Category: Issue 30

my mother’s eyes came to brush my head      my mother’s eyes came to brush my head  they said, grow up well wear clothes that fit but time passed just by eating, sleeping the future unfurled a denser smokescreen I also wanted a fine pair of rainboots bright enough to draw the eye of…

Numbers Upon Numbers   It’s a rehearsal for the end of the world, I told myself. But it has been the end of many worlds. They say two hundred died yesterday. They say that at the end of this day three hundred will have been, four hundred may be gone tomorrow. They talk about numbers…

     for Amy Do you capitalize phobias? Do you capitalize job titles when they’re attached to people? You capitalize the shorthand of a degree but not the degree spelled out. At my job we leave out the Oxford Comma, which sometimes gets us into trouble when it comes to clarity and always gets us into trouble…

Untitled 1. but last night, a moth kissed my forehead while i slept—         & its wings were soft         & so my dreams were softened. dreams of silverfish & paper chewed to pulp.         dreams of turning         the pillow over. 2.…

Lights Collapsing in the Tunnel We Go So Fast Through   The halogen flashes we go fast We go and go and still we are not next to each other  We’ve been all over the country together and every place we’re farther from us   I wish love were obvious and not this painful twig…

Words in the genocide   There are no words for this, we repeat. I think about this instead of the dead. The brain matter. The reddened kids. There have never been more words. In English, and Arabic: a thousand novels, a hundred thousand poems, decades of song, laws days-long, a thesis stack that can reach…

Oversight   It was December and the orange leaves of the water oak all faced the ground identically, as of hawks. I held vigil over a thousand living mice. There were rainbowed braids of wire and oil derricks behind the paintings in the museum. I curled my tail around my body—its uneven distribution among the…

An Abundance of Caution    Suddenly the flight attendants were in their parkas.  They put the accentless pilot on the PA to inform us of the emergency.  When we landed the ladder trucks were there to greet us. The fleet of ambulances shuttled back  to their hangars with silent flashing lights  that were impossible not…

  It’s hard having been a plague, all swarm and plunder: nobody texts you to make plans  for happy hour, nobody asks  if you’ve had a good day or if you fidget from hunger.  Even plagues desire company  from time to time. In retirement from my status as a plague  of locusts, I am now…

                                                         the dream that my doorwon’t lock                         & my patient is dying                                                              I only studiedbio in college                                      dropped chem                 a night class  the phone rings it’s my sister the doctor                                                                            she wonders                                          what to do  about mamá                          ten years dead this October                                                            has cancer what optionsdo we have in the U.S. alone, 1,132,206 people have…

The distorted cat will follow under the door,  Above the rug, and float like a scent  You’ve never smelled  Though sure that others smell it too.  It’s sweet. It had eaten the grass,  Had a sore throat, and lied flat, Like a thick towel on the bed Where you are headed sick, Not a stray,…

              My great-grandfather was named Martin and when he got to a certain age—somewhere after sixty but no one can say for sure now—he had to be locked up in the back bedroom of the house. He was mean and he would yell and beat on people. Martin died…