy Lowell A lighthouse skews romantic. Its remote location on a moody windswept coast, its isolation, a brooding devotion to keep a fire burning. Its promise of safety but also final caution, its brightness a precursor to the wreck. I watched disaster come and thought… Continue reading Donna Vorreyer

Sacandaga, Placid, Desolation The first friend I made after we moved upstate was literally uncomfortable in his own skin: born with some disorder where his layers rubbed together until they blistered, Justin kept a sewing needle in his pocket even then, at age ten, to lance whatever part of him bubbled up. His god-fearing mother… Continue reading Benjamin Voigt

An Underworld I stopped my breath for as long as I could in the grit beneath my little brother’s bed, afraid of my father. Even the dust would betray me if it dared, and what then? Pupils so flared a kid could hide in there. My mother loved but wouldn’t save us or didn’t believe… Continue reading Lesley Wheeler

The Monster Manufactures Spectacle Lenses The labs discourage CR-39 and I am well past the prime of life: polycarbonate it is ( impact-resistant space shuttle window material ) though I prefer the clarity of Trivex. Victor would have insisted on an ST-28 flat-top bifocal with a low seg height ( I made him an old… Continue reading Calvin Olsen

Shanghai-ed 2019 1. My psycho-pink nails ra-ta-tat the bartop to a fever pitch She takes a drag longer than the French New Wave 2. Her slow, winged eyes fix on the man who pours from the top shelf 3. “我生日/My birthday,” his mint linen suit creases around me “给点面子/you must,” he inflames my ear. 4.… Continue reading Nicole Liu

Praise Up a Storm in a landscape not dead we stand with the dead fermenting the sky many syllables of despair the heart follows horizontal in the wet new grass in the low moss where stones slant up and we are doing with or without a man spoke when he spoke it was a first… Continue reading Lauren Camp