eyelids tender from rubbing + reaction become irritated once more I drive out to Kalona at night to see the dark + scream + cry after getting off work at the big box store When back in Iowa City I sit in a BK parking lot to listen to university radio +…
Category: Poetry
The BOI Rushes To, by MARS
feat. Frank Ocean Saturdays involved making out entrances into life outside / we’ve been in this room too long / recreation is keeping us self-contained and aware / of each other’s form Another love becomes ghost & that’s cliché but true Her hair scattered across my bathroom, bedroom floors. Door the shape of…
Girl Work, by Zefyr Lisowski
Girl Work After Grey Vild Most of them tell me I’m pretty. The first man grabs me rough but fucks like he’s afraid of something breaking. Another has a patchy beard and says how special and underappreciated I am. It must just kill you, he says. The one on Tinder asks if I have a…
“clippings*” by Aurielle Marie
here is an alphabet slicing open the belly of a boar. out come pulverized apples. vicodin. shoelaces. the neck of an artisanal soap maker. there is tobacco in the cupboard and a stew of cigarettes boils on the stove. inside the tv set a woman scolds the circumference of your belly. another prays…
“Breaking News” by Noor Hindi
Breaking News We know death is futile know death as 3.5 thousand retweets a trauma a thing named empty in internet measured in the slow bend of your fingers clicking the quiet tempo of expiration your spleen in the shape of a gun in the shape of a pen I am going door to door…
“On Ekphrasis & Revision”, and “from UNIVERSAL THEORY IN WHICH EVERY FAILED GESTURE TOWARDS LOVE IS A SOULMATE FROM AN ALTERNATE TIMELINE” by George Abraham
On Ekphrasis & Revision A Markov Sonnet with Memory Leak The video game, Assassin’s Creed: Origins, follows an ancient Egyptian assassin named Bayak, and his wife Aya, who work to protect the people under Ptolemy XIII’s rule. Their son was martyred by the Ptolemic police state, and so the game follows Bayak & Aya’s quest…
“First Sex Sonnet During the Pandemic” by Craig Santos
First Sex Sonnet During the Pandemic awkward my wife & i kiss undress inch slowly as if emerging from separate quarantines is it safe skin tensed at the vulnerable risk of reopening Craig Santos Perez is the author of five books of poetry and the co-editor of five anthologies. He teaches at the University…
“Prison Break” by Jennifer Sperry Steinorth
This work is excerpted from the forthcoming book, Her Read, a graphic poem (Texas Review Press, 2021). I began this make-over in the summer of 2016, in that pre-election heat. Finding myself otherwise unable to write, I set to work remodeling a seminal text, The Meaning of Art by Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency in Read’s illustrated text which spans from…
Two Poems by Sam Preminger
Prelude Someone is trying out shiny soldier’s boots right now – right now. And don’t they look excellent? Reflecting the stern jaw staring down, un-scuffed. Without music, men set out to pain the night. There’s an allowance, always, for what fits tightly: the starched-white, fresh-pressed, machine-stitched lettering, like ice. Someone is sleeping outside. Someone’s slouched in the…
Two Poems by Michael Adam Carroll
Central American History Lessons If you can writeYour history Without The bodies… [redacted] And their survivorsWhisper of generationsDisappearedFrom their own soil Foreign to youSavage to youDistant from youThe truth sanitized for you In Kodachrome newsreelsWhere you’re The lead actorIn their oral tradition Webs of truthSpunFrom ear to earUnder the cover of night BecauseCentral to this country’s Intelligence is a…