Category: Issue 5

Blue Traveler Storm over Irondequoit Bay— the sky a thick soup, gray as tombstones. I am inches from a bridge I could easily jump; the guardrail no detriment to the death ambition that I can tell. I feel it, a great turning within me, hopeless— My father is dead. O God, my father is dead.… Continue reading Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer

Summer and winter clouds troweling Dank green and a woodshed in the backyard of my father’s parents’ house. tools and other objects in the shed announced worlds not yet known to me. I wanted to find ways to use them and imagined the worlds where they belonged. But still, a sense of threat weighed heavy… Continue reading Shira Dentz

Cochineal Only the female makes dye, helpless to the red that swells her and for which she is crushed on the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. Dragonsblood burns seven midnights at a woman’s window to bring her lover back. May they come lording idle sprezzatura like our hostess, shirtsleeves rolled. Her kitchen hisses… Continue reading Ashley Keyser

February 13 — After James Schuyler Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, my birthday. But those are tomorrow’s complications. I am not so jaded by the magic of snow, the tiniest flakes that swirl before spiraling to the ground. The sky a stretched-out cheesecloth pulled taut over quiet houses. Still winter. Walkways puddled with icy water from… Continue reading January Gill O’Neil

From the Author: These two splinters come from a manuscript in progress, titled The Dead One, The Unconscious One, Thundering in the Ear, Thriving Slumber which explores how trees might delimit the human. The italicised line is borrowed from an Old Norse text, the Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson.  Jay Gao is a poet from Edinburgh, Scotland, living in… Continue reading Jay Gao

out of hunger after Mary O. what we are made of eventually makes something else. the day fools us. the dishes are dirty. hummingbirds arrive. in every poem. wilderness eats us from the inside. while you gather food, we foolishly wander behind you. we soak our bones in poison. convince ourselves of dirt. this isn’t… Continue reading Nicole Santalucia

Dear Bhagat Uncle, 100 years later from the city in which I’m invisible most days, I’m writing to you as I linger on street corners to eavesdrop on conversations between delivery bikers who look like me as they pause between gigs, wishing I could speak to them in any tongue not born on this continent.… Continue reading Sanat Ranadive

Equestrian Portrait of an Unknown Noble On our first date, he showed me the painting he kept from his ex on the mantle. “Now it’s a reminder why I left.” A man, dark hair held back by folds of silk, head set in classic three-quarter-profile, to show how his ear drips pearls on the black… Continue reading Daniel Barnum

But Gravity Still Exists Physics predicts loneliness. There is this matter of matter moving away from all matter, the increasing quantity of nothing between all things. But gravity still exists he says, frying eggs in the kitchen. I can still move toward you.   Adam & the Void “You evolve, perfectly deterministically, from a single… Continue reading Jacquelyn Bengfort

БАЙКАЛ (BAIKAL) I. Возлюбленный, did you know there is an entire octave below the bass staff? Unfathomable depth, yet all my forefathers sang it. It sounded perilous, hovering on the rim of eternity. My дедушка, himself one of the blessed, took me out on Байкал. I was supposed to admire the mountains and look for… Continue reading Mary Ford Neal