By T.W. Sia

crabgrass. syphilisflower. 
the clap then boom. earth with its crust bitten off. 

some lesions are slow and beautiful. going home after dark.  

forearms. drawing the bow back, meteors shower on the sky.
new year’s eve. kiss again and again  

on the last week of summer camp. 

the word “crush” means it sits in the center of your chest.  

i am trying to measure out crush on my kitchen scale. 
i want enough. i want in fistfuls. 

the first baby tooth comes out. then all the teeth keep coming out, 
like confetti from the mouth. 

all i know about love begins long ago. my father dancing 
in the nightclub. fingers spread the air. confetti rains down. 

my mother would have married the man she loved. she could tell me
how it feels to kiss when you’re dying. 

i said, all i know about love begins long ago. in 1998, steve michael 
lays to rest in front of the white house. 

his mother walks him down lafayette park before sending him off. down the aisle. homebound.  

i was shaped from the language of hands. holding. AIDS memorial quilt. 
lying down together in churches. confetti. throwing parties to the wind. 

i said, all i know is that i’m in love with forever. 
exploding slowly. my ancestors need me  

to dance around my bedroom in my ratty underwear with holes. until dawn 
i’m king of prussia. i’m the forever. 

waiting for you to light up my phone. rockets coming home. fireworks 
in a long, drawn-out absence. angels gleaming in the gutter. 

i’m in forever. supine on the side of a hill. english daisies bloom 
through my body like gummata. i am burning up without consequence. 

By T.W. Sia

I love getting married up and down the narrow aisles
of the gas station, peach rings on all my fingers. My gown
trailing behind me like slug juice, as if to say I was here. 

And I love getting up to pee on the plane. Hallways of hands
brushing at my sides like tall ferns. We were all sitting
at the same refectory table in a distant life. Ada asserts that the joy 

of living in the city is to be near many bookstores, each with aisles 
designed by someone else. Your favorite is the one with the most people 
in transit with you. I picture all of us walking slowly  

with our mouths ajar, fingertips brushing on spines. Before sunrise,
I feed wool into a spinning wheel, wood clicking as it turns 
in the grand passage of time. Passing is why I became a poet. I keep conjuring  

the wind, sweeping over orchards I remember. 
The walk to the apartment lined with olive trees, green and fruiting 
in the summer. My father waiting his turn at the stop light.  

I understand lineage years later at the same light. 
A lineage of waiting our turn. Unstoppable lineage. The wet way 
blood goes from the heart. Water dripping from cupped palms. There,  

I’ve seen my reflection change over the years. I keep growing 
into these wrinkles. My father laughed like me too. I have our face
generations have fallen in love with. I want to talk to myself gently. It’s true 

I like my memories without shape, just passing through. Dancing 
like joss paper as it burns. Moving prayer beads in bed.
I dream when I rest, a door creaks open above me,  

the route to find me in every life. Shimmering above every crack 
in the sidewalk, pushing a cart at the Dollar Tree,
staring out the bus window home. Find me there.

a corner of the ocean gets stuck 
inside a cave with  
a squid who can conceal her own shadow  

with, you think, a sick combo      of instinct & bioluminescence. 

you have zero survival instincts. 
you have a spinning pink lure & yellow boots that keep your feet 

safe from the rain.        the smoke. 
               the darkness 
will crack open & yield a tiny pearl but you’ve got to beg  

a little first,               okay?                wade out to your waist 
in the bathwater turquoise.        thermometer the salt. 

you dip mason jar after mason jar into the ocean & still come home  
without a wave. 

where’s an epithalamion when you need one? 
where are all the birds?  
               
                   it’s okay. 

yesterday a man with a dog followed your bootprints down to the dock 
and lingered near where you stood,  

                 watching time freezing light. 

        the sky was starting to melt 

                  like an orange popsicle. 

your mother called to you out her car window: don’t you need a ride home? 

By Merridawn Duckler

Usually I’m all Emily’s got her problems and I’ve got mine. But sometimes I feel really bad she never found love, or she did find love but rejected it, or she had no idea what she was missing, or it was all about some Majesty. I wish I could’ve helped her, I really do. Genius is mad lonely, and truth-telling is always a sad end game for us bitches. Don’t we all die a little if some poor sod isn’t willing to stand up for that world? I mean be all in. In my spare time (haha) I’ve tried to do some checking around to see if there’s any legal options or a podcast, a campaign of some sort so I don’t just sit around doing nothing. But I’m not a school marm (sic) who has time to cross check like a million diary entries written in teensy tiny handwriting that looks like it was written with miniature crab hands. That is not my skill set. My skill set is having my whole universe rocked by a genius and wanting to acknowledge the source. I’m the first to say: People, give back. Reach out. It’s just a big challenge when everyone is dead. You kinda hit a brick wall there with how much you can do. I mean, I’m not stopping entirely. They say every time you read a thing and bow to the genius of the creator you’re one step closer. The question is to what.  

