Category: Issue 2

MAID MARION WAITS INSIDE THE DIM HALLS OF PATRIARCHY Like a glove all summer. Like a shelved bell. Haunted? No, nor bridled. Not quite petulant child. More like reading by brooks and sighing. Or leaning against a wall like a painting of someone painting. I don’t have Penelope’s loom or Demeter’s winter. Nor would I… Continue reading Amie Whittemore

Relic I you are countless birds leering over countless winds; in my sleep your neck a range of heads in tireless rank and beak in pirouette the sky offers nothing vision in ink night this stream’s connection to a bay older than a strait distilling— something important I’d forgotten about replication so send the birds… Continue reading Catherine Cafferty

Death Subterfuges in the Double Helix of Life Photons mother-of-pearl like aureloa of your dreams like fingers dancing on the bridges of a harp you elixir your fate line into bows of filigree dryads and naiads spout splashes of nacré baroque weaving moments with yarn of smiles and frolicking to the death of shadows the… Continue reading Hafsa Mumtaz

Sycamore Higher than our house, one foot in a crook, another perched on a branch, but barely, the whole tree swayed in a good wind while sixty feet below my mother shouting things it’s lucky I couldn’t hear to get me down, but from such heights I could see clear to Parker Street, the old… Continue reading Grant Clauser

AQUATIC To leave the image of scuttling off intact—it is this dispersion effect you came to know, and love. Some man’s flashlight sweeping over and back across the beach. A sanded dark centering on those floating, pointed stars. You think too much my mother says in summer. In spring my thinking turns to a garden… Continue reading Sarah Gridley

Ekphrasis as Eye Test (by Jane Zwart) If you wake to a Rothko where the windows should be, to the dark wearing an indistinct belt between uneven sashes of glass, one oxblood shoe-polish, one midnight blue, the problem is refraction. The light–what little outruns the dark–has turned its ankle on the retina, bouncing false on… Continue reading Jane Zwart & Amit Majmudar

Afghan Villanelle 1: Explode At Mazar-i-sharif I watched the land mines explode— controlled detonations on the distant hillsides. We never thought it would end like this. We did our jobs. The moon lit up our rough dirt roads on the blackout FOBs. Those long, cold desert nights. At Leatherneck I heard the Taliban rockets explode.… Continue reading Joanna Grant

Essay on Lady Macbeth I believed that sleep was the key, but also that the play showed the problem of women’s speech. The season of what nature? I asked if she needed a minute, re-entered the room in which one boy played a video game and another searched online for a free PDF of Walter… Continue reading MC Hyland

NO ONE EVER TELLS YOU My hand to God, you will not care if you shit the table. You will be busy, so busy, throttled by the jaws of a crocodile on the banks of a blood-drenched river. Nursing—the sensation of a hot confession uncinching, unspooling, from the tightest pulley. And the relief, a sea… Continue reading Debora Kuan

Wendy and Danny in the Maze Begin by running Begin breathless within the green walls Feel your boots sink into gravel Quicksand for you and your boy The hotel feels far away Let the man write and glower there Here you and the child chase lightness and delight a reprieve Isn’t it beautiful In asking… Continue reading Hannah Stephenson