Contents:

Central Park on a Sunday Afternoon

 by Jodi Chao

The sun has everyone outside today,
Including myself, sitting in the dewy grass
Alongside other city dwellers who have crawled
Out of Fifth Avenue high-rise caves,
Tempted by the chance of warmth
Untainted by steel frames or the shadows of giants.

Sparkling yellow blankets and terry-cloth towels
Are sprinkled with birthday picnics for newborns,
And couples caught in quiet conversation.
I begin to think how different life could be
If we wore thoughts like T-shirts
Or had tickers where our deepest questions
Scroll across our chests in vivid neon letters.

Today I’m wearing the color of creamy confusion,
And passing beneath my collarbone, in hurricane green,
Is a stormy brew of questions:
Did my great-grandfather sit like me,
Under sheltering cypress trees painted on black ink hills,
Staring into a sky of milky swirls
And think tomorrow held nothing more?
Would he believe the age of tank tops and flip-flops?
Of underground trains and vertical cities?
Or maybe he really could see
A time when man would defeat the moon,

Capturing its mystery and pulling it down to Earth,
And even imagine me,
Resting beneath the shade of berry trees
On the other side of the world,
Among shirtless men who leap like tigers
After white Frisbees floating through the air,
Just out of reach.

To the Former Owner of Outside History

 by Colette Becker

I suppose that I should fault myself
for not inspecting the book
before I put it in my basket;
those few dollars I saved
are grossly outweighed by
the havoc you have wreaked
page after page.

Your heavy, smudged lead
(what penmanship!)
crowds and mars the poetry,
summarizing each stanza.
Even numbering the lines on
a particular poem which
had a total of eleven.
Really!
I picture a collection of
Shakespearean sonnets
on your shelf, each marked
with the rhyme scheme.

Look, here you have underlined
“injury,” and in the margin
written “feels bad.”
Or where you underlined
“tea towel” and added
not one, but three question marks
followed by “just got out of shower!”
How on earth can you hope
to grasp poetry if you don’t
even know what a tea towel is?

For all your clumsy script
you have forgotten to write
just one thing.
The inside cover is blank;
there is no name.
Which is all for the best, really.
Otherwise you would be found
asphyxiated, your mouth
packed with pink erasers.

Of My Mother

 by Emily Kropp

I.
She wore a clothespin on one ear all day
Once numb, she pierced the lobe
With a sterile sewing needle

That evening
In the kitchen lined with yellow ceramics
And wildflower watercolors
Her mother sobbed,
“My daughter is a gypsy!”

The pot roast was dry
The broccoli
Sodden and over-salted.

II.
In a rusted pick-up
She drove around Montana
High on joints
In big sky country
Papers and bottles scattered on the bench seat
Between her and a friend
They haunted empty houses long abandoned
Kicking around tin cans
And bones
Taking notes for the state
Coordinates
Dates
Times.

III.
When they were small
Dressed in swimsuits
And old-fashioned life jackets
My mother and her brother and sister
Rowed the blue rowboat
Into Little Black
Silent
Turtle nets poised in hand
Sunburns on the backs of their necks

They took with them a bottle of nail polish
To mark the bellies of each catch
Before slipping them back under the surface.

IV.
When my mother is happy
She twists her fists in the air
And pops one hip
Trilling on a note

All around the house she has written tiny words:
Improvise!
Smile!
Make fun!

She only gets wilder
Kinder
And more forgiving
With each new year.

(Time)lines

 by John Kultgen

Suggestions for improvement:
Unfamiliar traits
A surgeon has scribbled a face that will
Make me beautiful,
Make me desirable,
Make me what society will envy.

Erase my father’s protruding nose,
That sparked his insecurities
Caused all but one girl to reject him.

Reduce my grandmother’s bugging eyes
How they caught the attention of a soldier,
Saved her from a starving country.

Shave off my relative’s belly,
Which kept him warm through the dark ages,
When fire often failed to spark.

Straighten my ancestor’s jagged teeth
His tribe never felt hunger,
His mouth tore through any carnage.

Lift my founder’s brow,
Furrowed deep to help wipe the water
As he rose from a prehistoric sea,
Then stepped onto land . . .
And what
Of those to succeed?

The knife will not halt
My son’s monstrous nose from smelling
A Martian plant,
With scent somehow light yet bitter.

The scalpel cannot cease
My grandson’s furrowed brow
From shadowing eyes from the sun
As he stares out the five-hundredth story window.

A surgeon’s lines will
Make me lone,
Make me without legacy
Make me forgettable,
Without familiar traits,
Suggestions of immortality.

