Three Poems

Collector

*

the first one is a coincidence          
the first one in a collection is not         

having crossed the threshold  
the practice commits

(it seems) it only

makes sense

*

the first encounter      
being a singularity

an impulsion
untimely    

a word
of caution               

a river that cannot be
crossed twice

has stones all over its banks

*                                  

I weigh stones
in palm

like all texts  
my palm convinces

to throw the cold
stones back

to the river

until the next virtue
finds its route

back to the palm                            

with damning intentions         
holding instants

& long

long evaporates

a plea
the palm is

for the mercy
of intents please

I throw

the cold stones away again  

*

in front of the court
I admit
I collect

other people’s pain

in front of the mirror
I admit
I collect

other people’s pain

in front of the mountains
I admit
I collect

other people’s pain    

in front of you I press
the illusory wounds
I admit

*

I collect

other people  

the warm oval

the sharp drone

the habitual    

human action

fail vail                                   

Speculative fiction #1

-

I saw the deer
Among many deers alive

Trees are
Rabbit seconds

Ruby speed; tech
Knee at auto dawn

Arrival is an
Ambush unenviable

All anus labored
A sloth

Cars eventual

-

A table grows sons

Mothers, unclaimed
Daughter cry over

Sugar in air; sugar
Nose - bless you

Crystal, mine kin
Not, job me

A swarm, swam,
Am

-

Miss American, missing
A spleen

Rather a warm
Day it is

Landlord

my landlord said: let there be love
so was love made, snitched

by an ark of comrades
hating life, feet in boiler

eating fecund, tail deep
in teeth, while fire caves

a sun purple, pointing
the rumble of daylight fright

the waste of it all,
the dawn cedes,

that’s when a lover comes -
as my landlord allows -

a rat or raccoon, their face
adjacent to a dancing

heart in dark, mooning
buddha’s eye. slasher

or prophecies, in cruelty
we depend on lamb -

like your arm, fragility is
in this house the only

thing i possess. so said
the land, the lord, the lover

governs this law - in this house

like hell
let there be love. 

∩

Yuyi Chen (they/them) is from Sichuan, China. They are now in a PhD program in anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. They are the author of the chapbook EROTIC CONTINENT (Discount Guillotine, 2025) and their poems are published or forthcoming in Nat. Brut, αntiphony, Landfill, and Pile Press. They go by Echo.

from A Field of Telephones

HUGO SCENE, 1

the ventriloquist requests a volunteer...

no, no: he insists...you in the front...let’s see what you have to say for yourself...what’s your name...

Brad...let’s hear it for Brad...

now Brad put this on...yes the straps and...you can still see his eyes folks but what can his eyes see...the less the better he’ll probably be thinking...

the nose over the nose...cheeks over his cheeks...

I’d say you’re looking pretty presidential Brad... maybe even professorial...

(strokes Brad’s head)...I’ve always thought education should be about making energy intellectual...that’s different from making intellectuality intellectual...

and yes the mouth over the mouth...dangling...it talks when I pump it like this...

how ya feeling Brad...

(Brad voice, ventriloquized, the mouth of the mask flapping as the ventriloquist talks for Brad and pumps) at last I can live like a human...

what were you before...

(Brad voice, deflatingly but also a little to-be-so-bold) I couldn’t say...

HUGO SCENE, 3

this is our critical pageant...a variety show...little scummy...starting any minute now...consider the mask Brad’s fellowship...a real honor...

our subject tonight is Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town...our title is “The Triggering Town: Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town at Forty”...snappy right...

forty refers to me...I’m about to turn...the book’s a little older, a classic...if forty is old enough for that...I read it first...who cares when...I lived in towns he knew...the wind bled coupons into earth... and the milk ran out with the spoon...Aberdeen, La Push...

it’s just that easy folks...poetry is mostly tone...a dial tone...pretending to be speech...like how you used to be able to record payphones...certain tones... and there was this one sequence you could record then hold up to the copy machines at Kinko’s...a hack...boop boop beep beep beep boop...and then print your zine for free...

I chaperoned the prom...I bought asparagus in the rain...this is Methodist and there is no air...art is what keeps you...I won’t say whole...art is what keeps you...perishable...and the trout ran out...it’s all right to applaud...

our sponsor tonight is the new university run by firefighters...mostly calendars...safe for work... they’re great...they have this new firesuit we’ll be showing off tonight...it’s not just for firefighters... little girl, would you like one...

the new firesuit also helps when we need Brad to go to sleep...do you all think Brad would like to go to sleep...

audience: NAP! THAT! BRAD!

OK Brad get ready...here comes the firesuit...

(pale blue sheet put over Brad, mouth pucker/suckle effect comedically visible through the sheet, cartoon snoring sounds, Brad acting like a parrot being put to sleep, a sheet over its cage, which counteracts any more sinister associations though not enough)

speaking of turning forty...you know that poem by Donald Justice, “Men at Forty”...you know it, don’t you Brad...

(Brad wakes, suckles/puckers mouth until sheet chomps off)

(Brad voice, reciting) Men at forty
Learn to close softly
The doors to rooms they will not be Coming back to

is it just me or is the changing understanding of great literature over the course of one’s life absolutely amazing...a round of applause...I guess my philosophy is you run until you feel the leash and then you hope your head is smaller than your neck...slip through...that’s why we need to be careful about learning...hey, Brad...do you ever wonder if it’s easier to make your head smaller or your neck larger...

(Brad voice) why not both...
do you ever feel like you’re at the end of your rope...

(Brad voice) think how the rope feels...

HUGO SCENE, 5

Hugo’s problem, I think, in The Triggering Town, is he’s trying to explain...should I stop there...

(Brad nods bigly)

Hugo’s problem is he’s trying to explain...period...

Hugo’s problem is he’s trying to explain a feeling he must have felt enough to feel he should explain it...but having felt it so much he knows...he can’t... that is, why’d he spend his life on poems...what’s wrong with him...what was he hoping for...why’d he feel like that was the best or only thing to do...and to keep doing...he doesn’t know why...his explaining doesn’t get it...he knows that...so why is he trying...I don’t think birds particularly like their nests...they just live there...they make them...it’s no critique of the nest if...the bird doesn’t like it and...it fits the bird...

like Hugo says...a writer can feel bad when they’re not writing...so then they think whenever they feel bad...it’s from not writing...here’s a drug that can cause madness or...if you are currently mad...cures it...

his title’s “triggering” isn’t triggering in the contemporary sense...like a trigger warning...he means things that catalyze, inspire...for him, a “small town that has seen better days often works”...but anything can do...“our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to”...and I thought poets mostly submitted to magazines...

yet Hugo seems to mean most...he’s talking about any subject seen as though it’s a town...move around your subject, he says...see who’s up...you can show them around...you could have any triggering subject, as he says...but he’s also asking you to look at any subject like it’s a town...a locus of lives, real or imagined or our own...a triggering town, a brigadier clown, a Frigidaire swan...therefore, and this is the real critical thing...however private he claims his poems are, ideally, their craft’s a civic vision...you can find plenty of essays about it I’m sure...

tourists in a non-tourist spot...Hawthorne’s “Wakefield”...Whitman after manifest destiny has passed him by...cohesive regionalism of the defunct...loading docks...Panera now has fried chicken and cheap pizza and there’s this hack where you put the hashbrowns from McDonald’s and the fish from Wendy’s on the pizza from Panera...Tom Petty on every station...the team apparel just shows us what was in the donation box...the accent is dental...two hot dogs for a dollar no matter what you might be about to do...say what you will...

A Field of Telephones is forthcoming from 53rd State Press.

∩

Zach Savich is the author of seven collections of poetry, including Momently (Black Ocean, 2024), and several chapbooks, limited-edition volumes, and books of prose. His work has received the Iowa Poetry Prize, the Colorado Prize for Poetry, the CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Award, and other honors, including residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, ArtPark, and the Chautauqua Institution. His writing has appeared in journals and anthologies including American Poetry Review, Best New Poets, Boston Review, Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. Savich teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art and serves as co-editor of Rescue Press’s Open Prose Series.

One Poem

FIRE WALK WITH ME

Day 7 (morning):

In this dream, I remember having the dream before.

When I wake, I attempt to record the dream in my diary, but
all of the pages are missing. Edges torn, tattered.

The still images of the dream collect and the future reels
flicker through me with a delicate balance between pleasure
and violence.

I’m a blonde girl;
I’ve always know how to ride it.

Day 7 (night):

I’m beginning to realize that it’s a different kind of world with this fire in it—
I leave the window open at night for you to crawl through and tuck me in.

Our empty language coalesces into touch, the not-speak crosses dimensions
before I catch its embrace.

The sensation of your fingers as they run delicately over my body—

Our alchemy is chemical;
this ancestral chemistry.

Day 6 (morning:)

The portrait I hung up on my wall changes, but I only notice after
my favorite color in it has disappeared.

The woman becomes transparent, an empty shape.
The most relentless part of grief is all that it disappears.

I’m not surprised;
The riddle of gender repeats itself each time.

Day 6 (night):

This bliss you leave behind in me is nuclear.

Day 5 (morning):

I suppose that when you look up from the bottom, anything could be God.

Maybe there, in Heaven, it’s always curtain call—always a pageant—
but never quite showtime.

Day 5 (night).

Wandering violets, wondering violents.

In this crisp autumn evening I understand their delights.

Day 4 (morning):

The truth is, I live for the pageantry—

when you’ve been in an eternal dark,
your eyes must eventually adjust.

At least somewhat.

Day 4 (night):

I’m rocking with D, I mean she followed me
all the way to the pink room.

In the pink room, anything could be love.

Topless on the billiard balls, the men deploy their sticks with their blue chalk tips
against my body.

No one can see the wreckage,
not even after the game has been won.

Day 3:

Omission.

.noissimO

O—
mission,

Oh.

Oh,

Oooh!—

Day 2 (morning):

I am child until this dawn, and then
I’m immortal, this half-heart of fire and gold.

This skin; this fear; this kin.

The moth that’s been resting on my hand flutters away, offering
a burn. Its circular shape, our twin flame, blistering.

Day 2 (night):

Salt and pepper; I season all my meals.

This night I give up, I mean this light—

I only understand pink once it deepens into red, like blood.

Men chase around the chalice until it becomes a chase until what
I’m willing to give everything up apart from the corruption of you.

The way light makes every image it flashes over into something new.

Christmas in July.

What is it you (or I) have to prove?

Day 1 (morning)

Drop me off by the green light, you better go fast, real

hard on red. You better go before I scream

or else the snow circle will reveal its entrance

and you, a punk your whole life, bad to the bone,

will try to make sense of its code. Honey,

life is a vortex of shifting dynamics;

The way we survive is not a pushing through
but a constant adjustment to its changing weathers.

I put on my little bikini,
I dance in the snow storm.

I laugh hysterically all coked up
cocking a pistol in my hand.

When you inevitably go,

I’ll give up my shape;
I’ll take on a new form.

Day 1 (night):

Black cup of joe. The mug will maintain the tar’s imprint.

Me and R on the train tracks, only my spirit is with her—a piece of it, anyway.

What’s difficult about being glamorous is that they portray us as trinkets.

Me with the ring, the cold Mermaid sing
that leads my body to the mill.

What else is there to give?
Is it my body, or is it the plastic?

What’s the difference;

The black lodge holds my heart.

I beg you to free me from this dream.

I beckon your manly body to come and take me.

Here, my moans ripple in reverse.

Hear, my moans slip and transverse a former landscape.

My mother will make dew with the former met,

eventually. I’ve spent it; I’ve used all my life force

and I reside in the red room perpetually.

What have I invited in?

You may as well have asked for it.

Oh, that’s right.

I did, diD, diD.

∩

Caelan Ernest is a poet living in Brooklyn, New York. They are a publicist at Graywolf Press.

