The city was New York.
The time was 1:34 pm.
One could see the sun.
The season was winter.
The temperature was 31°F.
It was snowing.

Prelude

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    Cover

    Issue

    4

      Bradley Trumpfheller
    • Late

      if we could remember how they built windows
      before rain if


    • Paige Quiñones
    • The Laundromat

      woman says sorry her shoes are so loud in the dryer. 

      reminds girl of a shaking bed.


    • Brandon Shimoda
    • Bayt Al-Qasid, The House of Poetry

      The cedars of Lebanon are ziggurats. Many had been opened, years before, by lightning, and resembled hands, in fists, out of which flourished sagacious bouquets of the cedars of Lebanon.


    • Madeleine Barnes
    • TO CHARGE FORWARD

      We were in the space between the moon and childhood, 
      and it was a miracle to belong there, capable of lingering


    • Jaime Zuckerman
    • The Cult of Quiet

      I hold the knife // point up // & lean over // & beg gravity // to bring me down // gravity disappoints


    • Adam J. Maynard
    • The World Perspiring

      The world perspires
      ​Perpendicular to the daffodils


    • Annie Christain
    • Paper Machines

      but I can spin around and around
      if I start to lose it.

    • When Robots Are Born, They're Adults

      Lilith arrived not knowing if she was waking up chained to a 30-year-old farmer who was just born, a murderer on a feedback loop, or a Technogod asking to be argued with

    • I Need You to Make Me My Own Dinosaur, but It Must Have Feathers

      A sun has a stomach.


    • Geneviève Paiement
    • A Brief History of Birth, Episode IX

      dragging Virginia Slim through coral lipstick scrubbing
      Hail Marys til they ignite your grandmother’s rosary
      her nylon stockings torn at the nape of what haunts


    • Liam Powell
    • DIALOGUE WITH A FLY 1

      who could it tell
      that I had paid attention

      (devotion as a currency again)


    • Griffin Brown
    • 118 Westerly Terrace

      A tree grows through the glass coach
      
partially buried in someone’s front yard pachysandra.


    • Hassan Melehy
    • OuLiPop N° 1

      Aux fauteuils de la Fille Sellette

    • On alert

      One of the best skills to have is cooking, then repairing your own house then your own car.


    • Rebecca Ariel Porte
    • Another Odicy: On the Two-Hundredth Anniversary of Keats's Odes of 1819

      Keats’s odes, for example, are different kinds of objects now than they were in 1819 and will continue to be different for future readers, if there are any. Perhaps they will be forgotten; this conjecture is not an unalloyed tragedy. 


    • Sean Bonney
    • Untitled

                                      There is no time. Our houses
      concealed, like songs, mumble to themselves

    • On the Hatred of the Sun

      The darkness of that mirror, which is not quite equal to the darkness and silence inside the opened mouth of someone drowning in the Mediterranean, right now.


    • Jessica Fischoff
    • When There is No Room Left for Shame, I Will Finally Unwrap the Mirror

      The more severe the loss, the brighter the arrangement.


    • Olatunde Osinaike
    • Ars Poetica

      you enjoy being judged
      as stiff as the larynx


    • Alexandria Hall
    • Return

      Because I was full of scandent pangs, livid wisteria.
      And at every familiar street corner, for that matter, bursts 
                of small flowers rose up me like reflux.


    • Austin Rodenbiker
    • A Crown of Pansies

      The audience coos. The bartender 

      waits for you to stop talking.


    • Petro Moysaenko
    • About Birds

      ​Dashing themselves over the wet blade
      Of night in Ohio


    • Robert Fernandez
    • vrykolokas

      pressure me at
      ​all costs

    • viejo

      sudden dawn sky
      chainlinked with
      stars


    • Aileen Bassis
    • Bialowieza Forest

                          Don’t ask for anything.