Untitled

 by Kat Yakubov

Still the taste of your consumption—
The wine, the smoke, now on my breath
He inhales and mistakes me,
This collection of another, for myself.

Freshman

  by Marley Lynch

Chameleons run up and down the walls
like your words sliding down my body,
changing meanings i can’t cling to.
Even though i think i’m rounding a corner
still i’m not quite following,
and my toes nip your heels.
Your hands are sticky with beer and
guilty intentions i don’t understand,
and i don’t want you to color me in.
Are we having fun yet?
Pound it down and
wipe that grimace off,
one more sip of how naked we can get.
Fun is fun but hiding under my covers
i think about forgotten grass stains and wonder,
why are you an alien and
how do you start to believe in this new language?

Lit Coals

  by Leah Evans

Cooking beneath the Brooklyn heat
On a roof, dirty and worn—with a ladder
Reaching downwards into a junk pile—
The green blanket underneath us warmed
And grew damp with sweat.

As arms and chests and tips of noses charred,
Sun-kissed and crisping,
A furnace moaned behind the skin of my cheeks,
You stirred and poked the coals.

The late summer had turned balmy
And like two prospectors
Looking upon fool’s gold,
We smiled at the fall.

When the planes hit, I will

  by Natalie Dupêcher

After Agi Mishol’s “Red Hail”

Curl into a tight period, rocking against the final letter and first capital,
A marble ricocheting around a sentence.
Unwrap into a colon for the punctuational future:

Sleep inside the curve of a question mark,
Nestled against the sloping loop under a same-shaped moon shrapnel.
Hunch in the cranny between an exclamation point’s line and dot,
Then straighten into its shadow, jump out like its twin
And in the whispered gaps between quotation marks, celebrate,
Popping the champagne-cork apostrophe.
Love like a tilde—these are my undulating hips and tongue,
Are you the dash stretching above me?

I will bend into a semicolon.
Here is my small head, looking out.
Here are my kneeling knees.
Here I am, begging for the promise of a comma.

Some Other Yesterday

  by Catherine Cho

Can you remember
how we used to hide from the man in the moon?
We would run in the church yard
with graveyard ghosts
laughing
we watched our shadows intertwine—
you always stepped in mine
and pretend we had found shadowland
where mothers didn’t drink in the afternoons
and dads stayed home.

You had curls that threatened to meet the sky
eyes of shale and dimples that creased deep—
made an easy smile
as though you didn’t hear the way
your mother slurred her words
or the call of the planes
your dad flew over the Atlantic
and how some whispered it was a pity your luck was spent.

I couldn’t see the tunnels in your eyes then
And when we all could—
You were no longer the boy
who dreamed and
greased his hair like Elvis
and I’d forgotten about shadowland
and never thought to pull you back
They said you cried when you woke,
deep shudders
at the folded map of bones
And they turned away
while you screamed
the dust off the moon.

Whirl with me.
Chasing—we are laughing
it’s not too late—
try to remember,
I wonder if you can hear me
through the taste of the dark.

Dog Dare

  by Karen Chien

He bit and every pore
opened, sighing steam.
No problem, he panted,
his face shiny as the chili rind

I paid him two pennies to eat.
Flushed, his soles left
behind damp footprints
on the tile to the fridge.

Wheezed like a parched cat, he
asked for the milk, no milk he
yowled for an iced salad
and opened his mouth as a bowl
for brown carrots & limp lettuce
his breath burned up.
I exchanged the cilantro stalks
for his hands and took him weeping
to the toothpaste which like a savior
I squeezed into his burning mouth.

I told his wet eyes:
It’s the best I can do.
A menthol blue seashell
floating on a milk-hungry tongue
& calves for him to knead
until it ended.

go fuck yourself after the beep.

  by Chelsea Adelaine Hassler

the click click click
of callused claws on computers.

the ring ring ring
with rotaries and rickety robots.

the dot dot dot
in digitally documented diaries.

the beep beep beep
from bony beat-down blackberries.

the shriek shriek shriek
of somebody sick of science.

Ricardo

 by Sarah M. Henderson

Ricardo,
You wouldn’t have liked the way you looked today
because a square bruised head
full of concrete
doesn’t suit you.

You know,
Ezra and I
were sitting in Sherwood Diner afterwards,
asses (and my thighs) stuck to the dirty red vinyl seat
booths of youth
and I asked him if he remembered
that you wanted to be put
in the Lake
not in the ground
into something fluid
not stuck in something still.

Ricardo, I remember this because:
You told me,
and I said
“Well let’s go swimming.”

