Love, unfold yourself like a flower unto spring. Let the sun cradle you when you ache for your mother’s arms. Do not weep when you trace your bloodlines but find only an empty picture frame hanging in your grandmother’s house.
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It must have got lost in the mail | Susannah Betts
The sweatshirt still smells musty at the third wash and my thong still in the corner of the laundromat floor where I left it. Does spandex decompose? I didn’t like the look of someone else’s blue detergent on my red so I couldn’t own the thong after I saw it. Thongs don’t get adopted though […]
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—moLt ShEd | Rebecca Y. Lee
Most mornings, I wake and imagine myself lizard— nails running over rust-gray puckerings, peeling centuries blood into dust when the old skin wears too ancient I never know if I’ll emerge— sloughed-off history showing soft new smooth, breathing fresh or when my mask will slip—reveal monster underneath: past deeds etched deep within each canyon crinkle If I […]
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3 Poems | Andrew Wetmore
Cancer We laid on our backs and pulled shapes from the sky like reading the letters out of porno magazines. You had all your vaccinations and went to Sunday school every Sunday. You memorized your catechism and realized you were witnessing an execution When I walk down the street widows throw signs warding against the […]
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Annual Well Woman Visit | Victoria Massie
I. My arms stretch to the heavens pre-destination lengthy torso stunted by chicken legs The nurse begged me stand tall; wall and back kissing; head and neck reconnecting inward like best-friend secrets. “Five and three quarters” It takes women in my family incessant earth-moon rotations for them to fall down permanently in love with the […]
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3 Poems | Kelsey Schmidt
conversely she was my saturday night my bathroom stall drug the cigarettes butts on my back porch. you are my sunday morning my lipstick stained coffee mug bleary-eyed kisses that taste like toothpaste left, right, you left again. i lost all desire to be your/china/doll your sixAM/hotelroom/smoke little bitch, don’t call me ring/voicemail/ring/hangup rinse, repeat. effloresce i am full […]
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3 Poems | Venus Crow
Home. Come home my love to gentle rains, where fire hearts breathe you in. walk among the feathered pines with me at your side. Be blessed by love’s tender touch swim with lost memories of days swiftly flown and scattered upon the breeze. We miss the sanctified song of your soul exalted among mere mortals. […]
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Majid | Maj al-Yasa
Majid from your wine-stained lips meem alif jiim daal م-ا-ج-د you print the letters on my palm and close my fist around the syllables. ت-ح-ب-ن-ش you love me like the Prophet –salaam– loved Fatima –beloved– and I love you as a brother. ت-ض-ح-ك you laugh. be my wife. و-ق-ف habibi, I […]
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2 Poems | Patricia P.
Futile Morbidity I imagine my funeral to have a punch bowl of regrets and scarcity of people the place would be drab, not much different than my own life my mother would burst into tears every second or so and my sister would be handing out tissues that would end up unused I hope the […]
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California | Lily Cigale
california did you forget scratching off your skin on the floor of your parents’ shower, home from a chilly vacation with a warm girl? a text at three am: “I’ve peeled all my skin off do you still love me? can you still love a mess of bloody muscle, viscous trails, teeth, teeth, teeth?? things […]
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Out of An Ant Hill | R.K. Gold
Out of ant hill, rolling over itself in unison with the white grains of sand was a green caterpillar. I’ve seen the desperate search for a home before. Reflecting off its eyes and down its cheeks hoping its tears will dampen the sand enough for a child to build him a castle. Only to have […]
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5 Poems | Šejla Srna
Salesclerk i feel like i am fading away everything irritates me the sound of my space bar at 2 am is my worst enemy right now and the fact that this isn’t a poem but i’m still making it look like one is making me sick to my fucking stomach i just drank a can […]
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Four Poems by Matthew J. Hall
French Manicure She thought about getting a new sprinkler for the freshly mowed lawn. He had worked on it for an hour, sweating. He was sweating now while her pondering moved to the kitchen, where she would have him fix the dripping tap.
