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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Homing
by Kate Welsh

An ornithologist tells me that all birds have a keel, a bony protrusion 
from their breastplate on which their wing muscles anchor, 

offering leverage for flight. Keel as in a ship’s first foundation, 
as in what keeps everything righted: stability in the waves, the air, 

in the surprise innate in both. Only recently I came to understand 
that messenger pigeons don’t know how to go anywhere but home.

Taken away from their coop, they orient solely towards what is familiar, 
returning again and again, relentless in their want for what they know.

Not travelers, then; not seekers. Despite their wings: rooted. 
For months last year, I had a new address every week. And now: 

a set nest, my own slippers by the door, a plant I must water.   
On the molting oak outside—my tree, I’ve claimed it—a small crew 

of tiny Odysseuses stop to rest. I welcome them. 

CONAN TAN
Self-Portrait as a Siphonophore


In my next life, I want to be a siphonophore.
Not a small creature by any means but a string
of queer lights. My body
less a body and more the living history of water.
Time passing through me like ghost
blue ripples. Big concepts, big joy, isn’t it?
The real terminology is less
romantic. Scientists would deem me a collection
of working parts. I prefer to think of the siphonophore
as chain and chiaroscuro. An expanse of brushstrokes.
Meaning I’ll have been touched
at least once. I’m trying to transparent
my shame into something beautiful. A depression
worthy of the Louvre. Vermeer deconstructed light
down to its photons and I can’t even
look the mirror in the eye. Four years of therapy
and every session ends with Julian thanking me
for being open, for being. For having
loosened this grief into a galaxy. I deserve
some gold stars by now, I say, and he smiles, grins even, almost
like a friend would. I wonder if the siphonophore
has friends, if it ever feels tired
at its own length. Its colonial weight and constellation.
All the visibility. I wonder if there’s anything
more tired than thinking of the self as fear and feminine
ache. That same night I empty
into bed and dream. I could be more
than the sum of my parts.

LENA RUBIN
Fort Plain

She gives me an electric saw and planks
of pine, and I run long, smooth, slow passes.
She teaches me to keep a strong core,
to hold it between my feet as it revs.
I straddle the machine, an excitable
animal. I take sandpaper to the wood
and even the grain.

The old dog pounces on me.
Flies buzz around him,
circling the scabs on his haunches.
In the painting above the door,
pastel-shaded cloud-sheep
loaf about a blue-green pasture.

I am asking language to do
what it can’t.
To be the handsome figure
who comes from his hidden grotto,
dripping with sea water,
to make love to me.
I batter down his door,
providing nothing in return.

At the demonstration farming
village, a man stacks chunks of
coal into the forge.
He pumps the bellows
and inserts the rough iron
into the fire, which emits
jagged sparks as it is shaped.

He takes a horsehair brush
to burnish the iron clean, his hands
gloved with soot, his heavy apron.
There is no shiny veneer,
no one to sweep me off
my feet. But there is the rough
work. There is the molten core.

NORA SULLIVAN
America, Give Me a New Fighter Jet 

The US military is searching for a missing F-35 in South Carolina after the pilot ejected yesterday and the jet kept flying. If you have seen an F-35 in the woods, please contact the US Marines [at 843-963-3600].
                 --@flightradar24

America, give me a new fighter jet.
Give me every green head in the air. 
I’ll be the swarm. Give me time
in the afterlife to reinvent chaos. 
Give me an afterlife, a swan theory,
a dried duck. Let me bite at the water for scent.
Give me a woman in the back kitchen
pulling silver skin from a rack of ribs
with her hands. Give me the ribs 
cooked and cut. I’ll shake them 
like bells. Give me a child’s thrill
as she rides her bike up and down
suburbia’s beveled curb. Show me 
how far can she get on foot 
after riding over a thick shard of glass 
and popping a tire. 
She stands in front of the tv later,
blood drying scab-tight over her knees
and the cut opens again as she sits.
America, give me an exit hatch,
top gun dreaming, the sky overhead,
the trees like knives, the parachute,
the silk, the how-wait-no-
not-now, the broken radio, the cabin pressure,
the eject button blinking wildly,
the seat springing up
like a cartoon, the pilot hanging in open air
until he realizes the metal plane under him is gone.

I don’t need a job
I need money 
Nobody understands the difference anymore
I went hungry as a child
My shoes worn down
            to holes
               through which 
          the earth became my mother
I don’t need a partner 
I need love
I don’t need freedom
I need room
A room
        small room 
           with walls to beat
       and beat and beat and beat
              against my working body  
       until I am free

What flowers do so well
we struggle to:
with stamen, pistil, petal—
white-ruffled, yellow, wilder—
with style and stigma, 
anther, answer
new to new to new.
Mostly they do 
require, as we do, aid:
with ant or moth
or wind or butterfly,
in place, they orchestrate 
the shift, the yellow freight
of pollen to and fro, 
out of and into.
Using what they’ve made, 
in shape and shade
alive as cloud,	
they draw to them 
what-all of earth and sky
they need to fruit, to seed, 
kin to kin. We gather
ourselves, again.

