by E. G. Ware

“‘she’s such a good baby,’ my mother says, present and bright…’she never cries,’ my father says, as the wine climbs red, ‘we forget she is there, she’s feather and light,’ no crying, only the soft unscroll of a ribcage…”

by Tempest Miller

“…arriving with a mahogany scent / with bells / with a birthmark / a crown of bones…”

by Craig Constantine

“Love at last sight, / Valedictorian of the first. / The eyes of experience, / Elegiacally taking their leave. / And the eyes of innocence, / Waking up to the erotic.”

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.

by Philip Venzke

“…that overly extended siren wail / was so loud it woke up the over-ripe banana /hibernating on a cigarette encrusted sidewalk.”

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.”

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.”

by Jonathan Butcher

“A slight glimpse of a magpie / tearing dandelions from pavement / cracks shadowed by an ebb of ascending / barbed wire offers a vein attempt / to maintain the slackened grip / on nature.”

by Fran Schumer

“I light my first cigarette / and know / this is how I want to feel / the rest of my life.”

by Liz DeGregorio

“In a flower bed, a snake / pops out of the ground: / her cool length passes almost silently / over the soil, as she ignores the / gardening tools, the busy hands, the bugs.”

by Vern Fein

“History hangs on skill or incompetence.”

by dan rafael

“I’ve found the same station seven places on the dial / when I switch to AM all I get is bingo numbers / with a secret code to get enough fresh chickens / to find my way home…”

by Nathan Nicolau

“It’s all a ruse to get us to stay in movie theaters / when the blood-soaked hero asks, ‘Was I the real villain?’”

by Makayla Edwards

“…I heard a soft breeze / beneath my feet, trapped on the underside of reality.”

by Damon Hubbs

“Grow my hair, / wear women’s clothes / to get an inch closer to you / my sweetly slutty princess days.”

by Sean Foster

“All the Evangelicals prayed / their children be boys. / They hoped he be either Jesus, / come again / or, his shadow./ Alleluia.”

by Howie Good

“All good stories, Hemingway said, end in death.”

by Mark James Andrews

“Saturday night and I was up at the lectern / off to the side of the altar in St David Church / in a fine Detroit neighborhood doing readings / from St. Paul and Kahil Gibran love verse…”

by Colette Maxfield

“Before long she was running in and out / Like a trapped cat / That hisses / When it speaks.”