From our current issue . . .

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  Petty Theft by William Doreski

  Writing with a pen stolen from the elegant shop in the mall, I feel tough as Pancho Villa. As the day thickens with impasto I compose unlikely rhetoric to peddle to whichever demagogue outbids the others. Meanwhile wine and cheese shops fatten for the holidays. Celebrities divorce and sue each other while draped in the […]

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  Rhythm as Wisdom by Michael T. Young

  This is not a way of time but of timing. It starts before the morning alarm, maybe in dream, maybe in pulses of the brain figuring a way to raise you from the burial of sleep and its nocturnal conjurings: fluttering eyelids and a memory of mother lifting you from the sea. But there it […]

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  The Detective’s Chair (6) by Anne M. Carson

  Comrade Chief Inspector Chen Cao Shanghai Police, China Comrade Chen is permeable to poetry. Ineffable feelings assail him—the waft, the glimpse—how poems unfold is how crimes. Self-professed romantic, he wishes poetic justice upon crimes. 1990s; Shanghai teeters between an open door and fear of the bourgeois West. Lit major, published modernist poet, Chen is yanked […]

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  Postcard to John, Overlooking Barachois Beach, Late May by Steve Bellin-Oka

  A little after dawn and no one else is here. The sky’s an envelope lightning scribbles on with disappearing ink. Illegible handwriting, a jagged cursive S on opaque nimbus clouds. Everything here will be gone once the tide goes back out—minnow pools in the red clay sand, crab husks, live clam maws scattered like discarded […]

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  The Prose Poem by Ethan Phibbs

  This blue midnight stirs with a myriad of eyes: those islands I know not even the names of; unidentified vegetation, enigmatic wildlife, unpredictable weathers. I swear I saw a bird nest perched on the revolving head of an owl inquisitive of identity. Impending clouds collapse like an airy ocean covering the streets in a gray-blue […]

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  Middle of the Night by Robin Wright

  My granddaughter drags crusty dreams from her eyes, and waddles to the kitchen, diaper squishing in time. She bellows for beans then claps at the plop of the pot on the stove, bounces like a rubber ball as the can opener whirs and beans slosh into the pan. Flames on the stove flash the orange […]

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  I am lying on the floor by Liz Howard

  I am lying on the floor & you are standing over me & you are saying things & you are saying things at me & you are yelling & I cannot hear what you are yelling & you are reinforcing your abuse with your behavior & you are denying your abuse while reinforcing your abuse […]

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  Harvest by Ken Poyner

  Six soldiers sit with their backs to the moon, looking like six chicken legs set out for this Sunday’s afternoon family reunion dinner. Six legs from chickens raised on this very farm; chickens that came when rhythmically called; chickens that received feed from the upturned, folded apron of the plaid family matriarch. Chickens that pulled […]

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  Haruspex by Eric Williams

  They say Schliemann found Troy by studying Homer, mapping the Iliad and dissecting the Odyssey for clues to its location—but this isn’t true. He found Troy by slicing open the belly of a white ram after cracking it on the head with a leaden mallet and cutting its throat. He saw the future in its […]

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  The Speaker Can’t Be in the Poem Today by Spencer Silverthorne

  I am on the verge of watching a terrific blockbuster. Direct your attention to the window. To some sinister expression of light. To lyric exposing the wild interiors of the insipid. Bark stripped from trunk, cast your eyes on the tender bleakness, insufficient thing-hood. You had me when you said I was prone to invasion. […]

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  Contrapuntal by J.A. Pak

  Playing Mozart’s sonata in F major & find myself at the third movement, which is a movement I’ve never liked and rarely play. I rarely play an entire sonata & in a mood of F major, I decided I must finish the sonata. It’s as I’d expected, and why I play it slowly [in a […]

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  How to Breathe by Jack Garrett

  Her trachea: that had been sliced. As the skin of her neck was drawn tight by shaky fingers, the gristly tube was sectioned by a penknife blade, and a plastic one, ripped viciously from her little boy’s science project The Purification of Water in the back seat, was poked in, blood sucked out through grimacing […]

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  Birches by Jan Stinchcomb

  The bus would never stop moving, that much Klara knew. The birches outside tapped on the rickety windows like passengers trying to get the driver’s attention. Their approach was polite but determined. First they entered in a flurry of twigs and then they pierced branch by branch through the cracks in the windows. The bus […]

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  Hazel by Ricky Garni

  Hazel filled the football with helium and the old lawyer kicked it as hard as he could and it went over one house and stuck in the chimney of another. The old couple in that house had a fire going in their fireplace and the smoke soon filled the room. If Hazel had known, she […]

