Ron Antonucci The humid shadow of nightfall blankets the grass as the stem of the daffodil bows to the weight of the dark: yellow as butter, its perfumed head bends to the ground as in prayer, as if to baptize its petals in the slow-coming dawn, as if the promise to stand anew were not as vaporous as the dew. Ron Antonucci is a librarian and book critic whose reviews and articles have appeared in dozens of magazines and newspapers....

Ron Antonucci (The Old Guitarist, 1903) Why viejo, bow your head to the morning of the century? Your age? the Age? The sad crush of the hand-hewn past caught in the racket rush of a new Now proclaimed by the turn of a calendar’s page? Each stroke of the brush colors your music with a hint of rose, yet still your song plays more blue than La vie, more grim than any dream dulled by absinthe or the clutter of the scraps of Le jou… (Even...

Dennis Mahagin In a parallel universe, expanding not so very fast, Robert Frost is petrified of mowing his own grass, owing to certain seasonal allergies, and the fidelity of blades making a fragrance he longed to know, and chew on every moment turning ceaselessly into the past. Dennis Mahagin is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. His work has appeared in magazines such as 42opus, Exquisite Corpse, Night Train, Juked, Stirring, 3...

Daniel Schwarz “You’re interrupting my radio,” she said, as I fell into my easy chair, turned on TV, seeking respite from noise in images. Divorce: Ours more like slow tearing of limb than surgical amputation, more drifting apart than cataclysm. Was it ever passionate attraction that tightens chest, magnetizes eyes? Rather, more moving together gradually to soothe needs, as if burying head under comforter on blustery dark...

Luke Hollis The nineteen-fifties number counters clacked as I waited for my father in the Fairmont Co-op. The heater blasted, and the man behind the counter lifted his Mycogen hat to wipe a stubble of sweat. Out of the window, I glanced at my father, wicking streams of light off our windshield with a squeegee. He glowed under the streetlights, his arm flashing like a low flame straining to stay lit in the gusts. Impatient, I kicked at...

Steve Fellner has published two books of poetry, Blind Date with Cavafy and The Weary World Rejoices. They could be a singular collection under the latter title. From the very opening Fellner announces his subject and his approach...

klipschutz music by Chuck Prophet Granted, he was stranger than the lot of us. I walked his dizzy plank once in Manhattan. Tell me now can I find peace here underneath This crazy quilt of pipe and restful waste, Not giving a tinker’s dam for a skyline view, Designing my dream house one fever-night at a time? klipschutz is a poet living in San Francisco. His poems have appeared in venues ranging from Poetry (of Chicago) to FUCK!...

Poet Bruce Snider talks about the experiences that shaped his prize-winning collection "Paradise, Indiana."

Simon Perchik You can tell by the curtain how the play will end, this sill dusted word for word till your ear slides along the feathers and you hear a door open the way between the passenger’s side and just one wing ...

Lisa Sewell Because his screech is melody and we are all in jeopardy and all have golden toadsongs semaphoring in our throats. Because the golden toad teaches us to flirt with day-Glo explosive breeding excess and to only emerge between the dry and the wet— though in the end all his flaxen chorusing could bring no darker gravid female to climb, to clutch and hang upon and his protective skin was also lung and kidney a failed-canary...