Three Poems

HOLLYWOOD  

Your word at dawn…
there was a guilty hunt… in your lugubrious past…

twitch twitch… like a rabbit…
death and destruction… I was a brilliant actress…

renowned for the lilt of my eyes…
hothouse orchids know the bonedry…

what a riot… seldom ever such a fringed hand…
young men… on the terrace in the moonlight…

second mistress… for the firing squad…
what did you see… in the spill of the ink… misery…

we didn’t have it… the radiant gas…
songbirds scattered… ornamentally the knot in my hair…

crack… it could be anyone… fermenting…
milk and tea leaves… I have something to say to you…

in a trance-state… orange and red…
that was a day for victors… I didn’t care…

heavy scent… heavy… resplendent…
tomorrow another… dank interior… your tactical vehicle…



FANTASY VALLEY

Running… through sharp brambles and talons…
obliquely… I swallowed gallons of sea water…

he said if I’d only bleach my asshole… then we’d really be…
ooh… a little something lascivious…

a martyr for the girls girls girls… sir… I know fairies…
as coy as oysters… sorrowful maidens… a tear-filled lagoon…

my nightgown so fatal… like picking a scab…
my nightingale so feral… a scratch-off redeemed…

we were uncertain… of how to make it last… silver…
I just thought you looked so beautiful…

there were mermaids… wingspans lined with glued-on feathers…
dangerous… was it the pink salt… the acids…

I have done nothing original… I stared at the mirror…
last April… ballroom plumed… for mating season…

there could be kissing… stars I threw rocks at…
not anymore sir… I left my secret…

in your backseat… lip gloss spilling… scales…
pulled-out… rust-stained… a little something… vicious…



HOUSE ON THE FROZEN LAKE

I was widely considered a young woman of virile appetite…
the charitable practice… of licking top lip…

pleasure… carrying me in your big strong arms…
decomposition… didn’t you know…

blossoming peach with its throat slit… lubricious…
diamonds… and other bovine delicacies…

I believed wholeheartedly in pasteurization…
crucible… nocturnal emission… always something…

something glowing… just outside your bedroom window…
seditious pinkness… hid my cheeks behind my fan…

beautiful… to sacrifice the naked children…
rot… white-powdered… something… atomic…

a birthday cake… for all the officers… always something…
something pulsing… just far enough away that…

slip a sleep mask… untie the silk bow of my robe…
smelling… spoiled… elegant… in her enucleation…

I appeared frequently in the pages for my parties…
sows and nannies… a fetid trough… the pure blank snow….

∩

Madeleine Scott is a doctoral student at Harvard working on gender, psychoanalysis, and the history of Christianity.

Three Stories

(i)

We sit in the yard beside the wrought iron tree with burnt-out bulbs, with bird shit on its limbs, and wait for the coroner. It’s the week after Christmas, before the New Year, and the cops can’t reach the man on his phone. He is probably with his family, we are told, like they should be. We can see it on their faces. It could be a while. We apologize. We are told we should not go in the house. It’s been six hours, but we can’t leave, either. We don’t want to. We piss in the rocks. Where else could we go, in this state? The gas station, where he used to buy beer? They might recognize him in our faces, ask how he is. His cellphone is ringing through the open window, has been for as long as we’ve been here. Whoever’s calling doesn’t know. We envy and pity them. The dogs are crying, clawing at the back door. They can smell him, we think but don’t say. We apologize again. Neighbors stop, ask us, ask the police, Is someone dead? What do you think? we want to say. Fuck you and your families, we want to say, Keep walking. We hide in the back. His ex-wife comes by, brings coffee. It gets cold in our hands. We haven’t seen her in a decade, more. She asks how she can help. We tell her to make the ringing stop. She leaves to talk to the cops. It gets quiet except for the dogs, except for the neighbors who keep coming. The ex comes back to find us with our heads in our hands, our fingers in our ears and asks, Is it too early to start telling stories?

(ii)

We pull up to the house with the truck’s windows down, with the cab already full.
            I hate it, my brother says, I hate all this goddamn air.
            The house is smaller than before, the rocks on its gravel path sharper. The flag and the worn truck are gone. We enter with shoes on, and the sun comes in sideways.
            Jesus, I say, Will you hit that fan?
            We didn’t pay the bill that makes the fan move, my brother says, And my name isn’t Jesus.
            He is so much of our father: square jaw, eyes like soil, can’t see straight when told to and only does what needs doing when it needs done or after. He comes on his own—to work, he says—but leaves once he hides the booze, once he cleans the blood. Always before dark, never what I ask. I catch him sitting on the couch, staring at the wall, at the holes we still need to patch. I catch him on his phone, scrolling, scrolling.
            We work without the fan. My brother picks up the gun by the bed, clears it and puts it with the gun from the closet, the gun from the kitchen under the sink, the guns from the car, the desk, the dresser. He has no need for these, needs less heat and recoil.
            What are you going to do with those? I ask.
            I don’t know, my brother says, Why do I have to know what to do all the time?
            We work in silence in the heat with no fan. We find the safe, a wooden box without a lock, full of two-dollar bills and no will. We search the light fixture, come back with a few silver coins. I look behind the painting of the Superstitions. My brother watches the hawk on the telephone pole and smokes a joint. We take apart the iron Christmas tree in the yard, burn our hands on the metal, find some gloves for the rest of the job. We empty the garage, dust the blinds until it’s the right time of day.
            On the table by the guns the mail sits in a high pile. The pile is so high it could be the mountain we were meant to climb that morning we found him, that mountain of perlite we meant to smash and crumble until we found them, the Apache Tears, that clear obsidian. We can toss it all—the mail, the rodeo posters, the Hillermans and their cracked spines—throw it all in the landfill with the dog shit. It would be easier that way, I think. There is so much, and we are only two. There is so much and still somehow not enough.
            Grab me a water? I say, but there is none. There is only a Modelo and condiments in the fridge, and the desert tap tastes of dirt. I could go to the store, buy us a gallon, but instead count the times my brother begged me not to leave him with our father, with all that responsibility, and I ran off anyway—to the creek bed all dried up, to the deep scar carved by water and time to make a canyon, to the shallow cave where I imagined I could live if no one looked for me. More than a handful.
            I stay. There is too much to do. We share the warm Modelo and work. My brother pulls weeds while I sift through the mail.
            We need the tax forms, I say, The bills. Have you seen them?
            My brother shrugs, says he wants to live in the house like our father wanted. There is not enough money for more than a week or two of living. A month if the sale takes a while. There’s no way to know, our realtor says, No one wants to buy in the heat. He works for cheap, the orphans’ commission.
            I fold the shirts I’ll have made into quilts for us. My brother digs through the boots, finds a pair that fits. I pick a hat to hang on my wall, pull up clay from the yard for an ashtray. Outside the sun sets the deep orange of dust and pollution. I flip a switch and remember the bills. I put the Apache Tears in my pocket, they clack together, and my brother dons an old cap. We leave when the light is gone.

(iii)

I hate your guts sometimes. That’s the evil in me.
            My brother says it. He pulls out of the gas station, and I pull from my bag a Red Bull, a vape cartridge, a bag of sour worms to share. I hold it all in my lap, wait for him to ask for something.
            I don’t say that to hurt your feelings, he says, But it’s the truth. 
            Then he adds, Only sometimes.
            We drive to see family who didn’t call when it happened, called instead about their new basement bar. We can’t wait for you to see it, they said across radio waves I couldn’t see, no evidence—We think of your dad sometimes.
            We should go, I tell my brother anyway, explaining that they didn’t get it, had never lost someone. We couldn’t hold that against them.
            The drive is an hour through the mountains. A piss break, a smoke break. My brother talks about quitting, wants to quit it all—the nicotine, the weed, the booze, his job, feeling sorry. It’s between Dad and me, he says, It’s between good and evil. I try to say that there is more than that, that there is a frustrating in-between and nothing is so black and white, and he tells me to shut up.
            You don’t know everything, he says. It’s life or death, he says, and it is. We have seen what not quitting can do. I nod because my softening of the truth comes out as condescension, I know. It has for all my life.
            Has the car always made this sound? I ask. It has for as long as I’ve had it.
            Fuck a basement bar, my brother says. Fuck people who have bars in their basements.

∩

Alexandra Salata is from Tempe, Arizona. Her stories appear in Black Warrior Review, Puerto del Sol, and Bellingham Review, among other journals, and she was named a finalist for the 2024 Salamander Fiction Prize. She holds degrees from John Carroll University and the Northeast Ohio MFA program.

from Terracotta Fragments

XLVIII

a dowry of dairy for the milkmaid’s hand in marriage
Captain Beefheart covers at the Sleepy Hollow bacchanal
crab apples roll down vales of thyme and timothy
my first epistemological panic watching Purple Rain
yakuza bodysuits throughout the gastropubs of Oregon
Pistol Pete sweeps a defense out of their Knickerbockers
my first sexual awakening to Suite for Jazz Orchestra No. 2
Raskolnikov’s terror flagellated by platza
urbane usurer expects interest on every eucharist
tubercular garrets of the Counter-Enlightenment
my first illness came in couplets, clad in thunder

XLIX

Celan bears witness through neologism
cherry blossoms divorced of meaning
divorces still cherried with mourning
hammer as a tool and synecdoche
Luddites dismember the automation
Bolshevik materialists with a dead tsar
Mishima’s reactionary body of seppuku
mezzo-soprano of an orientalist Egypt
metallurgist kisses the casing of every bullet
whispers of breath from the end of the flute
my hand forgets everything it touches

L

all cherry cola and Lexapro libido
all Don Juans and Dorothies in dungarees
all grubworms and gibbons ex machina
all saline and syntax as salubrious strategies
all knaves with knives at the end of a chord
all proselytes performing the seminary sex sequence
all droughts in Hollywood, all draughts in Dublin
all darling derrières doomed to effluvia 
all of us fetishists when faced with the eternal
all prosody an imprudent and palliative pursuit
all eleven liars hang the jury to heaven

LI

Buddhist penises weaponized as warplanes
guerilla ambush of coffee through the colon
my fugitive alias rendered through la petite mort
grief counselor texting me on Giving Tuesday
described my political struggle as mankini Marxism
the love of my life doomsday prepping in the underwear department
Arthur Russell’s warped cello ironizes the KMart
purple rabbits on cousin’s lawn, a premature shotgun
my second circumcision scars a circumflex
my domestic migraine colors the sunrise Coors Light
the IRS rejects my appeasement of Negative Dialectics

LII

sycophants julienne their fingers into mise en place
bitumen and blood still left from the Bugatti collision
fast food workers narcing from the drive-thru
stubborn Hegelians incapable of mirth
no matter which side of the squirt-pee dialectic
Bosniak nationalists struggle to supplant the Serb
my Croatian father’s cushy job installing sheetrock
and his father’s lazy ass hogging the intubation
all of my dalliances in a diseased denouement
my fresh set of lavender linens ruined
by modern life’s happy, inevitable sodomy

LIII

dialogist dependency on diacritics and diuretics
toxic adhesives of the hackneyed endodontist
Hippocratic Oaths under coercion of the casting couch
falafel debates bombed by the IDF, forensics obliterated
hip replacements exacerbated by Steely Dan
bacon egg and cheese salt pepper ketchup
the waiter’s cruising wink bespirits my largesse
wasp after wasp embalmed in fuck of the fig
even Joey Chestnut on hunger strike
barefoot on Brighton Beach, one with the soft metals
nobody, not even the rain, knows it’s my birthday

∩

Eric Tyler Benick wrote the fox hunts (Beautiful Days, 2023) and Memory Field; A Travelogue of Forgetting (Long Day, 2024). With Nick Rossi, he runs Ursus Americanus Press, a publisher of shorter poetics. His recent work has appeared in Bennington Review, Brooklyn Review, Copper Nickel, Harvard Advocate, NOIR SAUNA, and Puerto Del Sol. His most recent chapbook, Solip Schism, is now available from Blue Bag Press. He lives in Brooklyn and teaches postcolonial and anti-carceral literatures at Wagner College where he is criminally adjunct. 

from CARTOON

I see a roadrunner and its shadow
on the cel, on the mesa—meep meeping,
probably going back
to its nest made of sticks,
snakeskins, and dung.

Buyers in the stairwell
of the building where I rent are
practically screaming:
Are all the units currently occupied?
They let the front door slam.
I did not know it was for sale.

A realtor showing my building asks
Is this a nice neighborhood?
waiting for buyers to come see.
I pretend I can’t hear her
I fucking live here, don’t I?

Some crow hovering, pinned
between two drafts
above torn rhododendron, cold schist
If he wanted, he could
break his body from that pose.
Does he like it, holding
his wings so still and unnatural?

∩

Miri Karraker lives and works in Minneapolis.

from the green notebook

When posting new entries in my ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview series, I’m continually reminded of the wide array of reading and writing influence possible, well beyond anything I could have imagined. Writers cite lists of works and artists I’ve never heard of as foundational for their own work, providing whole worlds of possibility—although you’d be amazed at the number of times I have to correct the spellings of names. Is it wrong to expect writers to know how to spell the names of their heroes? Either way: there are so very many ways to approach writing, thinking and publishing, and the reminders of so many of these names, many of whom are previously unknown to me, are entirely welcome.

