The city was New York.
The time was 10:45 am.
One could see the sun.
The season was spring.
The temperature was 59°F.
It was raining.

Prelude

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    Cover

    Issue

    4

      Michael Chang
    • PERSONAL JESUS

      scandals of the canadian variety
      involving monopoly money

    • THE LOVELIEST TIME

      lasertag having gone the way of velcro
      like ur career it’s fallen by the wayside


    • Cecilia Stelzer
    • Fantasy

      I'm trying to read 
      the underpainting


    • Chris Campanioni
    • trinitarian formula

      mainframe & sea
      floor cast & flattened

    • {unattainable in this ruby tuesday}

      that raw yet crispy salmon
      unattainable in this ruby
      tuesday so I aspire to leek

    • {mannequin}

      windows in moving
      picture of the same

    • {in a slippery body}

      all four obliques
      of perspective
      neck susceptible 


    • Reuben Gelley Newman
    • Ambient Gay Cortical Jenga

      Clutching my necklace agate
      Talismanic as metaphor

    • Homonympotence

      baritone skimming sixteenth notes

      off the Bach like sea-surf at the surface


    • Deborah J. Shore
    • Oracle

      into the aurora’s magnet, 
      and into the rugosa rose, baby blue eyes, 


    • Ry Cook
    • Poets in the Hamptons

      poets in the Hamptons
                breaking their backs for 

    • Conditional

      The leaves move the wind from the trees to the fire escape.


    • Koss
    • A Passing on the Waste Land (embellished redaction from The Waste Land)

      she is pyrene and not given to gamboge or bullshit


    • Daniel Poppick
    • MAY NOTEBOOK

      In the public garden: something there is that doesn’t love a wall of undead daffodils.


    • Cat Tyc
    • THE ROMANCE MYTH

      The people who created Zoom
      Might be shepherds of the devil
      Promoting
      False connection
      But


    • Tracy Fuad
    • The Third Space

      This is how I learned to speak. 
      A frantic architecture. 
      I mean, forensic architecture. 

    • Thick Time

      I was always somewhere
      So exactly 
      In one place


    • Ariel Yelen
    • Poets Need So Much

      My hands are flagging cabs
      They need holding 

    • Technology in General

      The computers were not edible.


    • Rainer Diana Hamilton
    • Trance Essay for Remembering Smells

      But sure I couldn’t smell anyway, it wasn’t so disappointing to learn that smell does not trigger the memory of smell itself, but of something else related to it 


    • Parker Menzimer
    • Polyphemus Butchering Odysseus's Man

      Today the library is loud
      The books are like untuned guitars
      My life is like an ugly song
      On radios in distant cars

       


    • Matthew Cooperman
    • the atmosphere is not a perfume it is odorless

      the crisis in or out, and little false lakes growing up the rolling hillsides of the 
      South Platte drainage that stretches lazily all the way to the Missouri, passing

    • A Field Mentality

      You are the voice
      inside the engine
      earth so


    • Stuart McPherson
    • Future Cities

      cleft / embattle scorched earth
      shake every historical foundation

    • Dissect Recurrent Theme

      Between twilight monstrosities find the flight of 
      a tawny owl, serene stillness, fade of pine inhaled;


    • 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

      Theo Meranze
    • Confessional #8

      The onlookers did nothing. The sky was
      dark and its teeth opened me imprecisely— jagged


    • Thomas Heise
    • Life Is Closer Than It Appears

      Perhaps it might be excused 
      by how little time or energy 
      is left over as the sand runs out 

    • The Repairs

      All the failures calendared in advance 
      in books that look official. 


    • Geoffrey Olsen
    • elate squirm recognition grips front stretch pinging as control

      shadow’s plumb then lilac breaks waiting word to accrue

    • seared film leaves edge only easeless creases and plasm material

      shared shred flickering in light cusp

    • silent infer reed exterior placed muscled pained flouts

      shadow riddance revealed slow subsistence

    • the earthly the earth limns enraging solar obsolete

      phragmite panoply song searing weird in undersoil

    • each just unspooling on sound and indeterminacy's metering indirect

      is it failure of my own composure a neglect that destroys the merit


    • Adam Strauss
    • Prolepsis Led

      Music small enough it fits in a box


    • Carolyn Oliver
    • New York State Thruway

      egg boat nose aimed down slope


    • Anthony Borruso
    • Hook's Soliloquy

      to nullify the ivy ropes that rule my mind. I hate


    • Raisa Tolchinsky
    • good patient

      O little kite,

      terrible anchor,


    • Jared Joseph
    • New

      Mark the death of the stone with your hand
      I like
      how Death eats into the rule of ideology

    • i sent you where you are.

      Do you come here often you said to the hot tub
      version of me.


    • Suphil Lee Park
    • An Unironic Union

                           A conspiracy
      of weather

    • Try Me

      Like I’m a second
      of water.


    • Ellen June Wright
    • Self-Portrait 2012 by Jordan Casteel

      Providence would have its way. The ancients knew that.

    • Betye Saar in her Laurel Canyon studio, 1970

      As in classical paintings, the subject is surrounded by objects that symbolize her, that ground her in time & place.


    • Hassan Melehy
    • They once called it a paper trail

      whose full reach remains unmeasured,
      except as the vague but unending echo


    • Olivia Sokolowski
    • As Long As I'm Not Left Alone

      just one huge oak out every gloomy window?


    • Benjamin Landry
    • Deep in the Emerald City,

      The City blister-glows.


    • JSA Lowe
    • Contraflow.

      The dialectic of enoughness which exceeds adequacy, the narratives of scarcity,   
      how complex and how luscious that complexity;


    • 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.

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