A Bouquet of Knives

by Henry Israeli

When I bend down to smell them

I get an eerie feeling that you’ve done this before
and it came to a sorry end.
What drives me to lower my bucket …

Seduction

by Diane Lockward

Peculiar, the way it starts out small,

then swells to a big fat bottom cupped
in my hand. I wish I could love it,
but something there is about a pear

Hard Core

by Robin Carstensen

Even the minimalist drinks beer, though he lives alone in a modest place

and walks everywhere. Sits on the floor with Rumi and a frying pan

with couscous. He touches himself to …

It Will Vanish

by Claudia Keelan

It will vanish

With the lizard
We will vanish

The gauze cut sky
And the unfolding generations

A child enroute
His first tour of hatred

Ceaselessly loving,
Disappearance cancels the tour,
Vanishing will vanish, …

Boulders

by Aaron Belz

This Dover Thrift

edition of Voltaire’s
Candide complete
with your banal
marginalia reminds
me of a joke I once
heard: what happens
when you cross a

or was it a pheasant
with …

Lifeguard Letter Home

by Jeffrey Hecker

Dear Mama,

I moved in with that brunette oceanographer I was telling you about who can’t swim. I always

ask what she does each day. I love to listen. She continues to …

Dancework: A Valentine

by Louise Mathias

In the ocean of our bed(s) I am suddenly right.

All our mouths, (all of us), stuffed with lace.
Not echoes but chandeliers. Not bones but bliss.
I want to ward …

Two Rooms

by JP Reese

Jigsaw men smoke behind cinder block walls,

assemble the pieces of people they’ve been.
Second-hand voices seep under the door
of the coffee-cup room severing “Al” from “Anon”
–Pain extended from …

The Nests in Winter

by Jeff Oaks

Of course the point is to be hidden, isn’t it?

To seem like nothing, to be forgettable,
to hold still. Lonely little things now,
the size of my fist and …

In the Face, Hard

by Charles Harper Webb

A child kneels beside a “dead” bee.

(Stinging black-and-gold soldier,
where’s your buzzing bluster now?)
Jab!–boxing glove in the face, hard.

A woman bends to change the diaper
on her newborn son. …

Credo

by Kevin Hearle

in memory of Kevin Calegari, who died of

AIDS on February 12, 1995 in San Francisco

Romanum Pontificem in rebus fidei
et morum definiendis errare non posse

Our senior year, how did you …

Damariscotta

by D. Nurkse

1

How we loved to create a world.

Out of gray we made the pin-oak leaves
with their saw teeth and odd waxy sheen,
dry and matte to the touch, out of …