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”
trigger warning: this poem may contain love, america, the ghosts of feeling sorry, radiohead lyrics, justice and injustice (in order), the prefrontal cortex, random assorted fish, and a pregnant baby
by Ron Riekki
“My uncle fell and broke his hip / and he was lying on the ground / and his computer was playing / The Rolling Stones / “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”
three poems
by William Taylor, Jr.
“…listen to them tonight / over more beer, / believing in beauty once again / for as long as the music lasts.”
five poems
by Frederick Pollack
“Our impulse is to build the museum / before we’re sure what it commemorates / or mourns.”
five poems
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.”
five poems
by Catfish McDaris
“Her freckles were devil’s kisses / showering down from purgatory.”
five poems
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.”
five poems
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.”
you want it darker
by Patrick Johnston
“A knife can be a tool / A dagger is always a story”
vaccumed off the carpet i’m in the vaccum now
by Rebecca Warlick
“You carried me to the sink / I woke up to luminous columns / And turned into dust“
two poems
by Cynthia Atkins
“Now I drive / with death on the passenger side./ A revenant finishing all my sentences.”
five poems
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”
breakfast machine
by Angel T. Dionne
“my blood supply is half-moon citrus / filtered through a gnat…”
after ma bell there was the hunchback
by Philip Venzke
“Quasimodo dials the number again and hears the steady buzz of a busy signal.”
postpartum
by Jesse Darnay
“Our newborn sounds / a fracture, / chipping my summer.”
grifted
by John Jeffire
“She regifted all, a painless sloughing of skin.”
through the cubes
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…”
five poems
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.”
two poems
by Ingrid Marie Jensen
“…bright horses, bolting in from the blue / and I know that’s borderline / affirmations written on the mirror in lipstick…”
five sonnets
by Rodrigo Toscano
“Ok, why not, bring on the asteroid / Gotta start—or end, somewhere.”
five poems
by Mitch Christensen
“Route A./ There’s / a woman. Her close-cropped hair / glistens in the soft yellow light as she talks / about a flight she must take…”