Ely Shipley I wanted to come back but the world didn’t want me. Your face was a blank bullet that still terrifies a blanket that hides a face erased page sheet we might have slept beneath without touching. Before I died, I cradled an infant. I sang it lull-a-byes. Aren’t all songs? But it kept crying. Its face frightened me, a fevered balloon of blood about to burst. I swaddled it tighter, rocked it in my arms. I began to...

Denise Duhamel I remember him as always having a tan, this guy I longed for in high school, whose affections I misunderstood, who became my good friend only to tell me how he was in love with Sally. How could he make her like him? He stood against a brick wall, smoking, as I gave him advice— good advice, as it never occurred to me to undermine his efforts. (But now, in this dream, he wants me, as though he was mistaken all those years...

Denise Duhamel It’s the first sunny day after weeks of rain so the line for the car wash is twenty-six deep. But I wait anyway, reading a book in my lap, looking up after every sentence or so to see if I can move, if there is progress. I’m number twelve when a Lexus SUV barges into the little space between the Toyota Corolla in front and me. I lean into the horn, all my sunny goodwill gone, roll down my window and shriek, “What’s...

Marion Brown You blue-eyed the camera and calculated quantities to bake. You wanted berries for muffins or a blue cake. Scouring the bright field, you leaned on your husband, sky for a shawl. (How thin you had grown; how keenly you felt cold.) I made too much of weather, so I missed the cloud break, you in the field, fingers ripe. While you plucked berries, pure blue slipped over your head. Blue has an end. A storm came and...

Lori Lamothe A hawk glides in on the music of lawnmowers. The light’s a sieve, darkness sifts down. The wingtips of the hawk brush the grass and in a single bound its shadow soars over the ghosts of television sets haunting identical houses. The wingspan of the hawk cuts a path through the air and disappears behind night’s door. The sky is webbed with echoes— ancient currents that cross and recross the silence. It is a map...

Lori Lamothe Substitutions so glib you hardly notice them that’s what you’re looking for. If you can find all fourteen before the hourglass inverts and ketchup splatters across the chests of twin cowboys you’ll win an all expense paid trip to fluorescence. Not a lasso but a golden ring. Not boots but cross-trainers. Only ten more and you’ll be showered with pastel, piped-in music, rock stars selling straight jackets. Not a...

Patrick Cook “…a calm darkens among water lights.” Anchored, the ship strains, turns slowly. Light-worms shimmy, writing a message only fish can read. On the fantail I watch as dock lights focus to pinpoints, harbor finally smooth. Parachute flare behind Monkey Mountain burns white, winks out. Another rises, blooms, begins its fall. Jagged rocks at harbor mouth ghostly in starlight. I’d sail through them on a raft if it were...

Gregg Shotwell all the evidence is in and it’s mounting the horse of mourning as the wind covers the mirrors and clouds the senses with whispers pinned to pine needles which sing September is a time to remember we leave nothing behind but seeds Gregg Shotwell is the author of Autoworkers Under the Gun. His poem “I am the Rouge” won the Partisan Press Working People’s Poetry Prize in 2011. Partisan Press published...

Ben reviews "The Wanted," the newly released first collection of poems by Brooklyn's Michael Tyrell.

Being asked to feature at a poetry reading is such validation and so much fun I accept without checking the calendar first. Shame on me.