prognosis of sound
by Sloan Asakura

i know uranium splitting makes a sound
	
the sound of vanishing children
	of a pillar of fire razing the land into silence
	the groan of bodies     spilling their pollen
	of a red rose     holding its eyes in its palms
	begging for water     and dying when having it
	of the river still running      black with the rainfall and rot

i know hydrogen fusing makes a sound
	
nuclear collisions       the sun strumming its static
	drone against the microphone      from here we
	can’t hear the screaming        muffled by the lullaby
	of the vacuum       which protects us from knowing it
	we lounge on the beach        and take better photos in the light
	the snap of aperture blades immortalizing our ignorance

i know a cell splitting makes a sound
	
a stutter into existence        some mirror or almost
	a baby tumbling over itself       out of dream this
	spiral of blood and bone in spin        the nerves in its spine
	singing up toward their god       that the flesh duplicates
	itself into applause        until it reaches the cupid’s bow
	and sews this soon-to-cry body shut at the mouth

i know a cell fusing makes a sound
	
the sound of the phone ringing       and my mother
	on the other line in the quiet         of the doctor telling me
	once you’re in the woods      you’re never out       if you’re
	not paying attention       the woods will swallow you whole
	that a tumor is a choir in discord        that you have to kill
	a monster in order to become one        that the threads of
		this body break every once in a while and you        just
		try to put it back together         knowing it should be a good thing for
		two lovers to kiss     but when one is mutated it fractures the other
		and when the chain reaction bleeds it kills everything and i
		hate that the landscape of war is everywhere       that it’s in me
		that the song of grief is a violent one that my gift to my mother
		is telling her how much       i love my life.        that i can forgive everything
                even when i shouldn’t. that everything i don’t know i’m trying to know
                         now.      that i hear my body dying all around me and
		                      it thumps and hums along to the tune
				      of the song my sister used to sing
	                              in our breathless blue house
				      when the killing came from outside
				      not the stars cackling in the caverns
				      of this sewn-to-survive doll

still i’m carrying the woods inside       all its 

birds of prayer          winged palms               unfolding
in a hymn of dark       eyes floorless             listening
for shimmers of sap       singing out
from the burl of a ginkgo tree

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First published in The Rumpus.

The Day the Night Terrors Finally Stopped
by Jessica Nordell

was a Saturday
in May.

The ground thickly wet,
black and stamped with clover.

On foot, and with some trepidation, the two
set off to tour 
their neighborhood,

which was not the underworld,
not one neighbor trapped forever in hell.

The minatory chorus 
grew sparse

and ornamental.

A shimmer rolled through the aspen
like a veil,

and the journey ended as it began,
in a house at the edge of a cutbank,

where a woman
and a man
learned one more lesson:

there is a land of the living
and a land

of the lost, and the bridge
is fine as a child’s ribbon, and the river

is dark
as the face of God

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First published in The Yale Review.

Wanderlust
by Miguel A. Vega

      For Jackie Mendoza

If, even now, I am excited about it: every cow & horse,
every canoe on the surface of Pyramid Lake—
If, at two hundred miles out, I take a selfie with the Bravoland cowboy,
record us driving by the Tule Elk Reserve, record
two jet-black crows circling the morning’s blue wrist of light
like a scrunchie, then, I can only imagine your excitement
three years back: the eldest daughter leaving home;
Southern California, a solid white line in the rearview mirror.
Today, I’m a regular Sal Paradise—a spider, a rickety bar,
a softball game beneath floodlights. Tell me: what did it take
for your Amá to let go? To type Chico State into Google Maps?
Did she see those blue lines as umbilical cords? Did she
feel a blue road being pulled out from deep within her body?
I think of my Amá; wish my America larger than Lillian
Street. Larger than Don Jones Park, than its bougainvillea.
When you left, did yours look up at the sky? Imagine
the return trip home without her daughter? O tell me: how
did you hide your excitement at grapes? How did you
get those dimples on your face to look less like car tires, skidding?

