The city was New York.
The time was 5:56 am.
One could not see the sun.
The season was spring.
The temperature was 44°F.
It was not raining.

Prelude

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    Cover

    Issue

    4

      Timothy Donnelly
    • Complicity

      they grow their long, pale, vermicular bodies and the tiny
           helmet-like shells they use to bore the tunnels

    • Eau de Nil

      can’t hold a candle to the surface of the Gowanus
           when it reflects the two nearby drum-like light vivid green

    • Air After Fireworks

      initial gasp at vibrant suddenness or past captivation by aromas
           arrowing in my direction in a diagram of the kitchen, all my concepts


    • Sarah Sarai
    • Another Way of Looking

      the page with the poem is
      the page with the poem it

    • Little Plump

      The schema of life insists 
      we feel our forward motion. 


    • Katherine Franco
    • Opening (the Inside) (the Beginside)

      Like a Barbie drum. The droll
      Drum of things thumbs
      Thinginess into my system.

    • Lamentation

      When I imagine lamentation,
      I imagine laminating


    • Iris McCloughan
    • The Arrival of St. Wolf

      I wanted a blue jay
      in the basement, 


    • Anastasios Karnazes
    • Sleep and Poetry

      I would never consider not burning my one sunglass a week, it is meaning replaces mouth for flipped image


    • Nica Franklin
    • Headland Ambit

      heath launders
      once-wetland


    • David Kirby
    • Everything You Need to Know

      The police won’t give me a chicken dinner


    • Katy Chrisler
    • Whiplash

                                    False
      parallel offers advantage.


    • Kassy Lee
    • Introduction to Abnormal Behavior

                                  I have often found it
      a difficult pursuit, to be deemed human


    • Ariel Francisco
    • SUN RISES ON THE AMERICAN EMPIRE YET AGAIN, TO MY GREAT DISDAIN

      Give me an infinite winter.

    • PHOTO OF MY DAD IN GUATEMALA STANDING IN FRONT OF A GRAFFITIED WALL THAT READS “CENTRAL AMERICA ANOTHER VIETNAM FOR THE IMPERIALIST YANQUI,” 1986

      The sun casts my dad’s shadow 
      at the soldiers knees

    • MY MOM THINKS SHE SEES A UFO OVER GUATEMALA WHILE SITTING AT THE BUS STOP JUST BEFORE THE EARTHQUAKE OF 1976

      a chunk of blackness breaking
      off from the night and besmoging
      the stars,


    • Ansley Clark
    • The Knife

      toothed belt      which prevents stillness and manifests
      as the feeling of mesh and emptiness


    • Joseph Minden
    • Poundbury

      stern Platz
                denial when you look in 
      der Spiegel
                like a pool reflecting 
      you sir 


    • Emily Wolahan
    • Inspirational

      I look at eons, eras, mountains made from oceanic trench. 


    • Paul Franz
    • Breakwater

      a glossy flank suggests itself again,
      like something you remember 


    • Christine Scanlon
    • CAUSAE ET CURAE

      Then jasper
      Should he eat
      & some littlefern
      In place or as part
      Of other hearts

       


    • Amie Zimmerman
    • False Spring

      I heard each toe land & knee crack

      & flexed my ankles in solidarity


    • Wayne Koestenbaum
    • Porous Incunabulum I Found in the Washroom

      as if Silly Putty were an accomplishment

    • Apology for Dadaism

      serrated edges to lick while the failure wafers pile up inside your wish

    • Cubism’s Just Deserts

      mother observing rat

      father observing mother observing rat

    • The Pontification Factory and Its Siblings

      excavate a new toilet if you must verify


    • Amanda Smeltz
    • These Squatting Girls in Black Spandex

      Easter at the megachurch. My favorite silk banner is hung.
      It’s shimmery pink with a purple silhouette of a dying man.

    • Then This Crazy Pony Put His Nose Into My Hands

      The line break is mostly vanity: wearing cologne at the airport.


    • Matthew Moore
    • Inter-Services Intelligence

      Improvised explosive devices play out a song,
      Inspired by the means of production, to come with me.

    • Marina

      Orthogonal to

      The zoned and the asylums


    • Giulia Bencivenga
    • Did I Know Then The Sun On My Face

      Every child wants to drive down the dirt road to the canyon alone, just to prove a point.

