I Want to Tell You Love is Castle Sex is a Planet, and We Are All Dogs With Very Special Leashes
by Suzanne Richardson

I bleed for months at the temple doorways so you’ll let me in.
I am tracing the vermillion border of your lips with my finger.

We are warm dunes of Martian pink snow. I want to know,
‍what would you get on your knees for? I haven’t asked because

the answer is not me. You are trying to control time. Slow it.
Speed it. Like a nature documentary in reverse, you burgeon

then seed. Why know me, then strange me? Why not keep me
strange and never know? The sun rises the same way on days

I’ve told lies. You lean in to touch and kiss my sinister side.
Tonight, the moon is eel skin wrapped in cellophane,
or a dancing cartoon elephant whispering:

‍be warned, I have barely any tenderness left.
Tho, I’d give you what I have, if you asked for it

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When You Return From the Dead, I Ask You For Interesting Facts About Clouds
by Sarah Mills

*

Lawnmowers clip your words like blades of grass. What did you say? I yell over the noise. Purple irises bloom inside your mouth. Cirrus, cumulus, stratus: each word a wet petal falling from your tongue.

*

I read you every poem I’ve written since you left. You smoke—death hasn’t cured your addiction. We lie in the cut grass, but now you can see through the sky. Tell me something interesting about clouds, I say. You think it over, and then: Do you regret letting your phone go to voicemail?

*

Your voice sounds different, like a recording of your voice. I read you my poems about grief. 
You say grief is not about what’s lost, but what’s left behind.

*

The irises in your mouth are rust-colored. I store your cigarette smoke in glass jars.

*

The rain may never end. And why would it want to? Why would it choose to fall to its death?
Grief reinvents itself. Like rain.

*

Today, the sky is cloudless and I am filled with dread.
Pareidolia: seeing familiar images in random things. Like animals in clouds.
You blow a smoke ring. It looks more like your face than your real face.

*

I try to lift your suitcase but it’s too heavy. I open it and a single cloud escapes. Clouds are surprisingly heavy, you say.

*

bleeding heart  *  red-winged blackbird  *  hyacinth  *  fistfuls of onion grass  *  rhododendron  *  pistachio ice cream  *  sturgeon moon  *  nimbostratus  *  cirrocumulus  *  New and Collected Works  *  tiger swallowtail  *  sleepy orange  *  hibiscus tea  *  Japanese maple  *  cumulonimbus  *  sky as metaphor  *  goodbye in eight languages  *  ocean as metaphor  *  death as metaphor  *  goodbye as cloudless sky  *  goodbye as white noise  *  goodbye as sugar cube  *  goodbye as goodbye  *  goodbye

*

What will I do with myself, now that grief is no longer the heaviest thing I’ve held?

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The American Scene [3]
by Taylor Byas

Halloween, and laughter gutters through the cracked window above my bed.

I’ve rubbed my contacts right out of my eyes, and I see the world as if looking through pantyhose.

The edges of everything soften—the dog-eared books I can’t finish, the coffee table, the quiet.

What is a day about horror when waking and not waking make me equally afraid?

If you asked me if I wanted to die, I would say no.

If you asked me if I wanted to live, I would tell you I die in almost every dream.

In last night’s dreamscape, I was a monster that felt pleasure when I enacted pain.

Eventually, I set myself on fire to feel ecstasy.

This is familiar work.

There is a knock on my apartment door, a muffled chorus of Trick or treat! on the other side.

When I open the door empty- handed, the children scatter.

I am the scariest thing they have ever seen.

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Self-Portrait As Midwestern Grocery Store
by Luisa Muradyan

As beautiful as an aisle of Jell-o
I am radiant orange, lemon-lime, blue raspberry, and green
grape. I am the entire Garden of Eden in box form,
a powder of pomegranates and apples and I am always
ready for the deli meat section.
The butterball is the only way
I ever want to think of a turkey
and not the wisdom on the face of the old
hen who would perch herself on a weather vane
in my backyard to remind me
to watch my children
who often wander too close to the forest.
And maybe I’m not cut out
for the real world or the fresh produce
section, which makes sense because I was born
right after Chornobyl exploded. And now
I’m in the candle aisle again
and I just can’t leave. A place of smells
where we replace reality with what we
think it should be, cucumber melon,
lilac spring, vanilla sugar cookie, the smell
of the funeral home where you planned
your grandfather’s wake
cedar and sweet caramel.
The warm baloney sandwich
he unwrapped from his pocket
the day you found out
he was leaving his body behind.

