(Click on the titles to view the poems)

 

Special Feature — Word Poems
Poems containing the words suture, obnoxious, carton, and testament.
Includes a special invitation for the next issue.

 

Two Poems
 
I know this of horse-toothed women:
they are very often not
like horses.  
 
Annalynn Hammond

 

Two Poems
 
Someday soon it will be illegal
to die. We're coughing now. And it's not funny,
but it is. Our hero. Our man in white.  
 
Clay D. Matthews

 

How to Survive on a Distant Planet
 
I don't know what I'd do without him,
or what life was like before the crash,
before he walked out of the tall grass  
 
Thomas D. Reynolds

 

Two Poems
 
But no one sees that sly lean, no one shouts
your name; my sin-drunk cronies in the lane
are busy slurping, lidless, from the spout.  
 
Sambarta Rakshit

 

In the early evening I can see the sea is dusty
 
The moon is a changing
voice that talks in scarves, yet the ancient shop
only deals in elastics.  
 
Julio Peralta-Paulino

 

Someone Always Objects to the Personal
 
My mother taught me chapter and verse
about virginity; how it is a lure that a woman
uses to entrap a man  
 
Silvia A. Brandon Pérez

 

Gandhiji, Me and My Blues
 
You know I'm Muhammad Jallaluddin Akbar,
Grand Moghul in my dreams that travel
at the speed of light.  
 
Sumanta Sanyal

 

Lenny Bruce is Dead
 
the only way for us to see the end
of the night is when it is parallel
to the beginning of a day  
 
Alex Stolis

 

Arrival
 
I go back
to the prologue, the woman
stepping into the water  
 
Chris Young

 

Between
 
I have seen planets crack
like eggshells and—God forgive me—
heard my mother groaning like a whore.  
 
Michael Meyerhofer

 

Sequence
 
Sometimes in the middle of a dream I'll hear
a Cajun tune I can't remember when I'm awake.
Makes me wonder what else I've forgotten, who sang.  
 
Shann Palmer

 

The Fall
 
One wrong step and she would be headlong, the banister flying by her like a reprimand. "Be careful," her mother always admonishes. "Careful." And she is.  
 
Andrea Moon

 

Before we were born,
 
Our fathers compelled
our mothers to wriggle
like insatiable worms on passion's hook.  
 
Leann Buhrow