Confession by Martine Bellen
Who seeks an old poem? / A poem / long in the tooth / losing / its words? / Who seeks a poem / that forgets? / The poem / placed a post / in the help / wanted section / of the virtual paper... Read More
Three Texts by Phoebe Glick
I looked into the center of an abstract painting and saw my own face, painted by someone who cared for me deeply. You were on the fence about whether you wanted to fuck the painting or one day become the painting. I reached over and touched your hand. It was wet, and you held mine... Read More
The Third by Claire Donato
There is no sequitur in the previous sentence, I realize. I got carried away by the sound of her head falling on the floor. Subsequently, I picked up the shards and rearranged them into a distorted portrait, through which I perceive a foreboding sense of self... Read More
Five Poems from The Star-Spangled Brand by Marcelo Morales, trans. from Spanish by Kristin Dykstra
Freedom and solitude go together. / The hand is better at killing than the mind. / The way power steers truth and steers lies. / The way they steer your life. / From a place in the present, you choose the past. / You accept the tyranny of circumstance... Read More
Three Poems by Franz Werfel, trans. from German by James Reidel
The poison only masters life’s emptiness, / Food from sunlight requires its opposite. / God himself places this evil in our way / As a baser need of the soul’s well-being...
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Three Prose Poems by Sheila E. Murphy
Now I lay me dormant as a spot. The clock taps shoulder length and hairlines fracture plot. I think the story was a maze, and you, my inkblot, told the tale of me toute seule where I would whisper your soft name, the frame of it, the hemline brushing tile... Read More
Mom Is Dying by Michael Ruby
We have something we don’t want to know / A landing in our instability / A threshold in the taut pendulum / Without belaboring the ice / And transcendental opportunity / For a heavy eraser applied to a pointed object / The point lives between the ice and the solvent... Read More
Three Texts by Gabriel Blackwell
Fenollosa, whose invention was simultaneously Pound’s most intriguing and least faithful translation, writes that “no full sentence really completes a thought [because] motion leaks everywhere... Read More
Three Poems by Zoe Tuck
How do I write our way in without building a wall, a gate? Here I am looking for an answer from your words, forced instead by circumstances back into my inner resources... Read More