Poetry

Because of their format, several poems that appear in the current issue are included only in pdf. To read them, click on their titles on the right side of this page.

Something You Left to Me
Owen McLeod

This box of apothecary vials with black rubber stops.
A strip of masking tape runs the length of each vial.

Breakup at the Starfish Brasserie
Owen McLeod

You imagine yourself the simplified figure
in this future person’s false romantic idea
of the present moment.  You’ve even stopped
believing you know where the sculptures end
and the furniture begins.  Well, bully for you
is all I can say—that, and have a good one.

On Being Told: You Must Learn to Love the Violence
John Sibley Williams

Like a man who sets himself on fire
on purpose every night without quite
achieving ash. This is something like
saying every stain, every scar makes

On Being Told: You Must Learn to Pray
John Sibley Williams

For the occasional carcass
dragged skyward by crows.

All those little mouths hungering
inside our mouths. The silence

Roundabout
Chad Davidson

As Odysseus finds his portal
to the underworld,

delivers his libations, I kill time
just down the shore,

For a Dog
Ryan Wilson

You’d wake us up—that shrill, insistent bark
Driving away whatever dreams had fogged
Our vision—and we’d rise in the true dark,

All We Are Not
Geri Doran

Offshore, beyond the breakwater, past guiding pylons,
where the bottom sand drops to depth and the fog collects
dense and more wet—

There
Rush Rankin

The ineffable and haunting sublimated

Concave Decades
Steve Barbaro

But of the many, many (the un-sundry, soap-glossy) plates at hand

Quadratic
Steve Barbaro

So with the thickly throaty, curt finality of a deity