Five Poems by Ted Dodson
I would look away / Into the room’s silent reception / But as my character recedes I tire of looking at all. / The world has ended. Your resurrection eyes / Come across this second to last line—you / Can be assured I have read this already...
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Five Poems by Lindsay Remee Ahl
what seemed solid, the brick building we lived in, / the street corner I waited on to hold my child’s hand— / vanished in a breath / night all around, rain falling, I hear a crack— / a tree plummets to the road right before me / but I’m still standing as though / all... Read More
EEG by Engram Wilkinson
Procedures exhausted / before hands emulsify / that last grief into effective / managerial utterances. / Constant monitoring, / lines of electrodes / extending into each / lengthening present / itching every universe / with the newest ideation... Read More
Two Poems by Vi Khi Nao
The eloquent lungs of us twins are piled / upon one another. Mother, your / concealed nipples are the tents that the / feet of our existence step on. / I hope our breathing doesn’t temporarily / upset your evening inside the tumescent / hide. This oblivion. This sublime maternal / gesture. Coming from you... Read More
Excerpts from My Heart Laid Bare by Charles Baudelaire, trans. 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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The Appetite Enormous by Armando Jaramillo Garcia
I trust in killing / Like one of many minor gods / Or some lesser despot in the drag of his predecessor / It’s the scale that interests me / Plagues wars and their numbers / Are quite boring compared to the care with which / One can practice the precise destruction of a single... Read More
Three Poems by Sharron Hass, trans. from Hebrew by Tsipi Keller
Honestly, the tapping of feet and the clatter of silverware / will hush in me the great loss. When you leave the house / will be filled with the glory of exhaustion to mean: / Did I have the strength to withstand the severity of visions, / or is this fatigue the oblation to the... Read More
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
The Teaser of a Full Year of Yesterday’s Life by Douglas Piccinnini
Music. Order. Tenderness. Without brutality yet instructed by an emptying / cause for a word like “love” unrefined / Unrefined, where I too fit approximately so. Who made you simple— / pure as an organ that way / In a crisis, in a vision, in an act of desperation to foment the banal—to say /... Read More
Three Poems by Ivonne Gordon Carrera, trans. from Spanish by Cindy Rinne
A secret lodges itself in the ellipsis. / The dream eclipses my body into yours. / The suns multiply themselves in thousands of eyelids. / Green disguises us as fluid dreams. / We suspend from the lung of the wind. / The burnt stone, our witness, blesses the sacredness / of our name... Read More