Issue 42

The taste is ritualistic: Peeling off your jacket. Cradling white-fleshed language  like distilled liquor parting father’s cracked lips. Sinking a tooth into grime and hoping to consume what pain has not taken from you. Two fingers jabbed in the jam jar — Maybe I will make a home out of this, you say. You cast […]

After Olivia Gatwood I want to feel summer again like a girl like she is standing right next to me breathing hot breath into my ear she whispers like car rides and smells like sweat and is never still, still anything like when I was fourteen and rode my red bicycle to the ocean every […]

I don’t go in. just noticed it in passing, pacing loops on a layover I am an hour’s flight and three hours of waiting from you I’m not one to imagine my own future, don’t build a life of what ifs, if this then that’s. But a chapel in an airport makes me stop Are […]

the sea sun-sick, sun-washed, sun-kissed the sea reckless and in love with the sun the sea with a heart of a fig, a pomegranate, a lemon the sea in the ear of the moon, the sea as the mouth of the moon, the sea vanishing into skins, the sea rebirthing skins, the sea as the […]

chicory grows by the roadside, their soft-blunted petals shading blue to purple in mimicry of dawn. i don’t think we ever talked through a sunrise. we came close, maybe, but mostly i remember easing the back door open to stand ankle-deep in melting snow. i remember looking up at wispy pinpricks of starlight, wondering if […]

On the doors of a church, where the windows run miles into the sky so high that god herself must reach up to open them a notice reads: no poems.  To my religion, I thank you.  Under your tutelage You taught me the way to live In spite of what you expected,  I admire your […]

So we rent a car & drive to the wild of Pennsylvania. Crops tall as biblical women, their heads flinching. Nobody lives here, it seems. Houses but they’re empty, lights but they’re off. We float to our hotel room & polaroid in the mirror. Swimming pool midnight, chlorine-safe. I couldn’t drown if I tried. We […]

You tell me how, in his Nobel prize speech, William Faulkner said the only thing worth writing is the human heart in conflict with itself. We are underneath the first tree to jump the gun on Autumn. Holding back October like a yawn, we stay in the park until dusk starts apologizing for the day, […]