Lord, when my mind goes,
let me have disposed
of most of my secrets,
let me have used up my lust
in good-natured rutting,
let me have thrown my knives 
at the hay bale, all of them, 
so what comes is, 
if a surprise, not
a terrible or even an insulting one
to whoever I am lucky 
enough to be around

Open not yet the windows. The screens can wait.
Somewhere, soft light is moving through the fields,
the mists, the mud, lying in tender pools.
Let it sit there, undisturbed, like the Lenten rose,
or the crocus, lighting its fires. And don’t
walk onto the ice, where you waited all winter
by the still breath of the fishing hole. The trout
will not answer you, any more than the cardinal,
blinking his hard eye, or the fox kits, blind
in their beds. Look to the deer, soft-footed in snow,
to the thin lines of their bodies. How they go even now
where you cannot follow, passing from one field
to the next, like light under a shade. All is
in motion: the air, the ice, the first shoots spinning
in darkness. Nothing is tame. Trust not the nights.

but yours is where the ache resides, site of a thousand delicate  
harms—soft of a cheek on the soft of a cheek—and hers  
a door upon which you try and try not to knock. Yes,  
remembering hurts, though you won’t indict the jaw, skin  
of the wrist, belly or its button, little hollow where the tongue  
in your mind still dips, conjuring the ghost of a moan from  
the mouth you have ceased to kiss for good. You don’t blame  
the hands, not yours or hers, not the animal they made  
when they touched, all sinew and heat. Type specimen  
and endling. Precious, I’m saying, then extinct. The fault  
is not the shoulder’s, warm or cold. The back is not the culprit,  
even turned. Body is setting, not plot, whether burning or  
burned. It’s the farm you already bought, and now—field sown  
with salt and somehow blooming—you’ll have to live in it.

When you said, Don’t get the wrong idea about me, 
I got so many ideas. The best of them were wrong.
Keats said hold your contradictions. Keats died young.
Maybe you were my contradictions. Maybe I held you.
Maybe we watched the ideas move in murmuration
over the barn. It was autumn. It was spring. The summer
hay was bailed in the loft. It was green. It was gold,
waiting for a winter match. Keats said yes to everything.
He called one cow Beauty and the other Truth.
You let them out while I found the kerosene and poured.
I promised this would be the last wrong idea. You coughed
up a nightingale. Fuck, I said, Keats is taking over this poem,
we’ve got to burn it down. You said yes. So we made love
in the burning barn, while all the ideas cindered and sang.

running the court, directing traffic, crossing over 
his defender and dropping him. He jumps a pass 
because he knows who’s scared to shoot. 
He pushes the pace, and what seems like chaos 
is just speed, what seems like noise is song: choir 
of collision, got-game gospel, heat-check harmony, melodies
that soar. You blink and he’s at the rim. 
You hear damn and ooo, but mostly sounds 
that can’t be spelled—before realizing you gasped too. 
Our language is violent: beast, steal, charge,
cut, hack, bury. Our country was built by these
migrant sons accustomed to sweat, these great-
grandchildren of slaves, those who grind and rebound 
and reach, and him with the crossover 
like a golden spike. A black court with white lines 
to remind us what’s worth what. He jabs, steps back, 
doesn’t even watch as his shot drops. That’s 20,
so you tie your laces. His shadow flickers by, his lava 
orange Kobes barely making a sound. Does it surprise you
that he talks the most trash? That his parents’ names 
are Sharpied on his soles? That opponents call him 
shifty? That he can dunk but never does? That
was game—you got next.

we were there at the slaughter
at the slaughter of Fala 

not all of us are guilty;
someone—not I—held the knife
and someone—not I—gave the order
but there are no innocents among us

some of us were inside the room
some of us were outside the room
some, just there by the door
but we were all in the same house

when Fala’s throat was slashed the blood splashed on us
Konko got it on his lips
Atteke got it on her fingernail
Tono’s throat was hit at the same place Fala’s was slit

Atteke wiped her hand on her skirt
Konko brought out his tongue and licked
and even those who did not see the blood
heard the cries pouring from Fala’s truncated throat

the ones who could stop it would not 
the ones who would stop it could not 
the ones who cared not numbered most of all; 
those who are not guilty must at least be shamefaced

we were there at the slaughter 
and none of our hands is clean

They are letting/not letting me return to Mexico the place that is/isn’t mine
I need to fill out a form to prove/disprove           my trip is/isn’t valid
The goal of immigrant paperwork is/isn’t      to see/unsee what our humanity
is/isn’t worth                If it is/isn’t there                    I will see/unsee my family
who are/aren’t mine                   to find out if my blood is/isn’t
image/flesh I can only see/unsee so many         pixel hands through Facebook
walk lost streets through Google Earth           I will return/leave to this
America where I won’t know               when/if             how/why           where/when
I will be deported            Undocumented/illegal
means my existence is                criminal
I am    a question of morals      un-American    citizen of            distance
Question 1a.:              Purpose of trip.
Answer: How much does my father look/not look like his father?
Answer: I want to hold/hold my grandmother’s hand.