The Train In a cold bed under thin covers the train goes through town miles away, humming a lullaby for me, a shrill note that once kept me from dreaming now a call to throw open my windows and run to catch a metal body, to lean into the exhaust cloud and tilt my hair into the night, the cool wind…

Vultures I see many vultures in the spring, omens among the new, fresh lives, sitting motionless and boring holes into passing cars with their large hungry eyes, waiting for someone to go a mile too fast without minding the tree line where everything is born, for something with pencil thin legs to…

Ode to Starlings A flock of starlings takes refuge in the church across the street, hundreds of delicate birds singing loud, pleading hymns with the choir, begging to be carried to a place where the weather is cold and the clouds hide their shimmering bodies from the judgement that will come when…

Vibrating Strings after Jane Hirshfield's "First Light Edging Cirrus" Whatever love is, whether apples or clocks, honey or iron locks, it is liquid as moonlight moving across the wall in the bedroom where you are asleep and I harmonize to the harp strings of your breath. Lana Hechtman Ayers…

Souvenirs Some are the kind you purchase at the aquarium gift shop, a blue tee shirt with Hopper's Nighthawks where all the humans are species of fish or mammals like shark. Some are the unasked-for kind, the red eel snaking up the back of your right thigh from the time your bike powered forward…

Ponder in Darkness We have begun to fray the way stars fade away completely by sunrise which is to say we're still whole though parts of ourselves seem unknowable during the day. Lana Hechtman Ayers shepherded over 150 poetry titles into print as managing editor of 3 presses. Her poems appear in…

One-Way Valve The dogs ate first. My mother-in-law lived in a house of fur and low growls in Charlotte. She ran the business from the kitchen table, surrounded by bloodhounds with weeping eyes and terriers that smelled wet. When a rescue nipped my son's cheek, she didn't check the wound; she…

Draft Season Tonight I promise to be briefly forgivable, if nothing else. Say 7/11's fluorescent glow reeks of artillery, the kind your mouth becomes wet newspaper for. Say this February's knife-air fancies itself a migraine. Help me find a kinder name for squall slash ambush. Say we apologize to…

How to make a home out of your body Douse it in black funnel the blackness until each part is separate: black- roasted dates, extract the sweetness you are a daughter & it is of no use to you lately, the neighbours have noticed the curves beneath your spine like a staircase growing into your womb.…

Looking in A fracture in the trees. The green outline of age dark brown burrows unsettled in Spring bellies of yarn, pastel speckled, sprigs eggs out in the cosy. Two miles from Mousehold the fraying clouds lift as a cover ready to be taken in. I carry on searching for nettles to soak in tea. Ammy…

Lylylyric Speak in lilies tongue leaves places no longer touched find the rust tomatoes ripe, salt-wanting I ask you for bread and you return – oranges the rind of the sun slow, unpeeling. Ammy Alamir is a poet writing out of Liverpool. Her work attends to the female voice, identity, and…

Peace Wheel The saffron monks stoop carefully dropping single grains of colored sand onto the mandala of peace. They rock gently as the intricate wheel takes shape and form. They are drawn to its center closer day by day, countless hours focussed to a singularity. They interlace fingers bow a…

A Loss Removing the photograph from the clear sleeve where it lay, choosing not to place another image there– honoring emptiness, the heart that holds it. Andrea Potos is the author of eight full-length books of poems, most recently The Presence of One Word, and Her Joy Becomes, both from Fernwood…

Ruellia Brittoniana: Desire When I allow my sandaled left foot to feel the dirt as I replant the Mexican petunias, hoping against hope and yet, on the other side of my mind, just curious to see if, unrooted, real regrowth can happen in the lexicon of the replanted, I wage a fresh bet: that dirt…

borrowed light i kept a lamp on for a version of me who never came home. all night, it hummed like a throat trying not to speak. moths gathered at the shade, soft-bodied and frantic, mistaking warmth for a way in. by morning, the room was still empty. only the bulb remained, pale and tired,…

dead letter office at the counter they ask do you know the address? i say it keeps moving rows of bins with paper weather envelopes thinned by going nowhere stamps of birds mid-flight postmarks like soft rings on water the clerk brings a bundle tied with string unable to forward printed in tired…