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“At A Party Recently I Saw” by Paul Strohm
At a party recently I saw Kierkegaard lounging in the curve of a sensuous chair and in a corner Kant leaning against a dark wall covering scrolling his big fat finger at a Wittgenstein arms akimbo threatening in his silent way stoic Hopper in green beads, red leather mulling small actions for Derrida’s roundness deconstructed […]
Read more2 poems | William Jackson
Apartment #112 Set the beer down on the counter where the roaches play, stir the food. It’s night outside and in your heart and in your mind. A police helicopter circles circles above your head a halo w/ search-lights and you’ve become so holy you no longer notice. The bag briefcase dynamite you left the […]
Read moreAnthropomorphism | Changming Yuan
the sea smiling widely with every wrinkle open towards the morning sun, the trees balletting in the storm of summer, the birds chatting aloud, indeed, all is well as God is taking a nap, dreaming about becoming a human both in form and in mind, where nature imposes itself as a wild urchin and the […]
Read moreI Said I’d Make You Breakfast | Natalie Strickland
I knew you were hiding behind the shelf silent and bare-ass naked but I had important things to do like say I’d make you breakfast, but I forgot, because I saw the paint on the counter asking to spread itself on blank pages that I opened and shut, and opened and shut, til it looked […]
Read moreDestinations | Diane Payne
Standing in the long line, burdened by suspicious border patrol agents and a heavy backpack, I see Bob’s blue truck. It looks the same as it did the day he left Michigan for Oregon, a place he believed to be hipper, more appreciative of guitar builders. Bob’s old truck idled in the vehicle lane, packed […]
Read more2 poems | Drew Pisarra
Despair A man who looked just like me, whispered (in my ear) something low and unexpectedly porno- graphic –- a crude come-on that basically meant, I should fuck myself, letting one of the me’s be he. Kindly I declined. Still, my alter ego persisted with one obscene suggestion after another. Initially, I pretended I had […]
Read more2 poems | Glen Armstrong
Floating in an Above Ground Pool While the Last Pill of Summer Goes About Its Business of Filling my Head with a Gentle Fuckery that Could Be Described, in the Broadest Sense of the Word, as “Anachronistic” The pill dissolved inside me. Then I dissolved in the swimming pool on a sunny suburban afternoon. Soon, […]
Read more2 poems | Jesse Back
Sex Is sex is the great affirmation more than anything else it tells us we’re alive heart pumping blood to the dick that throbs in anticipation. sex is our only goal in life to make another live so when we do it our purpose is fulfilled bodies pumping sweat heat spilling from our naked selves […]
Read moreMammywood | Gloria Holwerda-Williams
As it goes, even J-Lo was maid up to remain the same Driving Miss Lazy just sticks to The same crazy creed racist fantasy greed Everyone else is maid to serve their old rule colonial need In just one movie Latifah, Alicia, and two more mammywood made all 4 one white child played the past […]
Read moreClarity | Dana Yost
Christ, this is good. Twelve hours of a clear head, no slog, no drag or the gauze-curtain of fatigue. Just a little ache under each eye, in that baggy flesh that turns dark upon deep tire. But that has only come late. Before that, a spree of writing, reading, and finding music videos on the […]
Read moreGirls’ Night Out | Nina Bennett
Friday is our night. Because I talk with my hands, broad exclamation points, the bartender flags me when I knock over my drink, first of the evening. Because she watches you get in the driver’s seat, she is back behind the bar when you tap a Mercedes as you pull out of the parking lot. […]
Read more2 poems | Zach Nabors
Manic Young Writer And The Misadventures of His Alter Ego: Laughing Boy I have a voice goddamnit! No matter What your robotic rejection email says. “We wish you luck publishing elsewhere.” They ALL say. Thank God for all the Lit-Mag wishes. Where would I be without them??? I got style mothafuckas. The substance is somewhere— […]
Read moreAvian Flu | Lilly Barels
I want granite instead of bones for ribs. I want cold stone to remind my heart that it has a bad habit of bumping up against flesh. I want to stop the sparks. I do not want a crow to live imprisoned in the granite cage. I would prefer he not wear his velvety black […]
Read moreWhat I feel about Jack Kerouac | Denise Mostacci Sklar
I feel his, Oh Boy baby innocence ( IN- no- sense world) pure blue-eyes warm pouring sadness in cold winter hiding—boy jumps snow bank Abandoned, Joy-self destroying…4-ever jumping The frozen flake, iron Triumph caught in flash of billboard sky avec tout le monde–fiery moment HOT alone in simple AHH!-mazement of scribbled truth —– Denise Mostacci […]
Read more2 poems | Walter Beck
Reflection in a Steam-Covered Mirror at Lorenzo’s Apartment It’s no longer the face Of a freewheeling kid on a wild weekend; It’s the face of a young man Growing too heavy around the eyes, Running and burning out Before his time. When Did the Rose-Colored Glasses Come Off? My brother asked me one night, Over […]
Read more2 poems | Connolly Ryan
Resentment is the New Champagne “Every time a friend succeeds. I die a little.”—Gore Vidal Drink up now, there’s plenty for everyone. That dude smirking in his kayak, eye-rolling prior to Eskimo-rolling: you’ve got it in for him, whether you know it or like it or not. Where does he get off? Or that lady […]
Read more2 poems | Meeah Williams
The Month of Dead Sparrows April is the month of dead sparrows in my pillow case in the vegetable crisper stuffed in the mailbox with the junk mail I find them everywhere I am in a movie starring dead sparrows I am married to a dead sparrow all my children are sparrows dead in the […]
Read more2 poems | Paul Alzate-Moreno
The Calculator So careful, full of measure, You weigh me against myself. My good faces off Against the darkness, And I want my champion, The white knight to win. My heart sighs, Which sways your scales. Your math exercise: Perhaps you do it From fear of calamity. Or you serve some goal Beyond what I […]
Read more2 poems | J.P. Herrera
open mic it was a day I went out on and there was this sad, stupid white woman and she said she was a poet and told us to go to her workshop because she was a poet and then she read some poetry about a whale but it wasn’t that good so she told […]
Read more2 Pieces | Kirby Wright
Reunion with a Friend Lost for 38 Years Meet me at the pub’s fire pit. I have a wife and you do too. I consider this a test. Who picks up the tab?
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VAGABOND CITY 