The city was New York.
The time was 2:42 am.
One could not see the sun.
The season was spring.
The temperature was 45°F.
It was raining.

Prelude

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    Cover

    Issue

    4

      Bradley Trumpfheller
    • April, April

      who could confess us living, garden-spire, your bright


    • John James
    • Vigils: After Rimbaud

      Lightning returns to the building's tree.


    • H.R. Webster
    • Velvet Touch

      Every morning is another lesson in the violence of a haphazard metaphor.


    • Logan Fry
    • Employ

      called home and brings
      its phantom gusto, its blunting limbs 

    • Continuity

      Stage glass has potential not 
      because it is made
      to break but because


    • Paige Menton
    • Begin today

      what if I weave
      dying ash twigs into my 
      longleaf


    • Hassan Melehy
    • Clockwork

      Vestiges of the heat of Roman embers along the Danube.


    • Jennifer MacKenzie
    • Ancestry.com

      War comes to peel away the gold braid covering 
      the princely cousins.

    • The vomit emoji

      The dewiness of the grasses slaps my shoe-tops 
      dressed in an undersea forest, girls enjoy their floaty skirts 


    • Disintegration Loop

      Grace knows she’s queen to the last. Hyssop
      is spreading only in dreams. A small dog walks
      slow over ice.


    • Paige Quiñones
    • North Carolina's Famous Wild Horses Emerge from Hurricane Florence Unscathed

      Storms in the Gulf & Atlantic flex their fingers 
      ​against our throats. 


    • Brendan White
    • There's Another Lament I Won't Get Into

      If I knew another more useful than you
      I would definitely rather live with him.

    • I Can Remember Becoming Deeply Concerned

      The goal isn’t to shut down the party and take
      All the fun out of the risk spectrum.


    • Satya Dash
    • Biopsy

      You could stand naked in front of a mirror 
      all day and still not see yourself 


    • Sandra Simonds
    • Bildungsroman

      Made macaroni and cheese.
      Commuted.
      Amassed nothing.


    • Andrew J. Smyth
    • al dente

      hypo     backward     typo

    • appliqué

      fluke ineluctable


    • Patricia Hartland
    • from LINGUABRASIONS

      smorgasbord maw


    • Christopher Spaide
    • Like Clockwork (after Andy Warhol)

      that attracts mystics, mistakes, and doesn’t skip the skeptic. Tock.


    • Maja Lukic
    • The New Year

      Some flashes in the distance⎯
      what are they?


    • Madison McCartha
    • from FREAKOPHONE WORLD

      as a chromaflock of hazmat-
      suits


    • Ellen Boyette
    • [In this one the derision is milk staggered with soil and I am in question as intelligentsia bewildered in dust and frayed velour]

      Longing in this case being impertinent to the garment, I took out my breast and said in truth I was hoping for coral to crush into sugar.

    • [In this one lasik eye surgery is considered as well as lingerie but ultimately the decision is futile and I am corrupted by a number of needles]

      In this one the flautist takes three showers daily. 

    • [In this one the young men say the translucent mask is an instrument of ecstasy but my pleasure source is arbitrary]

      The townspeople must acquire a stenographer’s perfect circle to gyrate spirits in the century’s sock hop.


    • Adam J. Gellings
    • Untitled (The Largest Room in the Salon)

      It’s a lot of small dots,
      up close.


    • Alice Hall
    • WHAT'S A NORMAL WAY TO DIE ON A MOUNTAIN

      my body           is  not  visible


    • Jon Ruseski
    • Echoes

      Remaindered in the sun

      A soft afterglow

      Lighting up


    • Emily Wallis Hughes
    • from Day

      pressed by Carmelite nuns

    • from Day

      the limpets have left


    • Michael Larson
    • Hudson at the Museum

      The old days when the stream impressed itself
      Upon him: cold, baptismal, absolute.


    • Vanessa Saunders
    • My Fake Mom

      Fibers of his polo-shirt sliding against the black leather of his Camry.


    • Jakob Maier
    • To the Heart on a Sunday

      you always say "Come out!" or
      "Go inside!" as if peace is to be found

    • Panic King

      ones that drive me deeper inside
      the rented house of myself, protected
      by years of shiny white paint.


