Category: Issue 3

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

From the Author: This pair of poems comes from my current project of found poetry, in which the cutting up and dismembering of cookbooks provides text for poetry that further explores interspecies relations, gender, and the chains of dissociation built into our society that make this territory so tricky to navigate. The act of writing… Continue reading Kylie Gellatly

To achieve luminosity we must “Get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction” (Walter Benjamin) That means our most tender parts & hollows: eyes / breasts / testicles The places we are scarred or baffled Even if the pictures are rough, too dark, Grainy, imperfect, we hold… Continue reading Erika Meitner

Transmutation lurching from eating to sleeping and back to make wings of iconic orange to the monarch’s antennae its short life span still hot and momentous the monarch doesn’t dream of greatness but aspires towards seasoned equilibrium of the tight-rope-walker with no trampoline below for an audience: teeth chattering on a ring of fire the… Continue reading Satya Dash

Heads We are walking and he stops, then with excruciating care and barely-balance bends down—suspense is about time, suspension is about space—and turns a fallen penny from tails to heads. He is leaving some luck for a stranger. He is leaving. Some luck. I can’t suss out what happens next. To sustain is also to… Continue reading Chloe Martinez

To My Hands On Their Birthday People will find any reason to shame you because they are ashamed of themselves. Therefore, I have resolved on this day, the anniversary of my birth—a dawn like any other in a Queens maternity hospital, night shift giving over to day, one nurse remarking on the vast circumference of… Continue reading Kathy Fagan

Being With Being Like In the last days I wheeled him to the courtyard for the fountain and the bench. Where he told me stories of my birth and of my childhood and I told him stories of his birth, his childhood. Because I had heard them I was now their teller. And he held… Continue reading Esther Lin

Sailor’s Knot As useless as a car wash in the rain- storm, my body stands in the shower without its brain. What I mean to say is my head hurts. What I mean to say is some days I throw up heartache. Orange flecks, curled caterpillar bodies, flop against the toilet seat. I was too… Continue reading Remi Recchia