      Great-horned aurochs have vanished


    • Tony Mancus
    • from Start Charging

      Forces
      having jumped
      their hoops


    • Jessie Janeshek
    • It's a Canned Picture and I'm Trapped on a Speedboat

      These days you can’t help but think every phone call’s a psycho
                  and not pay the bills that come in.


    • Mark Russell
    • Men Winding Us Up

      It is as common to think that redistribution of wealth is the mark of Satan, as it is to think that redistribution of one’s assets will mean we keep the house and all the pension benefits. 

    • Men as Chorus Girls

      A man dancing and singing on the ramparts may be passing military secrets to the besiegers, or confident that the supplies within the castle walls will last a thousand years.


    • Adam Scheffler
    • To Willpower

      black & lusty seas – you rarely remember your
      myriad defeats at the hands of drugs or booze    


    • James Loop
    • January Belly

      Wisdom resolved its compact of dread, for example,
      in mouthfuls of greenish verbiage, & the warp


    • Austin Adams
    • Failure of the First

      Pools overbrim
      Only once,
      Cruelly once.


    • Stephanie Young
    • Congenital

      the shape our togetherness took
      not exactly our decision

      not exactly not


    • Marie Buck
    • Let's Memorialize the Dead Even More

      The real version is much better but also sadder.


    • Anton Yakovlev
    • The Exterminating Angel

      ​What is he thinking?

    • Marconi Seashore

      Chalk it up to
                            breathing, chalk it up to
      the sweat of past mistakes


    • Sebastien Bernard
    • A system of pointing

      an adder’s udder of recollection Nothing New


    • Varun Ravindran
    • Two-Part Invention for One Voice

      running from or to and from where?


    • nv baker
    • Moths

      using a pebble as a stilt, the moon in the high cupboard 
      has gotten in my skin like fish oil.


    • Cortney Lamar Charleston
    • The Love Song of Percy Sledgehammer

      I love you right but can never be certain being what I am.

    • Louis Vuitton Timberlands

      But in my defense, there’s no such thing as
      a thief among family.


    • TR Brady
    • Phantom Mirror

      this morning I’m still alive


    • Christopher Spaide
    • One-Star Review

      Glad, admittedly, if with one rapturous swoop of a MasterCard 
      My appetite is ruined, my damned demand massacred, 

    • Laws of Motion

      How long was I hung in that moment of um, the whole world strung
      over my head?


    • Maja Lukic
    • Norway

      Now I am the heavy mist over green fjords slicking


    • Satya Dash
    • All at Sea

      atoms of sand sliding for a pleasurable second

    • Chilling at a Pool in Goa

      What does it take to let reality persist, to stay in the present? 


    • Katie Ebbitt
    • Bedlam by way of a serious girl

      Wrote a letter with a craving for power.

    • [My Moon]

      My hair has shifted in shape
      Ineluctable like my habits

    • A lot of body

      And I, queenlike, reign over myself

      And any who will yield themselves to me


    • Michelle Bitting
    • Elliptical

      Dreamer, you know you are a dreamer
      along spiraling jetties of silence


    • Jim Juletid
    • Lobster Hand

      Twinky residue and
      Parchment dry 
      Heave

    • Untitled

      stubble flagging gently
      beneath pruned nostril

    • 1010 Wins

      tomorrow i’ll spit
      chaw on the terrace


    • Evan Gill Smith
    • Atlantis-Truther

      I’m watching the formation of a new world
      Through low-quality blast goggles


    • Sarah Johnson
    • Truth in Sex

      and said to keep the noise
      down. The fluorescent light
      above us hummed.


    • Morgan Dowdy
    • Internationale

      you must know this now
      there is no one to know this for you


    • Raúl Quintana Selleras
    • Them and Me

      Both our criticisms are equally hurtful,
      But theirs are temporary,
      ​And mine are eternal.


    • Filip Marinovich
    • Uncle Dragon Remains.

      These are slobvious prophecies.


    • kerry rawlinson
    • let me sleep with knees

      All too soon, too soon,
      they’ll sail.


