FALL 2023

House
​BY ELLIE ATTISANI

​Come along now
and march through this doorway
absorb the scent that wafts across this air
allow your eyes to adjust to my these lights
don’t be surprised

killers dream of love, my father dreamed of guns
​BY GIDEON ELLANT REITER

when the killer comes crying
toxic cinnabar staining
knuckles turned white from
cleaving to the hilt of the
knife not in malice but

You Always Have Candy in Your Pocket
​BY SARU POTTURI 

because you're an older brother, been one since you were three
because you know what cheers a ten-year-old up, and because
you know you've got to distribute them equally

​​[ ] of desire
​BY BELLA JACOBS

How can sappho not 
            suffocate
Between [        ]  silences we revere like sonnets. 

ENGLISH CLASS KICK MY ASS
BY SARU POTTURI

These are disorienting places. Here it is,
The fabled English class, the one they warned you about.
The one where you are a sore thumb, a sour clementine,
Tangerine, sitting here in your metaphorical lingerie
They'll hose us down today, but we're all see-through anyway.

delilah, on a brown couch in the evening
​BY AANJI SIN

I only think about you now in the shower,
on mornings when I didn’t sleep well
but I’ll pay you back for that time in
quarters, like we used to,
when I would eye the fishbone curve of your hip
​and the hair in your bathroom sink.

to roost
BY AANJI SIN

i love you because that is what it means to be good.
take things apart and put them back together
—call it invention.
no matter. all the cities feel like me anyways.
​

fire&fever
BY ELLARA RADHA

this is how 
           i burn you out of my 
           body, fire & fever.

my limbs tremble now with
           chill and
sting eats at my chest 
           & yet
           still this body is still stronger
than you will ever be. 
​

​I wandered the desert for forty years and all I got was this lousy t-shirtI wandered the desert for forty years and all I got was this lousy t-shirt
​​BY NIKKI SMITH​​

        But that was then. Now it is only
the highway thundering under us two chapped-lipped pilgrims,

Chronicles of Transspace Fleet #128x
BY NIKKI SMITH

I. 
“Nature held me close and seemed to find no fault with
             me.” - Leslie Feinberg 
​
So finally they eradicated nature, too. 

Posto Santo
BY EMILIO N. BANKIER

​Beyond the white caps of the northern mountains 
near the foothills where the cows and the brooks 
gargle and run down into the ricefields, 
the heat will hit you like a bull, trample over you and drag you 
to a place long forgotten and long rotten 
like the wrinkled, molding fruit in the tabletop bowl.

FALL 2022

Mannequins of Ourselves
​BY VERA CALDWELL

​I was like, I wanted 
to say that I swallowed, 
so I did, she says; 
the power lines have fallen 
down on the sidewalk,
​ 

Saints on the Shore
BY R.M. CORBIN

a soft orange mold has grown round the center 
of things. 
it’s the color of tang, like too-wet sand – gives 
way at a paper towel stroke and holds fast at a 
fist. 

Red-Eye
BY ALLY STALLINGS

​Today, I think I will become a runaway train.
My departure: early Tuesday (long before you wake).
A bleary-footed conductor will scarce miss the tracks,
lurching the distance, escaping, from my stubborn dispatch.

Autumn Notes
BY ADAM OSMAN-KRINSKY

​When the air tightens around my ears
And grabs the back of my throat
After running, I crunch and itch
My way out of linen and into wool
And out of ice and into steam.
​

A Courtier's Lament
BY GEM STERN

​A Courtier's LamentA Courtier's LamentA Courtier's LamentTidal-eyed the hidey squire woke and sighed
and through the ferrous ferrocyanide (replacing azurite)
crawled from the powder in the permafrost of his throat
to the still sleeping second squire
who found his pleasure in a dream of ancient works,
oxide emanations, vibrations of a silent song that tripped
and fell as snow in the sensation of lines, sonatas, strings of light
light to touch; almost nothing, these symbols.

​

Apples and Oranges
BY ADAM OSMAN-KRINSKY

​I remember standing next to you as you lept
To the third bar on the monkey bars 
And swung gracefully across while I stood
In awe.
​

Post-Haircut, Written in Twin Cinema
​BY KATIE WANG

my old self is returning                                 
dark roots spilling from sunburnt scalp     
flattening into the yellowing pink                
ends, split into two 
​

Musings from a seaside window
BY CLARA MEYERS

I open the door to a pond in the living room.
Brown like the feet of the stained antique chair 
Whose legs it gathers around.