Steeplechase

  by Joseph B. Calavenna

They rush through raging streets past cars that hate them, under streetlights that shine fury onto sidewalks hissing and muttering fumes

Stop to drink, stop to smoke, stop to mix coffee into cream, sugar into cream, coffee into tea, drinking it black and grainy in condemned apartments next to crumbling shelters, their own crumbling shelter

They dig for clothes, dig for bikes, and shoes socks paper pencils pens some kind of freedom from something, some kind of something to hold or paint or cut apart trash and put back together

The Boys eat seldom and the Girls don’t eat at all and shout it at the Boys crying for them, crying for the things boys want and the things men expect

They focus, lose focus, focus and return to dreadful feelings—their tour of drugs making good time sharing joints, sharing needles, sharing stolen pills and powders, sharing the suburbs they came from and the Detroit they want to claim

Sharing confusion, confused wandering getting pregnant and killing the baby, keeping the baby, hating the baby, killing the baby, raising the baby—some wishing sex was an option

Boys with hair and girls with hair and both covering their eyes bumping and banging into each other, tripping and falling over one another, wandering wondering needing each other to see

Lasagna (The Boy At The Monkey Bars)

  by Lex Evan Schoenfeld

“You come here often?” the eight-year-old wannabe primate at the bar baritones from beneath a half-past-noon shadow to the six-year- old stranger in the sandbox.

“You come here often?” the rehab nurse jabs the tabloid starlet who tries her best to act sincere, though her training is in sexy.

“You come here often?” ponders the fast food cashier philosopher as a whale waddles toward the register.

“You come here often?” the judge slaps the mother of five, as he finalizes her fifth divorce. She’s used to it and can only smile.

“You come here often?” I huff toward the jawline and abs of the shirtless miracle/spectacle on the next treadmill, as I realize how Michelangelo’s now nameless contemporaries must have felt.

“You come here often?” the photo album asks the widower.

“You come here often?” reads the sign just beyond the entrance of the suburb’s fourth-most-popular whorehouse.

“You come here often?” the Middle East deadpans toward the United States.

“You come here often?” the husband butters his wife, as he enters a bed with her for the six-thousandth consecutive night.

“You come here often?” the lush asks the bulimic as they share the downstairs toilet. And he holds back her hair. “Sometimes,

I feel like I’ve vomited out my lungs and dreams and promise and capacity to love, and every single redeeming quality those girls saw flicker inside of me.”

And looking up, with a flicker in her eye, the bulimic replies that she thinks hers was lasagna.

Jimmy Kittrell writes about war

  by Miriam R. Haier

Jimmy Kittrell writes about war.
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 even though he’s never been to war
 and he just dares you to question him.
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 crashing cozy in the basement
 blue beanbag chair writing on the back
 of his mama’s old shopping lists.
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 and his sister shouts down the stairs
 her voice hitting high prissy pitch,
“What you doin’ down there?”
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 dull pencil point ’gainst paper
 and he answers her, he answers her:
 “Livin,’ Suzie, just livin.’ ”

 ’cause he’s never more alive
 than when he’s writing the
dead dying dead gone dead—
 deep.

 and when they bleed (he writes) when they bleed
 (he feels) when they bleed (he’s alive);
 the dead are dying and he’s alive,

 different from dead dying dead gone dead
but the same, the same, so much the same.

Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 that’s real; war you can feel
more than algebra problems,
 more than the lunch line or the once-gooey gum
 on the smooth side bottom of his school desk.
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 ’bout brothers burnin’ up in Iraq
those who never come back
and those who do, too;
yeah, those who do.
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war
 ’cause it’s about sacrifice, paying freedom’s price
and he ain’t no coward who hides from that truth.
Jimmy Kittrell writes:
Don’t participate? Still, appreciate!

soldiering on, writing it down, doing his duty
to his made-up screwed-up blown-up countrymen:
Jimmy Kittrell writes about war.

Doubt

  by Julia Fincher

When we get coffee you tell the barista your name is Bartholomew—
Then you look at me like what?
And I want to take that paper cup
With the fake name written on it and throw it at your face, so maybe
You’d tell the truth every once in a while.
You lie like third graders say the pledge of allegiance every morning:
Quickly, without thinking, with your hand over your heart
With at least some semblance of sincerity.

You told my doorman that you have a professor with eleven fingers and
You told that cop you’ve never been to New York before and
You told me you only lie to strangers
But I’m still itching to get my hands on a polygraph machine.

When that milk was three days past its expiration date
You said you drink expired milk all the time and have never gotten sick.
But I thought about what it means to go bad
Until I could feel curdled chunks in my throat and
I threw the half-full carton away.
Some things I’d rather not take on faith.

