FINGER GUNS
PETER HOPE
Sunlight felt sterile. And it was never quiet, but somehow an odd hush spread through eerie hallways. I’d notice these things while working at a mental hospital. My car sitting idle outside, waiting for me, was a source of reprieve. On break, I’d glide my feet through grass, and bugs would be chirping and buzzing around me.
THE HEART PLEDGES LIKE A CANON / FLOWERS GROW IN THE GUARD TOWER
SAM PINK
A trick you can do is
reverse negatives
by just not continuing them.
You can tie things off like that
it’s hard to explain.
Balance scales instantly.
GOOD LOOKIN’ RIVERBOAT
JACOB SEFERIAN
In the hallways of this pseudo-luxury national chain, the carpet’s swooping pan-European patterns stand still long enough to consider the difference between hotel and motel, and whether it’s as serious a distinction as boat and ship. Then I see the Riverboat, his scalp glistening under chandeliers made of plexiglass.
FATCATMANIA
ALICE MADDOCK
A year ago he died and became very dead and I’ve never once used the phrase passed away, saying passed away fast three times sounds like an Italian fast food chain, I recently stumbled into a Dolly Parton tribute concert that happened to take place in a church and so there was a little less Dolly a little more priest saying, When you explain grief to children, you sometimes say that it’s stripy, and that it’s easy to get stuck on one of the dark stripes, every priest’s special interest being death, but then, eventually, you move along to a lighter stripe, and then back to a dark stripe, and so on, the past year was just that, an overweight stripy cat…
SLOWCORE
AQEEL PARVEZ
sorry there's nothing to write home about / I still fear strangers, the passing faces like mute clock / with age grow more withdrawn / without
LILLY
CHARLIE ZACKS
I put down our dog today. Took her behind the house and held her face in the water bucket.
You, in your sundress on the lawn. The center of the quad. That college was made for you, baby. I watched from afar. We didn’t meet on the lawn. We met at Gary’s. Under the Christmas lights in his backyard. He inherited that house I think. Syracuse looked so good on you, baby. Everything was so new. I guess that’s what it’s like being 18. I only remember you. Everyone was smoking cigs but you. The red and green lights flickered in your eyes. Maybe it was the beer haze, but I remember you smiling at the sky, turning your head, and smiling at me. You, me, the sky. That’s where it started. And it was just like that. Like remembering a dream.
HAPPYFUNLAND
MAXWELL NORMAN
The GameStop at the Poughkeepsie Galleria does not seem to me like the birthplace of any revolution, but I’ve been wrong before. So I drove to the Galleria with my friend Naomi so she could go to Target and I could loiter around one of America’s finest gaming institutions, taking notes and photos, trying to understand how thousands of people have invested their hopes and their money into a GameStop-led collapse. It was the first day above 30 degrees Fahrenheit in fucking forever and I could have been going for a walk or frolicking with my pals, so of course I wasn’t gonna do that, I was gonna go do ethnographic research at a slowly dying mall.
SIX APHORISMS
J.M. Ó FAOLÁIN
In the enduring night, she bleeds, a silent martyr to sick misery. An itch surges through her veins, a shudder nestles in her shoulders. Awoken from her lethargic stupor, she faces a solitary page, barely legible, and discards it—a ritual of disappointment. Defence by abstraction fails her; the thought of a dull blade at her wrists persists.
BUCKY DONE GUN
MAX SHOHAM
Our CO’s daughter got into a nice school, and to me and the other worms that meant he was gonna blow his hooch in one go. Yep, drunk as a boiled owl. After a few minutes of groping around Black Betsy’s dark prefab bathroom pantries stocked with jacked up Euro meds and arm and hammer toothpaste, we finally plucked the prettiest flower in the field—a small orange bottle inside a white paper bag labeled BPM-KET, what they call a mythic pull, but it’s the same painkiller that all NATO SSN submarines are stocked with.
HALOGEN
SALLY CUNNINGHAM
I was in that apartment downtown. Our place on Main that I always used to covet when I visited the TV star and her son before it was ours. But I was alone, and I couldn’t get any lights on. No matter how many times I tried, the switch wouldn’t move—bruising my fingers, bending bone. It was so dark. I just wanted to flick on the lamp, see it again like it was.
KNUCKLE DUSTER
AL DERVISEVIC
There was good fighting and bad fighting
There was good sex and not bad sex
There was drinking and smoking
There was sparring and smokers
Changing levels, slips and counters
Brawlers, meatheads, tanks, and technicians
Water, sweat, Thai oil, Sunday morning coffee
And sometimes
so much blood.
IN DREAMS
GABRIELLE COLE
In the beginning, a possum sneaks into the house through the front door. I’ve never seen a possum in real life, but it kind of looks like the ones from Over the Hedge. Probably a possum. No one else seems to care just yet. It crawls beneath the couch that my brother’s now-dead hamster chewed a hole in that one time.
<3
CLARA CRONHIELM
i slowly realise / i'm just scared / that the ones who've / fucked me / until now / have done it as a bet or / to find something out / about themselves
CAVE DATE
JOHNNY CARTER
Don’t listen to the archaeologists or the anthropologists. What do they know? They’ll tell you that cave paintings were made for ritual or some belief in ancient magic, but they have it all wrong!
VALUE VILLAGE
KAT MULLIGAN
It was a glorious day in Value Village, dropped from the heavens like ripe apples from an orchard canopy. Wool-clad children, relieved of their chores on the Lord’s Day, ran to and fro in the cobbled streets, volleying inflated sheep bladders and coaxing wooden hoops along with their sticks.
HORSE
NICHOLAS WILDER FORMAN
I know that I’m bad, you sing
My ears, getting ready to hug the night, perk up.
I am looking at a photo on my phone,
of this guy I had sex with, because I’m thinking about the dream I had,
where I show him a collection of these CD’s that don’t exist.
RAT GIRL
REBECCA LAWRENCE LYNCH
The dirty duvet I was sleeping under slipped off, revealing my bare chest as I blinked myself awake and rolled onto my side. It wasn’t unusual for me to sleep naked, the radiator in my bedroom had been stuck on high for years. Plus, it cuts down on laundry. Snaking my hand through the collection of dirty dishes and empty cans on my bedside table, I grabbed my phone.
SLEEPWALKER FUGUE
JACOB SPONGA
Albertine Todd. Pianist manquée. Young, none too wise, but inculcated well, inoculated sparingly. Though she relishes not in sunshine, daquiris, croquet, bronzed pool boys, Tuscan kitchens, reading. Though she’s badly pitted by her recent competitive upset at the prestigious Rabling Tournament, zillions lost, career down the drain, scouts mutinied, Mums taken off to some white-sand hideaway.
POEMS FOR KORINE
ELIS MONTEVERDE BURRAU
When we pass my old school I always point at it There is my old school
nine paternal poems
LAMB
May the piano strings detune in unison. May the dandelion seeds not float into the neighbor’s yard. May I be patient with my daughter when she hits the baby.