By S. Lieto

fast rain those blurry reds streamed our front dash 
though the car was steam & comfort as we entered the curve 

gliding inside the rotary when a produce truck one of those  
long ones cut ahead of us & a horn belted from my palm’s own  

force my own hand & my foot a harsh hard brake & look there  
was no accident but I felt every clearcut tree through  

a window deep inside me & the truck’s wheels sliding just-past  
the hood & just look at how I yelled fuck off & no one heard  

me but my lover who caught herself on the whim of a taut  
seatbelt & I felt like a child again thrumming ready  

for that argumentative wake within me & waiting for the right 
exit & look there was no accident just adrenaline’s face  

alongside my face & silence & a lover beside me touching  
the back of my neck at my hairline asking: do you want me 
 
to clean it up later? my hair was growing out & I wanted  
so many things & I eased my grip on the wheel. yes, I must 
 
have answered her just as we passed the place I was born  
shining out as reflective letters on a highway sign. 

By Nancy McCabe

Later it became one of those stories you tell at parties, embellishing: how I’d forgotten that my 1976 orange Hornet was prone to rolling if I didn’t put on the parking brake, how I parked it at the top of a hill that sloped sharply down to Highway 71, which bisected Fayetteville, Arkansas, and hopped out to fetch my neighbor. How I returned to find my car gone. 

“Someone stole your car?” my neighbor asked incredulously, meaning, who would steal that car, with its ceiling that drooped like a tent’s, with an orange finish that had dulled and turned mostly black because, at 25 and in graduate school, I never had the time or inclination to wash it? 

A pickup truck chugged up the street. “Are you looking for a car?” the driver called out the window. “It turned thataway.” He pointed. I ran. 

By Morgan Hamill

You’ve seen the corn grow tall twice already. The goats drop kids.  
The carpenter bees drill their holes and die. July stops 
feeling sultry; then it’s winter. You’ve been back to visit the city,  

where you recall the three a.m. dawn chorus,    a cacophony 
    set to streetlights, sun nowhere in sight.  
Out here, in the country, with no trees  
          on your property, 

mornings are silent.     Every morning is silent. 
Each morning, in your head, all that’s left  
is to make coffee,   go to work,     and keep working.  

You’ve done this before, had this idea  

that you have no ideas   
no words   
        that you’re trapped 
and might as well get off the horse. 

But  

here’s the thing: the horse knows to stop when you’re asking too much. 
it throws you off. 

And 

this is not how 
you’d meant to quit 

(you’d meant to quit 
but not like this) 

but here it is 
and here you are 

held by the hush that comes 
not because there is  silence  
but because everything listens. 

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

for Ursula Vernon 

The caption reads, in its entirety, 
 “The kelp root serves no absorbent function. 
It serves only as an anchor.” Only. 

Well, pardon kelp roots for doing one thing well,
 for not multitasking, for failing to walk 
the center line, backward, on one foot, juggling plums.  

You’d think anchoring a keystone species might be enough. 
 Those amber cathedrals swaying toward the light 
are able to harbor, nourish, filter because 

of single-minded, undistracted roots 
 who have mastered their craft, anonymous, 
remarkable only for sticking to one job. 

Some of us ultra-absorbers frankly envy 
 those kelp roots. They never feel compelled 
to tell perfect strangers why Charles Steinmetz 

was more brilliant than Nikola Tesla, and by the way 
 had friends who called poker night “The Society 
for the Redistribution of Salaries.” No kelp root 

ever burned with retrospective shame 
 at having delivered a monologue on Sham, 
the second-fastest horse to run the Derby, 

losing to Secretariat by a third
 of a second and who has dwindled to a footnote 
though no horse ever ran that fast again. 

Sure, it’s rough to be passed over, your one talent
 for tenacity dismissed as merely stolid, 
but it is preferable to being the frog 

chomping water beetles who realizes
  she’s swallowed a Regembartia attenuate 
again, feels it resist digestion, walking 

steadily through her convoluted gut, and knows 
 from experience that the beetle’s going to stroll 
irresistibly into another day. 

By Susan Blackwell Ramsey

There’s a pear-shaped pearl so perfect it has a name, 
     “La Peregrina,” and a history of luck. 
The slave who found it traded it for his freedom. 
      Spanish queens wore it, French kings took it home.
So heavy it slipped its setting, lost in a sofa  
     at Windsor Castle, at a Buckingham Palace ball, 

always found. Burton bought it for Elizabeth Taylor
    and when she realized it was gone again 
she scuffed barefoot and terrified through the shag carpet 
     in their Caesar’s Palace suite, until she heard  
one of the puppies chewing on something and fished
     it out of the tiny mouth, not even scratched. 