I’d originally begun the ‘12 or 20 questions’ interview series in September 2007, at the beginning of my University of Alberta writer-in-residence year, thinking that if I could send the same rough grouping of questions to an array of writers and post on my blog every couple of days, it would allow my blog to appear productive, while allowing my attentions to focus deeper into my actual writing. Through my office in the Department of English and Film Studies, I was quite literally living with unlimited internet access for the first time, not having to rely on spending money at internet cafés, rushing to get as much work done in either one or two half-hour sessions before my change ran out. I think I began to craft the questions on the plane heading west, which is entirely possible. It took three days to properly craft that first round, and a few days more to start soliciting responses. This was a project prompted through access, and it opened up glorious possibility. Since September 2007, I’ve posted nearly 1,700 interviews, with only one or two accidental repeats of authors, posting a new interview every three days. Just how far might this go? Just how far might this go before I finally decide to deliberately repeat authors from, say, the first half decade or decade of this ongoing project?

*

The site formerly known as Twitter provides a link to a new interview, “On Agency and Writing a Life Lost: A Conversation with Sarah Gerard” conducted by Afton Montgomery for Chicago Review of Books. The interview focuses on Gerard’s book Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable (2024), a book written about and around the tragedy of a friend’s murder, attempting to provide some kind of answers, and, for her friend, a kind of agency.

I was never a reader of true crime, although I did catch elements during my eventual ex-wife’s teenaged years (simultaneous to my own), as she read through stacks of same, what our daughter eventually read on her own during her own teenaged years. Helter Skelter: The True Story of The Manson Murders (1974), for example, by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry. Twenty years after her mother went through them, our daughter, reading through her mother’s library, her mother’s volumes. From what the interview provides, I can appreciate Gerard wishing to focus her questions around her late friend, allowing her some space for her story:

I still don’t know, with a hundred percent certainty, why this happened, but seeking a “why” gives meaning to an event that otherwise seems totally random and is even more frightening in that regard.

I also think every story worth telling has an unanswerable “why” at the center. Right away everybody who knew Carolyn was asking, “Why this person? She’s a good person. There’s nothing she did to deserve this, so why?” Within twenty-four hours, Render was giving an interview in which he said it wasn’t her fault. So why?

*

I’m moving through LEX ICON (2024), the last poetry title by the late Portuguese writer, poet and essayist Salette Tavares (1922-1994), translated by Massachusetts-based poet and translator Isabel Sobral Campos and Kristofer Petersen-Overton and available in English for the first time. Campos was good enough to send me a copy recently for potential review, and then, a week or two later, a package arrived from Brooklyn’s ugly duckling presse, with a further copy along. What might I do with the spare?

All these rich worlds                of expression
all this an inverse position of terms.

With the volume of books that land daily on our doorstep, I do tend to receive duplicates fairly regularly, and keep a running stack by my office door of books for give-away, whether hand-gifted at an event, or slipped into an envelope or package to be mailed further afield. Who might be the best reader for this, who might appreciate what is going on with this particular book? There are certain publishers that run banners across covers that scream NOT FOR RESALE – REVIEW COPY ONLY or print as a stamp on the title page, which I consider rather obnoxious. I haven’t even opened the book for review consideration yet, and already I’m branded a thief. I’m already reviewing sans compensation, and you accuse me of this? Do I not at least deserve a proper copy of the book for the work that I’m doing? With the charming production of ugly duckling, I appreciate that they understood not to damage their own books going out.

Spending the 1990s and further scouring used bookstores, I at least understand the concern: repeated fresh titles on used bookstore shelves, most of which include press release. If I’m gifted a book, I always make a point of passing it on, re-selling only that which I’ve purchased. One doesn’t see much in the way of money from resale, either, so it just seems easier to pass it along. Here, read this. This is interesting. And, given any gifted book presumes a recommendation? Any book I don’t like, I tend to hide in a box in our storage, or slip into a local free library when no-one is looking.

Tavares was primarily known as a visual poet, and exploring her visual work online, I can see an affinity with the work of Burlington poet Sacha Archer, which is rather interesting. I like the description the translators offer in their note at the end of this particular collection: “Tavares splits words apart and, in doing so, draws out other words nesting within, words that lie in hiding.”

I know my pal Lea Graham down in New York State has been working on English translations of poetry from Spanish for a while now; maybe I’ll send this to her. I’m already building her a package of other things, I can slip into there. What might Tavares have said of such beneficience?

And so             art
made everything pass through the bathroom.

*

Apparently the Summer Olympics have begun, but I so rarely pay attention to such things. Snoop Dogg as torch-bearer amuses me, nonetheless. No one in the game like him.

*

I’m gearing up for a Toronto overnight in a few days, to read as part of Bänoo Zan’s Shab-e She’r series. A train in, with university residence accommodation, and a train home the following morning. I spent half of yesterday incorporating my edits on the short story manuscript from our Picton jaunt for the sake of a fresh manuscript to dig through, while speeding across that Ontario countryside. The lip of Lake Ontario. I’m not quite at packing reading material as yet, but I’ve my eye on some recent uncorrected proofs that landed, neither of which I’ve had a chance to open: Stuart Ross’ The Sky is a Sky in the Sky (2024) and JoAnna Novak’s Domestirexia (2024). There’s also Samuel Ace’s I want to start by saying (2024), as well as Jane Huffman’s Public Abstract (2023). I’m still in the midst of my Sheila Heti essay, and my Lydia Davis essay. I’m still in the midst of a handful of other reviews.

I’ve at least one Jacob Wren title on my shelf I’ve been wanting to go through. I should probably bring that as well.

*

“Writing,” she says, “is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.” – Edna O’Brien, Paris Review

I’m reading Irish writer Edna O’Brien’s Paris Review interview, conducted by Shusha Guppy for issue 92, summer 1984. The piece has been unlocked from the journal’s digital archive, prompted by the announcement of the author’s death. I’m aware abstractly of O’Brien (1930-2024), but haven’t read any of her work. I recall that my maternal grandmother had a paperback copy of O’Brien’s short stories, A Scandalous Woman (1976) on the bookshelf in her family room. Between the history, non-fiction and cookbooks, it was one of the few works of fiction on my grandmother’s shelf, which itself was worth noting.

I find it interesting, as part of this particular interview, O’Brien’s take suggests that one needs to be removed from the world to write, instead of directly inside it:

So writing, I think, is an interestingly perverse occupation. It is quite sick in the sense of normal human enjoyment of life, because the writer is always removed, the way an actor never is. An actor is with the audience, a writer is not with his readers, and by the time the work appears, he or she is again incarcerated in the next book—or in barrenness.

This is a curious consideration, entirely different from my own approach. In my mind, writing is a way through which to articulate, argue, document and process, none of which require to be specifically removed from action, yet requiring an amount of distance. The interview suggests her comments come from a far deeper complexity than this particular excerpt might provide. There is a darkness, one O’Brien’s responses exist with in tandem, and occasionally, in conflict; and still, here’s a slow moving, serious consideration of art and the writing life. “Nowadays there are too many writers,” she offers:

and I think one of the reasons for the deterioration of language and literature in the last forty years has been the spawning of inferior novels. Everybody writes novels—journalists, broadcasters, tv announcers . . . it is a free-for-all! But writing is a vocation, like being a nun or a priest. I work at my writing as an athlete does at his training, taking it very seriously. Whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed. I think a casual or frivolous attitude is pernicious.

Had I remained on the farm I would most likely not have written at all, and hold the irony of being able to articulate that loss of the family farm, a loss prompted in part through my own choice to leave, and to write. Had I simply done as I was told, the farm might still be there. It might not, also. Either way, I was never quite good at doing what I was told.

Someone on social media posts a translation of a quote from the Paris Olympics’ opening ceremony: “Life is not about waiting for the storm to pass. It’s about learning to dance in the rain.”

*

Last night, one of Aoife’s baby teeth fell out. We folded it into a Kleenex for her to slip into a drawer for safekeeping. Today, Rose prompts one of her own wiggly teeth out, staunching the bleeding with toilet paper. These two, in constant competition.

∩

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles include On Beauty: stories (University of Alberta Press, 2024) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His next poetry collections, Snow day (Spuyten Duyvil) and the book of sentences (University of Calgary Press) appear in 2025. An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics (periodicityjournal.blogspot.com) and Touch the Donkey (touchthedonkey.blogspot.com). The current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival, he spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com.

Five Poems

mill at

arm and ham

an inter linen

backer to run

toward mason

arm worsened

do not get bad  

crayon box to

cheese replace

flightless elbow

when the back went

out and we were

told to I hung

my coat up but

knew my skin would

char but did not

know my neck

would my back

impressed

depress

rise for

backswing toward the totem mouth. it has snowed outside of    

the atrium I have never been invited to enter.

when I learn how to move the earth I fear     

I will be deprogrammed. by then    

the sun is up. I am praying the way I know   

how to dive. pyramid first into a glass jar. I am      

prey to reticulum shards.

watch this weight bloom. OG all. steep.

ear to wall. hand to God. wait for the chime to tell yourself it is wrong.

wait for the cabinet to open and get in even     

if it does not feel right to be doing. take a bike ride    

in your car. middle finger. from worry

I fear. structure      a remarkable fumble   .   go on

to do everything. go to sleep

I dare you to coat the skin good     mister you       

can’t tell the difference from a foot and a high horse. structure      

an incredible feat. did you get your gf to stay

with the kids to get into the respectful aftermarket of the Walmart skateboard

did you hear about the one where     the mailman gets robbed. 

this is a hold up      gimme all your birthday cards.

did you realize that you have     said that     before how about

that one where the head is torn open and you are born again

without taking probiotics.    did you focus yet today

the yoga mat is bound    .    it is not wrong to     .

kiss yourself to unwind      incandescent

heavens      remind me of my cause   

equate on

It is me call.

Which will we wore the grate.

This is my need.

X to operate.

It is weighted wham.

Egg smoked youth.

On a scale.

Like a clock when it.

Goes on for.

Like a calling.

Goes on for.

great and

I know what I will do it will be something great. I am something great. I will be great. America again.

In a land I was running and a bucket there I came across one. It was a green there and everybody knew that about it.

A tile in the backyard told me to stay. As if the tools had been protected outside the of the garage I remember inside of a large can. Behind the wood were a pile of boxes. Twins told me to stay still. I did not and so instead began to rock back and forth.

What is it I am good at it. To go pleeaassee and point to my brain.

What is the name of that commercial where that happens. Where they put it directly on the forehead. Do you know it you do.

Consider beating the carpet over the balcony while you are holding it with one hand. Apply it head on. Do you know the security questions. My mother’s third pet saved our life.

Boy oh boy I am over it. Not the moon but the dark. It is too bright.

Guck. A big truck. A red red room z. A broom xe. How fast does it go into a through. A wall of it.

I have not. Or in a when. A whirl went and left.

Today I listen to a song and cried but it was not a sad song. Or because it was even if it was. I remember he thing I was? Am?

I am not over it. I am not it. Wait. What is it that I am in.

A big whole. A big whole break down I crawl into. Watch you melt or.

Head on again. It is Ash Wednesday. Apply directly.

jerk off

to do the dishes I have to.

take my socks off first.

what is it late. I am late

I believe.

I am make believe.

∩

Angelo Maneage lives in northeast Ohio next to Texas Roadhouse. He can be found there.

from [hail]

[04]

The turmoil you’ve described so beautifully.
As in a table.
But your white leather satchel has been emptied.
Of contents.
This is unusual navigation. It works like this:
Despite its salutary effects.
There was a problem with the buffering.
Really just a diary.
A non-chromium oxidizing agent.
In other words, sanctity is gradated.
In adjacent lines or clauses.
Of my inflamed throat, which is itself.
Or less. Or more.
This is unusual turmoil. It works.
It’s buffering.
Like this: we shall live above neighbors.
And never pay.
Our diaries are plagued by tables of contents.
For heat again, which rises.
There was a cell found in your satchel.
We’ve already fracked a confession.
New user, there was a problem loading your avatar.