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First published in Poetry (January/February 2025).

IN RESPONSE TO MY WHITE MANAGER WHEN SHE SAID I WAS ‘SLURPING MY NOODLES LOUDLY LIKE A LITTLE ASIAN’
by Claudia Yang

First a snag. Then it chokes and lodges itself inside my throat. Nose running, glasses 
fogging, chopsticks mid-wielding. It's these kinds of little deaths that slaughter me 
whole. Finds the fishbone in the emergency room. The unforgotten hauntings 
grazing the dust off the walls after all these years. Cheeks flushed, bones crunched, 
tongue slumped. Her eyes slicing my hiccupped mumble response. So searing with 
her cruel smile. To mandoline chunks of my hungry self. Fact: it's rendered down 
in her skull somewhere that all our (insert where-are-you-from? ethnicity) ancestors 
ate (insert animal). Branded. Swallowed. Undercooked. Maybe I was just a hungry
bitch wanting to be left alone. How does one insideout the carcass of meat like that? 
Pass the carving knife. That bit. No fat. White meat only. What's even worse is 
when I find flies sticking to unpeeled fruit or when shells are husked off its flesh, 
desired only for the pearl. Took me forever to forage myself again. Not even the 
mycelium can commune me out of knots. I keep fishing for a right answer to this 
undesirable statement. Berated a palate cleanser for mouths. It wasn't until winters 
later, when I'm nosedived in at the bottom of the bowl, slurping appreciatively, that
I realised — maybe she's just never been that hungry for a hot bowl of noodle soup.

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First published in Arc Poetry.

Origin Story
by Hannah Levy

after Wo Chan

My mother was a rabbit under trembling sky. My father was the sky.
Not the sky, a storm. He boomed across the pasture of her body, split
the horizon with bright teeth and called it love. I was born between
that burrow of longing and lightning, eyes rain-wet and wide. Slept
with one ear pressed to thunder, my heart a molting metronome.
My mother folded the day into squares, hid her sugar by the pound.
She taught me to speak without speaking, to mistake myself
for stone. In the dark, my copper tongue cut itself on weathered wood,
carving the sign for stay and the sign for run. My father rolled on,
silver cumulonimbus clotting the grass. I’m grown now, gathering
the torn light of my limbs. I’m the open field with nowhere to hide.

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First published in Ink & Marrow (Issue 12).

When a Black Girl is Killed
by Akhim Yuseff Cabey

a runner cheats several paces off the bag
at second base, his intent to steal third
as fast as he can. once as a boy he’d gouged
his chest against a nail at a construction site—
white meat flesh popcorned past the surface
of brown skin. and he saw inside himself,
what he was made of, for the first time. he ran
home shirtless, and she laid him down
on the pavement in front of the tenement
building. the blood had dried beverage-straw wide
from the gash to navel. she licked her palm
wet enough to erase the line of red along
his stomach then adhered gauze to the wound
with grease from her baby-hair edges. he stood up
and she gave him a piece of bubble gum
and a baseball autographed with a forged
signature of his favorite player. penmanship

she’d been practicing in that place we are born
before we are born. just as the ball leaves
the pitcher’s hand, he takes off, cleat teeth
chewing up dirt, and slides in head first,
safely ahead of the throw. theft like theirs
is egotistical—a measured act of greed—
but it’s the only way he knows how to speed
up time so he can get back to fingering
the smooth, half-penny-shaped scar
above his right nipple, and how she spat
in her hand then took the needful from her scalp
to mend him. he desires to steal home—
knows he will have to plow through the catcher
guarding the base—so sets his lungs on fire
with breath he no longer possesses,
breath escaped already aboard the thought
of her frozen body face down in the river.

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First published in The Adroit Journal (Issue 53).

