Comics & Art
Fiction
Carolyn Byrne
The Half Life of
Quentin Hayes
The Bomb was fat and disappointing—a bomb like other bombs, only more of what it was. It was sequence, geometry, like paper creased into a plane or a child’s fortune teller. Cootie catchers. That’s what they had called them in school, doom-saying from their sticky desks.
Fiction
Megan Martin
7 Stories
Walk past baby grave, baby grave, baby grave: so many rows of brand new skeletons, fresh like vegetables in the ground.
I try not to step on their faces. On their tiny plastic caskets of despair.
Fiction
Kim d. hunter
2 Stories
Once there was man who did very little besides go to work, blame others for the world’s problems and inhale the images and sounds that were transmitted to the implants in his brain.
Fiction
Emily Abendroth
Excerpt from: It Looked Like What You Needed and Then It Needled You
Sousveillance Pageant has one older brother who is in lock-up and one ex-lover who is there. Within any single given year, the Pageant also has anywhere in the whereabouts of three to four companions who rotate in and out of an assortment of state-enforced and gated walls.
Fiction
Harris Lahti
You're a Legend!
Last minute order comes in and you rip the ticket, hold it an inch before your face. Squint one eye. You’re near-sighted. Myopic. Also, pre-diabetic, wet-brained, irritably bowelled. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
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Kate Petersen
Horses Under the Bridge
Horses under the bridge, my father would say to me. Knowing it wasn’t what people said. He meant, let it go. He meant forget about it. Where it equals one of four hundred things I refuse to forget.
Natalie Rogers
Novel Excerpt: Queen Fatty
After school, Fatty tied her siblings to the dining table at home, then headed across the courtyard to her friend Mui Mui’s building.
Nonfiction
The Disabled & Deaf Uprising
article - Report from the Field: Behind the Scenes at AWP with members of The Disabled & Deaf Uprising
This Report from the Field is a post by a collective of anonymous writers regarding the developing controversy concerning noted literary convention AWP.
Joshua Dixon
interview - Artist Interiew
I used art but mostly Photoshop, to save my life to help me express my pain to the world and heal scars in my soul that was making me weak. I started to see how art can help me through my PTSD, social anxiety, depression and how it can help to heal others that feel the same way.
Sean Singer
essay - Free Jazz: Where Jazz Meets Poetry, Outside the Poem
What if we came around to thinking about free-form jazz the way we think about a poem? Poems are not puzzles or codes; they are a human voice speaking through intelligence into language. Likewise, jazz, paraphrasing Duke Ellington, is about choosing to be joyful in spite of conditions.
Casey Clague
essay - The Dharma and the Pen: On Meditation and Poetry
Though “inspiration” and “spirituality” share a root word—spirare (Latin: to breathe)—the connection of poetry to meditation practice is not simply an etymological one. We might never know if John Keats was a meditator, but his conception of negative capability is a Western analogue
Music
Eluvium
Pianoworks (Disc 1)
Pianoworks is Eluvium’s first solo piano album since his sophomore album, An Accidental Memory In The Case Of Death (2004). Inspired by the quiet thoughts and solitary observations of children – and the evolution/dissolution of that ephemeral, uncorrupted wonder of simple joy....
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GRLwood
Daddy
"The South has a reputation for being somewhere cool queer folks move out of to make their art and be themselves. We at WUSSY know that’s not always the case.
There’s a whole contingency of punk rock southern queerdos who parade in front of conservatives every day. One of the louder voices for these queers comes from the band GRLwood."
Wax Fang
Victory Laps and "Glass Island"(featuring Lacey Guthrie of Twin Limb)
Victory Laps, the follow-up to 2014’s dark concept record, The Astronaut, is a dense, song-focused record that maintains Wax Fang’s standard theatrical feel, while leaning into some experimental, electronic-type production ideas.
Poetry
Heather Madden
From What Breaks Becomes the Binding Agent
Together we study what’s broken.
Water drips from the insulation surrounding the copper pipe.
This is not condensation, I say, pressing the foam
and a hot stream spills to the floor.
Bailey Schaumburg
3 Poems
the bridge. fecal matter. the blinds.
the stove. the flower. the shrub.
the dynamo, silk-laden hand of your brain, doling punishment
for the way
you do your day.
Abraham Smith
Rabbit Sing Us In
vermillion hats marooned
upon sentimental nails
scabbed some with seafoam
slouching loom scabbed some
bubblegum moon
machine turn the honk
David Harrity
3 Poems
That lorikeet is ovulating—you shouldn't touch her.
But what if she comes to me? Sips honey from my paper cup?
What if she desires touch, nearing without request or enticement?
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Lauren Hunter
from The Talents
on tuesday i wake up early and draw the four of coins. i'm uncertain and unconvinced—i couldn't be enough. grasp at someone else's thoughts or art to express my deepest; want to show up but not as myself, you know. having a handful, taking a few. i'm not alone, i'm not lonely but still i fear it.
Dulce Maria Loynaz
Three poems from Beastiarium
Musca domestica
Housefly
Flies, black stitches
that sew one day to another...
Flies lodged in the great big cake
of fifteen little candles…
Flies. Sun.
Colby Gates
3 Poems
I tell him about the swans that have appeared at the lake—
stretch of neck, sound of flight.
He says: they are not swans. They are geese.
