The city was New York.
The time was 6:08 am.
One could not see the sun.
The season was winter.
The temperature was 29°F.
It was not snowing.

Prelude

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Issue

4

Cover
    Jennifer Soong
  • Western Way

    An orange source
                            floats in glass

  • Some Weather (To J.J. Wieners)

    your babes would be born as soon as now


  • Lindsay Turner
  • 2/1/17

    in the trees the twigs at least can still cascade

  • Accomplice

    accomplice you said but what does it mean


  • Grey Vild
  • & I thought we were done begging

    but I know they’re all the names we’ll never give to anyone.


  • xtian w.
  • bowers white

    irony being white hot like the white heat


  • Mary Meriam
  • The Sad Palace of Ill Effects

    So ordered by the Queen of Childhood’s House
    ​whose spirit had been stolen by a witch.


  • Aria Aber
  • In Which God is a Party

    their furious thumbs sprouting dollar-bills


  • Hillery Stone
  • Dream of the Separate Body

    You were gone, though your body stayed behind and rose

  • Inheriting the Cave

    Anne made her soup in there. Mother set a lampshade
    beside her father’s torn neck.

  • Forgive Your Assassin

    Surely I understood the tragedy of exchange watching


  • Daniel Coudriet
  • Poem

    The children running around with mirrors.

  • We Make Weather By Walking In It

    just above the powerlines
    already it is a season


  • Ana Božičević
  • Happy Ending

    That’s what i wanted
    To do for u
    To paris


  • Graham Barnhart
  • Blocking An Imagined War Movie

    Now the van is driving away, and the boy
    going home is not the boy who arrived.

  • How To Stay Awake On A Training Exercise

    Some guys take straight dips of instant coffee
    ​between their gum and lower lip.


  • Candace Williams
  • On Neoliberalism or: Why My Black Ass Is Tired

    drink ride or stand
    sit or lay my body down

  • blackbody

    a blackbody can be red or blue or another color. The blackness is theoretical.


  • Shira Erlichman
  • Aftertaste

    everything
    on this brutal blue
    dot is constructed of elemental attraction


  • Patty Nash
  • Player Piano

    line at the HyVee 33 minutes’ brisk walk


  • Chris Campanioni
  • Portrait w/ Rt. 4

    Always reached for a body
    Made to last


  • Carly Dashiell
  • Castles of England

    that makes me certain
    ​New York is not safe for art

  • Castles of England

    no excuse o cat it’s evening


  • John Koethe
  • Plastic Saxophone

    He urged Terry Gross to bring her clarinet to his group
    And see what happened (she didn’t go).

  • Rural Churches

    They’re always surrounded by small graveyards
    ​Supporting occasional ghosts, fences and a few flowers.


  • Dolapo Demuren
  • You Still Accompany Me, After You Vanish

    like the parents of butterflies
    careful among what they’ve left

  • At My Father's New Worksite

    you’re someone I’ve never met,
    quite perfect, intensely lit.


  • Greg Nissan
  • from The City is Lush With / Obstructed Views

     Not insomnia but bartered weather
          Prints me off this chthonic
           Terrace.


  • Lizzie Harris
  • Leaked Nude

    To life on mars,
    each flicker
    is a star.

  • This New Planet

    Billionaires are developing a Nano stamp.
    Hope moves like a micro-sail.


  • Ben Purkert
  • In Zero Gravity

    in my heart. No explorer goes that deep:

                Columbus discovered nothing but his own likeness

  • No Other Way

    therefore it rises


  • Caitlin Roach
  • goldenrod dreams of dew point blazing

    —the charred snags, the whole forest that carried on

  • host

    I wanted something sick, a thick throat of pearls


  • Kathleen Winter
  • Faux Romanesque

    Your lancet window let in
    ​very little light.

  • Sainte de Glace

    Christ crucified on antlers of an elk.
    Bring on the operators, equal and unequal.


  • Carly Inghram
  • When I Consider the African American

    I do not consider sticking my hand out the moving taxi
    just so I could see the wind catch through my fingers.

  • National Anthem

    I think to make folded birds
    across a sea of black openness.

  • Black History Month

    He drinks his coffee black without sugars or creams.

  • Fingerpainting

    As we all know by now, power only has one chin,
    because the angle we take its picture from is always up.


  • Elisa Gonzalez
  • Passive Voice

    weighed down
    by the problem of proving
    that I exist

  • Weather Journal (I)

    on cold nights, open the chimney
    so the sky is the one
    adorned by smoke


  • Robert Archambeau
  • Notes on the Avant-Garde

    He was about to say something, but
    I put him in a sonnet,

  • The Uncontained

    Or no. The way your body contains the pain
    that eats it whole, 


  • Kailey Tedesco
  • Ophelia as Lazarus

    to be a trinity to web
    my voice with florets,
    dilating my bones

  • The Ritual Calls for Belladonna

    sea, only
    the next
    best thing
    only


  • Ian Bonaparte
  • The Ballad of Johnny Changes

    Johnny begazed
    his colorshifted city


  • Aaron Kent
  • Morning in Retrograde

    We have disturbed our child
    in nocturna.