(((Shylock))) To Netanyahu
by Jeremy Radin

God is lonely & it’s your fault.
At the breakfast table you have forgotten
God, & growling about your dry cleaning
& certainly reviewing your various
intelligence reports. God is lonely
though you send to the realms reams
of gardeners & poets & schoolchildren,
though you hoard, as if possessed,
the tools that fill God’s rooms—
it’s not what God wants. God wants you.
God longs for you, Benjamin, sad Bibi,
just as God has longed for every bloodless
lizard wreaking havoc in the celestial desert.
As you writhe amongst your underlings,
as they suck the petroleum out of your ass
at the climax of your unctuous orgies
God watches the bombs fall onto the city,
onto hospitals & pigeons & billions
of olives, which you make every effort
to send in your stead, to send instead
of sending yourself, because you know that what
God wants to say to you, & you know you’ll be
from history deleted by the saying, it’s why you say
God’s name so often, so loudly, which makes
God so terribly lonely. When you say God’s name
each God that leaves your sloganeer’s mouth
pushes God a little further away, into the loneliness
to which you have devoted yourself, the loneliness
you long for, but which cannot ever be yours
because everywhere you look, look!—all
you have killed (& all you cannot) keeping
you, keeping you company.

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First published in Rejected Lit Magazine, Issue 11.

How to Give a Lecture on How to Eat an Elephant
by Jordan Hamel

On the faculty hiring committee, I march, 
demanding they acknowledge me 
and my virtues. I tell them I am decent. 
I never thought about killing someone
except myself, even then I didn’t do it. 
Despite myself & the myself I found 
in everyone else, I kept living, growing up 
to becoming the world’s most singular professor, 
giving my only lecture: ‘How to Eat an Elephant’. 
Sure, everyone knows one bite at a time. 
Committee, I’m here to tell you, nothing matters. 
Trunks can be broiled to the consistency of salmon.
My ‘Elly Belly soft tacos’ are second to none. Listen, 
members of the committee, I have been the elephant, 
no, I mean I was in the room, when it almost happened.
Now that room is the elephant in every room I enter,
so stop asking me about my qualifications or why 
I’m on the desk screaming. Soups & broths are good 
if you can find a big pot. Ears are great bacon substitutes.
Hire me now & give me money forever. I didn’t do it, 
but I really wanted to. Please, don’t tell anyone, 
but the secret is you never really finish the elephant. 
So many rooms have made a meal out of me.

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First published in The Sonora Review.

After Another Doctor Has Given Up
by Chrissy Martin

I deserve to indulge, buy a burrito
smoothly swaddled to rip open
with my teeth, reveal soft meat.
Find a public spot on the riverwalk
where the tourists sip salty margaritas,
search for a place to feast their eyes.
And perfect—it begins to rain.
I deserve a body felt by water. As I take
the first bite of flesh and heat, I release.
Cry in fat drops that season my food
and lick the new brine from my meat.
I made this. My body poured forth
and made better. My sorrow is seen
by so many. The mourning is decadent
like licking batter from the bowl, a large
pizza for myself with breadsticks
and tonguing clean garlic butter
from the thin skin between each finger.
My eyes so green against the red
ringed around them, look feral.
Tourists line the bridges a story above,
put their bellies to the barrier and lean
like children while the zoo monkeys
fuck, disgusted and can’t stop gawking.

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First published in Whole, Holy, Hot by Chrissy Martin (Write Bloody Publishing, 2026).

Personal Issues with Top Surgery
by J Brooke

Scrolling Instagram in a bathroom   
          (mindless avoidance my old friend) 
seasoning my days callousing agile 
 
fingertips while I pray not my heart 
          as well. Oh hell, how awful my life 
when my algorithm disappoints me  
 
like this day, streaming royal family 
          reels I didn’t search for. I barely care  
these whiter than white billionaires  
 
spew & skew racist. I watched them 
          fictionalized on Netflix— a version  
so well-acted, so well edited, so well   
 
my nosy phone eavesdropped, ratted 
          me out so now I’m stuck scrolling  
princes I don’t care about riding  
 
horses I don’t care about so hide 
          content I hit (tho adorable animal  
scrolling I of course like conveyed  
 
as ♡ but too many cats and hardly 
          enough bears if you ask me.) I used  
to spew “my spirit animal is a bear”  
 
before updating— me appropriating 
          at best & racist at worst making me 
more royal I guess than bear-like… 
 
