ISSUE 07
Steve Evans. Oteeyho Iro. Charles Haddox. Zama Madinana. Taylor Graham. Natalie Harris-Spencer. Jason Lobell. Maggie Yang. Aaron Weinzapfel. Meredith Wadley. Asma Al-Masyabi. Linda Neal. Shilo Niziolek. David A. Porter.
01
READ • WATCH • LISTEN
U.S. Poet Laureate Emeritus Juan Felipe Herrera leads us from Ginsberg's supermarket to an ochre yellow green stone Huichol camp. Jane Wong unlocks her phone screen, and we peek. Angie Kang lends new meaning to someone getting "in your ear," while Amit Majmudar points to myriad meanings of the letter K. John Sibley Williams catches us hanging our children by the wrists. Sofie Harsha submerges us; lets us up again for air. Keenan Norris sharpens the scalpel. Donna Steiner takes us to the aquarium. Jendi Reiter notes that those born in this Year of the Rat will search for happiness. David Moore searches the sky, instead. Meg Hurtado Bloom warns us to select our treasure carefully. Megan Merchant puts her dead mother's dog to sleep. Louise Wareham Leonard introduces us to the cool crowd. Arisa White steers us off the old roads.
POETRY
MEG
HURTADO
BLOOM
“Everyone’s Cutting Their Hair”
and other poems
“You’d best believe that Adam & Eve / attempted orchards everywhere”
JUAN
FELIPE
HERRERA
“Federico García Lorca & The Angels of Celery”
and other poems
“call please you must do it you must do it now you must”
ARISA
WHITE
“If Only I Thought to Shame My Brother for Being a Black Man”
and other poems
“Like: Oh, you want to get shot in your chest 42 times? Be a baby’s / daddy”
JENDI
REITER
“Rumspringa on the Polar Express”
and other poems
“Rats stud their tunnels with prizes they can't eat”
JANE
WONG
“Because I Am Afraid of Dentists”
and other poems
“Click, click – the tiny gears / of my jaw rusted, loose bolts / spewing a junkyard”
JOHN
SIBLEY
WILLIAMS
“First Ocean”
and other poems
“a country chaws off limb / after limb to save what some of us believe, / sincerely I think, a redeemable whole”
MEGAN
MERCHANT
“Putting my dead mom's dog to sleep”
and other poems
“A map of tuft, a canvas of ash”
DONNA
STEINER
“Aquarium”
and other poems
“it is like emerging / from the Saturday matinees / of childhood”
AMIT
MAJMUDAR
“Kaf”
and other poems
“the throat's gun cocked: / the breath, briefly, caught”
FICTION
SOFIE
HARSHA
"Gentlelady Nadia Cannot Be Spooked"
“I couldn’t stop saying the word Minnesota to myself in my head. I felt like a young carpenter building something out of nothing. Minnesota. Minisoda. Minnesohtah.”
ANGIE
KANG
"Minor Aching"
“Maybe Ally was really that atheist, enough to sever the god from godmother and claim the title of mother for herself.”
KEENAN
NORRIS
"The Blessèd of the Earth"
“there is something about her that he cannot kill and something within him that he wants dead”
SIAMAK
VOSSOUGHI
"Fountainball"
“When you actually go to the famous places, you remember the little things you saw there. At the Eiffel Tower, I saw an old woman teaching her grandson how to whistle.”
LOUISE
WAREHAM
LEONARD
"The German Crowd"
“Soon, I too started sneaking into the Brick Church after school. It was a blocky red brick building in the federal style, with a white frieze, two Ionic columns and one white circular window."
MOLLY
GILES
"Hopeless"
“They stopped for gas at the first stop over the Nevada border and when Scotty came out of the restrooms she saw Uncle Carl inside the convenience store playing a slot machine. 'Try your luck?' he asked, handing her a quarter.”
WATCH
DAVID
MOORE
David Moore is a poet, musician, dilettante of photography, and thinker of life and literature’s vertiginous complexities. He recently graduated from SUNY Oswego, earning a BA in English. Moore’s poetry has been thrice featured in the university’s literary magazine: the Great Lake Review. He is currently in the process of applying to graduate programs in the Northeast, intent on pursuing a PhD in English Language and Literature with the ultimate goal of teaching college English.
A TOUCH OF BLUE
"Above us was his workplace, where he glided at 40,000 feet, slicing through clouds like a pizza cutter..."