Anthophobia

Michelle Chen

It is almost spring in the asylum
by the olive groves. Once I saw a dog
the color of a wedding train
eat the newly planted daffodil
bulbs but slept through its
vomit. The next day the gardener
found the streaks of a sixteen-wheeler
between its eyes, a staggering promise.
If I’d known I would’ve
clutched a bayonet and
circumcised the moon.
Today, the lobes of tulips
wave dreamishly towards my
sill like virginal bells, and the
anger pulls and closes
like cat gums on nip.

Materials & Properties

Jonathan Travelstead

Skyscrapers whirligig Boeing 747s away like maple seeds
while nothing grenades down Fifth Avenue, clouding our lungs with emphysema’s
ghost. The new materials, tenfold stronger than steel,

taken out of service for how it wrinkles, then fails at twelve-hundred degrees.
Angels dance on neon atoms of gussets & trusses we print
from the nobler elements. Admiring our construction’s spinoid,

novel geometries, representatives from the class of arachnae
sigh, get on the horn, inform spiders everywhere they can cease weaving silk.
Snow flakes, unsurprising to us now, melt.

Ten years & nary a fire catches the new boughs, jumps a break,
or burns the mountain down. Come, speaking after me: Love Thy Properties.
Come, see what’s under the hood, what new engines purr.

Breaking the Rules

Roberta Feins

Tell me Never use ‘blue’ in a poem, Never
step in the same river twice. Blue Creek
straddles two seasons, rime white as blued laundry,
rimming rocks, bluets scattering the verge.
Rounding the curve of slough, the crack of ice—
one loud boo to a single dipper, feathered
slate-blue and hopping upstream. She starts,
rises up into the blue morning.

Driving Through West Virginia

Gary Charles Wilkens

What I thought was mountain
was cloud,
what I thought cloud
was mountain.

The old travel out of desire,
the young travel
out of need.

Lily’s Room

nyoka

Lily’s head led her into a white room where the carpet lurched into a lotion so hot her nipples melted, cooled, then slid right off. Hours before, at the tanning salon, she sat in a gold-knobbed chair and coolly questioned other girls about the parts of her skin she will never control: tiny inexplicable bead-drops of brown dripping down onto her shoulders from outer space, little light bulb-gods hexing up a deep, itching pink. In the end, she tells them it all peels away. The white room, pregnant with steam and sweat, is curated by Lily’s very own mind but coroners of an older, more arcane stoma of science gave it life. No matter is safe, no atom guarantees it will stay. Once her nipples fell, she cupped two warm black eggs gently in her hands because what breaks ceases to mystify her. As fast as Lily’s mind can swim within itself, dimension yields and the walls are throbbing chests of cornered felines, maybe the mealy innards of a mantis-hued gourd. Once, it was her own body poured, uninspected, and then split four ways.

There was a time when the white room could not exist. There was a time when Lily had a green lion for a father but her mother would not marry him. From the last fragment of their alchemy, Lily ignited, cauterizing each channel of his heart until he became flesh and bone. Her mother’s molecules were curdling long before. Inside them, wet, dark Lily grew. Though it is said to be impossible, she remembers the first white room she ever entered. She cannot remember exactly where she was three afternoons ago but some sort of modern science occurred. If she held the thought long enough she might recall, in its place, the first time she set conditions to create life. Following that, she might revisit how it felt when the bloom finally unsealed itself. She caught sight of it on her way out, in the sun, one floret too bright to call coincidence. In her white room, it yellows gracefully.

Duane Reade Run

Adrienne Christian

Only on Halloween does she miss homeownership.
For she is ordinary tonight, not
The Lady Who Gives Whole Snickers and
Silver Dollars. When her lover sees she’s almost in tears about something so silly
he suggests they have junk food that night for dinner. His treat he says.
They even raid the center console of his truck
for change.

Taxidermy

Landon Godfrey

Glass-domed on a mantle, a rose-headed, pert-beaked finger puppet finch plans the epitaph for its invisible tombstone: The forest ghettoes trees.

Up On a High Shelf, the Living and the Dead

Len Kuntz

All her wigs are lined up by hue, each nestled atop a torso-less mannequin, just heads, and of course a sight like that can frighten anybody, especially a kid as young as me, yet I find a footstool from her closet to get a closer look where they sit like glass-eyed zombies, freaky, ghostly, these facsimiles of women who are not my mother. I recognize nothing but the tinny odor of her hairspray, remembering how that was always the last application after her shower and wardrobing, accessorizing, checking makeup in the mirror. I am strong but I admit to missing her, to needing the warm wind of my mother’s breath down my neck as she napped. That time seems not so long ago, like night which was up and then gone, a curtain drawn then opened. So now I do the damndest thing. I close my eyes and rifle my fingers across the plastic cheeks of each mannequin. I picture skin and a face, pretty. I touch there but not the hair, the wigs which are styled perfectly.

from “pointing at the window while asking for the door”

Joe Nicholas

if only this mouth in the ceiling could lick up its drool

no  /  this is not stardust  /  this is an attempt

at sanity  /   do you ever wonder

if we’re already doomed  /  i do

so often it hurts

if i had a nickel for every time  /  i would give you

all of them

if i had the time to build a steamboat

i would spend it in the garden

instead

We Knew Her To A Small Degree

Mercedes Lawry

She was a boulevard of a woman, with black-eyed dreams and absent tears. She’d carried a bastion of troubles in her doughy hands, crushed and creased them into fine grains. This was long before her lies caught up with her. Her terrors were mauled and buried deep, no lingering voices, no midnight gasps. Her cloud of hair could have housed a welter of wildlife, small enough to hide, sharp enough to bite. The green of her walls was the green of her longing, chilly and somewhat related to nausea. She spoke in tercets when she spoke at all, not minding if no one paid heed and edged closer to the brick and stone of buildings, rough but silent. Her stories were knit by a madwoman, knotted by a drunken sailor, pounded down like cheap meat ought to be. The head of one and the tail of another. Bridges, burnt stew, apple rot, arguments. Quelled clamor, when sleep would come out of stolen grace. She was a woman thick with the slums of faraway countries, yet marvelous. We knew her only in pieces and plenty missing. We knew nothing of the glue that kept the pieces together, only that it was failing, losing its suck, and the pieces were falling erratically, one by one.

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