Author: rebeccaslehmann

Sad Girl Sonnet #15 I leave museums too fast like the men in the morning— no coffee, maybe a kiss on the cheek, sometimes I’ll call you. I stroll by Michelangelo paintings, some da Vinci, whole rooms of Botticelli. Still, there is no limit to my dissatisfaction with the world. Nothing feels right, throat burning.… Continue reading Diannely Antigua

HORRORS one day you wake with an old man’s dick in your hand and it’s your own VD JOKE you’ll get it later and you’ll laugh D. A. Powell’s books include Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys. He received the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters… Continue reading D. A. Powell

SUGAR STACK, SKYBABY As kids we’d fuck around in the abandoned mine like it was a vintage schoolhouse. My hair both hair and kerchief, sometimes also our flag. Dashed with thistles for its stars. I couldn’t tell you how to get back there except accident. Road now paved at least on surveillance footage. My hair… Continue reading Mary Biddinger

HOW TO STAY SAFE When your wife asks if you want another child, tell her that the sun’s core is nuclear fusion that will one day consume the Earth, that the corner cemetery is wet and full of quiet bodies. There are guns on the news today—a grocery and a synagogue, and a school is… Continue reading W. Todd Kaneko

To Take a Lover   Intricately woven     but very soft, the suds      of catastrophe, lethargic and hung-     over like the eucalyptus trees in September,      October, gently peeling away yet none-      theless charismatic. I was strangely     intrigued by poetrylover-     inthesky who said and I quote…would     look much better… Continue reading Sandra Simonds / Summer J. Hart

Dappled Horses, Pech Merle by Suzanne Doppelt, translated by Cole Swensen        here the world ends said the blind man having touched the wall, but another opens up underground, a long way from the light almost without season, reaching out like a rhizome, complicated paths made of straights and curves, the bottom obscure… Continue reading Suzanne Doppelt / Cole Swensen

My Therapist Says I Learned to Be Vigilant   My father was charming, especially when he hit the Cold Duck. He’d paste on his falsehood mustache, don a smother jacket, appear as a fanfare waiter who didn’t wallop   but walky-talkied his praises like cream-centered caramels. When he wasn’t a dream disassembler, a happiness liquidator,… Continue reading Martha Silano

Rabid Schematic   [I]nfection rates in randomly-selected members of naturally occurring bat populations range from only about one in 1,000 (0.1%) to about one in 200 (0.5 %) […R]abid bats do not usually become enraged and attack people or other animals.  Rather, they become paralyzed and die quietly. —In Ohio’s Backyard: Bats (Belwood)   Klaus… Continue reading Benjamin Landry

I Nominate the Magnolia as Sexiest Tree     Forget the stories of fairy-tailed monsters that spooked you. The wolf of local women’s eyes is the one who will eat you for brunch with ambrosia salad. There is no forest outside the tradition’s silk tent: an alien must wed a southern man to keep the… Continue reading Alina Stefanescu

Dreamless Your face in that hour between two nighttime hours is the place your breaths occur  without you. An unlatched gate opened by the wind settles back to rest on its hinges. Leaves on the branches, leaves on the ground are red, gold despite the bleaching of night — its palette of yes and no.… Continue reading Marc Rahe