Big luck is what most people mean by luck—
  the lottery win, the ground ball bouncing fair, 
the chunk of change from a cousin you never knew. 
  But big luck’s cumbersome, its gravity 
so great it attracts an asteroid belt of envy,  
  a malice moon. And big luck tends to have
a flip side for someone—that understudy only
  gets her break when the star’s leg breaks, too. 

So in real life I’m fond of a finer focus,
   noticing motes of luck as they catch the light,
before they land and are swept away by the daily.  
  This approach is like birding—not for everyone, 
but possible to practice everywhere, added facet  
  of pleasure improved by practice. Any lifelist  

is personal, whether trainspotting, eclipses, or operas. 
    Another person might only be satisfied 
by a purple gallinule, a roseate spoonbill. 
     I’m more like the birder who kept a list  
of birds seen from her backyard, and if that meant
    standing with one foot on the garbage can, 
one braced against the back fence, leaning to see 
     the sharp-shinned hawk down the block—my list, my rules. 

Luckiest of all might be a gift
  for recognizing your luck, its ebb and flow, 
its magnify and shrink, its bloom and furl. 
 When that maple fell and filled our yard, 
but barely kissed our window with thinnest twigs 
  my sister told me “You have good bad luck.”  

No one wants constant fireworks. Better to have  
  luck like fireflies’ unpredictable winks. 
North America has one hundred forty six species  
   of fireflies punctuating our summer nights. 
There are fifteen species just in Kentucky.
 Fifteen species—that’s what I call lucky. 

By Julie Teixeira

It was Chloe’s first day of first grade, and she insisted on wearing an embroidered linen blouse with a pair of swishy athletic shorts. The outfit reminded Gina of a mullet: business on top and a party on the bottom. But despite Gina’s pleading, Chloe refused to change. Gina took pictures of her daughter in that strange outfit, pictures of her smiling so wide it looked like her jaw might unhinge. Chloe’s doe-eyed optimism made Gina’s heart tighten.  

Please, she thought. Please let her make friends. 

By Caroline Laganas

If I could serve you a buffet worthy  
   of Italian American musician  
      Louis Prima and keep you returning, 
   then I’d dig my fingers into the ground  
beneath your feet to plant the seeds to grow  
   grapes, plums, pomodori, donut peaches,  
      string beans, and a shiny rainbow of onions,  
   because as soon as they ripen I’d toss them  
in an insalata and antipasto  
   to go with a tray of exotic cheeses 
      that smell as tantalizing as God’s feet—
   except Casu Marzu from Sardinia  
because sadly we’re not allowed to import  
   sheep’s milk fermented with insect larvae—
but what do I know about the law 
other than voir dire means “to speak the truth” 
and it’s essential for potential jurors  
   to answer every question truthfully 
      to see if they can serve impartially, 
   so I might as well confess to you now 
that I can see us drinking whiskey 
   and getting frisky off a mint julep 
the same way Prima did in that one song,  
   then we can decant the super-duper 
Tuscan to let it breathe and catch our breath  
   before pairing it with steak pizzaiola,  
      cutlet parmesan, and chicken cacciatore—
   then we’d share a dish of sunshine and ravioli   
before eating a spread of baked ziti, macaroni,  
   chop suey, chow mein, and minestrone, 
      with braised fillets of baccalà on polenta—  
   but I could never stand by the stovetop  
stirring cornmeal for an hour nonstop, 
   especially when I could watch your lips 
      pucker up to the spoon I now envy, 
   brimming with steaming pasta fazool— 
I admit I could be a fool for you 
   but not enough to go to carpentry school    
      to learn how to build a bigger table  
   that could display platters of spumoni  
and cannoli, or the banana split  
   Prima dedicates an entire tune to, 
      you know the one with whipped cream piled high  
   as the Eiffel Tower topped with cherries,  
nuts, a pepperoni pizza for fun,  
   drowned in an infinity pool of hot fudge—
      and with me, you’d never be left hungry, 
   so by the time we devour our feast  
and the insatiable jazz band can’t feed off  
   the sizzling crowd for one more encore to end the night, 
      our empty plates could become a lifetime of full moons. 

By Eric Rasmussen

Apparently the after-school club meets in an old Chinese restaurant? Colin parks out front, takes a deep breath, and tries one more time to tie the tie Heather gave him. It’s a lost cause. The fabric is too slippery or something, so he balls it up and throws it in the back. It’s fine. He’s not interested in any of the kids who would find such attire appealing, anyway. 

