By Sandy Gringas

Once I posed for nude pictures. It was just with a guy I was seeing at the time,
who called himself a photographer. He was someone I found on the internet. I
think it was big fish dot com. Is that still around? His profile picture was cute, and
his voice was smooth on the phone, but he really was unemployed and living in
his mom’s trailer and was much fatter in person. Truth emerges, as they say. They
weren’t really wild pictures or anything. It was just me lying on my bed. Lying or
laying? Laying is when it’s an object, right? You lay eggs for example. It must be
lying. Anyway. I had my jeans on, so I was only half-naked. I had a belly-button
ring at the time. I don’t have it anymore, but I still have the hole. So, you’d know
it was me if those pictures surfaced. Why I did it was because I can’t ever seem
to see myself. I mean, can you? No matter how many mirrors I look in or photos
of me there are, I always think, Is that me? Why I thought this photographer
guy would be the one to show me my true self is really the issue here. I know.
And I don’t do that anymore. I grew up, I promise. Just in case I am running for
president one day and you’re worried about my judgment in men. But I really
can’t run for president, even though the world is so stupid, and I’d be good at
giving speeches or at least I’d be better than most of the presidents I’ve heard
over the years. I know those photos would do me in. And that guy. I can’t even
remember his name. But I know he’d be the kind to keep the photos, you know?
Just in case a situation arose where they’d come in handy. He told me once that he
was in the army, and he got this special survivalist training so he could stay under
the snow for eight hours at a time. After we stopped seeing each other, which was
pretty much right after he threw a hoagie at me, it snowed at my house, and I was
convinced that he was out there watching me from under a snowbank.

By Lance Larsen

Map day in Social Studies: our duty was to save
good Europe from bad Russia by giving
each country its proper name and a color
from the rainbow. Fifth grade, and the new girl
sitting in front of me, some move-in
Carla from California, shook out her hair.
Of course, it spilled on my map. Of course,
it basked there, a breathing animal. You can’t
ask a beautiful girl to please move her beautiful
hair, especially if it’s goldish and unruly
and smells like the sea. How about move the hair
yourself or re-position the map? No sirree.
Girls have spies in their hair and think you
have a crush on them, which in this case—
okay, yes. Sometimes allure stuns us into stillness.
I left east Europe blank but breathed in
Carla’s world. Hungary, Malta, Bulgaria, Greece . . .
Called her hair every magic name in the book.

By Tammy C. Greenwood

these sheets billowing on the line
would become a sail,
carry me away from this body
which now rejects every vice.
Take me to that shirtless girl
in the shelled driveway
making mudpies in rain-soaked soil.
To the font of sand and silt
collecting liquefied heaven.
The patch where grass never grew,
where the earth saved a space
just for me. Cleansed of inhibitions,
alabaster skin and underwear
now the color of excavated clay.
I’m sure she never questioned
belonging, or tomorrow—or even me.
Arms and legs flapped into mud angels
in a dusk of fireflies
floating in her own bioluminescent sea.
Or how when she dried in the summer sun
she stood like a terra cotta god
taking her place among the ancients
brimming with all the answers.

By Garth Upshaw

Jed’s a big guy, a linebacker gone to seed,
New jeans, button-down cream shirt. Nice.
Dante’s, close in on the second ring, has a heavy
Red-and-black theme. Natural-gas flames
Under a glass bar. Though the fire’s off.
Tuesday night. Early.

Open mic isn’t even in the main space.
The bartender jerks his head, uninterested, towards
A side room tucked away behind,
With its own tiny black stage, its own tiny bar.
A quartet of stools, half-a-dozen two tops.
Bonanza flickers soundlessly on the wall.

The emcee’s a short guy, full of manic energy,
Chip-on-the-shoulder vibes as he rattles off the
Rules. Five minutes. Hard limit. Be funny.
Don’t worry about the gravity.
He mocks Jed’s shirt.
You look like you’ve got a 401(k).

A young woman does a bit about one night
Stands. Vaginal discharge. What we’ll do when we get there.
A blond, milk-fed guy, dented guitar,
Sings a story song about a terrible blind date.
The emcee does another, even angrier, diatribe. Says we
Can catch him every other Thursday at Kell’s.

Jed’s material is solid, but his demographic is
Old-school, nostalgia porn. He gets off a bit
About flying cars, and I laugh.

