(These are excerpts—click on the titles to view the complete poems)

 

Special Feature
The Word Poem feature is taking a hiatus this issue.
If you'd like to participate for the Oct/Nov issue, the words are still trigger, scrap, steam, and platinum.

 

Untitled
 
so many years apart and always
there's room for more dead
 
Simon Perchik

 

Adaptation
 
People cautiously folded back
Glass sheets and glass bedspreads,
Slid gingerly out of glass beds
 
Ken Poyner

 

Deus in Machina
 
The pipes
began to hiss, as if to themselves, like a reptile lullaby in iron.
 
John Dutterer

 

Roadside, US 64
 
Jesus, I believe,
waits in your mobile home, waits
for your praying knees.
 
Alicia Cole

 

Means of Dispersal
 
Hovering over phials of curiosity
Some rank with the rot of failure
Others yielding green secrets
 
Rae Spencer

 

Sign Watching
 
She waits for the flood like a sea-wife
willing the ocean to return her Captain.
 
Michelle McMullin

 

The Untitled
 
Bone brothers licked
clean of skin's misdirection.
The final white
lightning underground.
 
A B Datta

 

Two Poems
 
Around this time the sky birthed guilt
& it rained into your bones every day
 
Ruth Ann Baumann

 

Two Poems
 
How green is his wet grass and

how lovely under its sick black sky! The voice offscreen
is always a woman's
 
Christine Potter

 

Rape of the Sabine Woman
 
A young pigeon lights on her hand.
It preens when a boy points,
   sleeps when a Frenchman meows
 
Emma Sovich

 

A Lost Language
 
All. Everything.
And, as the last inhabitant fell still,
a language, too, was drowned.
 
Marjorie Mir

 

Tyto Alba
 
Tuesday morning my mother woke up to a murder of crows having a panic attack on the power lines that demarcate our front yard.
 
Alexandra Smyth

 

Car Horn
 
He hears it
in his monologue,
when he speaks for himself,
when he pronounces his fate
 
Joel Fry

 

Food Photography
 
Thinking this is nothing but art, my uncle clicked.
One after another.
 
Nandini Dhar

 

Jupiter
 
I see Jupiter just before dawn
So fat I think it's a helicopter hovering
Over bad traffic on the expressway
 
Pat Smith

 

This Relationship
 
You first
run next to the canvas like a poor
farm girl beside the train tracks
 
Corey Mingura