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The Boat
by Sal Randolph

Once, there was a boat. Or was it a bird? No, a boat. A boat-bird, a bird-boat. It doesn’t matter which is water and which is air, only that there is a surface between them. The bird-boat can float on the water, facing into the sky, or on the air, facing into the ocean. The bird-boat, whose name was Ada, could spin the way a kayaker rolls, flip, flip, flip. Air, water, air. But like everyone else, Ada had a desire. It really doesn’t matter if you are a marvel and a joy, there is always something you want that you are not. Ada wanted to be more like a submarine, or an angel, trading depth for surface. Ada wanted heaven, even though it meant she would travel so deep or so high that everything was blackness, complete void or terrible pressure. Ada wanted heaven even though she would not survive it. Ada. Ada, like all of us, had friends. Everything floating was her friend, up or down. And there were fish, flying fish, who like to speak with her as they leapt and fluttered. There were cormorants who dove beneath her and held their breath until she laughed. The waves were her playmates. But this desire was like a storm, coming in from all points on the horizon. Nothing that floated was safe from it. Waves became walls and currents became predators. Ada was thrashed by everything she had loved. Winds battered her, rains flooded her. Soon there was no distinction between water and air. There was no up or down, no depth or height. Ada spun and spun, tumbling end over end. When she awoke, she was no longer a bird and no longer a boat. She was a cloven thing, a half-thing. Something like a person. 

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Sky Rats
by Elise Powers

We carried them in our hands—
tied letters of love and war
to their paper pink ankles.
They don’t know
they’re unwanted,
that they’ve become
iridescent burdens burrowed
in gutters we’ve lined with spikes
just for them.
They bob their heads,
coo at the feet that kick them away,
doing only as we taught them:
return.
And isn’t that the way of things?
The heart loves to outlive its welcome,
to circle the place it was last fed,
to make a meal out of crumbs.

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The Mechanics of Dying
by jason b crawford

I am trying to rewrite the ways I name blood—scarlet ribbon dancing in me; a hex of summer tanagers who refuse to silence. It is hard to make pretty of what America makes sport. It is hard to know my blood wishes to exit my body. My mother calls, says her brother has a cancer that sleeps in him, like her father did and his father before, a small seed blooming in us, singing in between the cells. It is hard to die in ways that are unknown to us. New assassins, lying in the field of our platelets. From what I understand, the blood is a script. A myriad of scrolls unrolling themselves within us. A play we are never to unlearn. Some call it by its god-name; fate—I just call it a murderer. This not to say that I have met death and bested it or understood its blades—no, I have just befriended the only eventuality to ever exist. And this makes me no better than you, one who believes in god and love and the way the light falls from the  illuminated cheeks of a disco ball just after a three tequila midnight. We were meant to break, that is the purpose of nature. The red in me now twinkling with new toxins. Or were they there before? I do not know.  I am out of definitions and yet, here I am trying to still breathe. So what if my blood is just a skulk of violent foxes racing towards an unending forest? What are we to learn then, in the heat of their noise?

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Delve
by Paul Hostovsky

I want to go deeper,
all the way down
to the cellar of the house
I grew up in. I go there
in my head, the same head
that easily cleared the low ceiling
above the dark, narrow staircase,
the lightswitch on the left,
the banister beginning halfway down
on the right, the aluminum nosing
of the treads groaning metallically
as I take the steps one at a time,
counting them as I go: one, two, three,
four, five, six, seven, eight–I think there were
ten altogether, though I could be overshooting it
or undershooting it. I can’t
remember exactly but I can imagine
(imagination is memory) the exact feel
of the newel—small, rounded, wooden—
and the squeak-rub sound it makes
as I grasp it briefly like the hand
of a dance partner and twirl myself around it,
jumping off the last step with a flourish
and landing on the linoleum tiles
of the floor of the basement
of my childhood, the furnace room
(fire-breathing, verboten) to the left,
the laundry room (sweet-smelling, white)
to the right, and one central cylindrical
vertical pole silently supporting everything
above. I put my arms around it
lovingly. I clamp my legs around it
tightly. And I embrace it like a fire pole,
replacing my tight grip with a looser grip
to allow myself to descend.

