Contents:

Melt Eventually

 by Alexa Wejko

icicles melting in the dusk
the sweet smell of rotting mahogany

crawling in the smoke of Friday
night, Castles made of sand

pretty images and fig trees
lemons freezing and freezing in winter

a round sunset and the night
made pale by the moon

women dancing in the nineteenth century
children waltzing underneath the tables

my love doing jumping jacks
on a dock outside of New Haven

I’ve never been, I hate it already
four AM and I’m an impressionist.

The Joy of It

 by Daniel Mehrian

To bite into
a pair of grapes
is to return
home after a
shitty date
where the girl
cracks her knuckles
in 4/4 time.
She still throws
rocks at my window.

AC/DC

 by Caitlin Steever

Flip that cool pillow’s reign.
Heat and wrinkle shipwrecked curls
Stranded on an Egyptian strain
Of sheet with clumps of heaving girl.

Beautiful in this bowl of dry wall
Nails are capped like Pope’s hats.
Fingers titter off the mattress. Fall
Away, crescent dead as aftermath.

New rhythm, fresh washboard to cheek on
To peck on to thump flatter.
Mortar to pestle. Chest lawn.
Laughing fit at nature’s fit
And cocky Pollock splatter.

Thunder pitched, you too are held
Under neck and ochre afghan,
Spinning skins of realms
That thicken in a hand.

No one current powers this lover’s inventory.
Electric shocks wear well on a mannequin.
Beauty is what it does to me.
As long as the light turns on and the bed frame spins.

Wordless

 by Carmen Petaccio

David Foster Wallace’s mouth is agape and wordless, in my mind.
Double-knotted cords of a word processor,
Hung from a tropical ceiling fan,
Keep him suspended and de-mapped.
His body sways, in a manner,
He may have described as chandelieric.

David is pant-lacking and dead.
There are cows on his boxer briefs.

Meanwhile, three thousand miles away,
I’m gabbing on the balcony of a three-story walkup,
In the glow of September Christmas lights,
Drunk and happy as David dangles in the dark.

His wife finds him, suspended and pantless,
And makes stentorian sounds with her mouth.
There are no words.

I am back, warm in my bed.
The next morning I eat melting omelettes
And blindly waste away the worst day of
Mrs. Foster Wallace’s life.

That night the news comes, and suddenly
I am standing in that doorway with Mrs. Wallace,
Slender hand gripping the light switch,
Looking at a face,
That only David Foster Wallace could have put into words.

nothing garden

 by Jesús Adam Esparza

a girl chases me with hummus but i dont notice her i feel embarrassed
when i walk in on the mailman putting letters in my box like hes
the easter bunny i tend to lose things in the winter i think its a symptom of too
many pockets i know this girl who always writes poems about her dead
boyfriend she also sends me text messages the closer I get to becoming
her boyfriend the deader i get i want to be hooked up to feeding tubes and
a breathing machine and a machine that pumps my heart for me and one
that simultaneously blows my nose and generates random thoughts moving
my hand over a piece of paper in the shape of poems and i want to be
surrounded by bleeps and blips that sound too alike to really mean anything
to anyone other than robots and i want to see what thats like because people
always say they would rather be left to die how could they know

Moonset

  by Ryan Stechler

the dented pseudo-star spun lazily towards
the region of the sky that hurts your neck to see.
the crescent shape was slightly off-center
and so it resembled yang more
than a pastry,
though flakes still crumbled from the sides to be scooped up
by cosmic pidgeons; the same ones
who spread their wings to connect constellations and told
the Greeks the myth of Icarus
incorrectly.
his wings weren’t made of wax but light
he didn’t crash into the water but
left the atmosphere and tumbled sideways releasing
thousands of little crumbs. little white lies. they didn’t want
to give the secret of their food away
to just anyone.

a haiku

  by Jason Lee

when the doors opened
all the winter’s short lived suns
closed our eyes for us.

The Shooting Death of John Bell

 by Joseph Knight Haldeman

was heard through Spokane
a fire engine
roaring on all fours

the soothing cleft between
imagined and real
in my room
I dreamt a man named Bell

made him for my mind
fixed his house in mine
fed the man for years
until I
shot him with a pill

Huis

 by Amanda J. Killian

You live in a house that bridges the river
and you forsake your bed for the barn
to drink and smoke among old dressers
filled with 1930s photos
and the blueprints of houses never built.

Your grandfather finishes nothing
but he straddles torrents and rocks in low-tide
and sleeps skeletal next to plywood.

Your mother is manic
and searches the river for you at night
with a flashlight showing only on fish.

Your father drives trucks
but tells you of ships and Catholic celibacy
and Amsterdam at night.

Your brother is lost
and sedated with too much religion
with an absent gaze on time.

You study psychology and philosophy,
sober and drunk
You stay quiet too long
as the leaves float under your house
wet, molded and warm.

Moving from Indiana to Massachusetts in June

 by Ben Radding

Dad’s mouth was formed of languid rigidity
as his car came into the driveway. A plea
from my mother, stern slang words from me;
from my brother, drawings of slight morbidity:
paladins, holding hummingbirds in their hands.
I asked my brother if they were meant to be free.
Dad taped them to the office wall, a decree
that things can’t be as bleak in future lands.

When we got to our new house, the walls were pink.
The rugs were stained with mud and dirt, once white
as porcelain. Someone had lived there before.
“Temporary rent,” as Dad put it, the sink
filled with murky water. My brother’s knights
grasping hummingbirds, taped to his drawer.

