My Glamorous Box by Vi Khi Nao
In Vegas, I live in a box. In a beautiful box for 4.5 months. And, it looks like this: / Where the light is miraculous. / There are radiations in my winter. My summer is skydiving. / I have been waking up in a cloud of fog. This weightlessness that is filled with liquid deterrent... Read More
Fragments from Moon Ring by Annie Le Brun, translated from French by Alicen Weida
Children of this century, avert your gaze. Lips are no longer on every word. Words climb pell-mell onto the backs of things. And things, wandering in the desert of their own erosion, seek to bribe our bones, the uncertain keepers of a fortified mirage... Read More
Six Prose Poems by Alistair McCartney
When I die, my memory—or do I mean your memory of me?—will dissolve like the Platonic (abstract) form of a cube of sugar in a cup of tea, like the post-abstract expressionist (Neoplatonic) form of the corpse of a boy in a hot pink ceramic tub of hydrochloric acid, correction: sodium hydroxide... Read More
Two Poems by Sawako Nakayasu
Girl F’s the getting, and tiredness is the reference, and the other is girled by their initials. There’s the decisive finding, that is, the name-outer, the girl-eacher, the come what may, but there are also some extremely marching shes, which makes Girl J say very well why there was so much Hi, name, fuck, of... Read More
Two Prose Poems by Michael Trocchia
He left the shovel out back, leaning against the elm; he left his radio on, tuned to a static sense of time, a pair of wet boots at the pedals of the piano, and his wool cloak, stained with wild game, draped carefully across the keys, as if to warm the heart of a winter... Read More
Three Poems by Gail Hanlon
After drones became the size of hummingbirds (and even the size of a grain of dust, it was rumored), we started to reevaluate the whole idea of shame. It was a sort of Garden of Eden scenario. But we could no longer cover ourselves. No longer seek cover... Read More
Cognoscenti In a Room Hung with Pictures by Benjamin K. Rice
The cruelty of an image is that it excites us toward an anticipation that it can’t fulfill. It gives by taking away. Though, when Cotán gives me an image of fruit, he does not take away from me any particular instance of pear or pomegranate—instead, he takes away the whole idea of fruit... Read More
Excerpt from Coil by Lou Pam Dick
If to start one step ahead, wrong step, the nix is a beginning. I wore my stairs around my neck, therefore I choke. Please be legible. What time is it? The door keeps opening. My protector gets all wet. I shout, I am my bodyguard! I whisper it inside me. Bare the neck of the... Read More
Excerpts from My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, translated from French by Rainer J. Hanshe
Love can be derived from a generous feeling: the taste for prostitution; but it is soon corrupted by the taste for property. Love wants to abandon itself, to confound itself with its victim, as the conqueror with the vanquished, & yet preserve the privileges of the conqueror...
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Lessons by Sean Kilpatrick
You’re born, someone sticks an unfolded paperclip into the meat of your eye, / you adjust to your condition, your conditions adjust you, you die horribly. / Like stubbing a cigarette out on your cheek when what you need is to be bathed in napalm... Read More