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 […]

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 […]

Adolfo remember that night of the Bandito Wind swindling             a live oak out of a few of its leaves, the rest hanging on, to life presumably, and a scent             in the air, wayward, like a fragrance with a name like Risqué or Rogue, tempting            the last saints to […]

Bare-Handed Unclothed by night and by noon hour, bareamong strangers, on the street, either inor out of the bath, in the rain, the handsgo around naked as faces, but unlike The Face they conceal nothing—unlessthey’ve got something to hide, a trick up the sleeve, a palmed card in a gameof […]

Bad Gun                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               Bad cause it’s cheap, cheap and bad. Saturday Night Special they call it, Trash Gun. The slide. The bullet can get caught between the nowand the split second later, between the Here and the Hereafter. Hard. A thick, flat, gun-shaped weight that gets harder in your […]