[22]

New user, we’re good now.
The right channel predominates.
We’re going to have a word with them.
From time to time.
About their making so much sense.
I think I’m going to begin.
When they metasignify.
To distance myself.
For the purposes of song.
From the derangement of my senses.
But is there a third.
My early influences included everything.
Can we talk about your time in prison.
I couldn’t see but heard.
Studies show that human ears can detect.
Through walls.
Rhymes of syntax and logic at least four.
Is it okay if I call it “your time in prison.”
Time zones away.
I think I’m just going to triplespeak.
How does one even begin to revise.
My afternoons from now on.
Specifically, the way it reinscribes memory.
We have safeguards in place.
It doesn’t even matter the order in which.
To account for the fact that I am not a performance artist.
Spiders hatch in the computer tower.
Can you teach me how to be a performance artist.
I need you to dampen my vision.
Is it okay if I call you “Your Time In Prison.”

[25]

You must come to the film as though a baby.
Even though we’ve been salooned.
But a cop or ruffian followed you there.
With great pomp and pipe smoke.
And we can hear “Mack the Knife.”
As of something futurist.
Sounding from the toddler’s iPad.
Which tilts fascistically.
You’re just going to have to drink more of it.
I promise there will be at least one.
Lurid staircase upon.
Luminary with slapback applied to their ideology.
Which all angles of approach are possible.
Like two blue lines beneath our clauses.
My face is already numb in the face.
Implying that something may be wrong.
Of newscast and calamity.
With our grammar or clarity.
New user, a new update is available.
Please note that I never implied or promised.
In which we allow for figurative language.
That metastasis would proceed in a coherent manner.
And when I heard him sing the song at the party.
I did not know that one day I would have to choose.
Everyone stood and wept in their shoes.
Between today and feelgood.
Take your goddamned hat off.
I think your sheep just leaked into my poem.
When I’m talking to you.
Even though we’ve been marooned.
Sometimes days are born from incoherence.
Then tilt fascistically.
It's a sign of disrespect.
But begin to make more sense.
I like to count sheep over the fence.

[37]

Let’s go into “the city.”
A shadow passing over the receiver.
And get dolled up to go nowhere.
I like to watch you move.
Corporations pay me to incorporate.
Toward the rotary telephone (we painted it “Windsor Cream”).
Ten, plus or minus, references to the keyword.
Because my mind feels cleaner.
Into immaculate copy.
If you begin to hear smoke.
The text gets smaller and smaller.
You know you’ve gone too far.
As the footnotes beget more footnotes.
When smoke becomes audible.
How many times do I have to tell you.
And in the good years we nurtured a correspondence.
That my psychosis was politically motivated.
Our mothers would call “unreadable.”
Everyone knows what we mean.
By which they meant that we do not wish.
When we say, “the city.”
To be understood.
As if it were the present—green rooms and seizures.
By logging into your system.
I think I’m going to live a little.
In order to foresee all possible valences.
Less long, or at least less concerned with endurance.
By smoking one cigarette a week.
Come here, contrarian.
The new intelligences promised to us.
There is a red or blue or green daub.
Are secure, hallucination-free.
In your eye. You need to know: after you called me strange.
And it’s okay if it can’t be recreated.
I disappeared for thirteen years.
Especially as it impacts the United States.
And got dolled up to go nowhere.
Seeking to damage the people and infrastructure.
I read Rimbaud to the open window.
I would have had to have had.
And the Library Tower harmonized phallically.
A few more years in institutions.
Overwhelmed me.
And in the bad years we spoke of the past.

∩

Alex Tretbar is the author of the chapbook Kansas City Gothic (Broken Sleep, 2025). As a Writers for Readers Fellow with the Kansas City Public Library, he teaches free writing classes to the community. His poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in APARTMENT, The Cincinnati Review, Iterant, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Protean, The Rumpus, The Threepenny Review, and elsewhere.

from The Vallejo Cycle

IX

A book at the border of aging,
A book was folded at the jean lip of the skin, at forty.
They took away our heroes,
and we consumed the death of their abilities;
we sweaty with the wait of our bags;
the moon sweat like a beer can;
the dead sweat like the moon.

A book in the Era of Israel,
book, after book, upon book, like dead people.

Poetry of the entry wound, whisper
of the blood as the bullet swims,
Poetry in the user guide
for your fucking heart, mom.
Remainéd the book in its sepulchral mind,
as the earth the earth’s womb,
It got stuck in the collar gap and went
totally infinite. You got married.

Book that sweats its letters while we wait,
the dead sweating letters to sweetheart
sediments in public parks.
Book after book, atop book
in the public park, burning.

*

There was another

In the last one I’d said Vallejo
Had given me a book to translate

From a language only I could speak
Saying everything you needed to hear
To believe everything that I did

In the one before that I said
It’s all the same book anyway
To protect it you must throw it all away:
The poetics of the family annihilator

Like your favorite writer’s favorite athlete
I will leave it all on the field
I will not talk about the Knicks at dinner
I said I will not talk about the Knicks at dinner

Roth said it’s the same book anyway
Pound said “we must remember as he remembered”
And you hated that I said that
I can’t even find where he said it
I said it for nothing, got Put in the Dog House

There was a version where I said something
Unmistakeable, I swear, so unmistakeable
I cannot even hope to say it now; it is impossible
To say it mistakenly, so you’ll just have to trust me

*

XIV

Ojo the eye phone maker of the forgotten bondi
Ojo the poster without PFP
Ojo the evil eye, tattooed on the Australian’s shoulder
Ojo the victim who wants to renew himself
the hobbyist corrections officer
the corrections
Ojo the time on the beach and what it means
the view from the Wonder Wheel
the little critters collected, the leftover tickets
Ojo the science of wrist bones
the carpology of gendered yearning
Ojo the poster that says bring home the hostages
Ojo the eyes blown out on your phone screen
the miraculous advent of new injury
Ojo the loyalty oath you’re asking of me
Ojo they make you pay to see many churches
in Europe too, it’s not some Jew thing just for synagogues
Ojo fallen into dark
Ojo the Atacama
Ojo the country loves you
Ojo don’t let it
Ojo like a deep well we all want to die in

*

Poem with the voice in off
Book with another book voiced over
Life with other life pasted over

Vallejo was in the trees
Watching me

An annoying poet was claiming kinship with a dead guy
He was watching Celan with binoculars
He was learning bad German, not even German
Badly, I did want things rectilinear, I offered
An experience in a verso-recto style
I offered a verso in the recto’s style

This book was once called
Sonnets from the Brazilian Portuguese
Now it is called Altazor

Now they call me Yankee
Call me Andrew
They call me AJ in what we call America
I call you in America from my Spanish sim card
I call you in América from my Argentine sim card
I call it a chip now, I call it a pileta, a remera, a luca, milanga, guita, mina, mango
I don’t call you ———— anymore
I don’t call you at all

*

The Disappeared

I

The blood just wants to talk.
Steeled in the night.
We know that missing girl is naked.
Unplucked from delirium.
Take the Heschel off the shelf.
Take off your clothes.

II

In the salted light,
They dumped the bodies like ashes

In the salted light,
The sea was like the Atacama
I beg myself for fervor
Imagining them in midtown windows

III

I promised you I wouldn’t make things up
They promised he would be right back
I promised I wouldn’t make any art
About the desaparecidos

IV

I interrogate myself
Into sense-making
The men I once wanted
To impress are bathed
In the salted light of the gas fields
The helicopters whirring
Like the moans of the dying; they say
Let’s use his penis as bait
And fish dreams from beneath
The arena

They say
Make art about this
Take off your clothes

*

Poem where that wasn’t how it was
That was how it was
A book project the length of a sentence
A silence as long as your body

So close to preparations
For the next life
I wanted a kitchen you could fit a table in
I wanted to stop mispronouncing dólar as dolor

I wanted to write a book where I interviewed
César Vallejo’s family, and they said everything
You might say to me; I wanted to write a book

I wanted to sound out the words at my own speed,
I wanted to sound out, like I couldn’t see, a kind of
sonar for memory, see if the pink bedspread
was as real as the pink bedspread

Poem where the pink bedspread
Poem where I don’t say your name
Poem where you say I can’t speak
for you, and book where I say
I won’t publish the book then

I wanted a poem that could pay for my kitchen
A poem without detail, with room for all detail
I wanted a book as long as a life sentence

I wanted you to leave so I could write
I wanted you to leave so I could write a book about it
So I could remember you

∩

Andrew Judson Stoughton is the U.S. editor of New Mundo Press. He is the author of En Un Auto Arteriado, available from Not Nothing Press. You can find his work in Works and Days and Jacobin. He splits his time between Jackson Heights, Queens and Buenos Aires.

Five Poems

memory from before you lost your mind

I learned the word anvil
from Bugs Bunny.
Grandma’s parlor TV
tray lunch, mailman
uncle asleep upstairs.
we all work nights
in this family. Boxed
steamship photos
Beetlejuice figurines
fake wood paneling.
My dad made it out
so he knows what webinar
means. converter cable
neighbors work in silence
they don’t have a dad
anymore.
me,
I am waiting for the foam ceiling
to drop

tap dancing

I care a lot
about being irrelevant
in case of freak
accidents like
a car driving into my
house. I know
some girls carry
ibuprofen
and I envy that,
having the backseat
illness.
life is all the time
gym class
to grave but
I resist putting
shit in the mailbox
because it’s illegal.
mister morse code
voice in my head says
beep beep
beep
mailboxes are
trashcans if
you have nothing
good
to say

undisclosure

reading your cause of death
in a rented car
high’s coming up
men say the damndest things

backseat manifesto
everybody’s got one
I’ll keep quiet if you
drop me off at home

me and the dog get real sad
after having a little treat
like we both know
nothing else is coming

could have done without

tried being a social climber
was too honest
you fancied yourself
a Futurist turned
out to be just
Italian
as I
get
old
-er
there
is less
of my
life to
lose

partners stick together

on our tongues
is cum fused like hot
honey

the dog eats
a pen we’re busy
ink all over his
snout

learned my lesson
words are feces
of the mouth

∩

L Scully (they) is a living writer. L cofounded Stone of Madness Press and now writes books in an attic. Their second collection, self-romancing, comes out with Michelle Tea’s DOPAMINE Books in autumn 2025. They are a lover.

Three Poems

ETERNAL PRESENT

What’s a meal, I wonder, eating fistfuls of peanut butter pretzels
alone in my office. I have an office, can afford fried foods just barely,
too tender cookies much like me lacking all utility falling apart
before they reach the mouth. I get distracted. I read so slowly
in the sense of not at all then all at once, occasionally. A similar
principle holds for everything else. Love especially. I do nothing at all 
by degrees. Accomplishments come on like calamities, whole days 
buried under sudden ash. Like this boy I fell into bed with once, 
twice, inappropriately, one of many only distinct when backlit 
in retrospect. He wasn’t then but he’s a poet now, younger and more 
famous than me. Jealousy wouldn’t quite be accurate, though my opinion
is hardly impartial. I wish we’d stayed in touch, he didn’t write, he loved me not,
we spewed away. I still have the cheap IKEA bed we didn’t fuck in, actually.
Warping in my mother’s garage, in the eternal present tense of art.

THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME

1.
Acute hexagonal longing in the shape
of a scullery maid, hands tanned and
mouse-bitten, frock, flaxen, checked
by emptied chamber pots, sooted, boiled,
thready at the knees, pockets full
of carrot and potato peels, hair the color
of blanched acorn caps and regret
proceeding, contrapuntal, along
coplanar axes, by dissonance
of the counterfactual, bonneted, not cossetted,
cossetted, verklempt, donning now that coveted
corsetry, mealy-mouthed, the fine china, the silver,
the slivered ahistorical bridges of aquiline noses,
up in airs put-on and chilled by perfect ignorance.

2.
Little bunny froufrou, hopping through
the forest of unrequited affections
lands on a rusty nail, gets lockjaw,

goes slow. Here lies her maggoty body
where wolves who cry boy are beaten
at craps by shoes who live on old ladies

like fleas, unhappy since the advent
of the telephone, wont to send, instead
of birthday cards, past-due notices,

parking tickets, shit sandwiches,
rent increases, process servers, bad horoscopes,
while all the while bedecked heirs apparent fret

over cheese curds and whey protein, hypodermic needles
nectared with anabolic steroids, their backs
raging with acne, their windpipes pinched by trapezius.

3.
May all your mountains be subalpine,
pocketed by moss and evergreen, rompable,

the jaundiced hysteria of canola fields
held in abeyance, wistful in their

self-congratulations, set off against
a toothless network, affected, enshittified

to the glory of scoured-out hall monitors,
crossing guards, choirboys, Saran Wrapped

by upstandingness, the toast
of profit margins everywhere,

caressed by fragrant circumstances
spritzed with canapés, bonbons, options.

