Contents:

Fall Factor

 by Sara M. Evangelista

In the morning
we inhale rock
candy
and star
dust

I pinch the earth between my fingers wipe asteroids
from my eyes

There’s dirt
on your face can you
taste it?

Forgive Me, Little Myth

 by Jordana Weiner

Sunday

 by Abby Kosisko

Little citron pearls strung around her neck,
sulphur baby carrots enameled like rotten teeth.

Letters from Japan, Kyoto 1

 by Thomas Hartwell

It is raining in Kyoto too, less consistently
than Osaka but it is colder and drier.
My clothes are not sticking to my spine.

There are no more falling drops at the steps
leading up to Kiyomizu-dera. The ground still slicks
beneath my feet so I climb slowly.

The temple is large, built nail-less over the hillside.
Haruna tells me if I survive the jump from its stage
my wish will be granted. I would rather just pray.

In the main hall I say a prayer for you.
I strike the iron bowl and it bellows, shrieks against
the mountains then settles over us and Kyoto.

From the mountains a shatter of crows
bursts from the woods. They swarm me
and the bowl, cawing spells and pecking my hair.

The bowl is vibrating still, it rumbles and cries,
resonating a thousand mallet strikes at once.
The temple reverberates with it.

Four hundred years of wood fractures
around me. I tumble down the hillside
in an avalanche of pillars and support beams.

I am not crushed by the rubble but buried.
The only light shining directly into my eye,
Otowa waterfall cascading into my mouth.

Brief History of Autumn

 by Jordana Weiner

I am not an animal anymore because
time is cream filling.

I grow out of my paws. Learn to cook.
strap an apron on my waist, chop, chop.

Imagine: everything that has ever been
or ever will be
like a small gourd blooming
in fast forward.
It twisting o³ its vine, hitting dirt,
bursting. Deer licking up its pieces
their small and sinewy
tongues.

If one day we find out that all of the universe is
busted orange fruit, well I think we will still
keep philosophy.

Like how the first man on the moon
just wants to go back and
wipe away his footprints.

Sake off West Crescent Boulevard

 by Danielle Bergere

fat and coral, cut into slivers
you were caught from the wild
raised in the ocean

I eat your soft, fleshy body
lined with white tender streaks
the citrus coldness of you, raw

thinking of the silvery skin
you lost to savage acts
and your dead eye, gleaming

Marijuana doesn’t cause cancer

 by Henry Hsiao

Miners sent a canary
down
my throat
and into
my chest.
It did not survive.

Rhubarb Pie

 by Andrés González

She smiles.
She reeks of eggplants and the
Perfume type that don’t come cheap.
She don’t sit across,
Prefers aside,
Thinks periphery’s more confessional.
Thinks crying is “kitsch,”
Holds quarantined lands under
Crossed arms.
Talks like a red onion
Drowned in sugarcane.
Wonders whether the next
Brandy-hot shadow will choose to
Peel layer by layer,
Or swallow the whole of her,
Forget to chew:
Think how that would taste
Going down.

In the Well

 by Amy Moore

I have no idea what I am touching

grief

I don’t know what that is.
Extending my first finger towards my uncle

who is holding his teacup like
a boulder;
who is sitting stiff on his chair.
His daughter is resting her hand on her breast
looking up, fish-eyed, thrumming with
new knowledge.
His wife stands behind him
rests her thumb pad on his neck.
His son stares at the potted fern.
The wind chime flashes white
over all of us.

I stand up. Everyone, I say,
    last night I changed under my skin.
    Like a bright fish dressed.
    Every interstitial bubble
    every curve of my intestines,
    made precise.
    After I had sex with a new man,
    he lifted my leg onto his lap
    and slipped his sock over my foot
    slowly.

I hold my hands out for my uncle
and he cups his pile of brand new pennies,
all pulsing orange breath.
Eyes heavy at his feet
he’s pouring them into my palms
each making the sound
of a fish splashing
in a wet, dark well.

this won't fit on an appointment form

 Susannah Perkins

Callum calls me while trying to make it home.
It’s frustrating he says our bodies
aren’t even good at being bodies. I see
a happy lesbian couple on the street
and I am dazzled by their beauty; afterwards
I realize one of them was a celebrity but
that seems to me less remarkable
than the fact of their bright-red happiness. Do you know
I used to eat paper? Balled-up, tattooed
in song lyrics, chewy and white. I have no future
as someone with a usable body, a workable
heart. Even when you’re kissing me I am thinking
this is happening by mistake. Even when I’m happy
I am not. My happiness isn’t even good
at being happiness.

move to trash

 by Camille Renaud

when ur texting someone and
midway thru typing a long message
back you see that they’re typing so
you start typing as fast as u can bc
what u have to say pertains to that
thing they said up there and not
some new thing they’re gonna say
and you’re spelling things wrong and
autocorrect is fucking up so you
have to go back and fix everything
and then they send their message
totally changing the topic so you
have to reword your whole thing or
just delete it and write haha instead
so now it looks like you were typing
haha for 10 years while really you
were saying something poignant or
insightful or revealing and instead
they get this pithy mundane “haha”
which makes you think how the
hell are you ever going to make
anything let alone ur magnum
opus

Altar

 by Amy Moore

my pelvis on an old wood table
in an empty room.
each part labeled-
    the wings of ilia
    the sacroiliac joint
    the sacral promontory.
come see.

come test its weight in your palms
    tongue the hip socket
    nose the flared bones
come drop it to the floor
like a clerical collar
sliced from a priest’s neck.

Black Sun

 by Sara M. Evangelista

i who rule
came into focus
like a black sun
quiet
& broken
broken
& unsuitable for this
bed on earth

a raw yell full of
water
through my lens i see
a flap of hide
off its cheek
whale flesh
dark & sour

the silence
ended with groans
painful
groans