Dana FangLAST SUMMER AT SUMMERLAND I When she trimmed the holly, when she trellised each lilac, her knuckles were starchy ...

In one town, an apricot held in the mouth of a rabbit like a swollen tongue. In another, a pear ...

Poul Lynggaard DamgaardDEAR CITY I want to tell about the gap between houses and the way the windows are beyond ...

When you don’t know what to expect you’re almost always expecting something, even if you’re mistaken, as when you expect ...

I could be more perceptive. Beneath me, 750 ft., my wife is thinking. I fool no one. My sweater is ...

The white car that lives in the white of the eye comes out of the sun behind the line of ...

An animal, let’s say my dog, has issues with the end of the world. She’s lined the back porch in ...

As of lately you said you have been strangely strange—a bit besides yourself, which you noticed when you take walk ...

Green stripes only. No round, less square, don’t forget orange grapes. Stem-plant that table, soldier! Christ, where’s a pinstripe umbrella ...

I caught you staring at that great Midwestern sunset sewn together with photons from the last six months in the ...

Hunger was secret—hump on the back, the something else, the body insisting that it was present. Child head and child ...

David CallanTHE ANT LIEUTENANT TELLS ME OF HIS RETURN Black soil collapsing onto rock. Beetles with shining blue backs humming ...

No kissing, though we both know that we want to. You show up at my house wearing the exact same ...

Forty millennia, and more, originating worlds, occasioning wines, wedges, plunder, and ( let’s guess, ) recovered and glassed, eyes around ...

Wild blackberry bramble all along the edge. Himalaya? Or Cutleaf? Or Pacific? Thimbleberry? Let me try again, what net? We ...

I've decided it's pigeons, not squirrels or worse, responsible for the ruckus— pigeons and some kind of metal fencing, chain ...

Numbing    forgiveness-salve slathered on eyes     damned eyes, to sit across from this              man praised for handling his bossy woman   ...

Leaning like a chiaroscuro, a man outside a bodega says, You only get one mother. I want my skin to ...

I. Every night, we listen to his favorite songs. The kind of music you want to hear when your country ...

Dip and paddle, bloom. A dragonfly barrels and darts. Hot afternoon balm rolls across the pond. The pending night wicks ...

Morning with Cane Corsos Two black dogs are playing on a hill / in front of my grandmother’s church. Majestic ...

We saw two barefoot boys walking down the double yellow lines, both holding their crotches in a two-hand grip, playing ...

Fist above foothold, stay invisible; don't open your mouth and waste words on statues that may or may not love ...

Roy WhiteTHE DAMAGE IS THE TRUTH Ice on the stairs, brief flight, pain and an impossible angle. A minute’s blindness, ...

How the body performs a blockade: I’m not here. Everyone wants to prove they can fight a tank. The Japanese ...

The stage curtain of my dreams needs an alteration. Ka-Pow! Ambient billiard balls. “It’s always broccoli with you.” And it ...

* You no longer bathe though a cold rain flows through one arm ...

want to be that featureless dove tucked in the saint's armpit. I want to nest where his hand presses me ...

Temporal weariness bought many women their milk,on condition that they would promise onlya small thing, some silent iniquity. They shuttheir ...

Otto, Otto everywhere. That was how I felt for a while, biting into wax fruit, crafting crusades in miniature, many ...

Born with multiple spinal malformations. Missing ribs on the left side—only flesh to guard the collapsed lung. One right lung ...

Instead of violence Instead of the trees Instead of the brier Instead of regulation Instead of music Instead of jail ...

the future is not Las Vegas yet here we are dying and newly alive glittering thunder dome of sweat ...

Tall A woman grows taller and taller till she looms above her friends, brushes her head on door frames, grows ...

My sight breaks up; orange rivulets drop down my eye; against my chest, a pain thwacks and clocks. I am ...

THE TOWER IN OUR CITY is always visible, no matter where we are, it doesn’t even matter what we’re looking ...

No one bothered to tip me back into my own image. Now, I’ve got one eye seeing forever thru an ...

I realize I do not wish to fall to the bottom of a well. With no one to hear my ...

The ridiculous dissatisfaction with good fortune begins in shade, when every bit of luck pops up like a harlequin jammed ...

For a time I felt harmonious and whole, if you know what I mean. Ringing bells alone could make a ...

you can’t hold your man                  you can’t hit a jet going six hundred miles per hour with a .50 calibre ...

The apocalypse goes to Stonehenge during the summer solstice and sings Joni Mitchell’s Blue while tripping on shrooms The apocalypse ...

perched on spindles of the branching spring the wren with conspicuous brow, the buff sparrow with its white appetite, ravishing ...

This was his third story, the one after the one about dinosaurs turning to glue and the ship trapped in ...

Heather HolmesTERMS AND CONDITIONS one month I am in philadelphia reading the Andrew Durbin book that describes this club The ...

Light Years: plurisy, renewed nostalgia for each moment as it goes, the dream returning as it’s escaping. / His wife’s ...

Kimberly Grabowski StrayerTHE REST I slept with a kitchen knife in my bedside table as a little girl, I don’t ...

Whilst I was human I walked around with glitter in my eye I wrote it down I believed in magic ...

In the sour aurora borealis of our political reveries every bruise dives together in a drink of lead paint pouring ...

Once there was a clementine when I couldn’t speak and a late afternoon on the steps in the sun when ...

Those that whispered stay in the corners unadorned, protecting their corners, pissing in their corners, un- willing to dance or ...