    • Daniel Bennett
    • You Know Me

      from the roadworks, like blossom
      of a horse chestnut, like hands

    • Rubbernecking

      But why should it be entirely bad?


    • Nancy Bevilaqua
    • from Gelyana

      crown the beads of sweat the dirt    unguarded
      as his mother makes her motions with her amulets


    • Daniel Richman
    • Sweet Betsy From Pike

      The whole thing                                                               
      smelled like an exhalation                                                                                         
      of the deepest world.


    • Helen Hofling
    • Silent Music Video

      A bird molting in dislocated shudders.


    • Camilo Roldan
    • from Dropout Poem

      a ubiquitous condition only
      pointed to by that occasional
            shape in

      the blur,


    • Katherine Gibbel
    • There Are Certain Facts

      below the tub’s meniscus
      now outside, now inside.

    • Ilulissat

      One can’t trim the sails
      ​of an inflatable boat.


    • Matthew Gelman
    • END OF WINTER

      broken open and the birds slowly 
      expanding. I'm here: trash, fountain,


    • Patty Nash
    • ACQUISITION

      the back of his concrete
      skull on the turquoise   liquid

    • SO MY DEVOUT FITS COME & GO AWAY

      “I don’t mean to be critical, but
      is something rotting in here?”
      It was.


    • Candace Williams
    • I'm leaning in

      tendons were arrow shields 
      babies teethed on foot bones
      blood was both paint
      & pudding & skulls were altars


    • Shira Erlichman
    • Ode to Lithium #6: Barometer

      I don’t know exactly what happened to me.
      Who put me here with a mud full of mouth


    • ET. Stark
    • Seven Conversations with the Minotaur

      Did you bring
      a sword
      this time


    • Lilian Ha
    • Extracurricular

      No, I broke the stove for fun, waited for my fingers
      to smolder and water steel on my tongue.


    • Rebecca Lindenberg
    • Studies from Childhood

      What’s the secret word.
                  What’s the secret word.


    • Robert Balun
    • Hived

      lost it in
      the spin

      in the spine
      the body


    • Caitlin Roach
    • not waving but drowning

      the throat relaxes.        water flows to the lungs.

    • whereabouts unknown

      of one burning branch in some wild brush
           flapping its carmine leaves.


    • Lucian Mattison
    • Nadeem

      Hours on the balcony
      are progress, compass
      pointed to no fixed place,
      always correct.


    • Jennifer MacBain-Stephens
    • One Hour

      I see the top of the hill just in reach but I can’t make it.

    • Zoosk Online Dating for Her

      Thighs parted within 50 miles. Hair swept up within 25 miles.


    • LM Rivera
    • The Argument

      In a Kafkan poetics, the father lacks a temporal sense of the world.

    • A Primer

      a counter-privation


    • Phillip Griffith
    • What emojis choose for this

      dateline cruise of Arctic


    • Leona Sevick
    • Sun and Moon

      His happiness is my relief, his sadness
      my undoing.


    • Eric G. Wilson
    • Shock

      Celtic honeymoons are of stone.  No one gets in or out.


    • heather hughes
    • Resurrection Ship

      our crystalline symmetry / embodied


    • Ryan Dzelzkalns
    • Door as Point of Contention

      What fears may take our shape.

    • Evolutionary Exit Strategy

      strictly gendered coloration
      courts
      strictly gendered coloration


    • Isabel Balée
    • an excerpt from land of eroded womb

      what is that you want to inhabit this gravity.


