Sam Neis The lawns are green and damp and deep. The trees rise up dark-trunked from beds of pachysandra. Back behind their hanging leaves the houses sit in greeny dapple-light. In some yards plastic toy cars and scooters lie abandoned. The greenest lawns though, bear no trace of children. That is too much work. One lawn has a porcelain jockey and a faultless weave. In another, a man pushes a mower, bowed like a Volga boatman. In a...

Michael T. Young The sun rises from trees, its light pooling under the leaves. But only for a moment, then the wind shakes it loose, glinting along rails as a train pulls out from Journal Square passing a recess in the granite trench where a ginkgo twists like a dancer of green grace fixed in a precarious balance of revelation and mystery which it passes on like love, never content to stay in the same place long, and maybe changes with...

Bruce McRae The weather promises to change from man to animal. Today’s forecast is absence, with a chance of longing. In the east, flying horses and a scattering of flowers. From the west, incursions, barbarous hordes, black ice. The weather changes its mind, abandons its principles, is forced to choose between darkness and light. They’re predicting tons of tons and long cold showers. They say it might break, but we’re in for a...

Sebastian Agudelo What country is this? blind Oedipus stumbles at the threshold, on his way out, his last job. You feel for him even if you’re neither old nor blind, are just waking to the headlines. What country? The neo-Nazi baby showers, bbq’s with aging KKK’s, the munitions stockpiled in some California basement where, about right now, they’re lifting prints, have handcuffed the ten year old who shot his white supremacist...

This issue features three new poems by Cave Canem Poetry Prize-winner Vievee Francis: "Finding the Baby"; "Approaching 50" and "Anti-Pastoral #4".

Scott Hightower reviews Miguel Murphy's "A Book Called Rats."

Scott Hightower “a murder of crows; a hell of guns” Oh, Vatican, have your bank clear our way to guns! We need them in our beauty shops, our schools, our class rooms, for our children with soft bodies. If we are going to transform our way of life into an arsenal, we need guns in our funeral parlors, our barber shops, our tattoo and bingo parlors. We need guns in our soup, our armoire, our one night stands, and our kitchen spice...

J. Rodney Karr His parents believe the soul is stretched across the skull. His skull has been modified by blue surgeons with saws. This will be his third time under gauze. They pared his tongue and jaw, made slides of the raw tissue. The parents say their boy looks human now. They deny his anger and lust, his art and love, his lineage to those murdered at birth, or freak-shown with the deranged to the king. Their boy’s face becomes an...

Catherine Champion I wanted a window looking out over tall ryegrasses, a wind bending them toward me, but there were only more houses, more lawns littered with failing gardens and stray sprigs of anemone. He was the white violets’ insisting bloom, taking on the blush of morning in the June-swelled air of that little room, the accruing weight of love. With trash-bagged bundles of pop cans, we’d tread to the store, maples fanning...

Raena Shirali & abandoned the jellyfish on the beach. no messages were etched in the sand— no lovers or children dragging twigs through the grains. we were left with cargo ships rounding the harbor, left standing amidst a plume of the dead, sunlight stinting off bodies the color of melting glass. i admit it was sunset. i looked at them to keep from looking at you. some withered from tentacle-up, those trailings purpling black,...