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”
two poems
by Olivia Rose
“All the bright parts were veering toward the hail that drummed the earth / new. Jesus, did you save this part? The mice in the road scream Caesar! Caesar! (I’m not / kidding.)”
three poems
by Brooke N. Plummer
“the last book I skimmed through / before break was a collection / of recipes from I Love Lucy.”
five poems
by Luke Janicki
“Your window is probably the same distance from mine / as those killer whales were last weekend, / twenty feet maybe…”
two poems
by Patricia Powers
“I saw a news story once about a dog eating its owner’s face. / She was drugged up on medicine and slept through it until she woke up and / realized something was wrong.”
five poems
by Joey Junsu Hong
“You smiled the way you did at the hall the night before, / freckles lifting briefly, / as if the welcome might hold.”
five poems
by Clayre Benzadón
“…moving my mouth around, / up and down, over the tip / of your dagger, I’d kept swinging / as versatile as a persistent / (penile) pendulum.“
four poems
by Ben Starr
“I was thirteen when I first noticed / dirt under my fingernails. In my hair, / between my curling toes. Indigenous / grasses sprouted.”
five poems
by Hayley Shucker
“I gave away / or lost / soul mates and sanity.”
three poems
by Carol Shillibeer
“It’s bad enough when she’s a huge-assed bird, but in her human form—it can get kind of awkward.”
five poems
by Annie Rachele Lanzillotto
“Stepping on Colors is deep in my consciousness. / As we step forward / we heal the ground with each step. / The world will know where we walked.”
four poems
by Yucheng Tao
“…time is a shattered mirror, / reflecting her in the arms / of a golden-haired man, / meeting me with cold silence.”
five poems
by David P. Miller
“In these waste circles, I seem more like waste / than my body would be, cut to shards.”
several specimens of small fervent campers gathered together in a frame and grooving with a bick
by Zev Levinson
“Ay the mainframe fails And we flail in isolation Physical pandemical unprecedentical Ne’er knowing thing beyond these walls”
five poems
by Raul Meza
“it falls from the mouth, the white bone / drying red. number six, bright red / juice lips shape, count in the dark and / cold. aged bare white hearts sit in a / pile, teeth crunch loudly, lovely and red.”
three poems
by Jason Reid
“The little paws stuck to the glue, they die / One way or another. Some try to chew / Off limbs and then the blood flows.”
four poems
by Kathryn Lasseter
“ Hands together now. / Let’s ovulate side by side / in drowsy serendipity.”
five poems
by Salvatore Difalco
“Hounds outside hunt fox / or men who play God.”
ringing in the memories
by Philip Venzke
“I go to bed / comforted by the electric hum / of the pseudo-candle.”
same home, different worlds
by g.a.costa
“In the sacred home of every woman, every girl, the paper flesh breaks down, strip by strip, it separates itself from the walls, melts into a calm stream, then whirlpools down the drain —”
the girl who paints pictures
by John Jeffire
“Temptation hangs across the avenue, a toothpick dangling between his lips.”