    • Halley Furlong-Mitchell
    • When you became a wing of me

      I tell our friends the story of how we met, once there was an orange and when they ask 
      for follow up I say nectarine but never anything as vivd as a cheeto, to love you  

      Izzy Casey
    • TO: iz (no subject)

      answer me or i cross
      a nun. answer me


    • Pablo Piñero Stillmann
    • Two Nicks

      The twins have taken to quoting Kierkegaard.

    • Tall Grass Blues

      As you can see, I've been learning French, mon amour.


    • Catherine Theis
    • Wildfires

      winds carrying your name
      coupled with mine
      the way you hold light


    • Claire DeVoogd
    • Adelaide

      A glossy car circles
      The path watching us.

    • Marie on Ed Sanders

      Neoclassical austerely
      Wait. Outside Austerlitz


    • Marie La Viña
    • Attrition and Difference

      a leaf playing dead


    • Zoë Ryder White
    • When I Got Drunk in Hyperspace,

      Here is what I wanted to do: hold 
      each willing face in my two hands, touch 
      each set of lips with my thumbs. 


    • Veronica Acosta
    • The Question of Selfishness

      You step out of Ken's jeep
      Into the San Francisco fog, shoving


    • Jeremy Hoevenaar
    • Prowl of Hovering

      Everything baggage, sightly, swamped with generosities, glassed, everything turned


    • Jared Daniel Fagen
    • Can You Be As Urchin

      Can you be the sunrise entrance song of ocean floors.

    • On a Thorn Bed of Neon

      I am all tremble and fray and torpid and molecular seams of a dusk breeze.

    • The Peacock of My Eyelids

      Maybe on the walk home I’ll carry my sandals between the middle and index of my plumage.


    • James Loop
    • The Machine for Destroying Nothing

      Likes to know which train I'm missing


    • Varun Ravindran
    • Schubert's Piano Sonata in B-flat

      Schubert who died November of 1828 chirrups.


    • Geoffrey Olsen
    • little pieces, ash over me

      luminous hill sides lavender quiet bath of intensity


    • Cortney Lamar Charleston
    • Waves

      but for once I don't think to look
      in the mirror and ask if I'm the kind
      of boy destined to be shot down,

    • “I Like My Women Like I Like My Cars,”

      if a tire pops, it'd be like gliding on air—


    • Rachel Abramowitz
    • This Is My Day for Crime

      The attendant heaped snow on a platter and recited a poem
      about spring and great faith and the plum, but


    • Cal Freeman
    • Pinconning

      the varieties of teeth (incisor, eye, and molar)
      and the way those teeth outlast us


    • Aileen Bassis
    • Gift for Apollo

      Loved a girl who became 
      a laurel tree and loved 
      a woman who betrayed him    
      with another.


    • Jeremiah Moriarty
    • Or

      Layered voices, strophe and antistrophe.


    • Jessica Yuan
    • Against the Future

      What will you say
      to the ones you promised 
      forever? You chewed down


    • Michael Larson
    • Hudson at the Museum

      The old days when the stream impressed itself
      Upon him: cold, baptismal, absolute.


    • Maxime Berclaz
    • Between the Trees

      a body formed from a handful of twigs then lost
      the limbless shapes a severing of stumps

    • Meutestraumen

      The blind moon hangs over the pillars
      and the burnt remains
      of the cedars,


    • James Moore
    • The Animals

      Wouldn’t tell us anything at all—
      we milled outside, buzzed
      with an ambient fear.


    • Kelly Hoffer
    • Vision 3

      my mother
      this morning
      pulling back the lashes
      of those eyes,


    • F. Daniel Rzicznek
    • from Leafmold

      White mulberry: I spent the better part of a morning watching it grow.


    • Lea Graham
    • When You’re in Romania and Wish You Were Alone

      Instead, you’re trapped as he smokes and tosses butts outside the airport, 
      no help deciphering the taxi racket, he lounges against a wall as if it’s some bar


    • Michael Juliani
    • When I see a Train, I Want to Take It in My Arms

      You were kicking blankets all over the ground 

    • South Pasadena: Rage Noir

      I always wanted to leave California. 
      To exit the hunt he might be making 
      of downtown diners and fading public parks, well-lit places


    • Elise Houcek
    • What Critics

      There is no trick to the cup,
      Arriving recovered to a shy deal 
      Though already a different photograph. 

    • The Kind of Hope

      A cloth lifts
      A partly landing veteran.
      The storm.


    • Nicolas Visconti
    • I know where but where where?

      ––And I thought of you,
      how there is no future in thought,
      how all thought is remembrance disordered

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