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Still Life With Absolution
by Dean Rader

Forgive my silence.
Forgive the middle parts, the lost ones.
Forgive the times I slept. I am sleeping now. Forgive me all the dreams.
Forgive the times I powered up a device instead of remembering.
Forgive what little remembering I’ve done.
Forgive my blindness; seeing
I have not thought nearly enough about those about to die. For this I ask forgiveness.
I have not believed enough in feet on the ground. I have not believed enough in grounds. For this I ask forgiveness.
I once believed there was more than there is now. I no longer do. For that I ask forgiveness.
I sometimes think of the dead walking through an empty field wearing coats. I imagine fog and a sky like pumice. For that I do not deserve forgiveness.
Forgive me the times, many, in the car alone, I do not think of ________.
Forgive me the times, many, when I am the only one awake in the house and I do not think of any heart but my own.
Forgive me for not knowing more of my heart.
For the times I have thought about you strapped to a chair in front of a plate of bones, I now ask forgiveness.
For the times I have wondered if things might be better if there was more ________, I ask forgiveness.
For the times I have neither sought nor wanted forgiveness, I remain ambivalent about forgiveness.
For the times I wanted the night sky on my skin alone I ask forgiveness.
For the times in the future when I should ask for forgiveness, I ask in advance for what I will not seek.
For the lies, many, I will tell my sons, I may or may not ask forgiveness.
When I speak to you next, will it be to ask for your forgiveness?
When the next shot is fired and I think about Kara Walker or my sons sleeping in the next room or Michael Kiwanuka or how glad it was not fired at my wife, am I to be forgiven?
When I began this poem, I thought it would mean something. For that I ask forgiveness.
Sometimes I feel as though hundreds of tiny birds live in my fingers. Forgive my vanity.
For the times I have not forgiven you, many, I ask forgiveness.
I have no idea if there is blood on my hands, for that I also seek forgiveness.
For the truths I will reluctantly tell my sons, many, I may or may not ask forgiveness.
For my mouth of snow I ask forgiveness.
What is too much sorrow? I may have it. Do I ask forgiveness?
What is the right amount of selflessness? I do not have it. Do I ask forgiveness?
What is the answer to the question have you lived? I do not know. Do I ask forgiveness?
People are being shot in the street in the fields in prison. I am thinking very hard about them but also about my league championship basketball game on Wednesday. Do I ask forgiveness?
The world is a sponge of suffering, and yet, by comparison I am spared. Do I ask forgiveness?
My son who brought home two small guns he made in woodworking class is 10. Who do we forgive?
Men are hanging by their necks under bridges in Mexico. Who do we forgive?
My son told me last night he is sometimes scared of the homeless men we see near our bakery. Who do we forgive?
I believe if something happens to my sons I will not forgive? Shall I be forgiven?
There are things I will not name here for which I should seek forgiveness. Shall I be forgiven?
I have lied to the people I love the most. To you. I will do this again. Shall I be forgiven?
It is very likely I would rather you die than me. For this, I do not ask for forgiveness.

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Photograph
by Nur Turkmani

Friends on grass, toes itching.
It is warm and Sunday.
They’ve known each other for years,
so what is unsaid is still captured.
Their mouths half-open, one of them asks,
Why are we still here?
To laugh, another says.
That is the general agreement
on that afternoon
where the sea is beastly blue.
You can’t see in the picture but flies buzz.
Ants crawl and a white butterfly flaps
above shoulders, a great omen.
Clouds like birds. Birds like wind.
This city forces a love of disappearing things:
all these fences and wires,
rubber trees replaced with parking lots.
Even the birds will soon flock elsewhere.
But before they share fruits and fish,
and a frame. This sweet breath.
It is September and they want to stay alive.

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Ode to the Hoarders
by xochi quetzali cartland

            “The library will endure; it is the universe.”
             —Jorge Luis Borges

Adoring architects,
Sculpting cities of newspapers
& burnt out bulbs.
Rome wasn’t built in a day,
It was years of collected dreams.
& you look for God in every
Thing. Sure that one of these days,
He’ll be at the bottom of a hefty bag
With the fish bones & milk cartons. Another
Ordinary love, cluttered & disposed
Of—don’t you want to be brave?
Enough to see it all as worth saving?