The Inhabitants; The Players
BY ALLY STALLINGS

​The feathered thing wakes from its post in the rafters,
and glibs slick down the walls to my feet.
It lurches on beside me in silent laughter as I make my rounds,
walk the halls, check the locks, off with the switches, shut the blinds,
Me and the lights, we are heaving together in time – like a family.
​

little friend 
BY SAGE KELLER

awakened by the morning whispers 
you are but an infinitesimal insect,
unyielding nonetheless 

being of earth
chirrup-willed

come home with me! 
sip from my glass with me
do as i do

i seek a companion 
to bear witness to my foolishness

​

​

Hometown Obituary
BY JEREMY MARTIN

Banged the lift seats one final time, flipped ‘em all up except for one
As he’d done for
60 years. A simple life 
of tidbits picked up at the breakfast counter,
day old copies of USA Today, conversations with
thousands of strangers turned friends
on the long ride up the hill.
​

first kiss
BY SASHA LEONARD

after it rains
the clouds sigh
a breath of relief 
that travels through 
bitter greyness--
subtlety squeezed of 
every drop of imagined 
color, that of which 
leaves the eyes stinging 
with an ancient memory 

Two Poets Should Never Be in Love
BY SARU POTTURI

Two Poets Should Never Be in LoveI fell asleep with my sweater still on, under the weight of my comforter.
When I woke up I was flushed with warmth, eyes crusted over
Pillow-indentations crisscrossing across my face like scars
From a particularly vicious cat. Your cat’s not vicious, though.
She mostly just doesn’t care, minds her own business
Slinks off by herself while you and I stand on your balcony
Together, me smoking, you silently hating that I smoke.

​

baby in exodus
​BY MICAH BUCHMAN

when i’m oranged up on the Lord’s plate i kiss the hamsa i pray for a revolution i pray for a lover i pray for a real lover i mean i pray for a crane to rip away a piece of my hip and i pace like my virgo moon told me to 
i only wear socks my wanted bathes in rose-dust my quanta arches its back in new mexico and a florist doesn’t know what to do with what i’ve laid out in front of him a month of fertility ends with a fist of red onion in my mouth and i bite down like i love it

​

insectual revolution in alphabetical order 
​BY MICAH BUCHMAN
​

apartments in new york city r never empty    six legged corpses burst from veiny walls and we
bury them under tissue gravestones. like goodbye engraved into
clustered cluster figs – a wasp’s
dirty graveyard    but WASPs sting    don’t trust them but don’t
ever DEET them bc they say you run the markets but they have the deets        building
factories where perspiring immigrants cryogenic cockroaches into
giant lollipops       
​

Autopsia
BY NELIA PERRY

You silently watch your feet pitter pattering against the edge 
of the sofa hovering slightly above the scratchy carpeted floors 
and you count the strands of dark thread wound up in the lighter stained yarn. You hear the lady in the big chair say something but your mind is lost 
in imagining the itch of the floor against your small body. 
You wish you could take off your shoes and rub your toes against it 
but the lady asks you again about your temper in school.

​

---

SPRING 2022

If Moby Dick Was A Woman
​BY CYNTHIA LI

The sea swells open. The ship capsizes, finally, all her wood splintering. All people drown eventually, the water coming to claim what’s hers: she widens her maw, and drinks.
​

Variation on a Theme by Mary Oliver
​BY LILLIAN AFF

I caught a lot of bugs back then, or, 
what I thought were bugs—roly polies,
the only terrestrial crustaceans
adapted to live on land alone
​

The Lady of Situations
BY JULIETTE JEFFERS

Self-mythologized in yellow,
she turns her face up 
towards you 
on the escalator. 
​​

Variations on a Theme: Hikoboshi and the House of Mirrors
BY SARU POTTURI

Rode a stallion once in my life
A rich father's attempt at reconnecting with his son.
But the fault never lay with him--
I never wanted to be known.
​

The Astronomy of Midnight's Orphan
BY SASHA LEONARD

a staggering sound echoes
​in this abyss—shaded ebony
by untold lifetimes,
​

witness
BY CECELIA BLUM

the backwards scroll of a camera roll 
a younger me
pretty like a girl 
who just got pretty 
​​

Rapture Waiting Room
BY SIMONE FLOURNOY

A symptom of the century 
Big blanks and scrapped plans 
Someone forgot to check the brakes and 
​

