June Contributors
Ron Arbuckle, Olivia Bell, Katherine Breeden, Lachlan Brooks, Mackenzie Carignan, Kathi Crawford, Nick Crowley, Francis de Lima, Ryan di Francesco, Peter Donnelley, Bart Edelman, Mike Ferguson, Devon Fulford, Howie Good, Shannon Guglielmo, Samantha Hund, Kiran Josen, dee p.r. kay, Josh Lipson, Kes Maro, Garth Martens, Colin McGuire, Mike McHone, Natalie Nee, Clara No!, Mark Parsons, Emily Pavick, Abish Qamar, and John Repp
Poetry
May Highlights
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swan story: ode to ambiguous pronouns
by John Repp
“…the delis & bookshops, / the cobblers & lectures & resettlement houses jostling / each block, all the free things penniless couples could do, / how they hid their Robeson records till McCarthy / was good and dead.”
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domestic sentences 11
by Bill Neumire
“[Jesse] just got a senior lecturer position at Cornell and he gets to teach a class on happiness, which is a secular replacement for god.
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it was a war, wasn't it?
by Crystal James
“Today, I celebrate my inner child / Her strength and resilience / Her messy hair and shy voice / Her dirty feet and fearless climb / Her vigilance / Her hope / Her love for red poppies in August”
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puppet man
by Frank Haberle
“Come, children, the man standing on a box / In the center of the bridge yelled to us, / In Shakespeare. Let us shut up this box / And put away these puppets, for our play / Has been played.”
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narcissus, repenting
by Hanna Webster
“I lick her palm, which tastes like mercy, her grooved heartline ensnared by the pathetic molecular boundary of her flesh. What a shame. I smell fear radiate from her hair like steam”
body poems
by Abish Qamar
“The body remains a loose creature of dissolution, / a fishhook slackened within the dirty banks of its wreck and flaw. / And the prodigious is now a starving hound, / thin-ribbed, gleaming in the spit of its maw.”
four poems
by Kes Maro
“between the old mill and the duck pond, harbor road is steady under my sparkling velcro sneakers. the path to Avalon is open and there is bread in my hand. swans and ducks and geese in the water.”
they say one percent of a billionaire’s wealth could end extreme poverty
by Kiran Josen
“somewhere / a girl plucks / her ribs / like prayer beads.”
four poems
by Mike McHone
“they found him on the floor of his apartment / so much blood around him the cops thought / he’d been killed, when a burst ulcer did him in.”
five poems
by Josh Lipson
“Adam and Eve falling through the sky / creating cosmos out of / breathless Abzu / certain we’re about to die…”
four poems
by Ryan Di Francesco
“I Remember When I Saw / folded skeletons of the flat city / on piles of saffron / carved out / of cement…”
five poems
by Mackenzie Carignan
“striking how the moments have space / between them / how quiet the quiet is / captured in unfurnished moments…”
five poems
by Samantha Hund
“I only fuck metaphorically / if you look at it / sober-eyed and sweat-free / it becomes hysterical…”
poem sequence for his cluster b online girlfriend
by Mark Parsons
“Her catabolic gaze reverse-effervesces, / Breaks down to assimilate all who surround her, / Wherever she casts her eye or attention.”
three poems
by Dee P. R. Kay
“you rapped / on the hotel door / framed by darkness / thru the peephole / larger than life…”
four poems
by Nick Crowley
“My ex was my principal therapeutic experience / which is to say / i was monitored constantly / to see if i was being ‘authentic’ / i’m not real at all / that’s why we broke up…”
five poems
by Lachlan Brooks
“Monstrous byproduct of sculpture, / and strange contortionist / Caught in the slow pose of / an emerging form, of entelechy / That reveals a great courtship with / nature and a messy divorce.”
prague, venice and burl ives (or “another renting-the-walk-in-closet in-viola’s-house poem”)
by John Repp
“Slumped tear-soaked / in a red brocade armchair that smelled of stale farts, I’d shut / my eyes & hum “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” till Dr. Burl / gently coaxed me back to the mundane muck of the present…”
three poems
by Ron Arbuckle
“Being hit by a train / gracefully / takes decades / Make your life choices / with its inevitability / in awareness”
five poems
by Colin McGuire
“You are the Ultimate Warrior / and I am the Undertaker / thudding / like boulders above the living room / while Mum and Dad watch Casualty.”
things inside my fridge
by Natalie Nee
“Five bottles of almost-empty hot sauce, an oil-stained to-go box of empanadas, a gifted psilocybin chocolate bar I’m saving for a rainy day…”
four poems
by Devon Fulford
Women: You dont get married for instagram. You dont get married to spend money. You dont get married to annoy your ex. You dont get married for fun, or freedom. You get married to BELONG to an
five poems
by Kathi Crawford
“Our lips the same shape as our pussies— / banks full of dividends wasted on misogynist mules. / A mountain is a mighty injustice.”
three poems
by Howie Good
“A committee of biased judges travels from town to town with a portable guillotine. If the chickens in a coop can peck a fox to death, and they can, no one is safe. Whang!”
a story of straight lines
by Mike Ferguson
“That / beneath / the flawlessness of straight lines / ploughed and planted and growing / in those forever fields) / there are bodies buried / dead or alive.”