Once I was so lonely, I spent all night talking to an android, her pursed lips whispering thick as a ...

Twelve hours under the flood the putrid silt sacked every staging and support, the poplar plank with its larch cross-sections, ...

Then it’s three years since—since displacement then it’s flesh on foil and planks spilling out oilcloth remnants—then we are formless, ...

Holy men pitched tents on my grandmother’s farm land. They trickled into 1975 fed by an ancient spring, while everyone ...

Khaleel GhebaGIANT POSSUM DRAWS CROWD IN NICETOWN From the west, a swell arrives with pomp, its wet regalia slaps my ...

His smile is a Spanish quarter, lopsides us down Campania street inclines, dodging grime bullets. Cerussite silk plunges down to ...

Scrapped leaves, the orange the gold the crimson, scratch along, clump, stop. Crumble. Rot., Blow off where it all blows ...

They did not believe us at the station. The voices weighing us as we stood naked in the south wind, ...

Patricia Hartlandwhere we come from tiny springs meet the red red sand the sea we built our little huts of ...

“Daddy, can I watch you make?” I was following my father down our long hallway to the bathroom, pulling the ...

ANATOMY OF A MONARCA by Antonio Lopez Emerging from the quilted cocoon of the brown monarcas is an infant who ...

Bloody Mary was neither skull nor naked bone. .............Sister of blood and flesh they said your name 3 times, .............walked ...

A blocked valve facilitates prayer. A blocked airway inspires a sudden reinvestment in the communicative powers of miming. A blocked ...

those various yellows, golden-rods, butter-fat, chrysanthemum wax-wings ..sprung from thin etchings of faith, is it just random— ....the rabbit/sleeve disguised: ...

moves in gravelly time, so that the words I say here have been said before, and my car is covered ...

In the first motion, I wrapped everything in newspaper, emptied glass stones from the bottoms of fishbowls, recycled the recyclables, ...

The world, I never thought, was worth its wake In my image alone, kicking storms about itself Like me, a ...

In the silver heart of everything there is a constant quivering. We think the sky is boneless only because it ...

There is a ceremonial volley over a grave I climb on the branch of an olive tree to peep at ...

It has nothing to do with the banjo –this chair aches for wheels that will rust, wobble the way riverbeds ...

A Civil War cannonball dug from a field near Petersburg now props open the door. He shows me in. The ...

We knew without speaking your left eye open just a crack caught between moans and a gasp. I toss in ...

The hair the doctors cut to clear from underneath the stitches, long and light, marbled my black shirt. As with ...

What would a God expect, anticipate. And what, besides endurance or equation, what, besides sentence, metaphor, should God, wearing a ...

John Sibley WilliamsTHE CHILDREN Back when play carried less grief, our darkness ruined only a half-acre or so of the ...

After the Washing of the Feet, an old woman gets up. She reaches into a basket. Takes out a couple ...

Propriety A weapon—an assemblage that knifes through this lattice of unspoken tales; this assurance that no one would force open ...

at park's edge a storm appeared returning from its tour of Vienna, and the car sped away in dust devils, ...

Mars HuWHAT MATTERS IS OUR HANDS: after Charlottesville: anti-racism protesters It's not that your mother was afraid herself, or of ...

thin a little ice for me but keep the slip melt slouches melt-ward and it's regular bad is it time ...

Daryl SznyterTHE MORNING AFTER ANOTHER COMING-OF-AGE FILM I dream of a man cutting into my stomach and you're observing it ...

Martha ZweigUNDERSONG Dawn: eight neighborhood bullies congregate spoiling to tweak a perfect day. They stalk tinfoil glints in the gutter ...

Cliff SaundersCOLONIZING THE WORLD i. The walking stick: an unlikely mast a bit long-in-the-tooth. ii. Good news: red doors beckon ...

For three nights we watched Vietnam documentaries, mom slipping into the TV, the TV blooming the blossom of '68 back ...

Cars backed up to where the geraniums manned the empty lifeboats in the square, we went to see the grounded ...

Stuti PachisiaMIXED MEDIUM ART Scenery 1: The sky is a permanent state of dawn, or dusk, if you will, and ...

Curtains checked for anthrax, podium erected. The balloons will fall to the floor if elected. The ass-groper, interloper, and false ...

He doesn't notice the desert. The smell of the dead rising, birds or fish, saltwater feeding on air or salt ...

I wear my love for foxgloves on my digits, nibble on each to slow the fibrillations ...

Daddy’s Pet fucking chrissakes Slewfoot conglomerates banging eachother Brock Road puddle son of a bitch Mongrel Palmer light the east ...

In the ground, the real never of a boy How a couple recovers I do not know Whose heart Agony ...

We gave ourselves matching haircuts but only temple rye cures. Temper your dog but only scaremongering ignites crows. Shared the ...

Sunlight sealed behind cirrus behemoths, I am deep in left field. Suited up in stripes, I wait for something to ...

don’t know what was wrong with the person who did this, but I met my wife when this was a ...

On the eve .....of never forgetting.....I still want to run away.....from you together..... or not run..... but bite or register ...

If I could be anywhere in the Fall it would be Korea walking rubberized pavement to the top of Namsan ...

He taught me how to bend their arms so they stayed. To solder them solid with lead and resin, perfect ...

When coarse human events become necessary, people dissolve, a gloom powers profit, the claws of paper and paper’s God hold ...

Some still see the shadow of the earth’s other moon, a ghost satellite over a ghost tide before one light ...