Category: Issue 34

ISSUE 34

POETRY TWO POEMS by Caitlyn Klum TWO POEMS by Rajiv Mohabir TWO POEMS by Sebastian Paramo SELF-PORTRAIT AS THE LAST LINGERING PETAL ON A CHERRY BLOSSOM by Anthony Thomas Lombardi BONE ATLAS by Allison Zhang HOLLYWOOD FOREVER CEMETERY by Hannah V Warren GHAZAL OF BORROWED GODS: A CENTO by Laura A. Ring DAY 559 by…
FOUR POEMS by Marie Lundquist, translated from the Swedish by Malena Mörling

What do we do with what we lack? A cleft palate weakness, a harmony,a sibling with whom to share ourselves. Quick and quarreling the rainfalls on memories no one is polishing. A few remain, hidden as if insecrecy. New names ring over the graves, mute and soft likemoss-mouths. …
THE HEART OF A SIREN by Margo Rejmer, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

From the recent collection The Burden of Skin. The sea was groaning like a wounded beast. Is the sea hungry? Or thirsty? Is it afraid? Dawn was slipping through holes in the thin curtains. Lying in bed, Enriko began to make out the contours of objects. He listened to the sea. It was calling…
THREE POEMS by Bejan Matur, translated from the Turkish by Nell Wright

No spring The Judas-trees have bloomedwe’re mourning againno springno countryand blood everywhere. When kissing the earth They talked about a cavalry girlwalking. Tenacitycrossing valleys, mountains.Saying as she goes,how much I believedhow bound I was.Foremost when climbingmountains and valleys,kissing the earth with a breathno one knows.As if the mountains were beginning for the first…
SPLIT UNIT by Ryan Bender-Murphy

For so long, the first thing I’d see in the morning was Gabby, her head against the pillow, and it was enough to complete the day. I didn’t need to look at anyone else or go anywhere else; I could simply go back to sleep. But whenever I woke and saw her, I thought I…
ONCE, THERE WAS HOME, by Karla Hirsch

once, there was time, there were moments that made up your life, there were hours and minutes, a morning’s routine, the bitter coffee you brewed in the copper pot you had longer than you could remember, mixed the hot liquid with sugar and spices, let it fill you awake to prepare you to journey to…
DIMINUTIVES by Gabriela Valencia

Like most divine relics I own, I have no memory of where my keychain came from. Was it college, high school, earlier than that? Joined in a loop to my home, my shed, my office, is a tarnished pewter scroll with a miniature relief of the Antigua Basilica de Guadalupe, windows tiny dashes below its…
SYRINX by Alison Mandaville

After five years it’s a vague harassment, your name in a stranger’s mouth, my ear, a soft punch up from the gurney. Still— slight birds wake me with such repetitions: the branch point adjustment of throat valves, labia in tension, not warm, not cold-blooded. A liquid resonation, two resonations, a final exhalation of atmosphere.…
90% DARK by Dina Folgia

The earth did not take me when I was nine, and I hated the earth for it. Each time I came to the place where the lake met the park and pressed my back into the soggy grooves at the boat launch, I flattened and flattened. When I couldn’t sink any lower into the…
DAY 559 by Kim Jensen

If you hit the snooze you’ll have a little longer to live in the body of a wolf to gnaw at a bone in the woods parading the entrails back to the den you’ll have more time to be a nobody an unwanted wallflower wearing not even half a dress a few more minutes to…
GHAZAL OF BORROWED GODS: A CENTO* by Laura A. Ring

Her funeral filled the road. O it is the old old myth. Gone by many names. Trust: I am no God. A chapel has fallen into ruins. I believe in the devil. Worse, that there are no gods. Outside, one statue keeps its head. The temple roof. Stand and remember its gods. My dead sisters…
BONE ATLAS by Allison Zhang

Seventeen pounds— the gospel weight of a skeleton. Mine is lighter, I think. It whistles in the wind. The body, a country I was told not to settle— its borders or cities. I dreamed I was salt, crushed, dissolving in rain. The nurses said hydrate, singing it soft. But thirst is a clever animal—…