The entryway features a big gold Buddha, and just past an empty fishtank, under a mural with mountains and dragons, about twenty children sit at tables, doing their homework or coloring. A few of the older ones stare at their phones. A woman in a blue Buddies 4 Life t-shirt meets Colin at the hostess station. “Can I help you?” 

“I hope so,” he says. “Otherwise I’m fucked.” 

By John Pring

Early evening and snow falls silent  
as grief. I had been learning to leave  
ajar the door of the aviary, the one  
shadowing the small gardens 
of my chest. When you turned up,  
freezing and exhausted, you had brushes 
tucked under your arm. It isn’t happening 
you said, I don’t know what I’m doing.  
By morning I have purged your squirrel 
hair, licked clean the maple  
and the alder. I want to ask if you love  
me the way you used to, but you are  
already leaving. It has to happen in the paint,  
you said, or it doesn’t happen at all.  

By Jiachen Wang

Every morning our father went under the bridge to collect the coal scattered along the railroad tracks. On a good day, he could fill three sacks and sell them for twenty yuan. On Sundays, he brought me and my brother with him. Sometimes the pieces I put in my sack were no good, and he had to pick them out one by one. It was very difficult for him to bend down, and this made me think that perhaps everyone in this world had some kind of clockwork inside their bodies, except that the one inside our father had not been oiled for a long time. That’s why it’d become so rusty.  

The three of us lived in a warehouse. It belonged to the government but had been mostly unoccupied. As time went by, it became filled with cardboard boxes and rat shit, like how when a garden stopped having children poisonous weeds started to grow. Every month, Old Liu from the train station would receive something from our father (in a good month, a carton of cigarettes; in a bad month, two bottles of baijiu), and he’d let us live here rent-free. Behind the warehouse stood a garbage mountain that looked like Kilimanjaro in winter but smelled terrible in summer. The inside of the warehouse was similar to a deep well. When we talked it sounded as if we were underwater. At the end of the storage racks was a little room with two plank beds and no light except for a lamp I used to do homework. That was where we lived. After dark, my favorite thing to do was climb up the pipe to the rooftop. Standing there I could always recognize, from the lights afar, the Ferris Wheel in South Lake Park.  

By Alex Mouw

She said, kiss my shoulder. 
I kissed each one hundred times. 

The moon rolled across the window 
as she drew her hair, like a curtain, to one side. 

I don’t care about money, she said  
when I bought a loveseat knit with ten thousand green threads. 

To prove we are an adventure in the clouds, 
I lay down and took three pictures 

of her easing to a cliff’s edge, 
not the mist settling on stripped mountains. 

She advertised for an agency, a university, a corporation. I filled  
ten notebooks with black ink. We came to want a statement sink. 

She asked me to count the greeting cards we’ve set 
on the shallow counters of eight apartments.  

I wanted rings stretched to orbit 
without a planet’s mass.  

For her I cracked hard fingertips on a guitar as now 
I burn them over butter and pearl onions, stuffing bird legs in a pot. For me 

we bought a second car. Do you want more?  
I asked for three Decembers, meaning, like a hairdresser, 

can I take more, 
it will be beautiful? 

She tweaked the lampshade and tried on dresses. 
Nearly naked—seven times! Fourteen when I counted the mirror. 

Were we a calendar reading FIRST RED LEAVES,  
TWO JARS OF HONEY SHATTERED IN THE STREET, 

are we the kind of flight to blaze orange-winged, thinner than stained glass, 
or shrivel to a dusty moth?  

Love the hunger—unyielding and, once fed, asleep— 
or love the house we built around it, the concrete troweled to the edges of a pit.  

I held a key to her. She slid it 
on a ring with seven others. 

She said, kiss my shoulder. 
I kissed each one hundred times.  

By Dion O’Reilly

I am regularly told my poems are too intense, that they vividly present the wound but not the cure, that they lack tenderness. This used to simply hurt me. Now it makes me think. 

Initially, I suspected that what’s called intense is sometimes just honest, and what’s called soft or quiet is just safe. But I’ve also had to ask whether the criticism contains something true—whether my poems deflect, not into softness, but into bluntness and brutality, which is its own kind of armor. Maybe I avoid the deeper thing by beating on the surface. 

Years ago, I taught art in an elementary school. Invariably, with each new assignment, the little artists would ask, “Can I be done?” But, in most cases, to create a more complete work of art, they still needed a few more brush strokes or scissor cuts. We want to be done. We want to hold our work to the light and see it’s good. Most poets, especially early in their development, are unconsciously looking for that exit—an ironic twist, an image that displaces feeling, the philosophical reframe, the sudden zoom out to landscape, history, cliché, or abstraction. These moves feel like sophistication because they resemble what sophisticated poets do. But in less skilled hands, and sometimes in skilled ones, they are escape hatches.