No one else is there to laugh, though, and
They sit like punished schoolchildren
Waiting their turn to shine in the light.

Meanwhile, Indians have taken Laura, and
Hoss is missing.

By Andrea Bishop

The surprise came when his bedroom curtains were closed against the brightness of the morning, though he’d been wishing for the light of the sun for many months now, or rather, the curtains were almost closed because they didn’t quite close properly. They were old-fashioned curtains which, ironically, had blackout screening that allowed him both privacy and the ability to sleep, but also restricted his view, and where the curtains joined together the hooks extending from the fabric flopped out of their intended rings on the rod, which happened so frequently it was easier just to leave them off and tuck one curtain behind the other each night, and besides, he would fling them open so violently in the morning—relieved after a night of dreams, of gains and losses, passions and disappointments, to land back in reality, a world solid and definite, possibly dull but at least predictable and explicable—that even if he did secure the curtain hooks in the curtain rings each evening they would just pop out again the next morning. When the curtains were open the view from his window was grass and a patch of mud and part of a low cement wall, with a few weeds in the far corners, but flowering weeds, and the only other things he could see were people’s legs as they passed by, and all of their dogs, usually. Unless it was a very tall dog and then he couldn’t see the ears, or the head, or the neck, depending. In those cases, just two human legs and four dog legs.

By SM Stubbs

I’m awfully good at it, with years
of experience, plus eons of needing
to disappear from the world, plus
my mother’s dead and my father isn’t
and I’d like to believe for a couple of hours
that one of those isn’t true. If I say,
Jigsaw a hole so you can crawl from your reality
to mine, can you do it? If I say, Reality
is a snare for unhinged minds, will you believe
we’re not all playing by the same set of rules?
Perhaps I’m searching for the trap door
they spring the minute you understand
how things work. Psychologists say children
learn how to negotiate the world by play-acting
adult roles. When I played Store, I learned
how capitalism relies on the bottom line
and slim profit margins with little room
for discounts and when I played House,
I learned how to manipulate my wife
into cooking dinner night after night, how
to avoid chores that don’t involve sparks.
Only now am I starting to understand
the precision with which children mock
their own futures. I’ve examined my traumas
and what that type of pretending meant,
but as long as we’re inventing new selves
I’m going to leave it out, make believe
it never happened. I hope that’s okay. I hope
I can deposit that in the past for now.
This is us pretending. This is us negotiating
the world. When we woke this morning,
the temperature had dropped thirty degrees
and everything was covered in frost.

By Jen Karetnick

My mother peeled sections like bananas,
in rot-spotted arcs, revealing the muffled
trends of decades until she reached drywall,
flesh dented from thrown fists, the rough
shove of chairs, the smack of accordion
doors that she uncoiled the phone cord
beyond, back in the days when a kitchen
was a heart, its double arteries shuttered
even when left ajar, never fully open.

By Joseph Landi

I.

You glow,
veiled, dress
like crusted snow
before traffic
has its way.

II.

The minister,
fighting hiccups,
asks: Do you take
as your awfully
wedded wife . . . ?

III.

Carving a grin
on his prime-rib face,
your Dad, unembarrassed,
flees into the wake
of tables, raising glasses,
celebrating
his disencumbrance.

IV.

Your Mom sits
unknowingly
next to his mistress—
her friend of forty
years. They chat
in matching dresses:
one pink, one green.

V.

My steak
never arrives.
I go hungry
immediately.

VI.

The band covers hits:
All My Life,
Beds Are Burning.

VII.

Silver and crystal
clink like railroad
switches. Kissing
becomes a burden.

VIII.

Your family argues
over the table photo.
Some are missing,
some already dead.

IX.

The cake fork’s full,
the cream capsizing.
I’m offering everything.
You’re laughing.

X.

The hall empties. Gift
boxes tilt like ruins.

XI.

In the lot,
my mother touches
my face like a blind
woman before I rejoin
you.

XII.

Cleaver.

