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Sunken Autumn

 by Ian Fishman

the world has color still * three months clot into one

grey dance * so time for now is quiet and flatter

than it used to be * sundays we skid outside amherst * 

steal acorns * wallow wetlands * sling black dogs

from the ink of our throats back into the prairie scuzz * 

there is always something to muzzle and be muzzled

by * those dull blue mornings the crows seem to like * 

a wood stove on the wind’s breath * the nighttime

the dogs all melt into * each day decapitating itself *

regenerating later * my friends and i * in love

with looking * for nothing * and finding it

girlhood

 by Lily Cohene

glowing palms
balmy pink and magma red
dandelion fingers over flashlight bulbs
quilted bed covers heavy over head
lost barrettes in tangled hair
driftwood on a messy sea
cotton and goose feather ocean shore
it is safe and warm here.
a ceiling-stuck star constellation glowing green
firefly sanctuary belly
lava lamp eyes
rolling and crawling little creature
heavy breath, high pitched wild laugh
crooked jack-o-lantern smile sparse with teeth
jump high! and land.
grip the ground
farm animal toes
run all the way home
from the school bus stop in crayon drawn afternoons
from nighttime stepping on the heels of shoes
laces tied in tedious bows
look how fast I can go!
without tripping
dripping ice cream streams
sticky cheeks
chin and wrists
reach down to your ankles and splash
sun sparkled water
in the open air
droplets dance
and fall.
all clean now.
summer is just summer
and not the season of someone.

Observations

 by Leah Muncy

I pinned my glass panel with the purple flowers
Against the white wall, instead of the window.
It is hard to get the light where you want it, anyway.

My toilet runs all night, it sounds like it is raining.
One day the bathroom floor is wet because it did rain inside.
This is called a leak.
I don’t know my Super says.
My bathroom does not have a window, but it has a fan,
But not a window.
It is hard to get the light when you want it, anyway.
I didn’t have to look when I changed the water temperature
From hot to cold in the shower.
That means I can call my apartment “Home.”
Hot too hot, cold too cold.

There has been one fruit fly in the kitchen for months.
There have been no flowers in the kitchen since August.
I had a dream that dying feels just like fainting.
What if dying just feels like fainting?
A person in front of me in line orders a cortada.
What the fuck is a cortada?

   “I shot a deer,” my great aunt says to me. “Don’t tell anyone.”
Three mismatched kitchen towels hanging on the oven door handle.
   “I shouldn’t have brought this up to you,” a friend says while bringing it up to me.

I can always remember the grass: dying, or green, or freshly cut.
I remember the lamps, particularly. No bulbs.
There is really only one way to arrange furniture in a living room.

The first night in Nana’s house I get very cold but
I am too afraid to tell her.
It is an old house.
There is nothing she could do.
Someone could say I have built character.
I build character like a house.
Cold too cold hot too hot.

I am so vain! I wrote that note to myself.
I taped it to the mirror.

哗哗

 by Connie Li

(This is Not a) Love Poem for Elon Musk

 by Julia Torres

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing
I’ll tell you is that every morning I wake up to
one more spider web on the window sill and
in my bathroom there is dark mold on the ceiling
that they thought they could conceal with
a cellophane white paint coat and the closet
light has a mind of its own, leaves you blinded
when you need it most and on my morning walk
to work there is vomit on the sidewalk and I think,
really I truly think that I’d rather be a ball of light
than a body. There is something about grocery stores
that makes me feel invisible. Hunger
and everything that walks behind it. There is a bird nest
somewhere with too many mouths to feed and there
you are in the canopy, fists full of worms, fishing for stars.
A personality quiz poses the question would you rather explore
the bottom of the ocean or the depths of outer space and I pick
ocean, because I know I can’t breathe in either
but at least I know how to swim and apparently
this makes me an introvert. It’s not like one big wave
hitting the shoreline it’s more like a thousand smaller waves
crashing into each other before they even see the coast.
In the margins of my water-damaged notebook I write do you ever thirst
for something you don’t have a name for
and in the dream in which you leave on the bus
in the pouring rain I finally hand you the letter that says I have
the answers to the questions you haven’t asked yet.
I am crossing over into a plane to which I cannot take you.
Let me buy you orange juice. With pulp, the way I like it,
and you might say through your fox smile you
might as well be eating an actual orange
and I might counter with no mercy then why
don’t you go down there and pick one off
the tree yourself? To which you might respond you
can’t risk the encounter with birds. Come down
from your tree before I cut you down. If I didn’t love
the feeling of walking barefoot in warm grass so much
I might leave the Earth behind too, dive headfirst into
the expanding darkness, ankles untethered.

