The city was New York.
The time was 1:02 am.
One could not see the sun.
The season was winter.
The temperature was 11°F.
It was not snowing.

Prelude

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Issue

1

Cover
    Frank Guan
  • Green House: A Brief History of “American Poetry”

    Which decrypted is of the rhetoric monolithic institutions linked to capital and the imperial state, academy they became complicit in spite of its aversion to definite poetic statements, can nonetheless be character


  • Michael Robbins
  • Sonnets to Edward Snowden

    The disappearing colonies / are no longer buzzworthy.


  • Morgan Parker
  • Please Wait (Or, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé)

    How it floats with flagrant privilege / And feels it can ask any question

  • Welcome to the Jungle

    like just standing in line / at Whole Foods or Purgatory

  • Beyoncé in Third Person

    I type Beyoncé into my phone / five out of seven days a week. / That’s because I am a woman.


  • Ri Pierce-Grove
  • Frames

    With shutter clicks, his noted moments pinned


  • Anthony Madrid
  • People's Republic of China Sequence

    There was an old man from Beijing: / You couldn’t tell that guy a thing.


  • Amanda Smeltz
  • Please Don't Text Me Pictures of the Sunrise

    That’s not an angel, it’s an ad.

  • I Tore a Lion with My Hands

    Here is a corridor too thin to be able to walk two abreast.

  • Missions Trip

    My white light / will bring forth the garden.


  • Cecilia Corrigan
  • from TITANIC

    I want to say “trust me,” but let’s all have a drink first,


  • Emily Swanson
  • (before you wake)

    slow and soft / fumbling with / the light switch

  • winter

    she points out the new


  • Alexandra Pechman
  • Texarkana

    here the only monument was a border, / the only magic sounded like a pop song.

  • The Spider

    I stared into that space / wondering if a part of me / was empty, small, / of no importance to the city,


  • Ana Božičević
  • Baroque

    Scroll. Scroll. The dawn is breaking, war is starting,

  • The Dialectic of Down

    ̑ = ̑

  • Main Blanche

    Flowers / Have a monopoly on flowers.

  • Green Apple

    ¡Que idiota!

  • Wittgenstein

    I passed through the lip of the shell

  • The Best Text Message Poem in the World

    As you read this,

  • Poem

    then it spoke to Lianne. Everyone was astonished.

  • The Importance of the Fire Ladder

    The fire ladder is important.

  • Melancholia

    If she loved you, she’d escape!

  • The Night I Fucked William Carlos Williams,

    I was alarmed at how stark his mien was.


  • Willis Plummer
  • Angle of Yawn

    I feed the cat and clean out its litter box. This is the good part.

  • the last three words i want to hear

    and the children get bored so fast

  • In The End, The Light

    Books begin piling on my nightstand.


  • Jesse Zuba
  • Moving On

    Of course there are circles
    within circles, but that’s everywhere.


  • Austin Allen
  • Apollo

    We have a problem:

  • Self-Portrait (The Desperate Man)

    Is that a fever’s rose / or rouge, do you suppose?

  • Sure

    (you could add other isn’ts to the list),


  • Maureen Miller
  • I am my own best friend

    I inscribed it I really did to no one


  • Jonathan Aprea
  • O Is for Ombrifuge

    In the car you tell me your reticulate dream

  • Building Your Animal

    you feed it something small, / during transportation or at work,


  • John Koethe
  • Chappaquiddick

    The rich were interesting and smart instead of just obscene,


  • Natalie Eilbert
  • I Want to Raise You in My Starving Image

    Did you want me to cackle.

  • Teenager

    Who will feast on the brainworms

  • Habit

    Go easy on me, nun


  • Alexander Nemser
  • The Sphinx

    There’s a story about my great-grandmother


  • Mary Austin Speaker
  • First Theory of Origin: The American Cowboy

    the high noon sun

  • Forever and Sunsmell

    for John Cage


  • Jason Anderson
  • Melting Roads

    the diamond-clean clinical glow, the whitened piss-yellow fluorescence

  • White Sands

    beyond fraying clotheslines and loose-leafed copse

  • As Rivers, Below

    as a half dream of leopards and doves, as falling asleep,


  • Howard Altmann
  • The Stone

    Not without reason did the stone break away—

  • Staples

    The spoon in the bowl / was the glass on the table,


  • Prudence Peiffer
  • Ode

    Summer is over, too quick


  • Adam Weg
  • Evening, By Them

    One side was age; the other, looks.

