by Steve Maitlen

“i’m jesus fucking christ; i’m the reason for the season…i’d certainly take my time coming back.”

by Erwin Ponce

“I walk through a forest of whispers. The fifteen mysteries. The Dalit. Voices fluttering like / leaves in a breeze. I think of the stillborn, her body tucked inside bamboo.”

by James Callan

“Open up, old man. Let’s see your teeth. Let’s see your agate browns. Don’t make me beg on my knees among the clay. Smile for me, bygone brand of man. Don’t make me raise my dental pick or awl.”

by Landscape Destruction Company (LDC)

“grand avenue tent cities / sequestered life on stolen land”

by Nikola Milosavljevic

“…when the hunger keeps / Knifing the belly from within, / Howling with mongrels is more / fun than whistling at the moon.”

by Howie Good

“An old grandma dozed on a plastic lawn chair in the dirt yard of a shack. Malnourished goats wandered the capital on spindly legs. There were no dogs that I could see. I just presumed dogs got eaten.”

by Dario Cvencek

“the days like sick roses / I kiss the wrinkled bread / with the knife heavy as the waking / up of a drunken god”

by Milan Parab

“five petals / of a pentagon, / 540 degrees, / centre a glistening star / of silver foil…”  

by Ryan Quinn Flanagan

“The popes go up in smoke / and I drive my seething ramrod jalopy / down the Vaseline highway, / looking for bullet trains from the minds / of lone gunmen, / and the pearly white who sold me / on lemons…”

by Trapper Markelz

“I don’t know all the pain in this world, / the price of head scars, the pace of change, the speed / of a galloping stallion, but I’ll keep doing the things / we’ve always done.”

by Spencer Silverthorne

“I lost the lush fading to his geyser. I google / all the fish I refuse to commit to memory.”

by Ihor Pidhainy

“their drivers did not worry / where’d they’d end – in a lake / or a deep ravine, or a combo / of the two. That is they were drugged, / left for dead…”

by Nicholas Castine

“In scorched grass, Girl turns — searching, knee-deep; / not a dandelion to blow.”

by Mykyta Ryzhykh

“bird with two wings / cannot dig a pit / for its chick”

by David Guiden

“This dick is fluent in every language”

by Rebecca Warlick

“Whoa I’m doing it / I’m escaping complex trauma/ I’m planting a rose garden / I’m hitting mom with a shovel“

by Tempest Miller

“I refuse to die, at home alone with drunk sleepy father. / I will take every treatment. / I will fill my lungs with air…”

by Abbie Hart

“i’m going to crawl into the bag of rambutan on the second shelf of / my parents’ fridge ($5.99/lb at heb) and try not to think about / the things i left behind for a dream that died five years ago.”

by Lucas Mancini

“wilting between treehouses and greenhouses / weeping like a real orchid hothouse / wearing stilts to a planetarium / flossing with starlight before bad first dates…”

by Seth Rice

“…your toweled heat / to hold / in the hallway / between laundry loads / and your vinegar running soles.”