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”
a comedy of marching graves
by Grady VanWright
“The laughter fades to a whisper of feet / marching, marching / lockstep to the edge of their graves, / no applause, no encore…”
caterpillar piss is the color
by Cody Gohl
“A violent green that shrieks in waves of yellow and chartreuse. It shouldn’t work but it does.”
four poems
by Meg Freer
“Beware magnetic particles / and unhinged brachiopods / in your breakfast cereal, / make space for the absurd…”
immersive
by GTimothy Gordon
“bluebudblueashbluesprucebluestemblueleaf…”
five poems
by Craig Kirchner
“It was last Saturday night, I ran into her / at the End Zone, we had drinks. / She drinks Crown Royal neat, no ice / says she choked once on an ice cube…”
four poems
by Dusti RW Levy
“If I am made in the image of god, then god / has been set on a pedestal, glared at, stared at, spit on…”
five poems
by Amelia Napiorkowski
“…I leave my beating heart in the grass, litter box / late response, in the name of self-care…”
a day like the best country songs
by Jordan Trethewey
“Got tired of stepping barefoot / on their goddamn LEGO and wheeled toys / while fumbling toward a 1 a.m. piss.”
two poems
by Olivia Rose
“…was mouth of a manmade monster. / was television rot. / was joke without reaction. / was attachment disorder.”
four poems
by Heather Truett
“I could / steal my own Bob’s Big Boy, but the fiberglass / of desire shredding my skin is aflame.”
the gospel
by Steve Maitlen
“i’m jesus fucking christ; i’m the reason for the season…i’d certainly take my time coming back.”
five poems
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.”
three poems
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.”
five poems
by Landscape Destruction Company (LDC)
“grand avenue tent cities / sequestered life on stolen land”
three poems
by Nikola Milosavljevic
“…when the hunger keeps / Knifing the belly from within, / Howling with mongrels is more / fun than whistling at the moon.”
five poems
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.”
three poems
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”
a cinquefoil’s polygon burnt cape, ha-ha bay, newfoundland
by Milan Parab
“five petals / of a pentagon, / 540 degrees, / centre a glistening star / of silver foil…”
five poems
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…”
three poems
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.”