I’m really most similar to teen boys 
          on my feed fooling around jumping  
around horsing around in jeans often 
 
shirtless their defined torsos liberated 
          strong cut perfect except for the scars  
those damn scars remaining evidence   
 
road map tracing backwards to where 
          their femaleness got removed— knifed  
away like a branding— I consider scars  
 
always considering my brand & if I can 
          handle such branding… I’d love myself  
so much more in a t-shirt, except bare- 
 
chested I imagine myself exposed still, 
          averting my eyes whenever passing  
mirrors or windows reflecting like I do  
 
now, always folding my arms covering 
          my chest, in photos I post I imagine it 
my symbol of strength (only in reality  
 
my symbol is hiding) still hiding always 
          hiding out— like I do in bathroom stalls 
stalling as I do, as if behind palace walls 
 
not a pretender— I have come out & out  
          & out again, so how is it I remain 
still in hiding? 

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From I Can Tell You The Version That Will Make You Take My Side (Driftwood Press, 2026). Copyright © 2026 by J Brooke. Used with permission from J Brooke on behalf of Driftwood Press. All rights reserved.

Mary as Kin
by Jo Bear

Dyke mother, you know the sacrament of hands 
worn from long work & gentle as the scabbard 
of a blade. You chose emptiness in its first 
sense: freedom from fear—womb as the warm welcome 
of a butch’s palm where you curl brow to knee 
with the ease of a child. You know the making 
of families begins so long before desire. 
Once, I told a lover I wanted to want 
her. Or, perhaps, I wanted lust’s easy shape. 
Some days, my leg was the leg of the moon & 
I knew not what it made me. I needed her 
as flight needs a bird. Language makes no yearning
but it sharpens the blade. I hold her with words 
at my throat. I hold her with empty arms & think of you. 

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First published in Grist

The Angels
by Michael Hettich

As the day turned to dusk, we sensed we could feel
the people we’d loved and lost calling
like a breeze that suggests itself but never
actually awakens the trees. She told me
again about the moment she decided to let
our first child go so she could go on
living herself, and I remembered
how once, as a young man, I’d walked by myself
for a day, until I was lost and came
to a boulder and a creek. She remembered yearning
to comfort our baby after we’d scattered
her ashes, and I remembered that the sun
had been warm; the sound of the creek had filled me
with something as different from thought or song
as a dream. She said she still dreamed of Audrey,
our lost child. And then I told her again
that when dusk fell, a clutch of black birds landed.
Even when I stood up and gestured, there
in that unfamiliar landscape, they refused to fly away.
I think they were hungry. But I had nowhere else to go,
so I lay down under stars so sharp
in that darkness they hurt my eyes, even
when my eyes were closed. All night those black birds
stood watching, waiting for something. Like angels,
she said then and laughed, though I don’t think she was joking.

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First published in Poem-a-Day on January 3, 2025

I Tell My Friend I’ve Been Feeding the Crows
by Todd Dillard

and he tells me that’s how kindness kills,
that by giving them food they'll forget
how to be crows, how to forage, survive,
and not for the first time I marvel at how friendly
failure is, pulling up a chair at the table
and asking for a plate after I carbonize the chicken,
tittering “love me, love me not” with the petal
confetti when I drive the mower across the flower bed. 
I hate the math that tallies up the good I try to do 
and subtracts 10,000 black feathers. But then 
it’s summer, and the sun is a bowling ball
rolling down the nape of my neck, 
and I don’t hear them like I normally do: 
the robins chucking YO MAMA jokes
through every noon-licked dogwood bough,
car alarms unfurling from mockingbird throats,
crows cawing ALL CLEAR across cedar tops. 
I step outside and the grass beneath my feet 
crunches like a cough, and in that moment 
I forget how to be a human 
who answers, What can you do? with nothing. 
Look at how alive these birds are 
splashing in my toddler's just-filled water table. 
What else, as you kill it, sings.