A Happy Poem
BY MUSTAJAB FARRUKH

I’ve decided this is going to be a happy poem
No more talk of this grief that makes my bones too heavy to move
​

I'll Meet You at the Bottom
​BY MUSTAJAB FARRUKH

A dead fish floats 
So does the human body. 
(But) not before 
Water gushes down the bronchial pathways
​

convenient
BY CECELIA BLUM

above the paperwhite expanse
one million incandescent suns
are in position
​

hourglass
​BY ISABEL LI

 years spent
chasing gravity,
unearthing a wormhole
upon which your footprints
dissolved
into 
vertigo: 
​

Watermelon Seed
BY NECDET CANIM

Where did I put my mind after cleaning everything
and beginning to grow a watermelon seed in it? 
​​

Awakenings
BY ADAM OSMAN-KRISKY

Sweat dripping like a broken faucet
Cleansing my breath... ​

shades of green
​BY LILLIAN AFF

the river mouth in Jenner
is shimmering like a youthful steelhead
yanked from the water on a fishing line
and I am following the river down
highway 1 through the cradle of Kashia
​

Rememories
​BY DEREK TALBOTT

I rise and tread amid sweet lilacs through the shades of dawn
Towards the cypress trees around these pebble paths
And from their shaking leaves my lungs pretend to extract
The thousand dreams the morning sun has vaporized. 
​​​

 On Forgiveness and Youth 
BY JULIETTE JEFFERS

Most things of this nature 
resolve in boiling water, 
the wool around your fingers, 
twisting in soap and dirt. 
​​

another 
​BY ISABEL LI

solitude: it lingers on my tongue
              like an insipid,
indigestible pill, waiting to lurch
              into my throat,
​

Lake Country
BY FREY LEMONHOLM

I’d catch an unmistakable urge to roll, laying in the grass, mind in the late afternoon clouds migrating always in the direction of their shadows, shadows on the left side looking south, I share the late afternoon’s suspicion, a trick had been played, the clouds, blown by the wind off the plain.

Russian River
BY LILLIAN AFF

​I lay in the daytime lantern
rocks and branches and bugs
poke into my back
the book is the lampshade
I look for someone to return to
in those pages of her
I look up: no one is around
​

03:12
BY LIBBY HARRIS

Vertical movement, jade lustre,
The hummingbird presents itself.
​

Prescription Woolgathering
BY SIMONE FLOURNOY

Mortar and pestle memories 
The past milled into dust 
Kept in a capsule 
Consumed 
​​

The Woman
BY ROSSANA LEAL

She walked along the edge of the river
crying and screaming frantically in vain.
Shedding tears of sorrow and silver
for she was the cause of her pain.
​

affirmations
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY

You need to eat healthy. Go to the grocery store and buy some fish, ask the fishmonger which fillet contains the most mercury to poison your perky sister-in-law at the dinner table.
​​

Stats for Non-Majors
​BY KENDALL PACKMAN

There are over one million nonbinary adults currently living in the United States. 
                        Honestly?
                                     That was more than I thought.
​

bellyache
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY

I have never been grateful for you and my body knows it. So does my
mother when she asks what are those scratches on your belly. I correct
her, bellies are for little girls with posed fat rolls, stomachs are for big
girls who age in an eternal culture. ​

Song of What Isn't
BY PATRICK LEWIS

How long I have spent in wordless thought
in search of words for what is not
I care not to know and so know not. 
I think each unthawed thought of the past
has come to be lost
​

Daily Contortions
BY JULIETTE JEFFERS​

Lying in bed, flattening myself, violently with clenched teeth,
delicate resistance to the lump in my throat, removed each day
with sheer will, and the reward of butter 
dissolving on my tongue. 
​​

Fruitless
BY JEREMY MARTIN

There’s an icicle garden in my front yard.
Stalactites become stalagmites. I pluck them 
from rooftops of houses with the lights off,
​

Rodin
BY KENDALL PACKMAN

Pedestals of weathered marble 
stained 
with rain
and the tell-tale sign of birds. 
​​

mousetraps
​BY JESSICA WANG

lost in the thicket of insincerities, insanity
the dried-up days they cast away
wait for
​

Peach
BY AIDAN TRULOVE

Poetry is biting into a raw peach.
Sometimes, it’s over sweet and gooey,
So ripe and pretty and perfumed
That it’s rotted from the inside out.