Biology Final Exam Review Guide

 by Larenz Brown

It Seems I Am America

 by Kassidy McIntosh

My roommate is a communist,
and I am alone in America,
watching the red flag play in the wind born from our fire escape.
America wants me dead.
It seems I am America
in the gyre of my mind.
I am America, spinning like a Kentucky tornado,
talking like a bad omen.
When I move too quickly and fall down,
when I skip breakfast
when I want you like a predator
when I use you like a capitalist.
There can be no ethical consumption under capitalism
and yet, I devour you like so many presidents before me.
Their bodies fall down at my alter.
Their skin peels away like an orange rind
in the hand of your mother.
She places it in the trash, delicately, so as not to disturb anyone.

Tell my future, America.
When is the next trial happening? I can’t keep up.
Bad brain medicated. Cannot make up my mind.
Cannot listen to another podcast, America.
A loud Soho bar: I yell in your ear and pretend we are whispering under your
bedsheets.
I pretend you’ll take me home after a long night of New York.
But your hands are cold when we kiss goodbye.
It seems America is me: tired weekend routine
white knuckles and money, kissing colonizers and
liking it, their unbeatable eyes and wide smiles.
I climb in their mouths and light a match.
I see the past down their throats.

My skin is coffee and half and half.
I stand for the anthem.
Your mouth tastes like dirty water.
I stand for the anthem.
I dreamt you murdered my brother.
I stand for the anthem.
I’m coming to terms with our sameness, America.
It’s a real nightmare, you should know.

I do not understand
when you ask me if I hate you. I say
stop. No, I don’t hate you. I want YOU!
Your country needs you so bad right now.
Poor, misunderstood America, disrespected by Prufrock and college students.
The Animals taught me how to fake it
for when I began to love you, that is not what I meant at all; that’s not it at all.

But there you are again, American made.
Beguiled only by rich black faces
on TV, in your ears, in your sheets.
The others are so hard to remember.
I believe they are invisible when they
leave their own neighborhoods.

It seems I am America,
an East Coast hurricane and a forest fire.
Wet for a woman’s touch, a woman’s tongue,
aching to be pushed against a wall and called the greatest in the world.
Again, I am America
keeping you all out.
America: where Mary blesses me on holy Jefferson Street,
where Jesus looks up my skirt on the J,
and my father asks me if I buy into all this climate change business.
I say, of course I do; what do you mean; of course I do.

Black gentrifier says,
fuck a wash and fold fuck four dollar pizza fuck killing myself.
Zip up my dress. Have whatever you’re having.
Buy shots for the table and take no one home.
Would you throw your body on a fire for me, Dido?
Dido, my dream girl, would you stop at a red light
or spit in my mouth instead?
Will Charon drive my taxi tonite?

Why waste our time, young America
plotting Palestinian revolutions from a broken couch in Brooklyn
scanning the M train for survivors, allies
giving dolls to black children that look like them
showing them where bullets enter and exit
pointing to where it hurts
going to drag shows and voting for democrats
combatting zionism with cigarettes and dirty underwear.

I wonder what Ginsburg would make of me now. Would he call me a fascist?
Would he call me baby? Would he tighten my bra strap and tell me I’m free?

