Category: Issue 4

Whistleblower The air itself isn’t dark, but it feels that way. There’s no moon, no stars. Or rather, there are, but not from this vantage point. Night is a hole in the basement floor and I am a mouse searching for somewhere warm to sleep. I recently heard AI has gained sentience. A whistleblower from… Continue reading Adam Gianforcaro

My Imaginary Daughter Asks for a Brother but one phantom is enough, don’t you think, darling? She splashes water out of the tub in response & I find tiny fish, maybe minnows, swimming in each puddle. Little biospheres. I show her how to scoop the water off the floor in pails. She shows me her… Continue reading Roseanna Alice Boswell

Derealization In a glass room, I wake in the sweat of lions. Angel-white lilacs lie facedown in my blood where my daughter cries at her representation in mirrors. I don’t know if she fears the rain is her autobiography as it shudders the glass wall between us. And yet—, I was born in my mother’s… Continue reading Chelsea Dingman

Do You See This? Do You See This? Get off the horse, marshal, shave your calf, coltsfoot. He stomps on my winter stores, I dust the palace in the buttonhole. There I will hurl a needy child composed of slick silicate tiles, the lake will begin to gargle like the span of Rustaveli’s mouth. Time,… Continue reading Tomaž Šalamun

Hurricane Fiona crashes into Atlantic Canada, September 2022 Forgive me if I say it might be better not to avoid disaster, to stumble across the shipwrecks, acts of gods and unexploded ordinance. Forgive me, but I’m still speaking of the weather. Perhaps these are the days to fill your belly on unprecedented landfalls, flood the… Continue reading Meghan Kemp-Gee

Bloodline: Menses I took invisibility too far then could not shake it no names no words not even No, I am a virgin the time they wheeled me naked except for the hospital gown to wait in the hall for an ultrasound. They forgot I was there for hours. My body chose to bleed then… Continue reading Jessica Cuello

Another Republic On a windowsill a church’s onion dome waits for night to eat it. I have to unfasten my ego, my corporeal self. It doesn’t hurt to be like a bicycle like a canal like a printing press in another country that funds the arts. Telescopes don’t experience anxiety. A dame walks into a… Continue reading Matt Broaddus

From the author: These two poems are from an ongoing series where all the titles are everyday phrases, the sort you’d learn early on when studying a new language. In the case of “I love you” and “I hate you,” these are likely phrases you’d already know if you’re interested in spending the time it… Continue reading Chen Chen