Category: Issue 10
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THREE POEMS by Jenny George
DEATH OF A CHILD This is how a child dies: little by little. His breath curdles. His hands soften, apricots heavy on their branches.
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TWO POEMS by Marlin M. Jenkins
DRINKING GAME When the pastor spits while sputtering any variation of God’s name.
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TWO POEMS by Tyree Daye
SAME OAKS, SAME YEAR My cousin kept me and his little brother saved me from our uncle’s pit bull, then spent seven years in prison for his set. Every other word he said was blood.
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HURT MUSIC by Melissa Cundieff-Pexa
The bell’s emptied space has no name. I would like to call it my never-born. I’m there and the metal clapper and bowl are asleep. My never-born is awake, very quiet. I don’t want to reach for him. I don’t want to fall from the rope’s fray or draw nothing from the naming. I call,…
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RAINY RIVER by Eric Lloyd Blix
They park fifty feet from shore, Nichols and his daughter, despite her quiet protests. “The river hasn’t changed,” he says, sipping Hamm’s, the last can of four he brought for the road. “It looks the god damn same.”
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ISSUE 10
Work by Jenny George, W. Todd Kaneko, Tariq al Haydar, Leslie Harrison, and more
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TWO POEMS by Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams
LETTER IN EXCHANGE FOR Painting all the spines of the books blue, for example. Tasting me so absolutely as to know the monsoon of my sickness. Licking my lips clean of disturbance while hunting for the trees I want at every window, that wanton green. What if, in reciprocation, you gave me every song you…
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TWO POEMS by Leslie Harrison
[No. 118] How snow and distance equal absence the page untouched the page a white blankness the way ink recedes from these cold vistas its absence a kind of reverence how the moon is also an absence untouched as if he knew it was beyond mere wood mere blade how burdened the humans are in…
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MISSION CREEP by Jeffrey Morgan
How a groove is a prayer for a needle and a hollow is a prayer for birds, how music fills a space and makes you aware of emptiness, somewhere my brother is not where my brother is supposed to be. I tell the sky how and the sky replies in sunlight on the river meaning…
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LETTER TO YASHA IN MY THIRD PERIOD AP LANG CLASS MORNING AFTER THAT GIRL SHE LIKES BLOCKED HER ON INSTAGRAM by Mamie Morgan
There must be something that can fix me, you say, but in sixteen years nothing has. Lexapro, Oleptro, Thiopropazate. Eighth grade, Hal Stoddard chased me into the Rosewood Lane cul-de-sac by the butt end of his BB gun yelling, C’mon piggypiggy, open up you whale, while I recited every word that had ever made me…
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CREATION by Gerardo Pacheco Matus
They made me with bones, white, yellow, brown & dusty bones, heavy & hollow, broken & shuttered, they made me with bones no one has ever claimed, bones no one will ever bury…