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  A Simple Postscript by C.C. Russell

  The guilt that underlies that story is, of course, a different narrative than the one that you would allow to creep into the writing. The guilt that underlies that story has eaten at you for years, decades now. The guilt that underlies the story is the reason that you are writing this postscript in the […]

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  Fabric by Carol Ellis

  The shirt on the floor crumpled into a human face is nothing more than what I dropped after pulling it over my head. Pulled off in the final jerk of fabric my face lies crumpled in all that it has seen I walk away from my face the resemblance I imagine and the presence of […]

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  Anew by Linda Grierson-Irish

  Where did you leave it? I asked. She didn’t know, her memory was skittish, kept spinning off sideways, she said. I agreed, reluctantly, to help her search. When did you last see it? I wanted to know. But she was off, gone sideways too. I followed. We walked a long way. In our sitting room, […]

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  Lumique by Matt Alexander

  I. I emplain to the oche oche oche. In the white violet night I recite the sephel-oh sephel-ay sephelee-lee, at least till the sun corylizes. I crimp a circuit for tom borrow. At last, as the final crepuscles give way to their shinder corpuscles, I perform the diminuendo of brooboo-lit day. It is the least […]

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  Day One by Mike Jacobson

  In the beginning. Of the beginning. From the beginning. Beguine. How to put it, who to put it, created. But how do you know this? And what gender? Or was there a gender? Answers to all your questions will surely be found, but to tell you the truth, there shouldn’t be any need for answers. […]

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  The Only Tear in Detroit by Lyndi Bell O’Laughlin

  It’s a riot in there, the mind incarcerating itself with yarns, vivid festivals of nothing. It’s hard to resist the urge to fling a little chum in the water, a risky thought, say, or an unchained memory. Stand back and watch as pictures and words roil and foam, listen as they whisper to each other […]

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  Let Down Your Hair by Carla Kirchner

  Weigh my hair—three quarters of a pound dry, one and 1/4 pound wet. Add two-pounds of large pizza plus the cardboard, peppers, extra cheese. Count the damp air burdening the trees, the strange light from the street lamps, the neighbors prying eyes as my braid coils down to the waiting delivery driver. Figure in the […]

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  Little Joe Gould #5 by Devon Balwit

  he was a bum, but he spoke the language of seagulls. when he flapped his arms and gave their lost-child shriek, your beer foam turned to surf and ebbed and flowed in your glass. he would cadge a cigarette, puffing with one hand, the other still a wing, rising and falling in the wind of […]

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  Enigma Machine by Richard J. Fleming

  1 During a full body scan, I am entering a phase of life where I no longer feel connected. At the bottom of the landfill, there are broken medicine bottles. I try to put together the pieces. There are traces of finger paint on the shards. My hard wired brain can’t process scrambled egg images […]

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  Relationship Status, Tenth Month by Matthew Smart

  During sex neither of them said much. But afterwards she would sometimes talk in strange nonsense strings of words, random and unrelated. If it was good she could go on for a long time, her eyes closed, her mouth rambling and running through a litany of nonsense. The first time it happened he thought that […]

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  How Contentment Comes by Deirdre Fagan

  In the quiet of a Sunday morning when with covers over my head the children play quietly while I sleep until ten. I wake completely before joining them, making myself a double espresso bedside before journeying to their needs. Upon making breakfast, a poem surprise discovered in yesterday’s pile of mail greets, and reading quietly […]

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  What the Hell Is Always the Right Decision by Wendy Taylor Carlisle

  She combed the yellow light into her hair and looked out the door into a street full of forties California. I have nothing but words to say these things. No shrugs or silences. No scent of Chanel or musk. My limits are the absence of muscle, the lack of spit, of mucus. She lay down […]

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  Building Blocks for Pedigree by AJ Urquidi

  Our ancestors were groomed in autonomous regions under state command. Franco roughed ‘emup real good from time to time. We pump up, fire water from our knockoffs in the driveway, bare feet stabbed by dead oak barbs. The afternoons marinate in fluoride and bloodgums from jawbutting handlebars. Our ancestors forgot we existed. We rarely think […]

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  Walker Evans Saves The Bridge by Benjamin Goluboff

  Their fathers had been, if not friends, associates in the elaborate network of capitalist exchange whose ramifications seemed to extend to the very boundaries of the Columbus Heights neighborhood where the two young men, along with certain kindred spirits, had established a kind of demi-monde. And so it was only natural, when brought together by […]