Morning II
​BY LIBBY HARRIS

Cheek turned, hot tea spills – 
​Your hair wet, gazing, contact – 
Past, you don’t know half.
​

An Unsettling Image
​BY ALEAH HAYES

"Are you ready?"                 "Yes." 

​I focused on her eyes.
Her green irises turned as brown as mine.
​

Her Calloused Fingers
​BY SMT

Her calloused fingers carefully uncover 
rice dumplings filled with care stacked  
in little bamboo boxes with wooden handles that
splinter and are hard to handle her black bangs
often fall into her face where sweat drips and falls
​

Stories
BY JOSIE MARRINER

I read your poetry like it will rewrite itself backwards. 
​​

Un-thinking 
BY JAYDA

I’m trying to think on you
                      like I do Tennessee.
​

Morning I
BY LIBBY HARRIS

My heart at your feet.
Fallen pines, dragons sleeping.
Clouds rush on – I, too.
​

Glazed
BY CHRISTIAN ANASTOS

Lips curled at the corners, 
I’ve something moronic to say. 
​​

On Tea
BY ADAM OSMAN-KRISKY

How can you taste a routine?
Centuries of waking up,
Millenia of water boiling, tasting
Leaves us becoming human.

---

FALL 2021

Pinky
BY MADISON YARDUMIAN

Words 
drizzle over the palm trees 
like a smile
Pinky orange trickling
onto treetops
​

marketplace
​BY ISA CAYETANO

bone fragments
shards of glass
sea but stained
red, it's the third rarest color
of sea glass in the world...
​

In windows
BY ANNA PREWITT

At night,
the incomprehensible le pathos of stranger's headlights
Maybe they trace the outline of your face, light the outside of stranger's lives and maybe they light the boundaries of your own...
​

Haunt Me
BY AJ JOLISH

I hope you don't mind that I submitted the poem I wrote about your death to a literary magazine.
I hope you don't mind that I'll do it again, because I'm doing it again, and I wouldn't even listen to you...
​

said the child
​BY SASHA LEONARD

in awe, I stare at black silhouettes bathed in a pale, yellow haze,
dust of an unfamiliar scent, stinging and brazen,
                                              &silence
​

empyrean meditation
​BY THEODORA HELGASON

this supernal creation can be found in the belly
of my breath. even pluto (you are still planet
to me!) is here in abundance. pocket-sized and
​

Love for a Blueberry
​BY KATIE WANG

The girl enters the garden and promptly seeks out her
closest parallel. Her cherubic compatriot floats in indigo
clusters, among crinkled leaves that conversed with
lukewarm drafts;
​

Against Homesickness - The Color Yellow
BY ADAM OSMAN-KRINSKY

I two there was a wildfire today.
I didn't see it because,
It wasn't mine to see.
​

THINGS YOU'RE NOT ALLOWED TO LOOK AT
BY NICOLE SMITH

A solar eclipse. A once-in-a-lifetime event.
Your mother's yearbook photo. The mirror
in a haunted house. That envelope.
​

Hiraeth for the Highlands
BY SIMONE FLOURNOY

I remember Caledonia's shouting breath
Scarlet kisses across my face
Every bit of my surroundings
​

saltwater cherry cola
BY SUNNY JEONG-EIMER

1
on hot days like this, we, stock, pile into the backseat of the Prius and let the faux leather scald stick slick to the insides of our knees.
​

A poet's religion
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY

Every time I start a poem, I have an anxiety attack. Because what
if god decides he is tired of funding my poetic pilgrimage and cuts me off.
​

Prelude to Death
BY DEREK TALBOTT

Drunk with melancholy
and the smoke of oblivion,
I sit against the bed
to watch your face emerge in the mirror
broken, tainted,
​sick of you.

Scientific Commentary On Coffee
BY VALERIE BRAYLOVSKIY

I am writing this in a coffee shop,
drinking a cup of coffee, struggling to
begin my personal critique on our
foolish obsession...
​

heliocentrism
​BY ISA CAYETANO

all coke gave me was a hangover. i prefer dissociatives to stimulants. but i imagine for most, the latter's effect is akin to that of your gaze on my tangled, spark-burnt circuiting...
​

i don't like to admit it
BY ISA CAYETANO

but I can only breathe if it burns.

Abuela can't sleep with the fan on
and every ten minutes she yells over the bookshelves...