4.
If you give a bro a blowjob
he’ll just want another.

If you ask a rich man for money
he’ll block your number.

If the palace catches fire [if you’ve chosen violence, if you’ve laid the gasoline, if you’ve lit the
            match]
let it burn.

MOUTHFEEL

The bearings I can’t get
are ball, burnished
to convex mirrors, lubed
to rubber out the idioms
of friction, if imperfectly,
with consonant precision.

All those small bore, boring
actualities pressed waferly,
fit to thimblefuls.

                            Appeasements
of the fleshly, of the flatulent,
of the of and of the oval, laid out
come- and lozengely. Pulled
to the point

                        of purpling.

I can’t say for sure
            that meaning surely matters,
                        though it needles at me
needlessly, it seems,
slouched in arbitrary corners
of shabby-chic rooms scooped
in neat rows in vast constructions
beset by differential settlement.

So.

I am either cracking up or cracking open
at this and every other moment,
lined up as if in order,
                                    momentous
only intrinsically,
intransigent only habitually,


and what, after all, is the difference?

∩

Cameron McLeod Martin is a queer and trans essayist and poet. They hold an MFA from the University of Idaho and their work has appeared in Fence, Black Warrior Review, The Journal, Atmospheric Quarterly, Afternoon Visitor, and elsewhere. They currently live in Clawson, Michigan.

from demonstration forest

∩

Kelly Clare is an artist, writer, and curator based in Western Massachusetts. Author of the chapbook NEARLY EARLY ARTLY NEVER (Greying Ghost, 2024), their multidisciplinary work can be found in FENCE, Annulet, mercury firs, TAGVVERK, and Second Factory. They are an editor at Ghost Proposal.

from The Cunt

1

“Sir, it is simple,” I said. When I told people it was simple their ears perked up — we loved solutions that were simple.
“Son, I don’t understand what you are saying to me.” Ah, I knew I would have to practice patience with this man. It was important that he understand me — it was important that everyone understand me.
I restarted, “You know how the world is so overwhelming,” he nodded with vigor, such vigor, I knew he was listening. I had his attention at last and you could never have enough attention. “Well, what if we could close ourselves off? And, by our own hand.
“It wouldn’t cost a dime, just a bit of string and a needle.” He nodded, and not just polite, he sincerely wanted my simple solution. A kind, good, God-fearing man, he had seen enough to know that whatever it was I was about to say might in fact be worth trusting — a good man, yes sir good sir — he was willing to try anything once.
“I will close myself off from the world, one part of my body at a time. Now, we have noses, but all those bad odors; I know to start there. I have a perfectly good mouth that will do all my breathing for me.” He didn’t mind this very much — okay, sure — the nose, whatever about the nose — it was ugly, it jutted, no one had a nice one.
I had him and I was sure I should continue, “Well the nose has two compartments, left nostril and right nostril. God has put them there for us to close them tight.
“I know how much we dislike mouth breathers — all the noise — but, yes sir good sir, I am above the noise.”
“Okay, son,” expressing impatience, “You have my attention. Stop beating around the bush.” It was true. Attention was nice but getting to the point — necessary. I apologized to the man, as the food arrived. He’d got a burger, and I’d got the same burger, medium rare, just how I liked it. Liked it as much as a clear blue sky. We sat at the counter looking out at the clear blue sky.
I wrapped up, “Well, I’ll do a nostril a day. “Then, I’ll do the eyes.
“Then, I’ll do the ears.
“Then, the mouth.
“That’s seven good, God-willing days. At that point, my face will be useless, but I will still have the mind. And, you know — I’m sure I won’t mind.” This got a chuckle. The man was scarfing his burger but still willing to chuckle — grease running down his face God bless him.
“Without the face, the guts stop doing their thing. Well, I’ll have one last good piss. One nice shit too I’m sure.” The man did not like this. His nose crinkled at the word shit, which was natural, but nature was only custom; and all after all, I was tailor-made. “After that last good piss, I’ll take the needle and the string and close up my foreskin. The next day I’ll take the needle and close up my ass too. It will take nine days for me to close all my cunts.
“What do you think?”
This man was extremely kind, a very willing participant in conversation, a truly good man yes sir good sir, he said, “Well, what happens after?”
“After?”

*

I had no string and I had no needle so I went to the appliance store on the other side of town.
I walked under that brightest blue sky I had ever seen.
See, I was stubborn, stubborner than a fighter — or a mule — though I had never seen one of those in real life, but I had seen a fight in real life. And also, if I didn’t have my stubbornness, then I didn’t have a very important part of myself, and I refused to not have all the most important parts of myself. Emotion, grit, assuredness of belief — this was what made a man.
I was saying as much to the cashier, “See this string is for my nose.” My enthusiasm was unkempt but as I was attractive she listened of course. The cashier was also attractive which made me want to talk to her. She had her own piercings, many piercings, septum and nose and ears.
She asked me what I meant.
I went on and on the way that I went on and on with the man with the burger; rather, I would have liked to have gone on and on the way that I went on and on with the man with the burger, but a big man in sweaty clothes arrived just then. Ah, ’twas her responsibility to treat us as equals, so please, she insisted. So please, and rushed me along.

*

When I talked to my friends — that is, when I used to talk to my friends — I would try to infuse them with my energy. That’s what I’d exclaim as they’d yawn, “I’m trying to infuse you with my energy!” They’d laugh, then they’d say, You’re funny, though they never said what was so funny. Didn’t say a thing after they laughed. But anyways then I knew I was funny, and I liked to be funny. This was how it went with my friends.
I had so many. For a while I had lots! I talked until they yawned. I’d always tell them, “I am infusing you with my energy!”
Ah, but I tried to never ever say the same thing. With so much to say, it was easy to do, but I tried not to, well that’s not totally true. I couldn’t help but tell them all about thunder. That there were ions on the grounds and ions in the clouds. That when ions needed a balance there were these tiny parts that went racing to meet each other, maybe billions of these ions of the skies and ions of the grounds. That they had this need that they were made with.
And when they met that need they went boom!
And that was thunder!
I could hardly believe it, I told my friend, every friend in fact, because I didn’t see those small parts, no one could see them, and I didn’t hear those small parts, no one could hear them, I just felt them when they met, a massive hug at the particulate level. I’d tell them I really liked that word, particulate, and they’d suck their face like a fish, then they’d slink and wait for me to stop — I’d take a breath and in that breath they’d say that they just had to get going — okay, yeah, that’s fine, I’d say.
But one more thing — just let me tell you one more thing! I couldn’t know if my friend was listening to me or to their insides, where they had slunk, which I didn’t mind. No, but I did think it was maybe their loss.
What I was saying was so full of life. And friends wouldn’t go to a place that was less full of life. That’d be dumb.
My friends were always doing things that I was no good at, like tossing and catching and flirting. So maybe what’d I know? So it must have been that I and all my talking were not a thing compared to that place inside. This was a big, big part of why I wanted to slink inside. But when I did it, it wouldn’t be a slink. I was so proud to finally do a thing that all my friends liked to do with me, slink. When I got to doing my cunt closing, I couldn’t find a friend to tell.

*

I had always had this lovable quality and I wouldn’t have known it was such a lovable quality if people hadn’t told me all the time how lovable a quality it was — I liked to talk to strangers. It was, apparently, not common. Well, people tried to explain, it was common; but, but it was a bit too complex to explain over dinner.
If only it was as simple as a smile.
Smiling, I simply couldn’t help but talk to everyone on the street who smiled. We all smiled in the same language — I heard that in a song once. Plus, once we got to smiling, people never told me to go away; they adored how supple my skin was and how lush my hair. My teeth were straight, my cheeks sharp and dimpled too. Plus, all these ideas! Ah, I had everyone’s eye.
It was important to have everyone’s eye.
Where we looked was where we went, and I wanted to go inside.
“That is why I will shut my first eye on the third day,” I exclaimed at the woman on the street with a beautiful dress. She had her child close and her child also had on a beautiful dress and she brought her child closer. The child was enchanted by my presence, so the mother brought her closer to warm her ears.
But, “The ears and the eyes I will do in sync. First the left eye, then the left ear. Second the right eye, second the right ear.” The mother, so so polite. She inched away. This frustrated me: conversation’s a single odd dash away from turning to ash.
She inched further — and further, nodding bye-bye — she just had to get on with her day. I waved sweetly goodbye! The child who smelled of a lavender field waved sweetly goodbye in return.

*

I looked in the mirror, and I promised myself I would, I needed, to complete my mission. I had run into money, and people with money came up with the craziest needs. I shooed away the thought that I was crazy. If I was crazy, I would know!
It was time to close my first cunt.
I looked at myself in the mirror — the sky blue string in one hand, the needle in the other, and my phone on the counter — my phone on the counter showed me how to put the string through the needle. It took being nimble but was in fact very simple, like all good things. Just fold the string into two then pull it through. Ah, that felt the same as folding my nose.
Slid the string together; slid the side of the nose together. A bit of pain then eternal bliss. I wanted to begin. I took a deep breath. I looked at myself in the mirror — the blood in my brain beat and the blood in my heart beat — and quickly I slashed the string through. There was no dripping yet. Without a single breath more, I slashed the string the other way through. Great satisfaction! I saw that the cusp of the nose was sealed. Then red slipped toward my mouth and I huffed it away. I pushed my lips like pff.
Pff, ignoring pain like the good monk preached, pff. Pff, I kept going.

2

I said to my dad, “It’s my new look.”
“Looks bad,” my dad said. And it did look bad. Infected, I thought. But infections went away, and — anyways anyways — what did it matter? I was learning.
All my teachers liked to say, learning is infectious. They’d point at the board and droll dully along, no one a’listening at all. So I learned learning was not infectious, no but truth was infectious. And I was living my truth.
Truth was like looks. We all had looks. Looks mattered.
And anyone saying otherwise probably wasn’t too raggedy. Anyone saying otherwise had probably been beaten in too many fights, which would make them right — looks didn’t matter in a fight.
Well I didn’t want to fight with my dad, yes sir good sir, so we stayed silent for the rest of our food. I’d assumed he’d want to hear the next bits of my plan. But when you assume, supposedly, you made an ass out of you and me. But see, I didn’t believe anything could make an ass out of — both — you and me.
My mom stayed silent too. She just looked at her plate and flicked at her food, but I wanted her to look at my face. I wanted her to gleam for me like the crunchy yellow goo on my nose. But to gleam with pride! Her boy, no, her sir yes sir good sir, was doing what he set out to do. And wasn’t that what a mom always wanted? I didn’t want my mom to worry. Worrying got her warts, worrying got her ulcers. To keep the worries away, she learned to plan ahead.
Still, she couldn’t help but worry for me. I have no idea why. She never really said. All of her worrying lied deep, deep in her head. Ah, and what good was that?

*

When I’d closed my first cunt, I thought I’d chosen the color of the string at random — I loved random — “Random, random, random,” I would sometimes say. But, no, no, no. ’Twas not random.
That clear blue sky was what I’d chose. That clear blue sky was above. Then, that clear blue sky was within. Then, I couldn’t stitch any other color whatsoever. I had to stitch the sky which was deep deep deep inside.
I returned to the store, whooshing through the doors automatic as fate, to locate more colors. The girl with the piercings, septum and nose and ears, found me grabbing handfuls and handfuls of string.
I turned to her. Her eyes went big and her shoulders went back.
One eye, I couldn’t track. It buzzed about like a fly.
The other eye slack, “Ahem,” she asked in the form of a say, “This must be your new look.” She understood! Forever rare and forever good to have a person who understood!
I was hooked, “I’m a man on a mission and my mission is clear. A cunt every day for nine days. There’s nothing to fear.”
She nodded polite.
“I’d thought I’d chosen this sky blue at random. Random, random, random, I like to say, yet it wasn’t, yes yes yes, there was a why.
“But you can’t say why the way I say random — why, why, why — sounds like a bug in your ear.
“See, the sky was up over my head. Now, the sky’s here plum through my nose. I have to get every color today to be ready. Ah, after the nose, it’s the eyes and the ears and the ass.
“Then who nose,” I winked and pointed at my nose to show her that I knew that she knew that I knew that my joke was bleh.
She flicked her finger. She motioned me to follow a few aisles down. “Disinfectant for the pus. Finer needles for the sutures. And a book on how to knit.”
“I don’t know,” I moaned, “What good is a book?”
“You can knit blind,” she said.
Real supportive, “And you’ll be blind for three days or so.”
“Ah,” I said in the form of an ask, “So it’s something to do?”
At the register, ding, ding, ding. I continued, “I do what I do to keep away, away my blues. Speaking of which — left nostril, sky blue; right nostril, who knows — maybe the color of your eyeshadow or maybe the color of your nails or maybe the color of your blush?
“Or — maybe, maybe, maybe — the color of your chandelier heart.” She smiled, “Toodaloo.”

