A Note on This Issue   Poetry Emma Bolden, The Liturgy of the Hours Edith Lidia Clare, [sorrow is real-er] Chris Crowder, God Does Everything Sandra Fees,  Antares in Winter Sky Elizabeth Galoozis, Nine of Pentacles Dariana Guerrero, Poem About My Rights Morgan Hamill, After Diagnosis // Act III Ian U. Lockaby, Ida the Storm… [Read More]

by Nikki Zambon He didn’t tell me his real name until we were already engaged 6 months. It happened on a road in the Atacama desert of Chile, the oldest desert on earth. We wagged our thumbs at the few cars that whizzed by. Hot earth lifted behind them, dust storms that swirled into our… [Read More]

by Brittany Micka-Foos We’re in the hospital again, me and my wayward womb. My daughter Nora, the birthday girl, was born four years ago. Once more, I wait and I watch the clock. The second hand slices through time—sick, sick, sick—a mean little knife. In a few hours, they will cut out a chunk of… [Read More]

by Ismael Santallines   In 1984, I went to prison. I wrote my fiancée, a young lady, fresh out of high school, who had really just begun to live. I asked her to find someone else to love, someone else with whom to plan a life. She responded, saying she loved me and would wait…. [Read More]

by Edith Lidia Clare after Albert Leung sorrow is real-er, like the moon; all we do in comparison is as illusory as mirror-glass, or trees: as anything a cloud of dust can light upon, heap softly over, be rinsed from. tonight, as this storm twists the trees, as roof & leaf sounds wrap the house,… [Read More]

by Hannah Seo I like to set unfocused eyes on the skyline, render every manmade thing invisible, imagine bodies separated by feet of empty air, stories high— asleep and suspended, or climbing increments of ether, hovering stacked and facing every which way gaze fixed a few feet ahead mesmerized by something that does not exist…. [Read More]

by Shaun T. Griffin   Ten years ago an Iraqi Vet walked into my poetry workshop at the prison.  Here’s one version of how it might have saved his life and brought us—soldier and teacher—together.  Bear with me:  this might sound like fiction—but it was an ornery fiction that ripples through us still.  Let’s say… [Read More]

by Nic Anstett When Anya arrives at a new town, she searches the mom-and-pop stores first. She knows that their pickings will be slim. Before the collapse the chances of a two-story house converted into a downtown pharmacy carrying spiro, estradiol, or progesterone was unlikely. Now it is near impossible. She keeps her expectations low… [Read More]

by Allison Grace Myers From the beginning, you created my heaviness and my easiness. Before you, my daughter (never known, never named, at least not by me), my shape was slippery, a cross too light to bear, an empty vol-au-vent—that flaky buttery pastry filled with vegetable or meat or maybe fish, on the menu at… [Read More]

by Robert Herbst Sliding gravel, clatter of falling rocks, a fine mist of red dust. When the man glanced back, the boy was sitting on the ground, examining a fresh wound on his knee. The boy frowned in concentration, his mouth ajar. He traced a finger along the trickle of blood, brought it to his… [Read More]

by Michelle Thomas Madison was a new student in the Detroit Waldorf school’s second grade, a class spoiled by three bad girls.  Nikola! Emily! Beth! Teachers usually hollered their names. But the bad girls kept right on balancing on the log-fence that surrounded the playground, deaf as cats. Or tipping slinkies down the stairs two… [Read More]

by Shaun T. Griffin for Greg Having served seven years before the cancer came, the tattoos scrawled up your broken wrist, no room for the dark survey of this grubbing art. Drummer who didn’t believe he could be hurt— you symbolized what the other men wanted: freedom between the lines. Hard to chain those words… [Read More]