    • Gerard Coletta
    • Don't Wait for the Translation

      a big Fuck You to prudence

    • Super Tuesday

      I and the country leave February limping


    • Hillery Stone
    • You Grow Accustomed

      Here on this continent / you consider the proverbial


    • Jason Koo
    • Always Finish What You Start

      because he wanted to make films, whereas
      films for me were one part of all of creative life

      I was trying to imbibe


    • Meagen Crawford
    • Feh

      hold a dull color and therefore a light

    • Green Thought

      slowed your existence


    • Andrew Collard
    • Man Matching Description

                   Some injuries are serious
      and some not serious enough

    • At the Checkout of Val's Pet Supply

      the essential purple, less primary
      than the same old sky we walked beneath,


    • Emily Martin
    • From Palisades

      information     not difficult to explain     but logistically necessary and thus made vague


    • Richard Georges
    • [new] Ways to Honour the Dead

      on my way home I list the carcasses I find:

    • Cane Harvest / La Romana, 1918

      cutlasses strike the charred cane in concert

      John James
    • Wet Hands in the Sun

      the splayed roots of an oak, the toothed ridges

      of its leaves. The I is hardly there.

    • Epigenesis

      When the language doesn’t work 
      you sew the vowels in your throat.


    • Erinrose Mager
    • A Pleasure To

      The rain has ceased, but we linger because anyone, half out the door, often requires a little gift for a person of tertiary importance.


    • Emma Winsor Wood
    • In the Book I'm Proofing

      “a planet consisting entirely of white and dark daisies”

    • Labor

      I have a watch that reminds me to breathe.


    • Mary Meriam
    • Charm

      My roof keeps cozy feelings in 
      while winter haz hir final fling.


    • Phoebe Glick
    • Amoeba of the Internet Age

      I had a dream she was crying and wanted to be let in.


    • Logan Fry
    • Toledo

      I am ward of Plainness I take


    • Elise Houcek
    • Passing

      Cunning ever is the selves
      We take for helping.

    • No Familiar Symbol

      No familiar symbol had come to us
      Out of the past to protect our interests


    • Brendan White
    • Poem for Jonah

      My all-time favorite perk
      Was the toy cubicle.


    • Alex Bernstein
    • The Thief

      Sometimes you feed me
      nonsense at random
      about who stole the cat.
      We don’t even have a cat.


    • Anne Marie Rooney
    • Sound Stage

      Every size indicted under the sky, its size
      As gauze as a helmeting pulse


    • Izzy Casey
    • Eating Disorder

      Señorita Rigid
      Disoriented Rag
      regard to inside:


    • Hassan Melehy
    • On alert

      One of the best skills to have is cooking, then repairing your own house then your own car.


    • Steve Barbaro
    • Of Property & Precipitation

              & though now all I can much ogle is
          snow, that skull was once a kind of proxy
           soul, so that when my pals & I all alike


    • Daniel Parsons
    • Werewolves of the communication age

      The famous porcupines are rolling up the dean has other plans.


    • Tasia Trevino
    • Menarche

      I have always wanted to know what could at least I
      didn’t know what yes yet I know that I have killed the dog


    • Sophie Farjeon
    • Poem for you

      The falling back like breath that knows it will swell again


    • Sam Rowe
    • Triptic

      If a night jar
      If a flint spoke
      If some threads converge

    • The Big Splay

      such great distances
      or flywheels thrumming
      unto oblivion or


    • Anne Becker
    • Tower

      By evening you’ll flicker between soppy, obsequious and scrappy
      an unsound candle unsure of itself and its voice’s light span


    • Patrick Samuel
    • Toe Head

      you first arrived red crackling in fireplace


    • Caroline Crew
    • What I Owe Others

      at the end of his life, my father’s dementia
      made loops of if there is any score I can settle, say it now.  


    • Patrick Dunham
    • Husk of the Feast

      pressing its greenness / against a slow curve / of light
      indigo deep / is the glassy pool


    • Leah Poole Osowski
    • Muted, Mutate

      the lake and her mood swings, the water 
      snake’s tendency of effortless division. 


    • Adam Strauss
    • Triptych: Flight

      Through to the sweet of otherness,
      Dolphin strong enough to negotiate


    • Valentine Conaty
    • Conflating surface pansy/ An enforced

      that bitch fervor/ Inequality in all its fury


    • Margaret Hanshaw
    • Tea of Impractical Thirsts

      Tea of
      Big red robes and
      Steeded brow.