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Roots Beneath the Cross Grandmother pulls a bundle of yarrow from the base of a grave cross. Blood from a cut on her palm mixes with the sap from the stems, running down her fingers in thin reddish streaks. She rubs it into the wood slowly, not like part of a ritual, but the way people rub grease…

Festival today everyone has changed only I remain where I was the roses lower their heads into the grass and sparse hearts gather until the streets grow embarrassed will it be possible to move from where there are roses to where there are none? will I be able to love what lingers in my sight when…

Hair Salon I dream of endings. I cling to a reality that never begins. Hairdressers raise the sound of their scissors, passing along the drivers' whispers urging everyone toward the cliff together. Half of the mirror keeps sinking heavily downward. Fallen hair fills the corners of a dark notebook.…

Argument v I chose silence and polymers seized or sang. Say the dialectic is worth the impotence; the prophet who lays parchment over truth against the one whose sandals spat sand on it. Like any game outside, rain adjudicates. I chose silence and polymers seized or sang. David Wong Hsien Ming…

Miracle between the five or seven loaves & the triune nondefinition of 'a few', it seems god works in prime numbers & that Italians therefore forsook divinity with the four-cheese; whether the miracle was duplication or duplicity, there's little point in asking coffeeshop ghosts who've long moved…

sprung we all surround the bradford pear spittoon of pollen vomit and watch ochre dust percolate while horseflies emerge from hides. this is to say it's april, and my eyes itch. i've decided i want to be the movie theater popcorn machine— seems like a good life to me. i'd like to be doused in…

blacking out at my first phillies game scarlet and powder blue are now phanatic-shaped blurs in the back of my retinae. surfside tastes like stevia so i stomach the whole can in sacrifice. i know i'm a good friend—that's not the point. i giggle from behind the phils' dugout and pray they dig…

sonnet for voegesite and exfoliants i like luxurious things. my standards are low—this means lavender incense, steam shower, terpinolene in bloodstream. i wouldn't know what to do with a porsche. i cannot place it on my altar to manifest the rapid demise of capitalism. instead i suck sediment from…

foiled orchards would that it were as simple as reaping exactly what i sow, but proverbs don't account for changes in the rain or the soil or the sun. i toss seeds in tilled dirt with reckless abandon, harvest shriveled husks come the end of the season. haters will say overwatered but really, the…

Beachcombing A piece of sea glass embedded in white wet sand glows green harkens another sunny day Beer bottle in hand laughing on the beach walking beside that long-gone lover bronzed by the blinding sun Through the mottled looking glass gale force winds become a breeze Senses crash and recede…

Bus Pelón, León, Nicaragua The Bus Pelón is an old yellow school bus with a chopped off top a bald bus León is hot, hot, hot, even in December It's the kind of heat that makes Northwest babies melt, cementing hair around pasty faces We board the Bus Pelón after a day filled with family and…

I keep finding you under the apricot tree. I keep wishing it would fruit again for you, fingers splayed open against the sky like skin, like you're begging to be forgiven. I remember begging like that. I walk the quiet midnight. Wanting for a streetlight is what brought me here, what brought you…

Autopsy Report: Girl Removes God With Her Front Teeth "And I don't need you to tell me what that means, I don't believe in that stuff anymore." – Phoebe Bridgers At twelve, I swallowed communion waters like tiny edible surveillance cameras, Paper-thin discs dissolving against the tongue while…

Emerging When I say I'm emerging I mean the way my sons did through four inches of scar I carry— their cries splitting the room lifting me winged into air. I'm scratching the surface and finding a thirteen-year-old girl shaking her hair down to her shoulders to hide the evidence of a stolen style…

What they don’t tell you is how rearing a home is a constant act of fixing. Some blasted water pipe. The three pieces of grapefruit in the cupboard left to decaying devices. Six pounds of linen in the stock room. Eight-week-old syrup grime on the kitchen floor. Missed garbage collection days. A…

Fluency I am not fluent in the language of your love. It has no dialect nor phrases for me to recite. Its syllables are in the kitchen, with steamed dumplings after dark. Its grammar is the weight of the grocery bag from Traders Joe's, its dialect, the click of the lock twice. Your love is not a…