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First published in Barrelhouse Issue 26

a boy is a dream is a god is an atom
by Maya Cheav

a shell is a slice-of-life novel.
a shell is a shovel for sandcastles,
a piece of a memory for a young boy to make
when he goes to the beach for the first time
on his sixth birthday.
a shell is a corner for love to hide in.
a shell is a ghost,
an echo from the other dimension,
keeper of tragedies.
a shell is a treasure of great magnitude,
one that was meant to sit on a glass shelf
in a museum
to be admired properly.
a shell is a weapon,
a means of self-defense.
a shell is a vessel,
fortitude for new spirits seeking shelter
from an unforgiving universe.
a shell is the world in the palm of your hand.
or maybe a shell is just a shell.

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First published in by-the-wind-sailor with Rockwood Press, 2026.

Eve, Escaped
by Choiselle Joseph

oh thank God for a friend in this Paradise where i was damned to wrestle against fat      nerve and sinew      where i wasn’t graced with eyes or a tongue until He was so kind to wrench me from that man’s chest      the spear tip of my marrow nearly pierced a hole in his lung      the garden breeze blew minty against his residues      as He laid me down on the clovers      molded my arms  my legs      that goddamn cavity      that stuttering drum      is it supposed to be beating this fast      He called me Companion      i squint every time until it’s over      until i’m scrubbed clean and itching   while he anchors me grunting like a bull      i pray for morning sickness      but the big guy must be deaf      i think only of figs and figs and figs      fig juice streaming down my chin and my wrists   if you could just unravel your scales from this branch please      my stomach is a serpent with a tail down its throat

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First published in Pithead Chapel

For My Friends, In Reply to Your Question
by R. A. Villanueva

We are making it through, yes,
but barely. What we have now
is at the least an everyday—
some bewildering dance where we
keep time with each other. My son
has chosen a corner of our street
where we’re meant to track
the neighborhood’s drifting
into spring: he watches a vine
creep along the brick face,
notes with pastels and gel pens,
its roots clawing the mortar,
a lone bumblebee in its fat orbit
around nearby blossoms. He tends
to his own carnations in a jar
of dye and water, sketches
an experiment to test if color
will disappear into the air. Nothing
is ever all-gone, he says, gently
drowning a small cactus
he carried from the bodega
before it shuttered for good. Later,
he will list the names of everyone
we miss. Later, he will sing
“Happy Birthday” to a cousin
across the Palisades, to an uncle
three stops away on the F,
to a family friend out west
as we gather by the light
of screens, around the dinner table
at a house my parents hope
to give away. We leave
Brooklyn for here—this lawn
I had to mow in the summer,
this backyard where Grandpa
nursed tomatoes and green beans,
where my brother and I
pressed rocks into the earth,
flicked pill bugs onto their backs.
I tried to tell my son those stories,
but he was chalking the driveway,
throwing tennis balls at windows,
pouring bubble solution
into flower beds. No one
has slept here in months
and I’ve spent these first hours
home paging through albums
while my daughter rolls
among the quilts and pillows
of the living room. She laughs
when I take her hands to cup
them to my ears, when I tickle
the ridges of her ribcage, when
we call her name with soft,
percussive notes, whisper boom
boom boom in triplet. You
could never imagine my hair
this long. Every photograph
and keepsake sits covered in dust.

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First published in A Holy Dread by R. A. Villanueva, Alice James Books, 2026.

Bevel
by Reuben Gelley Newman

Jasper Johns, Pinion, Lithograph, 1963-1966; after Elizabeth Bishop

Hang a wire beneath a spread of plenty.
Choose a specific word with a meaning
No one quite knows. Diagram yourself
As ruler, thermometer, ambiguous
Cans of soup. Painstakingly
Test the temperature of the invisible
Cake in the baking pan.
Set the timer again: when it buzzes,
take the cake and run with it.
Crash the wedding. Rub
Your body on the page.
Say you don’t understand.
Foot, foot, knee, hand, hand.