*

A smart man said, so my dad liked to say, though he wasn’t the smart man, he just really liked to say — if it cannot be said in three words or less it must not be said!
Always waxing wisdom — spoke like this — my dad did. He said once — purpose is special.
He added — this his trick for speaking in bigger than threes — appreciate what’s special.
So no sir he simply wouldn’t have my long long tale but if he had had my long long tale I think things might have ended differently. Anyway about that!
I was looking hard in the mirror — not to reflect — but to clean up my leaky, creamy nostril. It hurt to the touch. My friend-girl from the store had advised me to only proceed once I had looked up some tips. So wise. She provided me websites where I learned about surgeons stabbing ladies up through the nose till their brains went to slush.
Interrupted! My phone’s ringtone — me sing’a’linging ’a’linging along — sang-a-lang-a-lang a’ring-a-ding-a-ding, a’ring-a-ding-a-dong, until I answered the phone the way I always answered the phone, “Hello hello hello hello hello helloooo.”
The phone person asked if this was me. “Yes,” I said, “This is he.”
They were the local news and asked if I agreed to an interview. They called me a ‘human interest story.’ Ah, not only was I human, but of course, I was also interesting.
“Yee,” I said nicely, “How’s three?”

*

∩

Emiliano Gomez attends the MFA for Poetry at the University of Notre Dame, is a contributing writer at the Cleveland Review of Books, and has received support from the California Arts Council. A chapbook of Townies was a finalist for the DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press chapbook contest. His work has been published in or is forthcoming from Acentos Review, ballast, Barzakh, Breakbread, Broadkill Review, Indolent Books, and mercuryfirs.

Seven Poems

[If dog is precipitate]

Of so-called princess shell, dog takes the carbon and shits
Dog believes history; shit before princess
and visa verso.

This is purpose, this
will not reduce:

dog
history
carbon princess shell purpose shit.

This is extraction—

Dog accepts “ball”
of shell-frag (digested)
that is, de-purposed (i.e., shit).

Here is the full on purpose shit-frag historic
princess lyric-shell gastronomy cycle
while dog, a poem, shits.



[If dog is a star]

Add dog to princess make star
Subtract dog from star get dog-star

Unfortunately. The bangdeed is already supernovas



[If dog is dog]

Nothing, seven times.



[Look]

I just — my body and lowercase
briefcase just go together! It’s just — my bodycase
goes and lowers briefcase together. It’s just my
body lows, brief and go-getter. I love mechanical cranes!
Meaning, I don’t — live inside that case anymore
Meaning, I haven’t — in that case anymore
will not — anymore
had not — more

Now look away — case closed!
I love mechanical cranes!



[In the box]

In the box I am a little boy. All the little girls
are speaking up. I am a little
box with the glow of a boy and all the little
girls are speaking up all around. Little
do they, boy, know — for now!
Boy boy — for now!
Bye bye — death comes later!



[Hazmat suit]

Never did I ever wear a corporate hazmat suit and get it off me — I put it on — in my belligerent posture — the way I send an email — it gets belligerenter — the little girls arrive and wait for me — to start the meeting — I have to write inside of this hazmat suit — it takes a long time — to pretend to get it off of me — the little girls stand at the coffee machine — to watch me — am I little girls — inside this hazmat suit — watching me — the imaginary carafe — of all outfits — are little girls girls —

Once I wore a hazmat suit — and never did I ever get it off of me —



[Quantum steps]

What’s the date, time-button?
Ours laughs the sky off its witness
stand in mirrors. There it is again

The blind mirror. Each of us is surveilled
behind the vanity of flat technologies. I need to forget
so I super-merge with “me” between 12 and 3. Time
ovulates, obfuscates, new body’s derived
from the copy of a photon devilish I have
created meaning with it. Sutures. To the future.
Not meaning ion is to forget, meaning
I on the only way to make meaning
is forgetting itself. Like surfaces, instructions
I forgot them. That’s how. And when I get this soul,
forget it. It could be so easy

∩

Zoe Darsee was born around noon on a Tuesday. They are the author of BELL LOGIC (Spiral Editions, 2022) and Anzündkind (Creative Writing Department, 2023). Their collaboration with Elise Houcek, a lysergic neo-noir poet’s novel, is forthcoming. Together with Nadia Marcus, they run TABLOID Press. This work continues.

Four Poems

вряд ли ты сможешь
(я бы удивился если б ты смог)
объяснить все наречия тумана
но
по крайней мере
вода налитая тобой
долго хранит прохладу


it is unlikely that you would be able to
(I would be surprised if you were able)
to explain all the adverbs for fog
but
at least
the water you poured
extensively stores cold

---

с такой простудой можно достичь
глубочайшей неуверенности окунуться
в неё как в озеро полное зыбких теней
увидеть шаткую телевышку
и уже на пределе подводного зрения
оттаявшее серебряное веко


with such a head cold it is possible to reach
the deepest insecurity dip
into her like into a lake full of unsteady shades
to see a rickety broadcasting tower
and already in underwater sight’s range
a thawed silver eyelid

---

угаданное имя
и та изначальная лёгкость
которую сменит плотность
и тяжесть

простёганное подозрение
и где-то на краю
бесцельный волос

а если наоброт: тишина
усыплённых туч и между ними
холёное солнце?

радоваться ли последнему первенцу
или первому последышу
нотным деревьям
филологическим поездам –
всем тайным сотрудникам
не оформленной в ветер надежды?

знаешь
как плоть двоится
и знаешь что боль
неизбежна
и обратима

видишь: такое сирое место
где любовь – двенадцатый присяжный


an identified name
and that incipient lightness
will be replaced by mass
and a weight

a quilted suspicion
and somewhere on the margin
an aimless hair

and if on the contrary: silence
of slumbering clouds and between them
a slick sun?

should we rejoice over the ultimate firstborn
or the first final
over rhythm trees
philological trains —
over all secret associates
hope unratified in the wind?

you know
how breadth doubles
and you know pain is
inevitable
and reversible

you see: such a damp place
where love — a twelfth juror

---

Наши тела образовали иероглиф,
непрерывно меняющий значение:
речная слепота,
колокольная ночь,
взятое на поруки забвение.


Our bodies formed a hieroglyph 
uninterrupted change in meaning: 
a river blindness  
a bell tower night,
an oblivion in custody. 

∩

Stanislav Belsky (Станислав Бельский) is a Russian language Ukrainian poet born in 1976 in Dnipropetrovsk. He is also a translator of contemporary Ukrainian poetry to Russian and works as a programmer. He has published thirteen books of poetry in Russian, including most recently: Quarantine Times (2023), On Sunny Concrete (2023), and Friendly Conversations with Robots (2024). His poems have been translated into Italian, Polish, Hebrew and Czech, and published widely in journals nationally and internationally. Belsky is a curator of the poetry book series Тонкие линии [“Thin lines”] and is co-organizer of a Dnipro and Kyiv poetry festival Чернил и плакать [“Get ink and weep”].

olga mikolaivna was born in Kyiv and works in the (intersectional/textual) liminal space of photography, word, translation, and installation. Her debut chapbook cities as fathers is out with Tilted House, and “our monuments to Southern California,” she calls them is forthcoming with Ursus Americanus. Other works can be found in mercury firs, LitHub, Metatron Press, Cleveland Review of Books, and elsewhere.

from Hella Down

The gingerbread kicks in around 25th. I’d scooped it from Bogey’s friend, the one with the sick swords mounted on his wall. Normally dealers will talk your ear off about their psycho interests, but this guy wasn’t a dealer. It was some kind of hobby for him, growing, and he didn’t talk at all. He can’t, Bogey explained weeks later. The guy’s voice is fine, but when he talks it sounds all backwards. Bogey is sitting on the kitchen island, munching on kimchi straight from the jar. I’d forgotten the gingerbread in the back of the freezer so now it’s encrusted with frost and smells like ruined ozone. Microwaving it would be too logical, so I shatter it under the butt of the only knife in the woodblock, making big ugly gems that are fun to crunch into snow but taste like potpourri and dogshit, so I give Bogey half. He sounds fucked up but he’s a genius, the sword guy. He invented a new kind of math when he was 14 and now he’s building robots in Sunnyvale and practices kenjutsu. It’s all on his blog. He says the singularity already happened, but we don’t have the neural connectivity to recognize it. He’s crossbreeding a special strain to help us close the gap. The edibles are just so his failed experiments don’t go to waste. 
So now the bus is almost to the laundromat on 34th, and, by my calculations, the experiment is a runaway success. The plastic of the seats is too orange. The advertisements for injury lawyers and online degrees and dental work are extremely compelling. Why are there so many smells? My only ally is the Asian lady with the giant green visor. At least one of us is ready for tax season. Her grocery cart is like a forcefield protecting us from the clique of skaters. I can tell they skate by their floppy beanies and BO, but also their skateboards. The artwork and stickers have scuffed off in all sorts of cool ways. One is of a radioactive skeleton grinding the lip of a UFO. The best trick I ever landed was an ollie unless you count Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Please don’t. The skaters already suspect I’m a major poser and the Asian lady’s grocery cart bangs into my knee and I look down and I’m wearing boat shoes, no socks. What am I a fucking cockswain? Thankfully, I’ve also got a Believer tote and a Hawaiian to hedge, but still. You can never be too careful.
The Asian lady is getting off so I do too. The bus pulls away to reveal the Egyptian restaurant with the crazy mural. Ten blocks to go, maybe more, but first I have to answer the riddle of why would the artist make the guy in the fez look so horny? Why are Sobek and Horus guarding the plaque with the Zagat score? I’m pretty sure they governed more consequential domains, but my knowledge of Egyptian mythology is mostly based on Stargate (1994) and I don’t want to argue. This is supposed to be Nicky’s no-thinking day. This is supposed to be fun. We’re having fun. We’re going to the beach. We’re almost there. Breathe.
The walk there does me some good, but by the time I get to the parking lot, I’m sweating through the polyester in blotches that stick to my back and chest. It’s not a particularly nice day, same as always, but the beach is mercifully empty, even more so with the tide out. Mostly wiry tan guys running in the surf and doomed first dates exploring the coves. A few dogs running off leash, their owners trying to get a bonfire started. They’re using the log cabin method so one of them is on his hands and knees, blowing, while his friend pretends to buttfuck him in long, passionate strokes. They’re all zipped up in the same Patagonia, but with different corporate logos on the breast, making them a formidable coalition of assholes, and one of them looks like my nemesis from AutoMagic, so I retreat to the dunes and find a divot between tufts of sharp grass, wiping away the cigarette butts before I plop down. From up here, I’ve got a good view of birdshit island and the surfers bobbing nearby, waiting for just the right wave. Maybe I should get into surfing. Learn patience and watchfulness. When to go with the flow and when to bail. Pick up some stoner koans and throw the shaka. Call beer cerveza. Teach at the community college. Live in a winnebago. Just live, man. The winnebago will have a woman’s name, something fittingly midcentury. Shirley. Betty. Janice. Midge. Okay, not that one. Is Peggy too obvious? What about Barbara? Barbara, Barbie, Babs. Beverley. Betty—no I did that one already…
When I wake up the fog is still holding the sun hostage, but everything is brighter somehow, the light diffracted, if that’s even the right word. An inventory of my tote reveals the wishful thinking of late morning. A few books to choose between, one too many to make a decision. A banana and a Nature Valley bar, most of which will crumble into the sand. The one vice is a sweating tallboy, some kind of imperial IPA with a reprehensible pun that tastes like an air freshener. It leaves me thirsty and I immediately want another, an idiot in a Greek myth. I am trapped in this labyrinth of a city, cursed to be so blessed. This makes me want to try out the Calvino, but the whitespace is too bright and my gas station sunglasses are back on the bus, I now realize. The sun peekaboos out from the fog, but never long enough to dry my sweat. There is always a but, but here I am. 
I squint back out over the beach. The Patagonia bros have given up on their fire, plenty warm with wine sloshing in their stomach and a game of two-hand touch that has devolved into tackle. The surfers have packed it in and the couples have retreated to the safety of their cars. All I want is to see a beautiful woman and briefly fall in love with the idea of her. She walks with unfashionable sandals looped in her fingers, a rascally dog circling her. She is wearing an oversized hoodie and cutoffs that show off her legs. The legs of an ex-athlete, still carrying that line down the outside of the thigh, coming into perfect definition when she pushes off of the loose pack of the sand. She doesn’t have any agenda in particular and this is the point, to flow.
Her dog is on a mission though. First to catch a seagull then smell the mermaid purse and then he’s sprinting towards me, climbing the dune, bathing me in psychotic licks. She jogs over to apologize and soon she’s sitting and I find a secret beer in my tote. We talk about what breed we’d be if we were dogs, how fucked the traffic is compared to when we were kids, essential YouTube videos, the weird thing washed up by the lifeguard tower. It’s probably just a bag of trash, but this can’t stop us from hypothesizing. The bladder of a humpback whale ripped apart by sharks. A Louis duffel full of heroin the traffickers had to dump before the coast guard showed. A mutant seal, escaped from a secret facility on the Farallons. She snorts when she laughs too hard, but this one makes her quiet and our eyes turn back to the gray postcard of the Pacific. The waves are endless. The sunset, theoretical. When it’s time for her to get her dog home, we don’t exchange numbers, that would break the spell. Maybe we’ll see each other around. For sure.
Instead the cosmos greets me with the travesty of a homeless guy jacking off beneath a tarp, though not out of any sense of modesty. He’s singing a song at the top of his lungs, a melody I can sing too, though I don’t know the lyrics. Neither does the guy it seems, but this doesn’t stop him from finding the right words. Words that mean nothing to us and everything to him. He is the one free man left in the entire world. All it cost him was his mind. He is staring directly at the sun, his googly eyes clouded with cataracts, the blue beneath murky. It roams in this soup like the answers of a Magic 8 Ball, demanding to be shaken. 
Hey, guy. Can you not? 
Without a doubt.
If I give you this banana will you go do your business somewhere else?
My sources say no.
And who might that be?
Better not tell you now.
Who are you then?
Try again.
So you’re just here to torture me?
Signs point to yes.
Is this punishment for something I did in a past life?
Most likely.
Then tell me one thing.
Very doubtful.
I’m going to be okay, right?
Outlook not so good.
Then when is it going to end?
Cannot predict now. 
So now what?
Concentrate and ask again. 
So now what?
Concentrate and ask again.

