by Karen Loeb We are pleased with the mattress. It really did come rolled and compressed inside a box. No, the Fed-Ex person will not stay and unleash it into the wilds of your bedroom. No, it doesn’t suddenly explode when you release it. It’s kind of like a person waking up, stretching and flexing,
by Sarah Lilius Your feet don’t want to touch mere ground. The Earth is supposed to belong to us all but I don’t buy that, what a mistake to share something so large, so phenomenal. I once knew how to spell hallelujah now there’s hate on my sleeve. I’m the feminist at the other side of
by Pamela L. Laskin In memory, George Floyd Eight minutes on his chest he called for Mama now George Floyd is dead he called for Mama in heaven now with God and also Mama Black boys still harassed without their Mamas children they are bruised without their Mamas while others in their graves with tears
by Joanne Grumet my tongue is mute servant of words longs for pleasure to lick at life has tasted the sweet and the bitter Joanne GrumetJoanne Grumet’s chapbook Garden of Eve was published by Finishing Line Press in 2020. Her poems have also appeared in the journals The Poetry Quarterly, The Same, Jewish Women’s Literary
by Howie Good It crawls through trees, a smell like the rancid diapers of the spawn of Satan. But how is that my fault? Autumn looms, fine black cracks etched all over. Courtship systems have collapsed, seemingly overnight. Who knows whose hands or breath harbors the virus? Please, oh please, preserve me from people who
by Howie Good It’s the village where the kill switch was flicked and a malfunction occurred, where disaster originated, where a Socialist-realist mural of cunnilingus is brightly lit at night, where characters from cartoons and fairy tales (a farmer, a firefighter, a Soviet cosmonaut) have been abandoned. Everything else has been declared safe for visitors
by Elaine Equi This is not just about keeping busy. I miss you. Even if we never spoke, or were only briefly underground, overhearing each other’s music, breathing shared-air together – the loss is profound. Walking down an empty avenue in spring, I miss you. Elaine EquiElaine Equi is the author of many books including
by W. D. Ehrhart George School (long ago, but still not long enough) My memories of that place are mostly anything but good. An oxymoron: Quaker institution. All the right—the righteous—words, a piece of the Peaceable Kingdom, but just another institution in the end: hypocritical, duplicitous, all smiles. “Speak truth to power,” but we don’t
by Marc Alan Di Martino I wake up lipstick-smeared in someone’s bed. Black coffee bites my tongue, still stung with wine, flows down the broken throttle of my throat; its acid slithers through my small intestine. I crouch in the kaleidoscopic dawn an animal, afraid to move, still drunk. I look around at what must
by Gregory Crosby On Seeing the Donald Judd Show at MoMA During the Pandemic No one ever thinks outside the box, unless it’s an oblong box, or a sculpture designed in one mind but fabricated by others. So much is fabricated by others. Is America a good idea poorly executed, or a bad idea brought