Self-Portrait As Hit Me Baby One More Time

by Lucy Biederman

Britney Spears, I can hear the static
you make from here. The bass line
beams low and clear across state lines,

they say. Do you miss indifferent
gas station attendants …

B L O O D   P A P A Y A

by Vi Khi Nao

Let’s have a compote duel:
Sweet against sweet
Liqueur against liqueur

Conceptually, I love you
Earthy truffle oil
The pressure to be with you
Is raw garlic
May require
A summer …

Europe

by Chloe Honum

On a too hot bus, my sister and I traveled through fields of sunflowers.

Because we couldn’t stop arguing, we sat rows apart.

I see us staring out the windows. Or eating …

No Earth Survives a Country

after Samiya Bashir

by Sasha Banks

Long: a measurement; the distance it takes to remember.

Remember: everything that had to fall.

Fall: the end of summer’s tyranny.

Tyranny: some part of us we could not love.

Love: absent …

Marina Abramović’s Gaze

by David Hernandez

I find her seated at the kitchen table at two a.m.,
her red dress a large heart in the dark’s chest.

I flip the light switch: she stares past the …

Night of Telescopes

by Emma Trelles

I have buried my share and hardly anyone knows.
A house must hold ghosts, writing
Names across funereal woods and windows
Good for viewing the lingering past.
This night of …

Ode to Your Hyper-Vigilance

by Jennifer L. Knox

Hugging you’s hard enough when you’re awake,
but to worm my arm under your downed trunk,
plutonium-core sequoia, and hold on? Pft.
Not with electric jolts reanimating your limbs in

Wolf Package

by Corey Oglesby

In the airless, fluorescent lung of a department store,
I am trying not to laugh at the wolf’s face
printed across the crotch of a pair of boxer briefs.

I nearly …

EVEN THE LAND IS TIRED

by Meriwether Clarke

I woke to rain
and wondered if that meant
the sky was trying

to be a prayer. Teary-eyed
and drooping are the clouds
inside my voice.

No one ever taught
water …

Dog Song

by José Angel Araguz

Make me write like a dog
gnawing a bone. Not anger,

but that animation, that knowing
focus and breath. The just as easy

letting go,
down into the dirt,

what …

Channel Surfing

after Forrest Gander’s ‘Deadout’

by Max Early

I.

Procure his bone-dry clay & burnish,
synchronous glide and precision.

Red Eared Slider stares beyond aquarium rim,
four feet shy of two from shell to carpet.

Aspen drum, synesthesia’s sunflower.
What are …

Measured Form

by Devin Becker

The children have left the red ball
disintegrating in the backyard.
Half-gone, it’s a dimpled dome

for dead grass, brittle and yellow—
Even the cows would pass if it were …