  • Emphasis on Yes

    some days, we’ll sound a lot like mom.


  • Jasper Bernes
  • from We Are Nothing and So Can You

    Is he one now? Is she one too?


  • Hyun Cho
  • Crucial Babe No.1

    He is such a crucial babe


  • Tim O'Connell
  • The Tiny Fly

    What kind of tiny fly

  • Anxiety in August

    And nailed a black tongue / To the door of Eleven Wall Street.


  • Mira Gonzalez
  • i think of others before you too often

    i will adjust my sleeping position / to accommodate the space

  • in which you anxiously anticipate events that will not occur

    or it’s the moment he finds you in someone else


  • Jenny Zhang
  • dumb theory

    the scenic route / the Pacific object / the industrial heroine

  • We must rapidly begin

    and for once it feels right to say / it is as if my entire life up until then / had been in service of everyone else’s dreams


  • Jeff Nagy
  • Palisade

    Love will be compulsive or not at all

  • Cheshire Chats

    FIG. ( \ / \ / ) (MANTA RAY GUN)


  • Delia Pless
  • The Nuns

    It’s just me in the kitchen. / Me and two jars of kombucha

  • Pine tree

    It’s a pine tree.

  • October 26th

    I think it’s been raining.


  • Cole Swensen
  • Debord

    the de- / Haussmannization of the mind on an October afternoon

  • Sinclair

    or walking as interactive cartography:


  • John Ashbery
  • Colors

    Yep what a story.

  • Cheap Legs

    “make an end run around darkness,” / someone said.


  • Robert C.L. Crawford
  • Movementalities

    Conceptualism is most usefully understood as a form, specifically the form of new forms.


  • Frank Guan and Charles Bernstein
  • (First Fifteen Minutes of) A Dialogue with Charles Bernstein

    G: Can you state your name and, serial number for the audience here?

    B: I … I don't really eat cereal that much.


  • Stu Watson
  • Political Poetry

    Thus political poetry is, somewhat paradoxically, language that makes us aware of those qualities of life that are beyond language.


  • Frank Guan
  • Outclassed, Outsourced: American Poetry at the Present (Part 1)

    But the critics, especially major critics as intelligent as they are tenured, should know better—know better even at the cost of purity. It's for that, if nothing else, that they exist.


  • Ann Lauterbach
  • Motif

    dead metallic -- crop / crop into the brightly zoned / animate debris.

  • To Anchor the Swarm, Its

    little cousins, little citizens of death / unnamed along these distributions  


  • Douglas Crase
  • Introduction to "Euangelia"

    Critics frequently ask the polite question of a poem. They ask how it is written when the rest of us might more radically wonder why.


  • Robert C.L. Crawford
  • Euangelia

    The lone mule kicked, murd’rous.


  • Frank Guan
  • Introduction to Cecily Iddings


  • Cecily Iddings
  • Lyman Street

    Merely clumsy, me, / I hit the brakes, I save / a skunk.

  • My Magic Mountain

    You / can have a treatment and / a treat too

  • American Singer Canary

    or for saying, / The cage is roomy but / the rent is too high.

  • Things We Don't Like That We Don't Like

    the image of a person / above all else, whether / handsome or grotesque

  • Your House Is My House

    it was easy to get into.

  • Come Trust Me

    like cross-dressing / or separating green glass / from clear,

  • A Concentration Problem

    who did he call / and who came?

  • Nights

    The cupboard kills the knife. / The knife smothers the cupboard.

  • Teething Ring

    to see All the World in a Box.

  • What Do You See?

    there I am / feeling crowded


  • Corina Copp
  • The Flatbed

    I am a Trümmerfrau of language.>>


  • Stu Watson
  • Introduction to Chris Hosea

    “Across the Boss’s Desk” is not a confession but a revelation


  • Chris Hosea
  • Across the Boss's Desk

    you are, like, a hurricane


  • Stu Watson
  • From Manning Unbound

    against the gravity of down 
    and holding fast
    in dream to where the wall 
    will let me hold fast
    to the wall. 


  • R. Tristan DeWitt
  • The Dodos of Espionage

    For innovations in shame.

  • Come to the Table

    A pink weld envelops

  • Regional Holiday

    As thirst climbs the esophagus, rings a bell in the head.

  • [Untitled]

    The red clay sang to them.

  • Granulate Compassionate

    I would put a flame to a face.

  • Tamper-Proof

    We are determined not to fall behind.

