Two Texts from Apostasy by Katy Mongeau
I fell asleep with our innards like a long sentimental rope. The white pillar holding all of this up has a halo. You can be ruined but not empty. You can be a temple but not empty. You can be a ruin but not nothing, no... Read More
Paris by Laurie Stone
We did not communicate again. Now he is the age I was when we met, and I am the age Gardner was when he died. Sometimes it comes into my thoughts that I will die this year, too. There is something we feel we are supposed to give back, like feeding a body to the... Read More
A Missing Suspiria de Profundis by Matt Schumacher
DEAR ______________, I hereby bequeath you the most frustrating case of my career, the baffling phantom, absurd goblin, and born wanderer of alleyways known as Thomas De Quincey. This De Quincey, famously laudanum-laced poet, is almost impossible to track, a slithering enigma, whose escape routes multiply everywhere he turns... Read More
The Cliff’s Edge by Evan Lavender-Smith
That she will fall from the cliff’s edge. That her son’s sweaty hand will slip from her grasp and her son will fall from the cliff’s edge. That her outstretched fingers will fail to catch onto her daughter’s onesie as her daughter waddles out past the cliff’s edge. That her flabby biceps won’t support her... Read More
One Poem by Scott Jacobs
the half of me you held was the dark radar feeling through the blur of how we are now electric that one time you tangled into me / like the slaughter of an animal in water turning the screws out of the hinges as the darkness of death reveals itself as freedom... Read More
Two Poems by K. Thomas Kahn
would that there were endless ink the skyscraper / flame reflected in the Hudson as the poem appears there / I keep you to one side the river on the other / words just copy to you padding your billfolds so that / on holiday you miss a sunset meet a deadline... Read More
An Archaeology of Holes by Stacy Hardy
A hole has so many enemies. I watch the weather closely, every pattern, every warning. Rain forms and drops. The soil is sodden and slippery. At night the wind blows. I fear avalanches... Read More
The Event Still to Come by David Peak
Transposition: A series of cavernous, empty spaces at the end of a winding road. Floor-to-ceiling windows. Walls covered with portraiture: families, children, hands and feet. Wood paneling. Molded ceilings. Various arrangements of tarnished silver. Significant water damage. Black mold. A staircase that leads nowhere... Read More
Don’t Let This Happen to You by Harry Leeds
The funeral is over and they’ve almost finished stuffing their craws with water, smoked fish, that good, black bread so cheap but these days rare. Jowls filled with water, bubbling to show off the prowess developed over decades, into middle age, of making unpleasant shapes and noises with their faces... Read More
Dalalæða by Iris Moulton
I have a houseplant. His name is Thor. I wanted to spell it the Icelandic way—Þór—with that impossible little thorn, that jaunty laminal voiceless alveolar non-sibilant fricative, but my boyfriend said it was too pretentious. He said medievalists have no business naming things, that we should make nothing new... Read More