By Denise Duhamel

When my grandnephew Max gave me a Starburst
from his stash, I took it because of the pleasure
he had in sharing. Once I heard his grampa’s voice
come out of his mouth—It is what it is—when his Jenga tower
collapsed. I called him my Little Nietzsche and he laughed.
I don’t like Starbursts but I love Max. He’d given me
a lemon square of candy and said Let’s write a poem
about video games about which I know so little
and he knows so much—things like the prisoner’s dilemma.
This makes me think of Michael Burkard’s Entire Dilemma
which I treasure. The poems center on his sobriety
and I remember how, when I first met him, he clutched
the Big Book in a poetry workshop where I was his student.
I’m on a plane sitting next to a woman who reeks of gin. I helped her
shove her carry-on in the overhead so she think we’re friends.
I only assisted because she was swaying and I was afraid
her bag would topple and hit me in the noggin.
She is telling me about her life with her husband
and his mother (whom she can’t stand) which is why she moved
to the back, to an empty middle seat, and wound up near me.
She is wound up and I would like to wind down.
She explains her husband is a momma’s boy,
that he and his mom are two peas in a pod while she is a lone pea
rolled under the table. She offers me a stick of Juicy Fruit
which I decline because I don’t love her
the way I love Max. I tell her I have to work
but I am really writing a draft of this poem in my notebook
(which is my work, but I don’t want to explain).
She starts to snore but not for long. She wakes up
with a start, just in time to order a Rum and Coke.
I’m going to a divorce lawyer, she says, as soon as we land.
I am sober like Michael was. He’s gone now
as are so many of my mentors. Wait! Is that a poem?
she asks, noticing my lines don’t go all the way to the end
of the page. I tell her I’m coming back from a writing conference
and she says I hope you learned some good tips. I don’t want to
tell her I spoke at the conference. I don’t want to
tell her anything at all. But suddenly she is talking
about her husband again, who will soon be her ex-
if she has her way. I sip on my seltzer and try to go back
to my notebook, where I can be more generous to her
than I can sitting next to her slurring. She too once wrote poems
before her life went to shit. Now she’s a nurse
and hates it. She wants me to know this won’t be her first divorce.
Who might have she become if she had stopped drinking?
Who might I have become if I was still ordering vodka tonics?
I wish I knew more about the prisoner’s dilemma—
I am a prisoner here, even as I turn my head and try to
write. I love that Max doesn’t know who Nietzsche is
but was happy to laugh at his name, which
I have to admit has a comic sound. At one point I say
I need to close my eyes and that makes her go quiet
though her head is lolling and slouching toward my shoulder.
Soon I’ll be home where I can sleep like a starfish,
my limbs sprawling towards the corners of my bed.
I wonder how marketers came up with the name
Starburst for candy—a kind of synesthesia
perhaps? Light in the galaxy of our mouths?
And I’m thinking now of Mars candy bars
and the way little kids like Max love planets and space.
We never finished our video game poem
because Max was happier in his Meta Quest alternate reality
headset where I watched him fight demons I couldn’t see
in his living room. He wanted me there, just as a witness,
and I was happy to sit still observing him, imagining
what was on his screen. I scooted out first, as I was on the aisle,
then saw my seatmate again at baggage claim
standing with her husband, his mother
reprimanding her about something, maybe her drinking.
Then a kind, young man with a lemony beard pulled
my suitcase with its orange “heavy” tag from the belt.