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Logic
by Bob Hicok

When someone says they're all ears, I know they're not
without looking, I'm a detective like that, but imagine
if this someone who is all ears also said, I love you
with all my heart, they'd really be saying, I love you
with all my ears, which — setting aside the dilemma
of how an ear could say any of this — would be wonderful,
a love of one hundred percent listening, at least
on paper, until you start living that love, when like
twelve minutes in, or a month, a year, tops,
you'd be tired of the sound of your voice and want
at least a few of the ears to be mouths, or tongues,
mouths and tongues, since one without the other
is harder to imagine than rain without sky or peanut butter
without spaghetti right next to it in the cupboard.
My goal is to be thirty four percent ears, zero percent
fists, thirteen percent hydrogen, six percent sass,
twenty two percent "tell me more," and seventeen percent
a man who helps war statues climb down
from their pedestals and walk to the nearest swing set
or sea, whichever they want when I convince them
there's a better way to live. How? That's
a good question. You must be twelve percent
scientific method, which is terrific. I was thinking
if we all wore t-shirts that read, Roses Are Red
and Violence Is Stupid, it would change nothing,
but that sartorial unity might be the spark
that brings us together around the vulnerability
of flowers, which is not that different
from the vulnerability of otters, which is a cousin
to the shyness of your shadow, which reminds me
how easy it is to break a person into halves,
or quarters, which sounds like I'm making change,
doesn't it, rather than begging for it.

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You Cannot Stop Me
by Kevin Chesser

I am making soup and I am stirring my soup with a bone. I can’t tell you where the bone came from. That’s classified information.

If you want me to stop stirring my soup with a bone, you better give me three good reasons and fast.

Because the soup’s almost done.

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I Want To Stop Wasting Time Thinking About Wasted Time
by Kelly Grace Thomas

Always in such a rush to hurry up and live.
Scribble joy off my To-Do list. How American
to want it all and still say more. Don’t I have
every ounce I thirsted for: quiet water, endless
ink, a little love on both sides of the bed.
I want to be less scared and more
salt water. To taste the wind
and never beg it to stay.

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Love Story of Beginning and End
by Kaylee Young-Eun Jeong

I had a boyfriend who once told me
it's more humane to shoot and eat deer,
showing me a video about the inevitability
of their prolonged starvation in the wild:
If I were a deer, he said—
I thought this only happened
in movies, but he was the first person I ever saw
pound the floor with his fists
when he sobbed, and begged me not to go.
My friend once told me
the story of the father of a friend who one day
went to Brazil on business forever
and not only that, but found it in him
to call his wife, and tell her so:
I've found a new woman; I'm never coming back
or something to that effect, as my friend relayed it
to me, and I remember wondering how else
it could have gone. What he could have done
differently. What he should have.
For some reason I'll never know, my mother
loved to tell anyone who would listen the story
of my piano teacher's wife, who one day
went for a hike alone
and had a stroke. Though she was healthy,
my mother would quickly clarify,
and it was not a question
of health, but a faulty vein inside of her
she never could have known. And though
my mother told it like a cautionary tale,
how could it have been, unless the moral of
the story was what Rilke said about how the end
grows inside of you like a fruit.
I used to think this was true. That people
wore their end on them, unknowable
as skin, and as visible, and then I sat on his couch
for the last time, the couch of that heroic
hunter of dying deer, and thought how
there was a beginning to this,
though I couldn't find it
and I would have to get off
that couch and go home one way
or another, and that staring at his hands
I could not imagine how.
After I walked through his door
for the last time, he left the city
and it was no longer his door. And did it start
when we met? In the car, when I was a child,
my mother would often cry in the driver's seat
and ask God why he had punished her
with me, and when I began
to cry, too, the first time it happened,
she turned and asked me what I was
crying for and I remember thinking earlier that day
we had laid on the kitchen floor
together, drawing pictures on butcher paper,
and I had messed up while drawing
our house and the more I tried
to fix it it only got worse
until eventually to keep me
from tears of frustration my mother took a red crayon
and drawing flames over it said look
now it's just a fire and as we sat there
on that couch I remembered
he did not only hunt deer, that boy,
he also loved watching birds, and would show me
videos of birds of prey moving in for the kill
in slow motion, making the osprey's sudden
plunge into water suddenly possible,
every beat of the wing, every drop of water
clarified to a moment of its own
and as he kept asking me what happened I thought
how I wanted the answer, too.