Reflecting Hurricanes

  by Lee Patterson

It’s a city of warmth
that’s only cool on my hand
passing quickly over the street,
and the street is quiet and dark
creating itself where headlights reach,
or where slowly flashing yellow
illuminates the rain
and drains the mind of sudden speech:

The rhythmic streetlights, each to each
a common thread, a golden chain
we circle round our hands to pull them closer
when the street is brushed over with wind and waves
and the lights disperse in blind retreat;
the city darkens in sudden squalls.
We gather each other in the gathering gloom
and wait in warmth in our rooms and halls
while the sun steps in, circling the sea.

I draw my hand in, close to me
to dry the palm and raise the glass,
spotted now with moving mirrors
that bend the leaves that slowly fall
to cushion our steps through circling trees
on the leaf-broken sunlight grass
pulled gently from the ground.

Careless of all we recline, our fingers entwined
in conversation with the new day near us,
beside the days that came to call
our reaching eyes to glinting windows
to find ourselves outside our walls
that can advance, compress the air,
become self portraits to empty eyes
until winds strike in crumbling blows,
to strip lifeless art from gilded frames.

We view the scene, our thoughts the same,
though different storms will bring them near
to memories of peace and chaos:
the balanced, careful loss and gain
that echoes and bends in reflection clear
like the sunlight on waters
that deflects toward our eyes.

It’s a city of warmth
whose every window is a mirror.

Young Poet

  by Kat Yakubov

With silver cape of youth
My poetry writes itself the same.
Each time, all thoughts of you
In constructions tamed
To make the tongue contort
In shapes yet to be traced—
A glossy truth, aggressions
Wired shut in prose,
Set free in verse.
Pent up joy nowhere to be spent
Turns what—to anger?
Solidified restraint?
Instead, handcrafted phrases
Stain blank sheets with ink and point
To a body restlessly in haste.

A Letter to Myself, in the Future

  by Lauren Ameila Hart

I.
My mother has taken
everything and packed it
into boxes, big brown
playthings I could not have
realized would not carry
foliage or maple
syrup. Neighbors have left
parting gifts: a sack of
walnuts tied with some red
raffia, a bit of
rock plucked from the cheek of
the man in the mountain.
It is the first I have
seen her cry, days of it,
I am scared, her flannel
nightgown, her tangled hair.

II.
My sisters and I sip
coffee-milk on a great
swinging bench (our feet, they
are bare, they do not reach
the ground). We snip spreading
chains of kudzu and count
clouds and make bouquets of
tissue paper. We pass
sweet tea summers, lighting
novena candles for ma
memere, and I soon find
myself sinking so low
behind the old dollar
cinema, swatting moths
away and learning just
exactly how to use
hand and tongue together,
moist as a pear, sinking
low enough, close enough to
that knee-enemy, the
pavement hot enough to
fry an egg, and learn the
hard way what it means to
be cool, cool as a fall
in New Hampshire, many
miles and months away.
One night my mother knows
and does not cry, no, does
not yell. She only sighs
the greatest sigh of all
sighs ever sighed, and through
this sigh culls new wear and
folds across her forehead,
and sinks an inch, and
like a piece of ribbon
slid across the scissors,
her back, it curls. For the
first time in seven years
she sings me to sleep, I
have sowed, and now I reap.

III.
Self, be wary of your
own senses, for they have
proven themselves to be
untrustworthy traitors,
conniving betrayers.
Self, the body human
is temple holiest,
and cleansing of vendors
should come each Spring. Live life
in tides, leaving but all
ways remembering to
return, trust only the
moon, that great pregnant mother,
the only one you
should expect to cry great
shuddering tears at your
misfortunes, because a-
cross this wide and hollow
Earth, that feels and breathes and
yearns, we must carry our
selves upon our own backs,
and learn, and learn, and learn,
and learn.

Manhattan at Night, From a Plane Flying South

  by W.M. Akers

The messy yellow lines of Long Island and the Bronx
Pour across the river to our artful miniature continent,
Where they are resolved into absurd parallels that seem natural on the ground.
I don’t know if I’m coming home or leaving it.
The MTA map distorts, showing her giant,
Surrounded by niggling islands, inlets and bridges
She looks modest.
(How rare!)
Above the glow of Midtown and Times Square
(Which runs eight blocks north to south, but a thousand feet into the air)
Central Park is a precious rectangle, as substantial as construction paper,

With the reservoir, a hole cut to show the schist beneath.
And the fabulous thing, I know, is that context is impossible,
Because as small as she is, I won’t ever doubt she could
Overwhelm the sprawls of
Tokyo
São Paolo
And (cough)
Los Angeles
With a turn of her heel, and a wave of her hair.