    • The Birth of Mother

      Carved by water Playing w the denouement
      of language

    • Closed Circuit

      It's true what you said this morning when the fog was low that roses


    • Samuel Amadon
    • Breathing Days

      I stop my walk as if watching a fire
      Slowly cease.

    • March Time

      Everyone has a sweatshirt.


    • Cassidy McFadzean
    • Germ

      One hooked barb

      caught on the nape

    • Animal Fancy

      Sprouted lentils I could not keep from wilting

      Poppies dropping petals from the desk


    • Adam Strauss
    • Torque

      Sight will withstand seen, scene fit for
      Myth, no, its allegory, story in
      Search of catalyzing enzyme;


    • Merna Dyer Skinner
    • The Bullet Guys and Me

      I kept them what-if-ing   perhaps-ing 
                       one indefensible angle after another


    • John Michael Colón
    • It Rains in a Dying World

      I attend the panels of elderly Marxist professors
      to shout denunciations at emptying rooms 
      the past, hard to believe, once existed 

    • The End of Politics

      Merrily the crowds will graze their way.
      We’ve arrived at something like the end of a principle.


    • Douglas Piccinnini
    • Kintsugi Feeling

      We change, studying what we remember
      ​feeling the punishment of dreams.


    • Emily Bludworth de Barrios
    • excerpt from THE PELVIC BONE

      At bedtime, I wrap the strands of my thoughts around a hug and release them into the night


    • Jon Lemay
    • Watching you die

      My brother dove into the water
      to save me, and I wish
      I had waded into traffic for you.


    • Nora Claire Miller
    • chapter 25

      anyway, like I told Kate on the phone,
      there isn’t any real way to get anger
      to count these days.

    • chapter 44

      what drinks from a straw comes back to me as gold.


    • Lukas Moe
    • from "Geary Street Poems"

      This is the ocean suite of lust
      Easy now, the ash in your eye


    • Mina Khan
    • we turn serpent because

      skin like barracks


    • Larry Thacker
    • Oblivion.

      Night equates to sleeping for many.
      Nothing can be wrong with sleeping.


    • John Poch
    • The Sweeping in Her Arms

      Meanwhile the lapping waves bank
      the clarity of coins on her clean sweeps.


    • Stephen Ira
    • Man In Bad Suit Leaving Pulpit

      All your answers are the perfect ones,
      but I’m not cured.


    • Emily Liebowitz
    • Goodbye 3

      they all began unremarkably, 
      with previous things presumed finished 

      Claire Scott
    • LYSANDER, ET AL

      Have you heard of Lysander he asks me
      I nod sagely, not caring the slightest bit about Lysander


    • Stan Sanvel Rubin
    • Initial Report from the Explorer

      Inner darkness is terrible too.

      That’s not a trick
      but one of the conditions.


    • Julie Marie Wade
    • From the Jeopardy! category, "Lesser Known Lesbians"

      Platinum doesn’t want to talk about the threat of reparative therapy always hanging over her head.


    • Ian U Lockaby
    • "The Self, i.e. in a Field."

      you hold your phone up towards yourself to know
      your self, and it tells on you 


    • Eric Helms
    • The Mark

      If not common lucidity for now I take it all for sheer madness,
      Pure stupidity.

    • Aleph

      What is the egg?
      The chamber of the cactus


    • Kelly Clare
    • Data Gathering Module

      ​Exhaustion, tell me the month. Tell me
      everything microchip.


    • Michael Borth
    • Melt Into The Pantheon

      whereby the neighbor urine
      is a rolling steady synonym


    • Ron Riekki
    • Mankind

      thirteen hours at a time, placed in nursing
      stations with shatterproof glass that one


    • Bobby Parrott
    • Why People Look Different from the Inside

      howl ululating from the other side of the woods


    • Adam J. Maynard
    • On Darling Green

      It is an excellent time for new habits
      With a couple of gin and tonics going on
      And today we did not become anything

    • Beautiful Flower Poem

      Daffy duck and a skeleton
      Smoke cigarettes in the graveyard

    • A Sea Conversation

      The baroque priapism of the butterflies
      Twisting in the dusty air


    • Anton Yakovlev
    • At the James Joyce House

      Neon lights above the front door displayed the new name 
      in genuine Joyce handwriting,
      and all the condos had been rearranged
      the way James Joyce would have done it.


