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,...

Martin Balgach For Jack Myers On my way to Arkansas for work this job has me selling books to strangers and I’m reading you on the plane drunk in your canopy of hurt when I think of my wife and son back home where I left them in winter’s morning, single digits, everything frozen white Mason barely fifteen months old and warmer than a thousand suns and I wonder why we kill ourselves for dollars when all we should want to know is the...

Kathy Fagan Spring’s go-go green’s flung over for harvest season’s 70s kitchen colors just in time. Cultivated thornless For the burbs, honey locusts heap their leaves up Like gold pieces for the common folk, a school Of minnows the cat might dream of, stretching, Flexing his paws, all Japanese maple & symmetrical Velvet. Worker worm made silk of me, too. Drank me black With plenty of sugar. I’ll soon be copper flashing...

Kathy Fagan Year 33 of Agnus Dei, Zac the tax man shimmies up to better see the Christ Parade: Parable Mirabilis, Parabola Miraculous. I knew the stories: the blind sighted, the dead alive, the cult of boys all soon-to-be-snoring at the soon-gored side. So I say: Little man, it is easier for a hundred needles to dance on the head of an angel than for a camel to enter the kingdom of God on the back of a tiny tax collector. Jesus,...

Jim Tolan Among the pines in summer, a fragrance before the rain At nightfall, a silence between the boughs. Even the insects of the high branches are without a sound. We are only partly dressed as wind begins to stir the grass around our knees. Where is my left shoe? How far are we from home? Jim Tolan is author of Red Walls (Dos Madres Press). His poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Atlanta Review, Fairy Tale...

Ely Shipley Beach sand and ocean blossom at high tide. We claw the cliff toward our hotel drunk. We tear off clothes. Our skin soaked with night. Squares of light from windows frame face, thigh, elbow. Stars seep in. Still as sun dial, the room shadows around me. My eyes close. A bud retracts color. Silhouettes of bird of paradise dip like oil rigs beyond blinds. Sky eaten. Freeway headlights stream walls and sheets we huddle...

Ely Shipley a movie unfolding from my ceiling, silent except the soundtrack a chirp. Black and white except the giant yellow blossom where the ceiling bleeds during storms. A kind of corsage a god brings. It hovers. A lamp, perched bird, eye of moon keeping watch. We undress beneath warm breath we blow against each other’s bodies. Feel hills sliding down. Great drifts of snow melt in our wake. Find ourselves at the center of a...