By Matt Hart

but error number one was mistyping “gin”
as “gun.” For the record, I do not like guns,
not even water pistols—especially not
water pistols—but that’s another matter
and not at all germane to the aesthetics
of my judgment about this gin,
which is literally a matter of taste.
Error number two: somebody described
the Hendricks Midsummer Solstice gin
I’m tasting now as flirtatious. I don’t know
what that means, except in the sense
that most alcohol dulls one’s senses
in a seductive way that makes one desire
more of it, until soon enough one finds oneself
drunk. Baudelaire was always drunk.
Apollinaire was drunk on stars.
Someone tasted a liquor never brewed, but
I don’t remember who and refuse
to look it up. I defuse, too, the catheterization
of catharsis. Those are errors three, four,
and five. Now I’m on my errors tour. From here,
let’s assume that drinking is a bad idea,
so always a mistake, and I can stop
numbering the issues and clear the air
of the word “error.” Always lean in
to the initial first impulse and the debacle
of the intellect, which is poetry
according to André Breton. Beauty will be
convulsive or not be at all, he also said
after drinking a shot of gun. I mean gin—
again, my mistake, stupid fingers. Some people die
from drink, including, I assume, from drinking
gin. Others die as firemen. A few people even die
as astronauts, but most people just die.
My maudlin-ness, here, a result of the floral notes,
the herbaceous caliginous, facticity of the factotum.
Obviously, I don’t even know what
some of those words mean . . . anymore . . . if
I ever did, but the thing is, as with guns,
I don’t really like gin, but until recently
I also didn’t like The Grateful Dead.
Then I heard that song “Box of Rain.” Now
I still don’t like The Grateful Dead, but
that song is convulsive if anything is, and thus,
beautiful, so maybe there’s still hope for me
and at least one kind of gin. Apparently,
Phil Lesh, bassist and occasional lead vocalist
for The Grateful Dead, wrote “Box of Rain”
for his father who was dying. I am a sucker
for the elegiac, I just wrote to somebody
the other day in a text. But Lesh was
also known for playing a six-string bass
and no one should ever play a six-string bass.
That’s about four strings too many. Why
I apparently associate gin with death is
somewhat inexplicable, since it obviously hasn’t
killed me, but it most certainly has something to do
with the “i” and the “u” being right next to each other
on the keyboard—thus creating the gun/gin
phenomenon or paradox or conundrum—and also
it has to do with the fact that “I” and “you”,
however close we are, are always significantly
separate from each other in time and space.
As human beings, there is an unmitigable distance
between us, which is part of what makes us
unique. Even if we were to be somehow
right on top of each other, we could never be
each other, nor feel each other’s feelings
except in an imaginative empathetic way.
It’s the sort of thing one tries to get to, or
to achieve, in poetry and drunkenness and
being on top of each other. But in reality,
we are always at a loss when it comes
to other people, the feelings they feel,
the deeper meanings of their words.
We lose and lose and lose throughout our lives,
until eventually we ourselves are lost to others.
Beyond that is the Beyond that no one knows,
an eternity of not-ness. At least
that’s what I suppose. And while that’s
a rather complicated web of associations,
it may help to illustrate the reasons
I associate gin with death. Were you still even cognizant
that that’s what I was doing? Have another drink.
In the short term at least, you’ll feel lighter.
The Hendricks Midsummer Solstice gin,
in particular, when one first tastes it, is a high point
with regard to lightness, though I’m sure
with each subsequent drink and every day after
it will be a little less. And you and I, too,
will be a little less—a little more occluded
in the darkness of what’s next, which is why
to arm myself against it, I misspell “gin” as “gun”
nearly every chance I get and why I don’t
drink gun unless I’m forced to at ginpoint.

By Janine Certo

A martini olive stick to remove
batteries. Shears to open packaged
chicken breasts, trim daisies,
dahlias, a rosemary sprig. No
extension cord for the unruly
front hedges. No Fiskars for the blade of
grass. A garden chair’s a stepladder.
Higher chair, a three-rung stepladder.
In the apartment of my twenties, people
joked I owned only a dull, single
knife to chop garlic, open envelopes, halve
large muffins. A coffee mug for a hammer.
Mostly, I try to do things right. Sometimes,
no tool at all. One eye’s a leveler. Nix that
orbital sander. A fingernail’s a screwdriver. Two will
pull splinters. What’s stashed in the basement isn’t
quicker. A leaf blower sounds in the distance, while this
rake becomes broom because it’s closer. Sloppy, you
say? Swat the fly with a novel. Here’s a story, kind,
true: a man once gave me a toolkit. He didn’t know. No
usual pegboard in my garage: DIY drills,
V-clamps, voltage testers, mallet, shovel, socket
wrenches. After my break-up text, I shuddered when he said I
carved out his heart with a rusty spoon.

By Jeff Whitney

In the movie the question is “What was that?”
and the Star Trek away team learns the answer
the hard way, losing usually a nameless face
in a red shirt. The procedure is figure out what
problem comes first, then what comes next.
In kindergarten it’s nap, eat, sandbox,
and actually, now, it’s not so different.
The issue of what to say versus what to feel
about what is said. The dilemma of training all your life
for something then, after it’s over, what to do with
your specialized equipment?
A shoe advertisement asks, “Who will
save your sole?” Nice one, shoe advertisement.
There are several ways to skin a thing,
it turns out, and none involves happy birthday
balloons. For a while you can live in a city
and have friends and feed the ducks
who assemble around you, a sort of
congregation. I didn’t know much at eleven
but I knew our neighbor Linda desired heaven
for we heathens, felt we were lost, how earnestly she tried
to save with her Saturday meetings and Rice Krispie squares.
Linda, if I let you down, I’m sorry, as much as my sole
loves good-faith attempts, I don’t think we’ll be beamed
up to the same ship. That’s okay. For a while we were together
on this team of nobodys, the plucky upstarts against
the biggest, baddest all-stars and headlines like “Dozens
killed waiting for aid,” and what god would allow
that, Linda? What person? might be the better question.
But every so often I put on my god hat
when a large enough spider is in a corner difficult enough
to reach at a late enough hour so for peace of mind
I decide to kill. How my apologies are well-meaning
and polite but don’t change anything, like saying sorry,
so sorry, while holding a neighbor’s head
underwater, as each night I go to sleep hungry.
I go to sleep hungry and dream of money.

