Master of None

By Sebastian Matthews

Turn the bottle not the cork.
I want a draft on my desk by morning.
Knuckles to the blade. A quick punch
to its bottom flaps opens an empty box.

Los Angeles, Late 1980s

By Wendy C. Ortiz

My knee-high lace-up moccasins made me
forget the nights my mother was lost in vodka.
I walked deep in the gunk of Hollywood.
The stretch of sidewalk glittered. Vendors
sold …

Letter to Body Made Breath

By Carly Joy Miller

Long rivulet of me
strikes the ram’s horn.

My name hymns
god-bright in the lungs:

Loosen me,
revenant. Your absence

caused me to crawl in
the low fields

like a woman in war.

At Last! 2016 Is in the Past

But Before We Reach Out for Something New—a Poem to Bid the Past 12 Months Adieu

By Sarah Rothbard

You’re game for the year ’17, so you say,
It’s time that the drear of ’16 went away.
Let’s keep the murk past, back where it belongs,
Stop dwelling on …

Bike Rides to the Ocean

By Sharif Shakhshir

A cento composed of lines from the songs by the Canadian band Hey Ocean!

The basket on my bicycle is hanging low.
It’s filled with strange things you said.
We took …

What I Have To Go On

By Killarney Clary

Delves

By Louise Mathias

A small bridge leads to the sea,
but you do not cross it.

No field guide, no bottle, no bible, no gun.
Just the softest of wars

between wind &

some kind of …

Night Blind

By Rebecca Norris Webb

One night, driving along Blue River Road, I’m startled and disoriented by the shock of headlights coming up over a hill. When you’re night blind like me, the …

FALL’S MIRROR

By John Brehm

Flat on
my back

staring
up at

a map of
my own

mind the
elm tree’s

black
branches—

nothing
left to

catch
the wind.

A Story Problem

By Oliver de la Paz

If a boy in the dark were to take three steps per second forward and if there were a coil of string approximately 100 yards in length rolled in the …

What Appeared Oceanic Turns Out to Be Coastal

By Olga Moskvina

By the lighthouse, my face:
curled shimmer
on the whorl of a shell.
A shell’s cavity, not mine—
its murmur, like weather gathering into your hearing,
not mine, never mine—

Train From New Mexico

By W. Vandoren Wheeler

In the Lamy train station, passengers lean stiff
hips against wooden benches. Hear that old creak.
An attendant heaves my green trunk onto an antique
scale made of wood and …