Author: rebeccaslehmann

[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

Man-Days Our first day on the yard crew we got given brooms and spades. The foreman put the jobs list on a clipboard—looped a length of nylon cinch strap through the hang hole—left it tied against the factory gate. We’d all signed on to skive off for the summer—fuck the dog—get paid a union wage.… Continue reading Phillip Crymble

Why write another poem about the moon? because my grays grow more numerous than moonlight & when my son asks to pluck one I tell him three more will shine in its place because I do not tell him about Hydra’s serpent heads multiplying this way because its teeth raise skeletons from the dead because… Continue reading Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

Ingressive Clouds always roll in, but Somehow, the sun keeps shining there is day, then a day, and a day with no nights to speak of in between except for twilight trickling in a sliver of time. The suspense is ongoing, constant like the clouds, without release a forever lack of resolution. a constant need… Continue reading DeMisty D. Bellinger