Alexis Pope
3 Poems
Your virginity can grow back
A loose fact
Floats from the screen to the girls
Watching this holy regeneration
Sluts,
This is our chance for redemption
Callie Garnett
3 Poems
I’ve been having trouble
Holding my phone
It hurts
Heat is good
That’s why the gun is warm
Faint lemon
GennaRose Nethercott
2 Poems
I. I prayed for the water to leave. Drowned a goat in the bay with a laurel of juniper hung around its throat. It brayed until it didn’t. I thought this would bring you back. One body for another.
Heather Hughes
3 Poems
Strapped down in a room. Cream and that ugly green that reflects back ugly: you bruised, terrible, calm. Too much, the mute bulb-flicker. Mountains crowd against the window. I edge in.
Elizabeth Clark Wessel
Blood Bag
All my dreams are about disasters – a plane crash, environmental crisis, losing you, searching for you.
I read about puerperal fever. I wonder if Mary Wollstonecraft felt fear in those last days or if pain was too much of a distraction. I think about sacrifice, about
Jennifer Rane Hancock
2 Poems
HR Haldeman told me what was said, but only
honesty will set you free, Dick. Dick,
look at yourself. Penned up in your skivvies
Peter Vanderberg
3 Poems
Make a plan. Stay optimistic. Your time adrift is likely to be brief & relatively comfortable. Tell motivational stories.
Sylvia Beato
2 Poems
Patio chairs are clothes racks for vines. They snake, decorating dreams of lizards asleep on their green.
Christopher Kennedy
3 Poems
An angry Christ enters limbo with a cross held over his head like a spear. He’s pushing open the door and appears to be crushing three demons made of burnished silver, one with bloody hands, crying out from its bird-like head.
Roger Smith
[1] I had a conversation with my daughter
about the differences between having cancer and being black in america and she told me that cancer is black, dark, dismal and causes depression, blackness in the brain, in the cells, it metastasizes and the people in their angelic lab coats
Liz Howard
from Letters in a Bruised Cosmos
I might sit in a chair and watch as a stranger’s brain appears
on the screen, slice by slice. It is the gruesome cum digital
and it what rues this world.
from Song of Discordia
There is a script I am writing, rewriting, reciting
in order to get away from myself.
As if just there in your upturned palms, new pastoral
appears as a throat making negative sounds open
Whitney Kerutis
3 Poems
As I slid over some wet sidewalk dog shit, trying not to fall, I heard a businessman say There’s no such thing as monsters!
Rumi suggested Start a huge foolish project like Noah.
Amy Lawless
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Club
The scuffed graffiti’d space
reeks like a vampire’s armpit
amaretto
sweated out
into powdered velvet
Simeon Berry
Sentimental Odes
A little note to the one who in life was known as—
Everybody gets elliptical & us—Hello!—all salutary
under lax or activist statutes,
in the little boat, we read, moves always
towards the perviness & necessity of hope.
C.J, Martin
Various Poems
snow is a mistake foreshadowing the end of all color
as I sit on the tarmac 16D in the specific darkness of a winter
night here comes the scatter here comes the loose edge
April Freely
Movement Study
One moves from a sense of confidence
One’s footing is learned from a doing
Footing is a phrase denoting confidence
Descending stairs takes such belief
Ascent is blind and normal
Flatlands are unsafe due to the flatness of waters
Moving on earth is difficult and hazardous
Historically it is the number one cause of death
Emily Toder
Self-Portrait With Rabbit Ears And Seventeen
a girl in crooked bangs
hitting the high note
on a channel of half static.
telephone cord
triple-wrapped
around my wrist.
Cassandra de Alba
Bright Blight
I close my eyes
when politicians speak
because there is logic
in darkness.
Maggie Wells
3 Poems
A people’s way of fighting reflects a people’s way of thinking, and the lessons of fighting are very apt, in a kind of dialectical progression, to modify and refine the thinking. …[T]he pragmatic bias of American philosophy is not without significant relation to the encounter between the Monitor and the Merrimac, the Confederate submarine, the earthworks of Petersburg or Atlanta, the observation balloon
Alicia Wright
3 Poems
Every kind of hiding now. You cannot say “the war.” The dead are loud mouths. Looking forward to a copy of my copy. Care to hum a few bars? “Don’t you forget about me” or “All about Eve.” Home is a staging ground. Render unto gender what is gender’s, render unto race what belongs to race. What if I preferred a skinless cat? Disequilibrium of the punctum. News vacillates, unable to choose. The white van circles
Trish Salah
2 Poems
On the right klezmer medley, baby.
Nature's not a thing but ecology is real.
Horah around the shack cuz it's almost shabbat
in the southern hemisphere.
Lizzy Golda
2 Poems
I can’t make it here, she said. We were at a work party. You can’t understand, can you? I was never supposed to be here. Oh great, an eccentric.
Anastasia Dotzauer
3 Poems
we evolve, textbooks claim
like a slow-moving wave
from dust particle
to many-limbed animal
capable of anything
but survival. what did i see
Zakia Henderson-Brown
2 Poems
My body, the problem
envelops a morning. Can’t
won’t can’t make like a
cheetah to coffee, and all
boar, no antelope into the
Michael Estes
3 Poems
in setting
intentions
for this trip, I
write: to record
in real time which
in writing I felt i
had never done
Connie Yu
Interrupted in the Night
We were balanced on a tight wire,
but it was also
as if I’d called her from a séance or a dream, where a spider
could be the afterbody
Eric Stiefel