by Maria Lisella You let me, your stepmother, Take your hand to walk into the surf, let slippery seaweed wrap around your ankles like emerald ribbons. We step on the edge of lacey waves that feel like butter on hot skin. You hold back, your mother’s fear of the sea, fear of me, sways you.
by Cameron Chiovitti After Hanif Abdurraqib What I mean is I have always hated raw tomatoes of any kind, but specifically cherry tomatoes. They are so small you could pop them in your mouth, like green grapes, but they are not sweet. Once,
by Talya Jankovits I. After I had a baby I sank deep into a tub murky with leaking milk. Daniel had to help me in and out— my limbs too heavy. She, too heavy. The small apartment fills with our weeping. The tub drains. II. Oh no, I said, I can’t take that medication. The
by Shira Dentz They say we went out on a limb, rustling more than flame between cracks, heat-packs. Moonlight hides, someone wrote as if the truth shows itself once a month, on schedule. The same goes for the entire secret. They say shadows are clues, nothing more. : : They say shadows are clues, nothing
by Stan Rubin I will wait all morning until the magpie finally breaks through the glass on its twenty-fifth try or twenty-eighth, who knows how many there’ve been, bird attacking glass again and again just because he sees his own reflection and mistakes it for a mate. But he’s magnificent in the persistence of his
by Stan Rubin The way heart and soul are transformed to Wisdom is not as the yogi promised in the rented space in the shopping center where students gather before work to test the body, its garland of pains and spoilage that is never ending. ii. You must practice continually, to reach the place where
by Simran Singh Jain What I’m trying to tell you is some nights I drink too much. Make a note: wine comes with strange dreams and stranger mornings, sometimes with strangers and sometimes alone. Oftentimes both. Some men think they know what God looks like, but you already knew that. When I wake up in
by Simran Singh Jain I have this bad habit of searching for myself inside of blue eyes. I expect to gaze into them and see myself skinny dipping, swimming the backstroke and laughing as I let my hair straighten out in our private pool water. Or perhaps the bad habit is that I’m shocked every
by Benjamin Balthaser On Jaffa Street, I watched Russian mobsters beat a man to death in front of a bar. The sound of the pipes striking bone was strangely hollow, long boxes of darkness that drifted down the empty street. All that was left of the beaten man was gauze and the black triangle of
by Benjamin Balthaser The red hooded birds on this island city run in formation, like disciplined school children, boxed on branches, scattered before the windshields of King St’s blue scooters. Everything else is heat. The banks of the canal blaze into green. The sky darkens like wool under water. There are so many possible bridges