  • The Mountain's Ugly Head

    Two marks thumbed into
    providence, bled dry under
    her palliative snowfall.


  • Momina Mela
  • Garden Varieties

    singed in red chilli lattice, latticework edges
    into the mouth of a devil who smokes rosemary


  • John Michael Colón
  • Snowmelt

    The thing I call myself has aged a bit,
    its atoms exchanged



  • Sergio Espinosa
  • from Toward Muteness

    this endless trial isn’t the calculated leap
    to your hunger to the priapism of your bloody mask


  • Sarah María Medina
  • When There's No Breadfruit

    the next gone down/ in a bullet or razor/ a narrow escape


  • Molly Damm
  • Line of Sight

    We covered her
    and propped her in the sun
    while the neighbors hummed


  • Peter Giebel
  • Together, It's Nothing

    drop enraged with weeds I don’t want
    anything can’t bear anything I learn to


  • Michelle Bitting
  • Where the Wild Cat's Paw Found my Pulse

    Gatsby, the green light’s gone, sold for some girl’s folio
    left in a bathroom stall.


  • Jonty Tiplady
  • I Usually Try Not To Take A Public Position

    The tree means a stolen playground taxied
    by light, a twin obstacle pendulum switching sadly to resolve
    impulse crammed into a doppelgänger.

  • Rob Lowe Ice Hockey Film

    Gary Cooper sketched alive on a train.

  • Welcome to Planet Mongoose

    This last line, which no-one will know if crossed, pops off layers
    into the spaghetti-pit of treason as eggshell poof goes shyly
    where the knackered poor kids may breath.

  • What Do We Talk Of When We Talk of Extinction

    When I talk like that, of extinction, then what do I talk scattering
    the ice-heavy magnitudes beneath the crowded kiosks of poor-will.

  • Sunphone And Orinoco Blip

    Wearing that voice that doesn’t fit, like a leg film ballooning a text-
    cradle thundered into meaning by the niche finality of Haribo
    Ozymandias.


  • Chelsea Dingman
  • Undaughtered

    Through kitchen windows, she points
                            at my sons playing in the rain. A steeple.
                The bell held in its throat. I am


  • Evan Gill Smith
  • Where Were Our Dads in the Summer of '92?

    Our dads were being jealous
    ​of big houses


  • Amanda Oosthuizen
  • Still Stalks Lit Gold

    No jostling now in
    ​this darkness between us,

  • Mushrooms

    Do not believe the mushroom’s
    bid for isolation


  • John Rodzvilla
  • Forty One Pots

    Wit and mirth are scarce.


  • Sarah Sarai
  • This Once-in-a-Lifetime Opportunity

    gave me, a fuchsia, as from my west of
    ​aching beauty.

  • Please Don't Think I'm Being Disrespectful

    Story is best friend and long-found love. 


  • Albert Thomas
  • Hear Ye Hear Ye

    the cliff and waiting for earth
    to move. no quake came. too 


  • Matthew Wedlock
  • Dinner Hatchet

    Baba Yaga, take the lampblack to my heart


  • Sarah Edwards
  • The Visit

    Approaching, proved less insistent
    Than her humiliating new desire: again

  • Rachel Eats The Nasturtium

    The dare to jump into early-year water, elastic unsnapping 
    of bras followed by bounding, wooden din, down the dock.


  • Lucian Mattison
  • from Clouds

    The collective conscious
    is in my right pocket, and it’s a clubbed


  • E. Kristin Anderson
  • Concerning Bending

    One more and I’ll
                  throw the truth,

  • I began to get words

    Wishing stars         drove
                three blocks    in
                      utter silence,

  • Warding

                     I kept the scream
                                 in my throat.


  • Jessica Hudgins
  • Ex-Lover as a Stranger in Nina's Café

    You sit a few seats down
    and rub the red marks your socks made
    around your calves.

  • Skipping Skeletons

    A new scar rose like a tooth
    on the knuckle of my index finger.


  • Zoe Darsee
  • Expansive

    not all the time
    get closer to the screen

  • Ammo

    my torn
    shoulder
    is also


  • Armando Jaramillo Garcia
  • Papers

    Degenerative complaints parallel with sense
    All there is to do is watch the wick crumble

  • A Truncated Account

    Relying on the postal service as if it was a right
    Dipping into social norms without fear

  • A Food-Based System

    How prone to a design of carbon-based stars
    Turning our heads instead of our minds


  • Timothy Donnelly
  • Prometheus

    Whatever I do next, it will be this, or not this: I can’t
    do otherwise. In this respect, I can be said to be a fatalist


  • Steven Alvarez
  • when i was when i was the old in this game

    0:30yes and i guess it can be spirit nationalism squashes

  • yr four days in three nights

                                                                 6:42threatened 
    in a relatively new field carries all nineteen hundred 
    another

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