By Darren Demaree
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i told my son you can reach me i am not the weather the same way my father was the weather i am not mystery or storm or the perfect day apology for the storm you can reach me i am willing to be shaken i used to be shaken all of the time you you you son you can reach me i have built a table too small to eat at so that we can sit there and hold no pursuit other than me what do you need
By José Gutiérrez
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“Well, if it doesn’t jell, it isn’t aspic, and this isn’t jellin’!”
—Psycho
Brine shrimp spawn a galaxy in a fishbowl.
Ergo, sea monkeys exist.
So do Higgs bosons and demodex.
These last look like scorpions
and live on the canopy of your eyelashes.
The difference being they’re not sold
at toy stores as a novelty item.
PETA has so far remained notoriously
mum about sea monkeys.
Long before that Nazi sympathizing
corpolite von Braunhut patented his presto shrimp
aquariums in the late ’60’s,
Kubla Khan’s gift to Marco Polo when they first met
was a porcelain bowl of sea monkeys
swimming in unfettered motility.
Michaelangelo sculpted a frieze
of sea monkeys once.
It’s now in one of the nine circles
of the Vatican, next to Pope Joan’s feeldoe.…
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By Brontë Pearson
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I levitate to the thirteenth floor
each time I proclaim how desperately
I covet connection,
and once the capsule jerks to a halt,
and my stomach drops,
the light blooms,
the imperceptible chime rings,
but the door won’t budge
because sincerity is too much,
and the floor was never there.
Author’s Note: “Triskaidekaphobia” was written for a poetry exercise called The Fish Tank of Rage, where you are given an abstract emotion and a random object and must craft a poem combining the two. “Triskaidekaphobia” was the product of “the elevator of rejection” and plays upon the idea of many buildings lacking a 13th-floor due to superstition. …
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By Benjamin Goluboff
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Evans, whose object would have been
to draw the biographer’s attention away
from the business of being photographed,
might have asked Edel to interpret
Eliot’s encomium on James:
that he had “a mind so fine
no idea could penetrate it.”
Edel, distinctly self-conscious,
might have laughed this off
as modernist hagiography,
allowed as how James
had plenty of big ideas:
Innocence, Europe, Art.…
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By Lindsey Roberts
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“My biggest fear…” I could tell him my biggest fear, but he wouldn’t understand it. Only two people in my life have understood it and one of them would never admit to understanding it. We are the 1%. The cosmic joke. The empty. The unexplainable.
We are living contradictions because we are not one person. No, we don’t have split personalities. We are always us. Always complicated, and always multiple things, never just one thing.
We want so badly to be a part of all this, but we will never be a part of this because we cannot commit to being one person. We will not take one path because we do not see the point in walking when the destination is not our decision. The destination is the same no matter the path.…
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By Claudia Rojas
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Because I’ve felt up the smooth spine of books
with the caress of my finger, and I’ve passed time
under the hold of a good book, I know my mother.
When I was seven, I learned about stone soup
from hungry soldiers in an audiobook, and you
wouldn’t believe how the stomach thinks in hunger.
My mother grew up and lived against a menu of hunger
and her Bible was the mountain peak to a pile of books.
She’s stopped going to church, but she’s said to me, you
have to believe. I was fifteen the first time
a pastor’s preaching made my tears collect like soup
in a falling bowl. I have seen my mother…
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By Maziar Karim
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1
I came
With thousand colorful dreams And the world
drunk them all Year after year
it dropped like a rain Drop by drop by drop
And I know tomorrow
even These few black crows Will fly away
From my snowy roof
2
Gliding from the elevator gushing on the street blowing with the taxi
Crossing the highway by the rain bow Saying hello to the old house
And entering my room It’s been years since human flew here
3
You plant your feet in the ground with fingers staring at clouds
you surrender your leaves to the wind and know that death
is not an exotic event
4
Sadness
is better than darkness
I fear the silence of lanterns waiting for sunset