Simon Perchik Its arms still around her, this dirt clings between what’s left behind and the rain –-its stones stare back can’t make out the fingers nearby easily yours and with each handful something that is not her forehead just the over and over nearness you pull closer and with your mouth welcomes this dirt, covers it the way any helpless wound is kept moist and on her cheeks, something later no longer remembers, barely...

Yvonne Zipter I. Our lips are so dry, she says, we could start a fire, kissing. Once, we were incendiary as match tips, any flick of skin on skin: a conflagration, a curtain of flame through which we saw the world. Something as coy as oxygen fed us, our bodies the proverbial two sticks rubbed in concert. And wasn’t it exciting? But fire never holds still, never latches on to a sole identity. Like when the dollar-store factory caught...

Hilary Sideris Could I labor better, repress my yes hiss in the power of a higher wage, a multitasking tongue, a sticky kiss in the Employees Only pantry over free cookies? Can you breathe life into me, mortal to whom I submit my report, by whom I’m blessed when I sneeze. Hilary Sideris holds an MFA from The Writers’ Workshop at The University of Iowa. Her poems have appeared in Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, The...

klipschutz Sirens advertise their right-of-way on empty streets, guards conjugate in workbooks, lobbies glisten. Glass shatters, voices carry, pressure drops. Entire buildings perfect the parlor trick of vanishing in fog. Found, they’re gone again, like that. And so are you. Finger moon deveins the dark as orbits cross. Not a hiccup, not a hitch, the moon’s gone too. Klipschutz (pen name of Kurt Lipschutz) is a poet, songwriter...

Vievee Francis for J With our down-turned mouths, and trenches forming on each side, evidence of our disappointments. Look at the nests by the eyes, we were so easily amused, (what else was there to be), and nurtured (if reluctantly) those who insisted upon our goodness. Ah, morality. Did you buy it? I didn’t. Ethics, sure, sure one needs those, but I value the wisdom of my own furrows. Look at my brow. I know what I know. We are...

Vievee Francis I want to put down what the mountain has awakened. My mouthful of straw. I want to stand still but find myself moving from patch to patch. There’s a low In my throat. I sink to my knees tired or not. My hair a charcoal fire. What Man could live with this? When I am forgotten, the valley floor will be The valley floor. Smoke will rise from the limbs without me. Without me. Other poems featured by Vievee...

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".