Contents:

the sleep of the just

 by Aaron Abbott Brown

i sleep too much but
how can sharks sleep
if they can never stop moving
and why do people think
it’s ok to cut lines and
vote
or not vote

i never dream but
if i did i’d be sure to
forget everything and
make no attempt to understand
out of fairness to the sharks
especially the hammerheads
who says fish can’t interpret
joseph was swallowed by a fish
and he read dreams
or was that jonah

i just know that
someday i’ll wake up
early without meaning to and
it will be because i
will be old

and the sharks
will be dead

Imaginary Rooms

 by Christy Tomecek

1.
her sad brown hair
gathered in bunches around her head.
together we stroke the last wilting petals
from rusted sheet metal.
many times we don’t stay to finish
the tale.

2.
only in the cool light of
the basement’s window will
she relax and lay back against
the chipped wall. she doesn’t
stay for company, she’d rather
keep the door shut.

3.
when purple ink splatters
against her arms, she smiles.
more colors fleck
her thin shoulders, contorted
bone only.

Volcanoes Might Erupt

 by Jason Jiang

two mirrors
   facing each other
      admiring themselves
         lilacs blossoming
   between them
         lilacs wilting
      detesting themselves
   facing each other
two mirrors

Digestive Thought

 by Stephanie Gallagher

In the room sleeping with his black sock

 by Amanda J. Killian

He saw he had knocked things down
and she had put them back

this pair that wrestles in bed
and laughs over slaps dealt.

Nightly, he hit the shelf above
his head and all her shells fell down.

She does not know dropping
the raw sea pieces into a jar

whether the amount is there from before.
He says they must be somewhere.

Enthoeogen

  by Michelle Chen

Three o’clock at the window seat,
and I am but rosemary in a peddler’s stock.
I am but herbs on the sun-stained dock
that simmers with inorganic heat—
pinched with flourish on a pasta dish
that you flung with rage on West 4th Street.
I am the roasting fowl, or flock.
(or the lonesome slice of stinking fish).
Yet all at once I can faintly see
an image of home on an old spice rack:
the Colorado folds its colors back
with a melancholy song or wish.

Parade Grounds

  by Andrew Colarusso

tone.

image of American momentarily I thought
of you in the hour of my small death. I ope
n vain and space shortly. watch this.

transmission.

you catch a glimpse of the face appearing t
o at last fill your half empty. looking again
so quickly you forget the cause for the turn
of each season. in this moment your path i
s altered and the body possessed with peri
pheral light is lost to concrete sight.

power.

to prove the transparency of the veil betwe
en worlds we dine on sensualism. vines on
nuclear ladders combust with idea to mast
er the ill advised idealist.

orientation.

the four gather and sway in a deciduous gr
een palisade. no limitless supply of mariju
ana and warm ecstasy can make this living    more real for them:
four pass beneath
blue scaffolding in a sort of giddy haze.

Haiku #19

 by Tom Mooseker

The dolphin looked up
toward the night’s fading moonlight
and thought: click click click.

Matches

 by Kayla Atherton

We don’t even know any
more, the names of the bones
in our hands, the Latin
word for skyline, if such a
word exists(ted) at all.

How we say take
a lover, recycle those cans,
and still; need nothing.
Touch no one’s hand.
Rucker. Go on and go
if you will. The unlit
end of a match. The night
time is much more quiet.
What little noises we make. I
think I make them at myself.
I wish (so much) to please
yourearswithnoise.
I don’t know how to say
it any other way: my love
some days seems to be end
less.

St. Patrick’s Day

 by Andrew James Weatherhead

Dissection

 by Katie Blakely

Oh you
   have the greatest yawn
   and the greatest sneeze.
I would love to live
inside your lymph nodes.
And you could not
possibly realize the power
of your hypnotic, fat face.
And how I dream of you.
And how I wake to dreamsounds.

That birthmark
on your inner thigh—
   more like a cloud
   it distracted me;
   I paid less attention to your dick.
   Sorry.
   I really do love the little
things in life, like your voice (monotonous).
Like your gait, the way you hate me.

Our love is repetition our
love is cruel, boring!—
like stealing legs off a spider, one by one.

We Were Like

 by Vanessa Victoria Volpe

three days asleep with boots on
that kind of stilt, or heaps of salt in your mouth

everything was little milk mist

stunted like bonsai trees
and as fragile
or foolish.

Lines of White

 by Marcine Miller

Often we sat in the dappled room

swabbed with cotton light

lace curtains blowing as we

chewed on apricots.

Outside the birds dug in the garden

the butterflies silently forgot themselves.

Lines of White¹

 by Ashley Imery-Garcia

Someone once told me it’s like being inside a giant nopal². Where everything is crisp and green and the world’s walls wrap around you like cool blankets. Being una niña sordita³ is not that bad when you are in a nopal—your sharp thorns keep the sound out, because you know Señor Sonido⁴ is a coward. Sound is nothing like sight, because you see their ears, open wide like the leaves of an elephant ear plant, and wonder how they can concentrate with all the noise.

When someone is boring, you close your eyes and open them again. Your body is the light switch that turns the world on and off. You are allowing them to be boring. Nobody else needs to know that this little deaf girl lives in un nopalito⁵. They’ll want to cut you open and heal their burns and bruises with a poultice made from your home. Todos heridos⁶. It is better to stay how you are than to be like them. They are all injured from the words of their brothers.

Don’t be alarmed. They can’t hurt you. The only thing you should be worried about now is waking up to find that the sticky green insides of the nopal have left your ears and you have a headache from realizing how loud you sound when you cry.

¹ Little Cacti
² cactus
³ a little deaf girl
⁴ Mister Sound
⁵ a little cactus
⁶ They all hurt

love me the description exactly

  by Jake Fournier

the immense loneliness above a discarded train ticket to southern
Jersey raises two of the ticket’s whitened corners. it’s not the first
feeling within or around an object to command the love of the
description exactly, but the upward lift lends the scrap a special
yearning. how much like a very flat man, his arms upraised, his mind reduced by homesickness to only offer nominative signs of his
hometown and his home state? “remember—” he says, “you don’t
have to. you sure as hell don’t have to.”