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Wheel

Jari Chevalier

Weeds blow
among ruins. Stones
cut to fit tight, fortress
razed to three
stones high.

People selling antennas,
fried bananas,
brooms, scratch
their chigger bites.

Cuenca’s cathedral,
where I place my running
shoes on the steps for someone,
light a candle.

Ornaments, vessels,
tools for killing or making music . . .
Incans lived without the wheel.
Vendor piercing

the square with ice cream
cries. Little hands,
sticky with ice cream,
washed in the colonial fountain.

In the market,
so many
chickens on spits
and a girl sobbing

beside a wire bin,
so overbrimmed
with chicken heads
they slide right off
the edge of the rim.

Mosquito Logic Three (We the Help)

Jake Edgar

Emerging from your chrysalis, you were welcomed by an ignition of light that caught you and held you there. The warmth of crossed hands, pudgy and sterile. Is this true? Can belief be found in a place full of failed attempts to coalesce?

Peter says that he really just misses his kids and thank GOD for those emergency workers for talking him off that roof. You think sort of less of him each time he says the word God.

You’re waiting for the coloring session to end, to show a blackness sans blackness and then he brings up his kids again, each time he says kids he blinks like a falcon.

A Tiny Crown

Martha McCollough

O Bug bug bug bug bug…
—John Hollander

Little musical hairdressers, His
favorites sing with nail and comb,
natter rhythmic clicksongs in His ear,

so many variations after the first
essay: pool skimmers to slide over
shady waters, little kitchen demigods

ruining the flour, nano-lumberjacks,
and you, assiduous worker, proud
to roll your ball of dung in the broad

field of His approving gaze: a God
so plainly fond of you if otherwise
unknowable, capricious, obscure.

Paradise

Christian Tanner

Christian Tanner Paradise
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Court-Bouillon

Clemonce Heard

is what French militants dubbed
the fish head mélange, but we say
Coubion, because the fewer syllables
the less bourgeois. This is no tartare.
This is the muculent skull of an arrow,
stirred into a stock with the butts
of scallions & celery, jealousy & snot.
Like Goliath’s lot, this too is prepared
for the sovereign, along with its guts
dangling from where the severance
took place. If a scalp is clutched
by its locks there is a face, if clasped
by its beard, a squid. Crustacean
shells & grey shallots may be heaved
in to give the stew more of a zing.
To ready the king’s palette, intestines
snipped from beneath the pectoral fin
are waved before his anointed brow,
in a hypnotic baiting, blood clotted
grapes. Here, he must bite down
& strain every drop before hawking
the putrid skins across the raw slate.

Appalachia

Will Cordeiro

A woodchuck munches
on a bruised crabapple
beyond the clothesline
where we play badminton.
It wobbles off, past mulch

and duff, snout dabbling in
rough muckage. Dandelions
lush the lawn with blowsy
ghosts. A truck guzzles up
a fog of yellow dust. Mizzle

stuns our horse-pond. Knuckle
deep, seep jellies over periwinkles,
whole brindled bundles of them.
A backlit buckle of felled trees
now doubles in it. Autumn,

and my life is almost over.
No, it only feels that way. Really,
the overcast erupts in slender
tinsel. Fat glops of frog spawn
slurry. The faint light suffers.

The Hurried Valley

Brad Rose

Nearly died of too much weekend. Even if you have only one symptom, you’ve probably got the whole disease. Like a bloodhound who’s lost the scent, you have to learn to adjust your goals. I thought I saw a face in the trees, but it was just my pareidolia acting up. Bruegel or Bosch? It’s bad, but it won’t kill you. My half-sister arrived with a basket of rented food. Usually it doesn’t agree with me, but here in Purgatory Park, I feel like a total bro, for sure. That’s why I tell people, Appreciate each hand clapping in the applause. You never know when it’s going to be too late to benefit from exercise. But it’s a balancing act. Your heart beats all the time. Six of one, a half-dozen of the other. Pretty soon you’ve grown eyes in the back of your head and the mountains crawl toward you, like a hunter on his knees, the dark of the approaching valleys, black and smooth as a panther’s flank. You’d like to think they only toy with you, but you’ve never run as fast as you’re running now, panicked prey fleeing the valley of the shadow of death. By the way, aren’t those fantastic snakes? But don’t take my word for it. Decide for yourself. No rush.

In the Dawn

Ricky Ray

for John Berryman

Nobody in the dawn. It hasn’t yet assembled
 the people in its psalm.
If a voice has no body, does it need an ear?
 Does the blood carry
its own crosses as it flickers in the flesh
 in search of nothing,
the woman it is, a walking yard of graves?
 She is not for loving,
as if love were the sharp tip of purpose
 piercing, cutting away
the civilizations bacteria build on bone.
 But loving does fit in,
if fitting means being strung along an act
 of service: the guitar
talks back to the fingers, the world whispers
 to the living: touch
until the noise and feel coalesce, reveal
 the music made when
strings and fingers lock as lovers
 knocking the headboard
against the wall, a thousand times
 its rhythmic pulse
that gives the hour what it wanted when
 it made the bodies
and made them ache and put them together
 for love or what
might ever come of living in the dawn.

Willing

Devon Balwit

Eat me, I say. Bite me. Pincerslice into soft webbing. Champ cuspids. Beakpick to bone. Lift me, shake me, breakneck, side to side, side to side. Dogroll over my unthreading innards. Bury muzzle in bloodmuck. I offer myself. I drizzle a garnish.

if a body is bound

Kristen Renee Miller

i. if a body is bound

—yet is not a book
(weird inner stringing)
call it hate, sprung
from under sodden, salten
fear, a kind of failure
open, given

see—
one’s best hid under,
working, see—
I’m dust and full of sight

 

ii. if a body is bound

—but you’re here on invitation
dear, so we decorate
and minister

embitter these
in greater numbers, O—
behind this roar, a door

binary be shade again
send in the gradient
sea

 

iii. if a body is bound

—I’m right to object
to die of wonder
creating under unseen welts
and trending sins

a sister dies—
her object was
a little darkness
not a book
not in the usual sense

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