Hot August Night in the South

by Cassandra Whitaker

I loved my friends, I came out, I lived my truth as the government turned inside out to flesh my freedoms, before we chased the wolf out, back when we had more fun, before the topsoil dusted, before the dollar busted, when we were young.

1 February 2023

by Anna Christian

imp pulse (toward a playful nudge) sucking up the water from my eye he performs a burp i mime inhaling it i remember the Erykah Badu movie not her movie but of sitting in his car outside the theater, crying laughing about a baby Badu being told she reminds people of their grandmothers.

Upon Learning of Your Death While Waiting to See the Barbie Movie

by Joan Kwon Glass

It seems only fitting that on the movie screen, Barbie too, has been thinking of death, called to an unseen portal and what it means to be human. How astonishing that I am one of the oldest women in this theater. That in spite of my devotion to self-destruction, in spite of the world with its absurd cruelties and terrible longings, here I sit

Dog Shit

by H.R. Webster

The proliferation of dog shit bags, filled with dog shit, on the beach leads me to believe people are more interested in appearing good than being good.

Of Owed Breath

by Ayling Zulema Dominguez

There is a “Hanging Tree” in Goliad whose brown limbs never imagined holding the brown limbs of another being.

Moving Place :: A Small Rebellion

by Eros Livieratos

Everything I own is in boxes. Sliced my finger on cardboard trying to unearth Debord for a paper I’ll never write.

It Took Me Twenty Years

by Christian Bancroft

Pink-Eye

by Farrah Fang

puss-swollen headlights: dilations outlining of bone and yolk transmuting; machete-deep in the sockets plugged in unpretentious

Self Portrait as a Difficult Name

by Paola Capó-García

Paola was my mother’s middle finger to my father’s mother who demanded I be named after her. Edith was too risky of a prophecy, my mother is not a gambler. Italian for small, which I tried to be my whole life and failed, according to the worst parts of myself. Perhaps she named me this as a prayer.

Doomsday

by Lillian-Yvonne Bertram

Fig of Unfolding

by Octavio Quintanilla

Tonight, I expect the only star in the sky to be so bright I’ll forget all I know about sorrow, how it feels like sandpaper against skin, how it looks like the old woman my mother has become.

Vulture

by Rachel Sahaidachny

She lifts from the dead thing she was eating  in the road and hulks gargoyle large on the corner of a house.