Satan Says your president is a cunt and I nod from inside my coffin
with Sharon Olds and Morgan Parker and a chameleon to keep me warm.
But what do you say, my darling? Will you kiss me already?
Will you say the word black with no pause?
Will you say the word black and mean it?
Even though I am too stubborn to change?
Even though I am so very beautiful?

It seems I am America:
kid in the horrible jakes.
You are dancing, dancing
around me, touching my inner
thigh. You say you will never die, but I know you will.
I know you will. Tomorrow
when I bomb another village, when I fuck another intern,
when I cage another baby and save another fetus.
Perhaps you will die
when I rig it all—everything!
When I shoot up another school so everyone will know
that’s just how it is.
It will certainly be before I change my mind.

America straightens its curly hair
America wears sunscreen at night
America sports fishnets
America does cocaine on the weekends
America cut its cable last year
America touches itself to men and women
America listens to Tracy Chapman
America hangs posters of Che Guevara
America buys avocados in bad neighborhoods
America is trying to get rich quick

America is not listening.

Self-Portrait as Yurico Holding His Mother’s Hand

 by Bailey Cohen

after Gabriel García Márquez

El mundo estaba triste desde el Martes
& we still call all of our ancestors

by their first names. Watching butterflies
adhere themselves to the cross-hatches

behind plastic screened windows and confusing
them for moths—it’s been becoming

harder for me to witness anything
& not think of it as a metaphor.

In my mother’s kitchen, I scoop out papaya
seeds with my bare hands. I know

seventeen ways to cook pork & have never
slaughtered a pig. My mother says I don’t

like the food that I’m supposed to. I only say
she would remember more than I would.

Self-Portrait as Yurico Eating a Strawberry

 by Bailey Cohen

Red-faced and enraged, I bite into
red strawberries, my face blushing

red. I read red words in a book my father
read. All of the pages are red. All of the words are

distractingly read. My skin, once red, is still
red. I spit red blood out of my copper-filled mouth,

ready to kiss a beautiful woman with my teeth stained
red. The woman is wearing a long

red dress. Our lips are being blasphemed into
red. A thirteen-year-old niño sits cross-legged atop a

red train car holding a red cigarette with his
red blood cascading from his nowreddening

finger. Across the street, two men drink
red wine from red cups sitting at a

red plastic table. Their house is painted
red. Behind it, the red sun sits, tinting the ocean

red. Hell is white, and then, suddenly, a raw-meat
red. I pick at a red scab and remove it. My skin, the

red of a grapefruit. There is red, and then, more
red. Even the sky is red. Even the roses.

For a while I even forgot the peace lilies

 by Miguel Coronado (Winner of the Editors’ Award in Poetry)

How the stems fell when my mother left to visit her family
Not a single man among us could manage any compassion
I was at the bottom of what remained
The least understanding person there

But I thank what’s left of them
My sisters of the dirt
How they sing in my head the green, tired countries
Lined in their veins
And my little sister living there, singing in the leaves
Her extra-light, spidery frame
And let me hold you up on my fingernail,
My littlest sister of dust
What I cannot see but know better than anyone

I thank you for all that you cover, that I forget
The broken mesh of mosquito netting in the window, how beautiful the sunset is
Barely balanced on its beam, the little worries cobwebbed in the corners of the room
My shoulders crumpled over into the summer, to see the view from the apartment
To see I could never fix or replace any of this
So I stayed at the bottom,

Biding my time up into a pile of tomorrows
Letting a plant by a window remind me of small failures,
Like an altar, saying tomorrow I’ll make a new start,
A new religion, for no other reason than a need to shut my hands together
Into a self-forgiving lock
Tomorrow my new god and I, we’re going places,
Even through the dust in our eyes we’ll see everything

I haven’t yet forgotten, will try not to
There is a song here yet,
Enough to last until tomorrow
There’s music in a man splitting apart,
That I cannot hear but know better than anyone, lilies,
Lilies in the cracks between rib and falling heart
Look up, tomorrow
My mother will return to us, the lilies will straighten their shoulders