Mara Beneway
Mara Beneway Song Inside the Music Box My friend teaches me how to be alone. She says I mustpicture myself as another person. I practice keeping my owncompany. Picture this: [...]
Sebastian Merrill
Sebastian Merrill Why I Left You: Reason #19 I cut myselfshaving: nickon my neck,bright blood.The red pearlreminds me ofthe rust stainon my sheetsafter you fuckedme in the assfor the first [...]
Todd Davis
Todd Davis Pit Ponies Hooves cross the carved historyof horses harnessed to coal carts, forgotten century orphaned like a corpse. An echoof a mare’s whicker as she’s forced to mate [...]
Natalie Tombasco
Natalie Tombasco Bees! “Honey-drudgers. / I am no drudge.” -Sylvia Plath Bees yellow as Twinkies swan-dive into wisteria.Colony Collapse is her primal scream: orangeBlossom, alfalfa—gone spindly in pesticides,Monoculture disease. Where [...]
Emily Van Kley
Emily Van Kley Dear Runner-up for the 2023 American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Judged by Brian Czyzyk Here is the cloud-addled sky,its long face dripping— the green backyardclutched in sun-snake & shadow. [...]
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach On the 100th Day of War in My Birthplace Winner of the 2023 American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Judged by Brian Czyzyk The rhododendrons keep bloomingdespite the [...]
Joy Moore
Joy Moore White Squirrel Joy Moore lives in Tennessee, where, for the last fifteen years, she has taught undergraduate writing and interdisciplinary courses, designed and managed two coffee shops, and [...]
Kimberly Kralowec
Kimberly Kralowec I Knew the Flavor of Apple, but Not Its Sweetness A year east of today, the word ash was singular. I had notyet decided to spend lockdown cleaning [...]
Denise Duhamel
Denise Duhamel Impossible Sophie Calle, with her mom’s permission, set up a camera to film her last breath, not knowing, of course, when it would come. I can’t bring [...]
Andrew Hemmert
Andrew Hemmert Death Has a Thousand Pictures in the World After a line by Brigit Pegeen Kelly Of a common swallow. Of a common swallow split open, and the [...]
Robin Gow
Robin Gow Do I Want to Decompose Like This? Time-lapse decomposition videos comfort me. The busy work of worms and flies that come and go like beads. In the [...]
Bill Hollands
Bill Hollands Queen for a Day I’m nobody’s idea of butch,not especially swishy either –middle-of-the-road gay, I guessyou could say. But this one day –I’m twenty, maybe twenty-one,a bit forlorn [...]