  • [Untitled]

    A man in uniform of fleets unknown / Herding the unwilling through

  • Broad Strokes Educate

    Muted trumpets:

  • Please Check All That Apply

    (It tugs at us / To be the ones finding out.)

  • When Baker Left His Mark

    Warrior-kings came through the window / Stained with parables.

  • The Masonic Frag

    The re-creation of yesterday park.

  • Leather Nostril

    Through concords of sexual death / And the avant garde.

  • Pro Forma

    To another crystal, doesn’t much care / For reform.

  • [Untitled]

    Now has become sooner.


  • Tom Blood
  • Better Off

    park bench desk the less I disturb, more remain

  • Now Spring Is Our Release

    unloved like dry wall shards, glass and lint

  • As Repeated Earlier

    as fall is an effort of trees

  • The Admitted Closure

    cruel to my own tsar heart

  • I Would If You Asked Me To

    found like a feather on my pillow in the van

  • Talking Can Be Not Easy

    so we didn’t use words in that moment

  • What We Treat It As

    armadillo red ember echo picnic

  • Forfeiting Gray

    fingering the dream catchers

  • Its Been Along Time

    before the Safeway moment / hand on a cold fish, mango in my pants

  • Perfection Is Not a Question

    I wander along the ice cream stand

  • Black Stygian Lotus

    your friends get naked and read your poems

  • Can We Return

    the beginning of the song is therominy

  • Glass Is a Sand Castle

    in this city of challenged passion

  • Bird Sketches

    book apricot


  • Stu Watson
  • Introduction to Brenda Iijima

    “Space is the place.”


  • Brenda Iijima
  • From Body Work

    Tombs cradle awakening tombs


  • Stu Watson
  • Introduction to John Kinsella

    Kinsella does not shy from the underside of poesis, from the negative operations that associate, talismanically, the figures of the past with a malicious present.


  • John Kinsella
  • From Paradise Lust Book II: Transferences


  • Frank Guan
  • Introduction to Nina Puro


  • Nina Puro
  • Social Security Office

    I am yelling through a cracked phone.

  • Outlived

    The slurring of choices into a singularity: / the baggie lying on a glazed blue saucer with chipped edges.

  • Fluke

    Sometimes trees talk back.

  • Speaker

    I put on a smile like snow and snow and snow.

  • Rivulets

    a chipped mirror, a teacup, an arm to grab. / A patch of sky worn thin, gold.

  • Thirsty and the Night Is Old

    the sound of a boat loud with waves / when there's no water near.

  • In Tlön, Uqbar

    Sometimes lying is better.

  • so much / a bit

    gold lemon grafted in the orange roots and worms

  • treatment

    never carefully enough

  • Bitters

    The light in summer holds almost too long.


  • Tao Lin
  • Friday, 4:16PM, May 16, 2014 (typed this title as the last thing I did for this, it’s the current time—it’s 4:17PM now actually, sorry about this title/piece, feel like apologizing)

    stream of consciousness


  • Lisa Jarnot
  • Part Five: The Sublime Porte

    meditations on death / interrupted by the / empty shampoo bottle


  • Frank Guan
  • The Underground Sonnets

    Just know that somewhere in Atlanta poems are created / And somewhere deep in Georgia poems are destroyed.

  • Going, Going, Back, Back

    I'm good at math. I set the three above the six.

  • Spare Generators

    The junk fleet sank / Into a subway with the possibility of destination,

  • Line Breaks

    that everyone was / really everyone without exception—

  • The Blessing and the

    the useful path to take is / Gratitude for being rendered into / Content.

  • In Disguise

    whatever works / For you.

  • Fibrillations

    without focusing— / glass shells clear / up the opera

  • Warm Arks

    Now, an artist statement,

  • First and Ten

    Where are the Syrians of yesteryear?

  • Imitation of Peace

    The gloom that manufactures / White leaves and red ink littering the crooked axes.


  • Rebecca Wolff
  • The Scope of Human Tragedy

    that’s a solution destined to poison

  • Homeowner

    ):

  • Was It Hubris

    “dirty whore”

  • Female Anecdote

    along the moving walkway to Terminal C.

  • Saving It All for the Morning

    Ass in the air / for you

  • In The

    half-seen and trill and ululation

  • Death In Copenhagen

    I accept Skills, measurement

  • Chips

    Pantone Solid Coated

  • Warden

    No ideas but in


  • Ariana Reines
  • Twelfth Night

    I think to be a poet is a very beautiful thing / Because a poet wants to be right but does not want to win

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