By Michael Derrick Hudson

He’s so cute! His eyes are brilliant blue and almost
perfectly round. So sincere! Sometimes

I dream about them, outsize like Disney mammals’

or an anime hero on a quest, lustrous with heartfelt,
unambiguous virtue. Save the princess!

Let me be the princess! Gallop me away from all
my trolls and this drip-drip-drip dungeon,

whisk me away on your pharmaceutical unicorns . . .

His office artwork is insipid (at best) but I’m such
an asshole I extravagantly praise it

in order to lay a trap (although such malice is hard
when you’re on the mood elevators

he’s got me on). Such bright, happy colors, I chirp,

grinning at the mess of daffodils, yellow-on-yellow
squeezed, apparently, right out of the tube.

My wife painted that, he tells me, with such a blend
of hope, doubt, and quavery pride

that I am disarmed. Touché shrink! Bad art and
sincerity grant the believer inviolability

(at least for a while). Besides, I think he’s in love . . .

Well, even real art does nobody any good and real
artists (as Soviet judges once proclaimed

at poets’ trials) are parasitical mopes. I nod gravely,
like a connoisseur. The world

can never have too much cadmium
yellow, I tell him. Yellow is like sunshine that way.

He looks suspicious, but I think I halfway meant it . . .

By Kelly Rowe

All morning I watched the inlet  
rushing back and forth 
like a woman packing up her house.  

Then I went out to climb over  
the rocks again; I love them,  
not just because they stay in one place,  

but for the way the shades  
of moss, bright green and dark, pulse,  
and underneath, the pink and silver veins. 

You think you saw me leave, waving  
from the scratched window of the ferry. 
But really, I’m still here;  

follow the clues—you’ll see how  
the stones gather at the edge  
of the water like a circle of old women 

who bring their handwork out of doors 
in spring; quiet women, who pause,  
nod at the sky as at a mirror,  

and at the copper plate of the beach, 
where, wave after wave, the sea,  
with its diamond needle, etches  

the bright kingdom below  
the cold slapping surface: 
far out, far out beyond the archipelago. 

    — To the memory of M.N., who departed, who remains

By Justin Rigamonti

I stop to gawk at a burned-out trailer—
kinda pretty. One of the guys behind it
taps his ear, asks, Are those nice?
They’re old, I say, lifting an earpiece.
Speaking of nice, the other guy says,
That bike is only twenty bucks. It’s pink
with tassels on the handlebars, and it’s
probably stolen. He must think I’ve got
a couple kids at home, but no, it’s two
chihuahuas, so I’m not interested. Instead,
I skirt a stand of poplars with laundry
hanging from the lower branches, a catalogue
of dirty magazines beneath. Three pit bulls
barking poetry behind a chain-link fence.
A tall dining chair in its Sunday best:
a red McDonald’s T-shirt. It’s like shopping
for moments down here. Because all of this
will vanish soon—everything, yes, but also
these woods and three feet of topsoil,
excised and hauled off to god knows where.
For now, a poisoned cluster of madrones
coughs up a guy who looks like me,
also wearing headphones, also browsing.
You teach at the college, he says, like it’s
not a question. I took a class with you ten
years ago, he says, and I don’t respond.
Because how is this still happening?
Life, I mean. Above us, a row of tan condos
lean out over the superfund riverbank
where hawks pluck salmon with gills the color
of benzopyrene, scrawls of green and pink
graffiti across the concrete pediments.
I want to offer him something, a shred
of hard-won middle-aged bullshit.
But he beats me to it: Life is strange,
he says, smiling. Which is true and I
finally answer: Compared to what?