---

Denise is here from New York on business or traveling there, it’s tough to make out as she alternates between me and her bluetooth. Whoever it is on the line, she’s talking down to them in the usual ways. Asking obvious questions to make sure they’re listening. Repeating simple instructions. She asks if I take cards. When I say no she asks, what about Amex? No, Timothy, creative said sans serif. Am I going to have to sign a makegood? Alright, signing off now, the delivery guy is here. Buh-bye.
Denise rubs her temple as she looks around for her purse. Is this it?, I ask pointing to a leather bag hanging from the handle of an exercise bike. She makes a face like duh and fishes a checkbook from the bag. She makes it out to who, exactly? Ben’s Dry Ice? Even as she says this, she’s reeling it back, asking questions about temperature, how long it will last. What are the optimal storage conditions? She is sure to let me know she knows the word sublimate. I give her the usual caveat that it’s all online, but she’s relentless. It’s not for her, it’s for her newborn. In six days shy of three months. She read that even bottles made from plant cellulose retain chemicals from the production process that can leak over 24-72 hours, otherwise she’d be happy pumping before she flies and, besides, shipping overnight isn’t that expensive anymore. What about cash, is cash alright?
I fold the twenties into my breast pocket and go to work, lugging five 10-lb slabs to a travel cooler that fits them perfectly. When I’m done, I don’t say anything so she thinks I’m lingering for a tip and pretends she has another call coming through so I should just see myself out. She could feed her baby artisan organic freerange cruelty-free BPA-free whatever and he’s still going to turn out an ADHD terrorist. Her baby is going to grow up to hate her for raising him in a fearful bubble. Her baby is going to be gay in ways she will pretend to accept. Her baby will make mediocre art with his expensive degree. Her baby is going to panic his way into a coke problem. He will test her in ways she is convinced she is prepared for because she read the books. What else is there to say?

---

It seems unlikely we’re going to talk about writing in this month’s writing group. Manuscripts are conspicuously fresh, the lone mark the corner creases made on the stoop before ringing the doorbell. Fiona sells it best, rifling through her messenger bag to make it look like she’d left it at home. She can see exactly where it is, sitting on her breakfast table between her mug and a pouch of American Spirit. The turquoise one, obvi. So what if that makes her basic? You wanna know what’s really fuckin basic? Her phone buzzes. It’s Jake, texting to say something came up, but he’ll be there next time. Nobody bothers to check in with Raf. Instead we meditate on important topics like who’s going to see Wooden Shjips at Hemlock and where Jen got her tote. Sixpacks circulate, then a joint. For the record it’s from Afterlife, the tote, which is to say it’s wildly overpriced.
This group had set a new landspeed record, going from initial optimism to patient flexibility to slack and ennui in just a few sessions. Last time, Scott stormed out because we couldn’t recognize the genius of his ecosophical space opera, which, to be clear, is nothing like Dune. Aurora and Johnny are fucking. So are Aurora and Dani, at least that’s what Allie heard, whispering loud enough for Tosh to hear. She is still drunk from bottomless mimosas at Dear, Mom. Her sister is visiting from Portland and is a total bitch, but Allie loves her, don’t I believe her? She grabs my arm and doesn’t let go, looking down at the papers rolled in my hand. I feel like an asshole with my typed-out notes for Boone’s Twin Peaks knock-off. We get it, you wish you were blue-collar Americana because you grew up in Atherton. Hilary’s parents are loaded too, it’s not a big deal. 
The silence has legitimate mass. Jaws scrape the floor. Eyes dart around the room, wondering, what the fuck now? Even Allie, though no one will meet her gaze and then it dawns on her. Oh fuck, she said that out loud, didn’t she? How could she be so stupid. She’s such a stupid fucking cunt. She knows everyone hated her cicada story. We think we’re being all subtle and shit, but she sees right through us. Especially you, she points right at me and then pukes onto her shirt, just a little though. It pools over her breasts, clinging a little to her striped shirt. She stares at it, bemused by its modest, sudden presence and, finally recognizing what it is, begins to sob.
Dani is hosting so she helps Allie to her room and when Dani’s back everyone starts to wheeze with laughter. A room of teakettles finally allowed to whistle, but not too loud. Don’t want to wake up the vomit laureate. Most everyone cringes at this one, but it does the trick and a few minutes later it’s like nothing had happened. It’s obvious we’ve had our last workshop and the mood is like a grad night, giddy and sentimental. We’re free from all the homework. Next up, more homework. Might as well get fucked up. Maybe someone will make out in a closet. Someone’s already puked. We list our grievances mostly to wave them off. What a joke, “workshop.” It was basically a monthly pity party. Allie’s free therapy.
Wait, Nick, weren’t you looking for a new guy? Fiona’s friend Taylor started seeing this burner chick who tells everyone they’re ADHD and prescribes hella Addys. I’m good, I tell her, but take her friend’s info anyway. Just in case, she says, winking. A big, drama-kid wink, but that’s just Fiona. Or is it? You tell me.

---

The cum trees are in bloom, bewildering all the transplants. Jackson used to be one of them, but it’s been over a decade, so we make a sport of it, drinking on stoops in nouveau neighborhoods so we can watch noses wrinkle. Guys of all ages doing double-takes, checking their clothing instinctively, unless they’re in a group and then they slug each other on the shoulders and pluck blossoms to shove in the most virginal face. Most girls wince, but a woman with straight, brown hair cut at the shoulders of her suit jacket gifts us a glimpse of a personal smile. 
Baris shows up as she’s passing by, his expression even more mischievous than hers. He’s coming straight from lab and looks the part, his backpack slung over one shoulder, bedhead starting to settle and matte with sweat. My mom likes to joke that he’s studying to save her life one day, imagining him with a scalpel when he’s mostly coding and when he’s not coding he’s surfing or flirting with baristas. He’s not here for the schadenfreude but the sundresses and so are we, at some level. Leaving the Whole Foods on Franklin with our six-pack we almost trampled a woman who could only be described as feline. The girls playing tennis at the park are on stilts. It’s a fraternal vocabulary, endangered the moment one of us spots a future ex. Someone who doesn’t have a type, though of course this is just another type. The exception to the rule. A shock of color on a black and white photo. 
Breaking her spell is one of Jackson’s club friends, a guy with Encino man hair and a full grill. He spots us on our perch and respects the format. He is so fried he looks like a lizard basking, eyes only ever half open, but any superiority I feel collapses the moment I realize this is how the normies see us, up on our stoop. He’s playing an afters this Friday if we wanna fuck with it. He hands us a poster that looks like it was made in Kid Pix. F I R E S T A R T E R, it says, child actress Drew Barrymore with spiky green hair and a studded choker drawn on. A speech bubble advertises the number to call for the location, but the guy tells us it’s at the Foundry, lowering his shades and looking around before whispering this sensitive intel and then he’s moving on.
That guy is a national treasure. He should be in a museum. No, Jackson says, patting down his breast pocket. That guy is faking the funk. When he moved here he told everyone his name was Mitch but it’s really something preposterous like Wellington or Xavier. Inside the breast pocket is Jackson’s lighter. Dude is from Connecticut and his dad is a banker. His older sister has an oxy problem and is always in and out of rehab so they’re glad he’s doing his art in San Francisco or whatever it is he tells them. Jackson flicks the lighter and the poster burns. His parents will bankroll anything. He dropped out of Tisch to follow Animal Collective around and they ditched him here. He crashed with Caleb for a while, that’s how Jackson knows him and it’s why the guy got into techno. His whole thing now with the stupid Photoshops and the tracksuit, he stole that from Primo and now he’s doing parties with Noah. He’s doing a week in Berlin in October. Jackson wants to hate the guy but respects the grift too much. He watches the paltry flame dance, but I’m watching the lighter. A white lighter. 
A birdfaced woman, too proper to tell us to get the fuck off her stoop, tiptoes between us up the steps. The smell of cum is fainter with the sun setting. It’s not too late to pop back into Whole Foods and figure out dinner, but a burrito is calling my name. Not the one I really want, but the one closest to my house. Tomorrow will be spent on the toilet. After that, I don’t know.

---

How was the powermom?, Ben asks, not really asking. This time he’s got another fun one. The woman lives above Molotov’s. She wants to donate her dead dog to a veterinary school, but they won’t accept it unless she gets the thing on ice within 24 hours. Do I accept this mission? I mean, I guess. Car insurance doesn’t pay itself.
The woman who answers the door is not Jess. Neither is the one lighting tea candles. There is another woman in the same flannel + undershirt combo tending a pot of lentils, also not Jess. Eventually she finds me politely declining a cup of whiskey. She is dressed in a variation on theme, her own flair, the cuffed jeans and horn rim glasses. It’s her derby team, she explains. The Butch Bombers, I read off a patch. They’re trying to get her to sit shiva, but she is all business. She shows me to the cooler Davis specified. We have only fifteen minutes to get this puppy on ice, no pun intended, she slugs me in the ribs.
The veneer starts to crack when we unroll the quilt. There is Rita, a sixty-pound bulldog with a monstrous underbite, all four legs like those of a chair, the old girl’s so rigored. The Bombers take turns patting her on the back and the tears come. I’ve already broken up the ice, so it’s just a matter of shoehorning the dog into the cooler, really a glorified styrofoam takeout box. It’s like notching a bow, getting the joints bent into place. Something snaps, not just a feeling inside the animal but a sound audible throughout the room. More tears, more conciliation. The horn rims fall to the carpet. The cooler groans, unhappy to be working overtime, so I wrap it with duct tape to make sure it all stays together. God I’m glad I didn’t blaze before this one, but I still have the brief delusion that the sublimation at the edges of the cooler is the dog’s soul, escaping into the axiom of air.
I write this down later, at Waziema, mouth chalky with cheap wine. In the movie version, I do the right thing and tear up the page. Throw it in the trash, light it on fire, something dramatic. In real life, I order another drink, this one a blotch in my memory, and click the nib of my pen in and out. In and out. Out and in. The truth is, I don’t have much to offer. I don’t know where this is all going. What is more potent than another person’s pain? If you know the answer, text me.