    • Adam Greenberg
    • from Cliffs of the Indian Southwest

      O, southern constellation of sonic fibers,
      publishing white the post-lighting
      spray of lines, coil-state snowdrift,


    • Bill Lessard
    • Newsfeed

      body part
      Romans believed
      could secrete
      the divine


    • Kirsten Ihns
    • seibutsugaku

      doubtless doubling back in it
      to stand up again—

    • of the five senses, desire is the sixth

      even those that leave it, a weapon of ax
      
to put the forest at permission, i touch


    • Geoffrey Olsen
    • froth self a gem

      whole screen is gray our parts are alike in this response they say


    • Anne Lesley Selcer
    • Bye gash

      Dear paragon program disappointing to no end.


    • JoAnna Novak
    • Be Green

      Persimmon orange chairs bleached by the St. Louis sun and hard on the bones in my back.


    • Asa Drake
    • Tonight, A Woman

      Was that spotted horse particularly westward?


    • Jen Frantz
    • The Legend Goes, Went, Is Gone

      I applaud for
      trees. They do a
      great job.


    • Emily Wallis Hughes
    • from Day

      sing with the ladybugs here, by the creek


    • Stella Hayes
    • Out of the Frame

      What's the use now that the shadows 
      are too wide.


    • Lotte L.S.
    • Visiting Hours

      The wind blows. The rain enters. Things get lost.


    • R.J. Keeler
    • The Orb Weaver

      Underneath all, an unseen, illusory ring of fire encircles
      light-fearing Morlocks and Pacific Rim alike


    • Mae Carter
    • Learning Lust

      he’d take aim at his hanging trousers and shirts, letting


    • Maureen Sherbondy
    • How to Scrabble

      Points accumulate with each word


    • YL Xue
    • The New Gold

      Amoebas sometimes project false
      feet, sometimes clone themselves.


    • Glyn Edwards
    • Iago Prytherch

      Descending to haunted churches                  
      To stalk meaning from the emptiness.


    • Tom Mandel
    • Getting Late

      Lid must wait
      for a jar

    • Homage: Thomas Bernhard

      (Cannot be digested)
      these we eat.


    • Beat McGuire
    • Anton's Teeth

      don't tell me you're under contract 
      ​what have they hired, your spirit or your hands?


    • John Stupp
    • Saved

      it was back to work
      to be scalded in the hot ether of foundry hell


    • Lukas Jackson
    • palimpsest (la)

      the conductor's morning greeting


    • Uzomah Ugwu
    • Department store windows

      With no face value doubts I got in and left

       Not knowing if It may be better than what no one should call home


    • Kevin McLellan
    • In Fog

      the guard asks “Spending
      time with the wrong people?”

    • After a Long Winter

      itself  / the room
      inside your room


    • Cassandra Euphrat Weston
    • Goldfish, 25¢

      it plugged the drain hole. Orange as a cheese puff;


    • Demond Blake
    • Stay hungry

      It’s a toss
      Up to me
      And to
      ​Them


    • Maggie Queeney
    • Exhibit

      and bones and fledglings. The parent and prey


    • Peter Krumbach
    • Visiting Future In-Laws

      That's when I said I felt like Pope Innocent X
      on his throne, baring his fangs, barking


    • Leah Umansky
    • Cento

      Do not speak;

      You burden the trees.


