BIG BANG Lynn Thayer

“It’s your voice and it’s not. Your body and not.
Between flesh and mind, love and friendship”

DISPLACED MONARCHS Brigittine French

“we, farmers’ daughters who became their mothers,
with certitude that books
                                                dates
                                                and equality”

PASSING Sara Cline

“an hour to kill, an hour to spare
I have mercy on my hours”

THREE WORDS Ghazal Azad Jahan

“what do waves whisper? / to be loved / enough / that i could scatter”

FULL MOON OVER I-40 Ty Zhang

“You glimpsed the truth,
you think,
at least part of it,
sitting at work today–
through a window and a door“

PACKARD Selen Frantz

“We stumble over the barrier and into a world only remembered by forbidden feet and the nozzle
of a spray can. Our words fill the air around us, bouncing off the flat walls and down“

THE ARITHMETIC OF AFTER Meg Taylor

“A stubbed toe can split a day,
so can a birth,
so can silence finally broken.“

IN JAPANESE MEMORIAM Wakako Ueshima

“One of three hundred sixty-five,
immortalized
            reduced
now the lonely One”

BARREN Jennifer Keith

“no clay feet: airborne in a dust devil
no place for light
or holding water,“

POST RETIREMENT SYNDROME Daniel Edward Moore

“Who would have thought these days would find me,
hypersensitive, easy to caress, like a toothbrush“

GHAZAL FOR NEW YORK CITY Erika Gill

“in Central Park I melt, slowly by stages, into a frozen strawberry lemonade
outside of Strawberry fields a sudden void scoops my soul into concavity“

HOWLIN’ WOLF Jianqing Zheng

“Howlin’ Wolf’s
wang dang doodle
boomeranging

in a somersault
all street long“

SECOND SHIFT Sarah Ellis

“Here, the parking lot is flooding. Seeping
into the soles of my boots.“