by Jieyan Wang my last name dwells in my throat. 汪, meaning a lot of water. enough to drown myself with myself. we’re cold my body says to me far too cold. * the hairs behind my ears are always raised. they are waiting for a flower petal. what falls & never forgets. belonging lives… [Read More]

by Jieyan Wang Qu Yuan (340-278 BCE): an ancient Chinese poet, drowned himself in the Miluo River after the capture of his country’s capital. in summer, your country falls & you’re left with nothing but koi fish & sunlit insomnia miluo: the quietest tributary, the off-cut you cast yourself into, ripples expanding into rhymes one… [Read More]

The priest          talks of gardens but doesn’t grow fruit. Oh, the mess     song birds make. Someday they will go to seed, sprout,               and shoot. A white lab mouse released into the woods doesn’t have the sense to run.            Instinct… [Read More]

by Edward Mayes   We know it would please us to stop with The surceases, if they could ever really Stop, such as the day we took away The spittoons but left the jungle gym, Healthy, wealthy et cetera, as if our life Had the ability to be an excerpt from A larger life, so… [Read More]

by Edward Mayes   The question is how can you get the temporary To last longer, finger food, ur-language scrawled On an original wall, everyone read it, everyone Jumped into the first fire, those who have Forgotten how to say the rosary in the rose Garden, or in the orto where the apples are Applauding the oranges… [Read More]

by Jenny Hykes Jiang   I. His mother’s voice crackles on NPR. Driving Luke to high school before it stopped we hear her mourn her son, Wen Liang, doctor who first saw what’s now named COVID-19 unattached to place/people we can harm. He had a son, five, a baby coming. I stop listening at five,… [Read More]

by Jennifer H. Dracos-Tice   Six years old, hair streaming, you pointed your toes toward the undersides of maples branching through powerlines looping over the school yard. You rose from your seat, thumped on the downswing, pulled the chains, leaned into the next up-swerve. Did you kick your saddle shoes into the littered leaves, did… [Read More]

by Jose Hernandez Diaz   I found a 19th century golden telescope in the attic of an old house I bought to fix up. The house was located downtown, by the lake. The golden telescope was covered in an old cardboard box with spider webs. Written on the box was the phrase, “The Stars Are… [Read More]

by Nancy Chen Long -inspired by @wrecked.archive by Patty Paine     Nancy Chen Long is the author of Wider than the Sky (Diode Editions, 2020), which was selected for the Diode Editions Book Award, and Light into Bodies (University of Tampa Press, 2017), which won the Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. Her work has… [Read More]

  Editor’s Note: In the year when movie theaters closed, performances were canceled, and human interaction was hard to come by (or impossible to escape), a year of sickness, uncertainty, outrage, anxiety, and unrest, who in possession of a TV didn’t turn it on for a little solace? Witness’s “As Seen on TV” issue asks… [Read More]