Issue 20
After so much pleading, after hands pressed together in mock prayer, after pleasemompleasemomplease, after promises of rooms cleaned and weeds pulled, the Scientist finally relents.…
Without a calendar, I will know I’m 86 when stickiness of my left lung matches density of cicada air. My right lung will fuddle some…
December settles like skin over the trees’ skeleton: bones bowed under a broken sky: my mother is the body of winter— her mind near the…
you were not the only child i didn’t have but the only one i named not Near Miss or Scare but a good and proper…
001969 My grandfather stamps the gas pedal, sending a rooster’s golden plume to settle over the green haze of Iowa corn. In the backseat of…
An owl with a broken beak, and a bone-mourned silence. It would have been a mistake to know the names of the turbulence here –…
identity, sameness from taútós, he, she, that + -ótita, -ity, -ness the mortician asked if we wanted to make sure the body was her the…
Leave the machete in the manchineel. break the ox’s neck. it’s approaching. body of water turned thunder farmland twisted into graves our parents are not…
Thomas had been the electronic sign manager for the Department of Transportation in Florida for four years. From the control center in Miami, he loved…
because a bird chirrups & I wonder if animals know / what they cry for or if they simply have noises assigned to…
The mouth of a father disappears into the mouth of a son, and that day my own mouth disappeared into my brother’s. All those prayers…
In eighth-grade science class I was distracted by the boy who sat in front of me (our last names alphabetically adjacent). I would gaze at…
Let me at them, devil’s batteries or toxic scarabs though they be, leeching from strata of Chernobyls and Pompeiis or seismic forge, the same force…
we were talking about guns at the luncheon after bill jrs father had died
Inside the cedar drawer, you are the mineral memory. The claw hammer’s steel scent-stain. Each moth-wing corner – a place my fingertips dissolve you accidentally.…
My big bad beautiful brain wants another shot, another taco and a big fizzy cherry joke to wash it all down. Such as: What’s the…
When Columbus returned to Spain, he gifted two parrots to Queen Isabella. History cannot tell us how long it took until the birds had forgotten…
The Russian poet S Frug took it as the subject of an epic: Or else your God appears to have abandoned you. He found it…
I believe in the myth of Napoleon shooting cannons at the Sphinx because I believe every story about a white man shooting at a black…