DAVID L. ULIN   ________________________________________     Early Flight   los angeles six am taxi windscreen drizzled neon blur morning as yet unbroken streetlights streaked by wipers glare and vapor neither softening the other only sharpening sharpening

ELYA BRADEN __________________________________________________     In the Breath of Non-doing     Silent, this silver streak of rippled motion, no collar, no bell she won’t claw   from muscled neck, her rare trills like unnamable bird song. Soundless   as she burrows into the soft shore of my belly, gliding […]

LEE ROSSI ______________________________________________________       Plain Jain     When Sally the goldfish died my daughter exploded, a four-year-old volcano, hurling puzzle pieces, plastic cows, spoons and her brother’s pancake miles into the air.   Only the promise of another Sally calmed the eruption, allowing the tiny village of […]

CHARLES HARPER WEBB _________________________________________________               ANGELENOS IN RAIN          We don’t drive well in it, true.      Some feel their way like the blind in unfamiliar rooms. Others   splash up speedboat-wakes.      The air is full of dots and dashes that spell s p i n o […]

why the earth cannot make its way towards you   after Joanna Klink     There are people who can’t feel a forest.  Won’t awaken to the great mathematical powers in the pine resin sheathing over a seed.  In the preservation of squirrels.  The sinews that store movement. Kinetic powers […]

TRESHA HAEFNER   _______________________________________________       Tiki Torch      If we go to the bar tonight It will be all ogglers and onlookers,   beer and the bad behavior of bubbles snapping rainbows into foam.   I can drop limes and peanuts into the stains of yesterday. You […]

CHRISTOPHER BUCKLEY   ____________________________________         The Music of Death & Heaven—Thousands of Miles from Spain   Jon Veinberg, 1947-2017   September, a light wind fingers pepper trees and scrub oaks, takes me back to grammar school, responses sung out by rote, one abstraction after another weighing down […]

CYNTHIA ALESSANDRA BRIANO   __________________________________     The Mouth-Carriers     We carried the gold between our teeth, the silver beneath our tongues, the treasure in the pockets of our lungs.   We passed it on to each other from breath to breath like oxygen—the fireflower kiss,   the cloudburst […]