    • Jennifer K Dick
    • Groundage

      of collect(ing) 
      recollections as in 
      off-season wavefoam 
      seagreen souvenirs


    • Austin Adams
    • First Principles

      A whole quarry of desiccation
      Yet not a drop of blood -
      What sport is your philosophy?

    • Filling the Fragment

      Apprehension is detention and
      Detained nothing ascends


    • Katie Fuller
    • Manual

      The only difference between us and the day-hikers is water.


    • tariq shah
    • haram

      world collects, slurped back into the blistered quicksilver mirror, I face life


    • Jason de Stefano
    • The News

      Sounds true, there’s nothing you can’t use
      Or kill. 


    • Rachel J. Bennett
    • Coat of Arms

      a row of apple trees stood at the back of our yard
      yielding little fruit


    • Lizzy Golda
    • Ghost

      some emotions more motivating than others
      what can we do


    • Erin Little
    • Whale Poem

      Skip the dull parts, 
      with their beatdown
      iron taste, droopy edges. 


    • Claudia Buckholts
    • Flight of the Owl

      the possessions of the dead that once 
      resonated, vibrant around them.


    • Daisy Bassen
    • What's more

      Open to the chilly air, the possible home
      Of our local raptor;


    • Elizabeth Hughey
    • Laugh Track

      the way my hand
      fell onto your hand
      and made a word 


    • Michael D. Snediker
    • It Is Growing Damp

      And alone it was the abbess alone chosen by lot, 
      a sphinx wandering far from her hive. 

    • Concord & Merrimack

      The graver gaps in our knowledge of quill 
      underlit those habits 

    • The Near Continuum

      The fickle pattern of lovers dissolves in
      shuddering white. Filigree structure 
      centurion, 

    • Two Kinds of Care

      Gladiolus, the trapp rock over there. 


    • Carrie MacLeod
    • thermohaline

      a brine of salt into separate sheath
      & broken break of shed salt sinks to feed a cloistered scientist


    • Paula Harris
    • I am a bad house guest, even though I try to be a good guest by minimising the amount of space I take up

      and I’d never stayed anywhere
      where I hadn’t just been told what to do


    • Elisabeth Reidy Denison
    • After a long illness,

      Emily Bronte, died, at thirty, of hers.


    • Jon Ruseski
    • Obituary

      Consulted the cards

      About demons to choose

    • Echoes

      Remaindered in the sun

      A soft afterglow

      Lighting up


    • Stella Wong
    • where's her beating on this dress?

      the best is when all icons are uniformed
      breathe from your feet


    • David Greenspan
    • Landscape

      and loose, fur
      unspoiled gray.


    • Molly Schaeffer
    • DEREK

      is it just another word for opening?


    • Erik Kennedy
    • Visiting the Waterfall

      (more in the mornings and evenings

      and on holiday weekends),


    • Benjamin Renne
    • Elegy: New Landscapes

      As if one could pour the sun
      through a sieve, and thereby separate the fine
      particles of light from the coarse.

    • Elegy: New Light

      There is a bright hole in the sky
      ​and where once hung a bright star hangs now only bright absence.


    • Koss
    • Slippery Gods, Not Things

      You wouldn’t betray your Gemini or couldn’t.
      And who you might be any minute was the hook.


    • Joseph Johnson
    • To Dissect Lions, You Need Lightning

      No bench prevents two humans, stable
      from distance, from bursting


    • Nikki Wallschlaeger
    • God Walks Out of the Room When You're Thinking About Money

      But like I said, God is still human and has his idiosyncrasies.

    • Soldiers, Poets, Civilians

      Even more is a refined silence
      and extravagant indifference.


    • Dominick Knowles
    • idylls for mall cop

      The cop standing beside us nods, the final mutation
      in a system so enormous that to think of it hurls us


    • Amanda Auerbach
    • Remember, Perceiving

      Seeing for second
      produces knowing


    • Lizzy Golda
    • I Could Be Your Magazine

      I am a language you could learn.
      I am the money you should earn.


    • Iris McCloughan
    • The Arrival of St. Wolf

      I wanted a blue jay
      in the basement, 

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