by Frederick Pollack

“Our impulse is to build the museum / before we’re sure what it commemorates / or mourns.”

by Lydia Rae Bush

“I still don't know what the dead feel like. / All I've learned since then is what it's like to actually / notice when you're feeling someone slowly die.”

by Catfish McDaris

“Her freckles were devil’s kisses / showering down from purgatory.”

by James Fleet Underwood

“…a destination seldom reached where even for the shortest second nothing’s / ever over, where nothing seems to die, where the last I’ll ever learn / and love of you is the glowing purple cactus flowers trembling all around.”

by Von Wise

“Off in the distance, the village pervert / watches us making love / in the afternoon heat. We regard him / as harmless, the way we'd regard a dog / or bird and continue with our wet return / into one another.”

by Patrick Johnston

“A knife can be a tool / A dagger is always a story”

by Rebecca Warlick

“You carried me to the sink / I woke up to luminous columns / And turned into dust“

by Cynthia Atkins

“Now I drive / with death on the passenger side./ A revenant finishing all my sentences.”

by Mykyta Ryzhykh

“This verse will be picked up by crows in the morning / And they will be thrown from heaven / On icy concrete heart rocks / All in vain”

by Philip Venzke

“Quasimodo dials the number again and hears the steady buzz of a busy signal.”

by Jesse Darnay

“Our newborn sounds / a fracture, / chipping my summer.”

by John Jeffire

“She regifted all, a painless sloughing of skin.”

by Grady VanWise

“You blink and now she's dressed in shadow, / a shroud of midnight, / with flickers of neon red pulsing underneath, / veins of pure electricity…”

by Craig Kirchner

“Insomnia and I decide to get up / and check out some late-night TV. / It’s a mutual decision, but he gets credit for the idea. / I’m going to have a coffee, hazelnut, /and he’s down with the 12-year-old bourbon, neat.”

by Ingrid Marie Jensen

“…bright horses, bolting in from the blue / and I know that’s borderline / affirmations written on the mirror in lipstick…”

by Rodrigo Toscano

“Ok, why not, bring on the asteroid / Gotta start—or end, somewhere.”

by Nick Power

“We are precious, / our dreams are precious, / we’ll dream them together, as the dream / of each other. ” 

by Jones Irwin

“Muerte la inteligensia! Viva la muerte! at Salamanca / Deep song of the duende”

by Emma Wells

“Here, stillness reigns. / Irritation stops.”

by Steven M. Smith

“They had to accelerate after work . . . away / from their frowning houses, where their spouses / perspired and sighed into pots of soup and laundry bins.”