    • Jeremy Cantor
    • Thoughts On Reading My Mentor's Death Poem

      I know we went to Vancouver
      but only because I have the photographs


    • Kathleen Winter
    • Primer/Coat

      a smoking, a good-looking funeral home
      is nest too comfortable for reader’s


    • Douglas Piccinnini
    • "LIFE" "EVENT"

      in sites of devotion
      the domains of obsolescence

      in lessons of calm
      the prosperity sickness, the world forest


    • Tony Mancus
    • after Jean Donnelly, K Lorraine Graham, & Rod Smith Book Launch Party

      of print – what shoves
      between the words

      to believe the sirens
      and the rocks


    • Adam J. Gellings
    • In Currents

      the viejos say the currents have never had a diet

    • American folklore

      My dad helped nail plywood on all the windows afterward
                  I bet those panels wished they were still trees


    • Steven Alvarez
    • demographics unit

      if both president & vice died
      who becomes president? the espeaker 
      of the casa


    • Santian Vataj
    • The Bistrica River

      The Bistrica River has by now reached
      America, reached the Bronx.


    • John Michael Colón
    • Message in a Bottle to Another Cosmos

      Perhaps in another life
      ​I could’ve known you better than yourself 


    • Sarah María Medina
    • We Don't Talk Much

      but what’s Taíno look like         these days? 

    • diaspora of ancient-now(s)

      you remember/ me as bold & wild with a cavity of laughter


    • Peter Bogart Johnson
    • Untitled

      the part of the collective
      ​unconsciousness you can access


    • Sergio Espinosa
    • Trusting the Voice

      at times a scream at times breathlessness


    • Lizzie Harris
    • After the Beginning, the End

      The right selfie outlasts
      the self.

    • Clear Signal, Outerspace

      Yes, we'd been sent here to die, but the flesh
      of fish had never been sweeter


    • Devin Kelly
    • Look At What I'm Looking At

      It’s a violent thing      to be alive


    • Danielle Zaccagnino
    • Electrostatic Ocean, Friday Night

      in the back seat / of your blue
      beetle submerged


    • Sarah Sarai
    • Wish Me Luck

      Could be luck’s the
      River Jordan of fiction


    • Nicolas Bock
    • When We Eat the Marrow

      The room is brighter / than me, conspicuously so

    • Polity

      Improbable fingers bear skyward


    • Mackenzie Kozak
    • moonmilk

      if i allow for all means of ruin

    • tracing lake superior

      that night my navel became an easel,
      became its own front yard


    • Joe Milazzo
    • Field Recording

      vocoders and color guards
      and fiberglass tubas


    • Halley Furlong-Mitchell
    • Millenial Slut

      Isn’t she so much more beautiful when she’s crying


    • Bryan Beck
    • Dreams of Being Human

      The Mischiefs
      Head Scratchers
      Tall Dudes
      Blood Tide


    • Jennifer Soong
    • We'll Probably Talk Before You Get This

      A membrane continues / with various openings.


    • Steve Barbaro
    • Rue'd

      until memory’s opposite


    • Nikolina Lazetic
    • Untrust (Me)

      I thought about an unlamented red

    • An Owner's Manual

      out-love time, press
      one ear against the door of a stranded
      elevator.


    • Joe Fletcher
    • Specimens of Dynamics

      Two proofs that brutes cannot abstract
      A source of bullets


    • Ashley Colley
    • Representative

      O mutable
      program, borders atremble


    • Jeremy Schmidt
    • Take Me to the Wondries

      Us a couple of untucked cowbots

    • How to Award Fit Punishments

      The marsh. The basic puttering. The eyewitnesses
      percolated in the minds to reveal the existence


    • Claire Wilcox
    • Midge

      The midge, the bleed around the edge.

    • Grips

      Under the archway

      they can see she’s gone


    • D.S. Kovacs
    • Consumed

      so my bones are liquid in sleep


    • Ashley Mares
    • Cravings

      (the way bones
      often do)


    • Kate Dempsey
    • The Stockhausen Handshake

      entrapment or caution?


    • Milo Muise
    • puberty(1)

      everyone is naked do i know
      what my body is planning


    • Ryan Cunningham
    • from Arabesques I-XX

      Nobody can agree what

      to do with the creature because

      nobody can agree what to call it. 

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