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First published in Petrichor

fruity ennui
by Alex Baskin

                 after Joe Brainard

Rarely apple, I am usually orange of unknown provenance. Sometimes
rotten muck seeps to my core, and sometimes everything
in the world was created for me. Melancholy seems 
conceivably cantaloupe-related. I am mystery pear, so
crisp and underrated—beware. Why do my eyes itch at night? Oh
internet, you unpeel the answer: They’ve itched all day—I
just didn’t stop and notice. Tell me about your seeds and pits, your thin skin. Don’t
overthink it, oh juicy friend, oh boundless banana. You know more than you know.

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First published in gather lit mag, March 2026.

SYED KABEER HASSAN
Lightning at Buxi Cliff

When it rained too less,
  Shams said “it’s as though the clouds 
                                    flicked its moist hands at 
                                                            the city and left.”

Now that the faucet is turned,
I tell him,
                                      “No one has such small hands  
                                                          not even the rain”



For rain is between the clefts of his large brown fingers— 
                  riding along the creases
                                           washing every destiny to 
                                                                    his pale wrist.

                              
This was something no one forecast;
                drops denting upon the fuel tank, radiating
                             far-reaching metallic reverberations,

our pupils being drummed, edging
                                    memory out in tears—

he is taking the longer route, 

so I could wonder
                   who would pay the price of grief as it coils up 
to the origin. Or how if atoms had satellites, they would 
find it anomalous—
                 my beard plunging into the mesh of his shoulder—
                                                 
he accelerates.

                                                            When I first steered a motorcycle, 
                                                                                   it was also monsoon.
     

   Water fell from the sky, made being                                
                      abandoned less personal.


Where were the winds then? Whirling dead straws like boomerangs
                                                                           out into the night.

Dead that was the world, and no time to change the plots,
                                           I sketched only the foreshadowing—

me and him on the bike, for the hundredth time,
                                                           our headlights limp. 
             Glimpses I’ll recall
                         if I live a life as long as his:
                                           trucks waking up 
                                                          then bursting,
                                                        
            but I could only hear the sounds like it was home arriving,
                                            I saw only his back,
                                                                         the stripes on his linen.

It wasn’t home though. He took a longer turn.

                                    Home was where we possessed the bodies
                                                    and the ceilings held the remnants.

where I lay down with a pillow
        between my legs as I swam
sideways in the bed

and the wind pushed the curtain into a cape of someone
                                        flying high above the hooks to bring me
                                                                                        back on the road
                                
again, his hands busy with the rain, the clouds rumbling.
Someone taking a screenshot from the sky.

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First published in Two Thirds North.

GUION PRATT 
Poem with misremembered Vermeer

Here is the line
where a colony

of purple-tooth
bracket fungi clashes

against a flank
of false turkey tails

across the surface
of the felled oak

by the creek. Deep
in the heartwood

the war beneath
the war: tendrils

of hyphae test
the border they make

with their bodies
urgent as knees

touching under
a table. Everywhere

I’ve lived already
had a fence

around it when I
moved in. It was never

in question whose property
the spruce tree was

though its branches reached over
to shade the neighbors’

trampoline. They’ve gone
back to Jakarta

until next summer
as they do each fall

but said to come jump
all we want. Said nothing

about the motorcycle
parked in the unlocked

shed. Sometimes, you
want to go somewhere

you can’t go, so you go
home and lie

down. Tonight,
I wanted the wine

in your cup. I mean,
to be it. Most days

what I want
is want, lucky me,

easy to come by
in this life. I want

a painting with good
exits, one

where the gambler hides
the ace behind

his back or the maid
pours milk into

the family bowl,
her eyes fixed

on something just
out of frame.

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First published by Poetry Society of America, 2025