---

It’s been six months since I left Swerv and I never bothered to switch my prescription to a closer Walgreens and Herr Doktor is off the clock on Sundays so I have to take the 31 downtown while my skin is crawling with bugs, though I guess this should help me fit in. Recently the TL has been a warzone, more than usual, and when I text this to Max, he tells me there’s no heroin so the junkies are smoking crack and corner store salvia and synthetic weed and it’s turning them into Tasmanian devils. Like straight Looney Tunes shit, dudes spinning into blurry tornadoes. Last week he saw a guy run out into the street, get flattened by a truck, and bounce back to his feet, whistling like nothing had happened. 
Today, the bus is quiet, too quiet, and sure enough the second we cross Van Ness, it disentangles from its line and the driver can’t lance it back on, leaving me to weather the elements. I stop in at L&G to fortify myself with mystery meat before braving the minefield of shit and needles, but the reality is I enjoy the entropy. Hotel neons, dead during the day. Bootleg copies of most if not all of the Jason Statham oeuvre. A woman leaving Cadillac Grocery swipes at me. Calls me a tall glass of milk, gives me a big slurp, and carries on with her day. The usual. Reagan’s legacy, thinks high school Nick, righteous with patch-jacket punk. Data analyst Nick wants to believe it’ll go away if he listens to enough NPR. Medicated Nick doesn’t believe in much of anything. My current incarnation is a bewildering ordeal, but if I stick it out I will be reborn as something unthinking and noble, a tree or boulder maybe. I’ll settle for a newt or a centipede if they’re out of flora. As if bardo is a Jack in the Box, a confusing glut of choice.
This is where I am now, sitting with my Dr. Pepper. I ordered a small but the cup dwarfs the pill bottle. The guy next to me is eyeing it, wondering if it’s worth the trouble of a grab and dash. He squints to make out the text. Paroxetine Tablets, USP. 20mg. I twist the cap and offer it to him, giving the pills a tempting rattle that has the opposite effect. Horrified, he collects his bags and heads out, crossing Mason back towards Union Square, not where he panhandles but where he’s staying. The bags had been from Lacoste and Burberry and he’d left his tray of food in disgust. Another tourist mistaking the Jumbo Jack for a good old-fashioned all-American hamburger. I can only imagine what that makes me.
I take the pill, as calmed by the ritual as the flattening that will come. Not a sensation so much as a realization weeks from now that things have been okay for a stretch I can’t bookend. This time it’s a woman and her two young boys, the mother exhausted by their hyperactivity, their special needs, the mess, but smiling still. She reminds them to stop and look both ways before crossing the street and they do, snapping into an earnestness I know all too well. If I could cry I would, but the welling inside me is modest and respectable, so I return this smile that isn’t for me and the light turns green. Green means go. Some things are that simple.

---

The city is approximately seven by seven miles, a neat fact notable to people who still buy magazines. Seven by seven is forty-nine, the name of our football team that will soon be relocated to landfill over the salt marshes of the South Bay. Far from the murals of Kaepernick kissing his biceps painted on liquor store shutters. The 49ers, so named for the year suckers first bumrushed the town hoping to strike gold. As legend has it, it wasn’t the prospectors who made off, but the locals who sold picks and shovels, a moral so beloved the Sand Hill crowd made it into jargon. On Thursdays they head up to the Rosewood for what’s come to be known as Cougar Night, though the crowd is a mix of divorcées and escorts, usually Ukrainian or Russian, and all the bridge-and-tunnel types looking to bag a seven-figure buck, though this is on the low end. We’re all entrepreneurs, each in our own way. In a past life I was a premium outlet, but now I’m a junk shop in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. If people notice me, it’s to wonder when I’m even open. How I haven’t been pushed out yet. To press their faces to the glass, shielding their eyes, and squint into the permanent twilight at the old maps and banjos and broken pachinko machines. Sitting atop of a stack of vintage nudie mags is a cat, staring back. Is it alive or is it stuffed or does it even matter? Soon you’ll be on your way. A new beer garden just opened and the sun is rumored to make an appearance this afternoon. Enjoy it, whether it does or not. There are only so many days, though they’re working on an app for that.

∩

Nick Greer is a writer from Berkeley. Current projects include essays on trend and postmodernity, a collaborative erotic comic, and a novel inspired by giallo, the conspiracy thriller, and other ’70s Eurosleaze.

Two Stories

ICEBREAKER

Not until I began using it as a test did I come to enjoy the story. Before that, whenever I told it—whenever I so much as thought about it—my whole body would contract, as if in an involuntary, full-scale scowl. But then I realized I could add it to my arsenal of icebreaking questions: What skill would keep you from being kicked off a desert island? When the apocalypse comes, would you prefer to survive or die first? Do you crumple or fold? Prefer bolo or bow?

The story went like this. I was teaching a writing workshop for adults through a local nonprofit. Most of the people were new to writing, but there were a couple who had published poems here and there online. And then there was Gerald. Mid-forties, blond and boyish, softspoken, a little stooped. He was a doctor, did two semesters at the Sorbonne studying Sassoon, volunteered every other year with Doctors Without Borders in sub-Saharan Africa. “Have you ever read The Constant Gardener?” he asked the woman who asked him what it was like treating the malnourished children in South Sudan his poems described in tender, if somewhat mawkish, terms. “A lot like that.” His stint started before the workshop ended, so he didn’t make it to the last three meetings. We gave him a simple goodbye, two-bite brownies and sparkling cider. People were quiet, solemn even, in the breakroom, commenting on the volume of the fridge compressor. Not that he was going off to die but that he was going to try to keep so many people from dying. What could we say that wouldn’t betray our total inability to fathom what he was going off to see and hear and do?

Some months later, I came across Gerald’s profile on a professional networking site. It said he was an oil and gas lawyer, and some cursory digging confirmed it. And this is where I find the eyes of my audience to ask how they’d react. Request to connect? Send a message asking how his stint went and when he’d be back? Would you pay the $16 processing fee to receive info on his criminal background, home address, phone number? Would you borrow a car and drive out there, slowing beneath the centenarian live oaks, their sweeping low-slung branches festooned with mossy epiphytes and holiday lights put up and removed by hired crews, some of the branches propped up by wooden beams? Would you say you were birding now, when your soon-to-be-ex asked what was up with the binoculars? That the dry-treated half rope was for securing yourself when scaling trees for a better look at migrating cranes? Would you, as night burns off to reveal the pump jacks nodding out of sync along the speed-blurred floodplain, tell him from the driver’s seat that you pitied him? Didn’t he know that lies bind, that they coil around the future and twist it into something comically small or painfully bent? While the truth, you say, catching his unblindfolded eye—even when it’s dull as a butter knife, it can always, with enough effort, cut.

CHANGING THE SHEETS

It had probably been a month. At least a few weeks beyond the recommended one-week-per-set, but he rationalized this delay by remembering a friend’s unverified advice that it was better to leave one’s bed unmade each morning, as he did, since the exposure to light and air made it a less desirable habitat for whatever would otherwise fester or bloom in the tight darkness of the tucked-in sheets.

He folded the duvet down to the foot of the bed, piling it on itself like an intestine or an oxbowed river, so only a thin section of it actually lay on the rug. Then he pulled the top sheet free, balling it loosely onto the floor before unhooking the fitted sheet from the nearest corners. He shimmied between the wall and the bed to free the opposite corners then shuck the cases from the thin pillows then shove them against the headboard.

There was nothing in his mind but the task itself as he shuffled his fists inside the clean fitted sheet, searching for the puckered corners and then hooking and pulling and smoothing it around the mattress, but as he unfolded the top sheet and lofted it over the bed, tugging it this way and that to settle it evenly, he thought of what his father had said about bed corners, as he did every time he made the bed, the way an argument about a friend’s doomed relationship entered his mind whenever he mowed around the scraggly lilac by the fenceline, or how the final image of another friend’s poem surfaced whenever he was testing the bathwater for his son.

The thought was involuntary. Consistent as a comet. Pulling the triangular fold up and tucking the lower fold under the mattress, there was his father, saying dismissively “of course she’d call it a hospital corner. She was a nurse for thirty years.” Why had she—his grandmother, his father’s mother-in-law—told him this? He couldn’t remember the circumstances, but he remembers understanding now that what you call something says more about you than about the thing itself.

“In the Marines,” his father went on, “we called them…” and here the memory slams shut. It wasn’t intentional. He just couldn’t remember what his father had called them. This meant something, but he wasn’t thinking about it as he stuffed the pillows into their fresh casings. He was finished, but he was stuck, standing in the middle of the room as the sun slipped its polygon of light off the bed. What was it like when he lofted the sheet over the bed? Not a sail, because what boat sails on its side. It was like the colorful parachute elementary kids played with in gym. Or a flag being draped over a coffin, its sharp triangular corners smoothed out into a final attempt to assert that the person within had belonged to an idea. Not their true nation, the earth. The soil and the dirt.

∩

Conor Bracken is a poet and translator based in Cleveland. His most recent book is The Enemy of My Enemy is Me (Diode Editions, 2021), and his most recent translation is of Jean D’Amérique’s Workshop of Silence (Vanderbilt University Press, 2025). He teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Two Poems from Oily Doily

Commercial break

disposed intent
handly may

breakthru
up to

scrim fill in the
________

assent
locus clean | ed

wide net
happy mid

purchase takes
just this

tomorrow’s
tomorrow

tomorrows
a focal

group salvo
five-in-one play

amen seaside
femoral ache

happy fathers day
plastic waterway

from Pool

When it happened when I saw it we were driving in a
red rock desert. JC saw it too we saw it then not and
that was what surprised us. Maybe people often saw
flying objects disappear there but for several years I
didn’t tell anyone it was afternoon late spring high
visibility sound mind and so on route 24. 

That morning we’d departed the park named for an
allocated heaven crossing into open range snow on
the plain around one stopped for some minutes as
steers walked up the asphalt’s exposed strips. Their
looks bore in a bad old dream or it could be they
were staring out the windscreen at themselves the
cloudbanks low and crawled up the road.

It rained
on the road

between reef
and grove

then in
the clear

air advanced
a wedge

a contoured
wedge

a gunmetal
pentagonal

it loomed
overhead

then wasn’t
not wasn’t

the image
slammed shut

A thermal inversion occurs when air is hotter higher

warm air rises trapping cold pollution in Missouri

try it on a research farm with a red smoke bomb

pastel fog puddles on the bean crop the hot hot lens

ungrounds lifts and disperses forms up on horizon

angelic Herefords for instance inverted or some form 

of curved polyhedron location is no indicator of actual

object location no more illusion than mirror but distorted

may elicit a scene its observer misinterprets is it moving

have you found a mirage to settle itself directly around

I have copied out the proceedings in which the ex-pilot
addresses the commission, and will fail to convince
now the radiant present
the last extractive shortwave rays
bombard the oceanic
play back again his recorded statement
the cockpit video that shows it seems no living
proof but clouds you filmed clouds
why did you I saw traces
of two men
the physicist father farther lost in dark and distant
undulations of the waves quickly lost him

in the undulations of the oceanic brain
in the folds the undulations
that alien in the folded
pulse of imitation
it holds him in anyone that would be
destroyer, son abandoned
a wife and
it molds his closest secret a surface he can touch as
the would-be was-and
pervades him

now the present bombardment, now and then

Looked at
looked past

a crack
in the wind

shield broken
in sister’s

HS parking acc
the accord

somehowed
the garage

I didn’t ask
received

a potential
dad’s later

warning
if an acc

the edge
of glass

eventually
he said

decap

So replaced
the glass

the break
came back

replaced
the glass

again it
cracked

replacing
its breaking

so break from
replacing

let be

a warp in
the chassis

I was being drawn along the road the sky a round open

window didn’t hear it approach but saw the surface flow

don’t know if it was a jet could be inaccurate whatever

it was an overhead F- the shining F-s we watched

like the elect and as we watched surprise it vanished

sleight of paint mirror temperature to look and not to see

what form accelerated its post-facto vision a neutral mask

the featureless look the console glass robotic cockpit

aerial drill reflective tint placid surfactant it scrubs away

it appliques the timeless craters to a nowhere place

are we meant to see we are not meant to see is not

to see it seems to portend a future of endless vision 

stretched no horizon but the locked coordinates

∩

Alyssa Perry is a writer, editor, and teacher from Iowa. She is the author of Oily Doily (Bench Editions, 2024). Her writing appears with Annulet, The Canary, Coma, Fence, Mercury Firs, River Styx, the Experimental Sound Studio, and other venues. Perry is poetry editor at the Cleveland Review of Books and an editor at the small press publisher Rescue Press. She lives in Ohio and teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art.