Cameras With No Film

 by Kathryn Mitchell

We wrote basement manifestos
In used marble notebooks
And that smile your parents paid for
Outshone everything I had to say

Flowers

 by Soren Stockman

It’s time to put on shoes. Flower petals keep falling but the sky is gray. John doesn’t feel that he has to smile. His hotel room is filled with clay pieces and ants that stop every minute to scratch their heads. Across the courtyard, one boy counts to ten and ten and nine and a girl bellows. John has seen the hummingbird once today, drinking the flowers. The flowers are as follows: yellow windmills, orange carrots, red wine grape patches, and the purple ones that keep falling. White and magenta attract bees on the brick ledge where John repeatedly sees something dark crawling, under the hanging vines. There’s a mountain and a pueblo and John’s hotel with internet access. He goes to sleep every night full of food. At rest time every day, he lies on the balcony sofa that is really more like a crib missing one side. The sofa has three pillows, two blue and one green. John arranges the pillows to fit comfortably under his head, putting them on top of each other in various ways. A cactus plant leaks a wetness trail on the balcony too small to be of any consequence, like the dried wetness on his hand.

Striving for Heaven

 by Jason Jiang

A drop of honey
flows down the back of an optimist
observing his thoughts
on top of a radiator
as he counts the holes on snowflakes.

The wide-eyed boy
plays pool on a diving board
over ice water
eating candied cardboard
and hits the eight-ball with his pen.

He sleeps beneath a napkin
covered with his dreams
of painting stars in the world’s eyes
and he bathes in sweat
from reaping mind-fields.

Coolness protects his ambitions
but he shivers every time
he looks into a mirror
and sees two sparrows perched side by side
on his bicycle seat.

Another Sunday

 by Lucas (Luke) “Meir” A. Gerber

There’s a world in your head,
the ant told me, then he tiptoed up my ear lobe
and dived into my inner ear.
This was no ordinary ant.
He collected crumbs or flecks
of dirt from every place he went
and stored them in between my walls.
He dropped out of AA a few times
after his wife left him.
I felt kinda bad for him
so I let him live in my walls
until I caught him masturbating
on my grandmother’s couch. I
don’t know where he lives now,
but he still comes by with beers
every Sunday during the NFL season
and to drop off crumbs and dirt
in a crevasse in the wall.
As he walked out of my ear, he said
That’s one fucked up world in there.
Then he told me he ate his ex-wife for breakfast.

The Birds

  by Eileen Myles [Guest Contributor]

I sort of like
myself each day
as you express
your longing looking
out the window
I witness your back
I groaning and
waiting for the
grains to soak their
minutes
reading some stray
thing eight years old
you pounce: oh.
Everything does its
work. Bold or hidden?
I enthuse to under
lining moving you
again. Bigger more
insistent desires
remind me of a
friend I must call
and what remains
of last night
accompanies me to a
surprising wet
street. Returning
the formula & some
of the work’s
done in my absence.
I will call you.
Like the book
your gift has arrived
inside of me daily
now the underlining
to hold on and be
heard now in the
wake of the new
knowledge. Just before
finishing I interrupt
to say. Confident
in my relation
to some sentence
some thing. And when I
thought your sweetness
would be left
you are gone.

After Six Years Pop Lets Go

  by Maggie Hall

When you gave me a nod I could not be contained
as if my heart was shooting through
the too exciting window of my first snow.

When you barely moved your lips I was in
on your secrets, like Cinderella using
the squirrel’s skills and the mouse’s magic.

I was still holding your hand when you let go of mine
like sand shifting out of my palm,
emptying handfuls from within—

or quicksand, sucking my forearm, pulling my face and
whole body entirely in, flushed down, across
the threshold, to a washed away rabbit hole.

I left the room to tell mom
when she said she could feel you had left,
like smoke from a chimney when the fire is put out.

Grandma Marian teaching my sister to set the dinner table

  by Ernest A. Hartwell

Take your hands back, Penny.
You picked them beautiful,
yes, but wildflowers fall
as they may.

Don’t brush your cheek
on the Queen Anne’s lace—
you’ll sneeze. And when you
pick them, leave at least one
tiger lily at each cluster;
I couldn’t stand myself
if there were no more tiger lilies in the Bay.

Look at them, leaning
on that wavy glass rim.

They are what I have.
That’s why they call me Bird:
my children are the flowers

& fields. They come and hide
in my skirt when scared,
and if you try & arrange them, child,
I promise you, they’ll just bend back.

Beth Israel

  by Johnny Gall

I’m staring at John’s gap-tooth while we sit in the waiting room for detox, and he tells us how addicts are angels with clipped wings.

He’s a fat, gruff man with a beard as big as his bald spot and when they call everyone in he hugs us close and calls us his sons before he goes to the back room and Mike and I go out for pancakes

And look out the window at the sunrise.

I walk a while through the November streets downtown, tipping my hat to the angels on the sidewalk.

And God appears in the form of a burning oil drum, and the Holy Spirit descends as a flock of pigeons.

I find the Kingdom of Heaven in a grating on Mercer Street where I stand and warm my hands before walking on.

Our Fear

  by Tyler Weston

yes your feet will get cold
but the river will hide our footsteps
and your boots are waterproof
and I know this snow is cold in your mouth
would you rather your breath be painted
on the slate of night like chalk dust
from two clapped erasers
we can’t travel by day
I’m sorry

think of us like highwaymen escaping
our lives on loan from the law
be careful on the rocks a twisted ankle
and I’d have to carry you
it is only fear that chases us

do you remember in our house
the white rabbit in the painting above your bed
with his two black eyes like chocolate drops

I need for you to be like that rabbit
and hide here under the snow
for a little while

yes the rabbit will be fine

he was a flat sheet of canvas
there was no blood beneath his skin