你来自于哪里 Not from, But Of For the aunties and uncles who ask, where are your parents from? I learn to say the answer before they finish the question. On the public train, a grandmother pulls her grandchild closer. I am fifteen, wearing my middle school uniform, the same one she wore thirty years…

Holy Summers Night August is a wild card. Summer is a book of longings. A longing for love and finding it in skin to skin. Crying on my birthday because I am so far from home, and not in the way you might think. In friends who are close just for the weekend. Coming and going has become a ceremony.…

While my voice cracks more in the cold with each year that passes as I desperately try to quiet all the broken promises that seem to give life's truths a suffocating breath, and I lose myself too often searching for comfort in a blanket made of soft words to help me forget the footprints in the…

Delivery Another package came today, one more container I can't help but see in terms of transience and useful emptiness. My cats have already claimed the umbral core. They purr, wallowing within their warmth and germs— mine, too, if I'm to be believed in this, the faith we put in space so we may…

Next to the on-ramp a field of wildflowers quietly repeating "even here there is beauty." Daniel Westreich is a writer and epidemiologist living in North Carolina. When not writing or working on science, he bakes a lot of pies, knits a lot of hats, runs a lot of trails, and reads a lot of books.…

Bukowski Barbie I am reading Bukowski in the children's toy section. I read: bunghole, drunkard, hatchet, whore and the Lego cars rev their toy engines, jonesing to run over the necks of the Barbies which themselves stare unsettlingly from behind flimsy plastic windows. Look at the violence of…

CPR Words, their meanings, support each other on strings. From human dangles cheekbone, flesh, sinew, muscle. From muscle dangles smile, flexion, vigor. When human loses its meaning, the rest of the words do too. Flesh becomes lobotomized, snipped away from blush and complexion, but still tethered…

good joss and a red burner in kl so much paper up in smoke and i lit it bill by bill and tugged at my beer and my eyes burned and it went up and up and a few light pieces of gray ash flew too and a seagull and a pigeon and one for my marriage and two for my job or lack thereof and three for a…

All through life we search for a place All through life we search for a place where our midnight movies and conversations outlast the daylight. All through life we search for a place where we walk on West 4th Street, the warmth I borrowed from your hand stays. All through life we search for a…

Half a Cookie I sat on the windowsill of South Court, half a cookie in my hand; the other half I gave you in my dreams. The plate of stir-fry asparagus still warm on my desk—I'd offer my terrible cooking, and we'd laugh about it. I wondered what lines of code rendered your sunset, across the…

Childhood, Before Erasure It smells of damp and bread already turning. A small square of sky hangs on the wall, a calendar page. Everything here is known: the door's slow creak, heavy as a shield, the steady tick of the wall clock. Sharp smell and sound press through and the room holds for a…

What Takes Hold I At the front of the classroom, Mark Gregory Robson holds a cranberry between his fingers, turning it slightly, as if it has disappointed him. "They don't bounce," he says. A few students laugh. On the table behind him sit bowls of cranberries, cups of juice, bags of craisins, and…

After You Original and translation by Minoo Salimi After you, a bird brought emptiness, and made the grasp of longing so obscure that I sit for hours in the rain without a single thought of you. Minoo Salimi is an Iranian poet and the author of two poetry collections, The Gardener Desires an…

I WANT I want to peel back my skin, cuticle to shoulder. I want to apologise to and hear apologies from everyone I've ever loved. I want to know if she is better, now, or if she still thinks about that night. I want to know if I will ever get out of that bathtub. I want to forget watching him…

hothouse orchids sweating against the glass. heat bends the stems toward their own reflections. I learn your name the way fruit learns the ground– bruising open slowly, the pit already showing. Rex Tee is a writer from Taipei, Taiwan. When not writing, he enjoys reading works of philosophical…

How to Live Like a Knick Knack First, wait for mothballs and wood polish to pile you. Wrap someone's arms around your elbows, limp onto places you hopscotched on. Next, back in granddaughter's home. Her room is of polka- dot wallpaper, she wears leggings only down to her knees with buckled boots.…

oranges, in lieu of flowers microwave hums the language of 4 a.m. i check my reflection in the oven door, then sit on the counter, peeling oranges and watching the skin fall like shed fingernails. oranges were your favorite food. i sit on the balcony, the starlight pressing its eyes shut against…