Call to Outlaws

I.      The Garage Knelt beneath the staircase my skin hummed against the threat of discovery, the shock of her blonde hair, the string of his guitar, the damp silhouette beneath my thin cotton dress. Clouds of laughter and smoke swung between us, a circuit of pungent electricity rocked with soft delirium. She kissed my lips with curling halos of marijuana and strawberry, blew dandelion-seed wishes for a boy.   II.     The Carnival The arc of the Ferris Wheel winked above Read more [...]

Matthew James Babcock Poems

The Journey I wonder if The Age of the Journey has passed in America now that The Port of Arlington has become Earl Snell Memorial Park, and not one hundred yards from rocky banks where burly voyageurs and their Cayuse brides upended canoes of fresh pelts, a toothless Shell station attendant who’s a dead ringer for Carmine Ragusa tops off my tank. Travel means nothing in an era when every destination is your living room. Will any of us ever drink our urine on the Read more [...]

Katie Reed Poems

Scattering Garden The bushes bear no seed in winter. Mourners stand on planks of a wooden arch. They release ashes onto rocks below, a sea of blank faces.   Spider’s Stance An alabaster stone, smooth as the rock which bore it and washed it by the stream - among grainy bits of speckled white, stood a spider. It turned – paused – positioned, its body, thick and copper, reared like a wild mustang in the western plains. I swallowed my fear, careful Read more [...]

Ivor Irwin

My Internist Prescribes Guess it depends on which of your three eyes that you look at it with. All I see, floating around me, is detritus. The detritus of denied intimacy. The detritus of the glib. Like beautiful Venezia, you float in your gondola and ignore the surfing turds. Peripherally, if you take the time to stuff cotton wool up your nose, there is the renaissance, gargoyles in repose. Pretty girls chinning crumbling window sills. Perry Como crooning. A strand Read more [...]

Zoe Etkin

The Dialogue   I say, Some parts of me are like this— and open his hand Rain water funnels into the pink   Thin channels of water branching out and then contracting as if surface tension isn’t a thing at all   He says he doesn’t understand how I made him this way so porous   I did it to show you, I say made us parallel and reflective   He says, I cannot accept this He means to say my body but the word has too much shape doesn’t fit well between Read more [...]

Fragments on Catherine Clodius

My grandmother, after her stroke   I.   Here, you are in that nightgown, a girl again, wandering the downstairs hallway escaping some dream.  Later I will find you in the dark kitchen trying to remember how to read the digits on the microwave.   II.   In our house the bell was unexpected, the cops even more so.  A call about a gun,   my father’s rigid confusion, my mother’s balance   failing.  I’m watching from Read more [...]

Ryan Mattern

Big Dirty A brown doe with tranquilizer darts stuck in her hide enters the red line to 95th, nestles vacant space between seats of Vietnam vets in Chicago-stained Cosby sweaters. A junkie teenager, ringworm scars like trilobite spirals fossilized into his scalp, steadies himself as the train quakes over demagnetized tracks and walks toward the deer. The two of them sleepy-eyed, unsure of movement, drunk and emaciated dancers on fetal calf legs. The deer mistakes industry for a meadow; passengers’ Read more [...]