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Girl / Guāi 乖
by Jenny Qi

In Lisbon I bought boba from a girl who looked twelve, maybe  
a small fifteen. We speak Mandarin and I hear her obedience.

‍乖 we praise the child who does what she is told / works          
the family business / fills out forms her parents can’t read /
earns her keep / makes herself useful / dutiful / demure.  

‍乖 we praise the child who follows rules / anticipates needs /
keeps quiet / keeps to herself / keeps secrets / keeps unseen
and unheard / respectful / well-behaved / docile / obedient.

‍Google translates 乖 to “good.”
Only an obedient daughter is good.

My father said I was a bad daughter
when I did not obey absolutely.

‍The girl in the boba shop is maybe still good / a pleasure            
to have in class / does what’s expected / doesn't ask why /                    
feels indebted to her parents for keeping her alive.

‍乖 we praise the girl who will make a good wife / good
daughter / good carer / good maid / good server / good
worker / good breeder / good ant / good lamb / good corpse.

‍乖 we praise the woman who lets everyone else eat first /
supports her husband / supports her child / supports her parents / supports her
in-laws / saves nothing for herself.  

‍In high school I asked my mother why she was deferential        
to an old man who insulted her / why she sent money to her
brothers / why she felt guilty / why she did not leave.  

‍I don’t remember her answer or if she was silent.
乖 we praise a woman who is silent.
乖 we praise a woman who complies.  

A dead woman is silent.
Is a dead woman good?

乖 I was praised only
when I did something I did not want to.  
Obedience is to bury yourself.

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First published in ONLY POEMS.

I Was A Superhero
by Basman Aldirawi

Today, I fantasized 
I was a superhero. 
And yes, before you ask,
I wore my underwear 
over my pants. 

My name was not Basman
but BASMAN in shiny letters.
My weapon? Pen and notebook!
My superpower? Truth!

I practiced facing Sabra, 
that fancier, fitter, whiter
Israeli superhero, so much better
in the eyes of the world.

Now, we stand face to face.
I have the strongest weapon!
I begin to speak—bold, clear— 
yet suddenly her rocket
obliterates my voice.

And I am dying.

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First published in ONLY POEMS.

Latching
by Arah Ko

When I was born, I did not feed
for three days. My mother’s nipples swollen
with mastitis, too thick to latch
onto, swallow around. The nurse hissed the worst case
I’ve ever seen as she milked her breasts
on the living room floor. I cried,
ravenous. How did I know to be hungry?
I, who had never eaten.

I heard a kitten weaned
too early will keep suckling her whole
life, mouth searching blankets, elbows, strangers,
for what she needs. My condition was not caused
by the lack of milk, but its abundance. Bud
too rich to latch. This is my whole life's
contradiction: to be surrounded by plenty,
and still starve.

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Spectacle
by Andrea Cohen

On sad days we'd go
to the planetarium.

We'd put on that
helmet of stars

and hardly anything
falling could hurt us.

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In the Dream of Money
by Henry Israeli

there is no window
that has not been filled
with cold hard bills
stacked up like bricks
to block out the sun.
In the dream of money
a woman gives birth
to a baby that cries
and cries until filled
with spoonful after
spoonful of coins.
In the dream of money
someone says, capitalism
is in our blood, and,
indeed the ground below
us is stained with money.
In the dream of money
money falls from clouds
but burns to ash before
hands lifted skyward
in prayer can reach them.
In the dream of money
all prayers start and end
with money, and the newly
converted fall to the floor
and writhe until they’re
covered in a blanket
of stitched together bills.
In the dream of money
we’re told that everyone’s
a winner before our
shirts are stuffed with
cash, our pants stuffed
with money, all of us hoisted
up like scarecrows in a field
of scarecrows, all of us
lifted onto our own posts,
coming apart in the wind.

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