The Snake
​BY EVA MOLINA

written at the LA River

The grasses are combing the river.
​I sit on the concrete slope from which nothing grows,
​

American Airlines
​BY MADISON YARDUMIAN

buildings exist
independent of end

I breathe in
a skyline of squares
While California Breaks
​

Fire Season
BY SIMONE FLOURNOY

I am burned and built
and burned again
An orbit of fires
The venerated touch of flame to foliage
​

---

SPRING 2021

beleaguered by sickness 
​BY IPIFUS IPIFIO

/ beleaguered by sickness
​I resurrect for a moment
if only for one moment
to smell the light
see the scent
touch my sensibility

Cybersex
​BY SAM BOVARD

The neighbor’s Ring camera
Observes my body through the window.
I notice it after a shower, towel dropped,
Parts exposed. A perversion,
An invasion; a cyber-voyeur,
​

Scallion Pancakes
BY ALBANY BLACKBURN

I work the dough beneath my hands, 
familiarly. I am making myself dinner tonight.
​

On Correcting Pronouns Over Zoom
BY KENDALL PACKMAN

The sound cut out.
                   what did he say?
         //***// will hear more about this.
NoNoNonoNononoNonoNo
​

Bodies Like Mine in the Louvre
BY ANDIE SHERIDAN

There will be glory built in wide, dirty strokes on my canvas. Stretching cotton around the rigid wooden pectorals
​

After the Apocalypse, I Live in a Cabin in the Woods
BY SOPHIA CHANIN

One
In the cold morning dark I split wood
with the axe you taught me to use.
I will use it to light a fire, cook my oats
​

the electronic dictionary
​BY SARU POTTURI

utopias
uto-pious
uto-pieces
​uterine people
​

Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)
​BY SAM BOVARD

i.
Let me remember that all I am is imagined.
175 pounds of cellophane-wrapped candies sit in a corner like the man they are meant to replace
​

Whirlwind
BY ALBANY BLACKBURN

​Last summer, you broke a man’s heart,
and you broke the man too.
The skies turned a sickly green,
​

On the Verge of Graduation
BY ALISSA MARTINEZ

I' worried I broke my brain for nothing--
that the hollow space will never be filled,
nothing to reap in this soil I've long tilled

Cosmos Chemos
​BY THEODORA HELGASON

You invited the universe into your brownstone, the order and
Harmony of these cosmos circling your garden
​

Parfum
BY MIMI THOMPSON

Fumigators were the 16th-century version of salespeople on Valentines Day.
The role came from the Latin fumus, to smoke,
and pleasant-smelling smokes
​

a remedy
​BY SARU POTTURI

i haven't felt too well today.
its not my fault:
it never is.
​

​Care Crawls Down the Sky
​BY ANDIE SHERIDAN

I cannot be home where I am. I belong with the viscous sun. Swollen open
​

Retrans My Body
​BY ANDIE SHERIDAN

If I were to retrain my body, I would un-fondant the hills of my stomach. (Let's be real, a knife would be involved.) I would know what wisteria looked like

American Crown
BY THEODORA HELGASON

oh, you must feel majesty, in your coronacastle 
touchlessly transmitting your spell to me. who are you, 
​

From a Distance
​BY NATHANIEL BRASWELL

At times, staring out of a dirty window is like scorning at heaven.
Every night, I watch as low-hanging canopies of crowning amber
​

PRIMORDIAL
BY LAYLA ELQUTAMI

In desperation, a schoolboy plucks the wallet from a vendor’s pocket--
men lower their heads in prayer beyond the wall--

Stillness, part 2
BY LILY ROSS

The distance between 
us swims inside of 
itself, sighs bathwater 
onto the edges of
​

thinking in the aftershock
​BY ALISSA MARTINEZ

i've been the home wrecker the incoming storm
I don't know how many times my name has
passed through a spiteful wife's lips like a curse
​

Scopophilia
​BY JULIETTE JEFFERS

Tell me your dreams. I’m hardly ever bored by
Nineteen fifties perversions. Rocky river
beds and Hudson eerily caress my hair
​

From my windowsill on Jupiter
​BY MIMI THOMPSON

It rains diamonds here and still,
the real estate market is barren.
A few years ago, a red tornado raged through the town,
​

Lamplights
BY CYNTHIA LI

Insects
wear exoskeletons:
the infrastructure of their bodies in the air
​

---

FALL 2020

Laughter
BY ​PATRICK LEWIS

I'm picking the pieces of a broken mirror
​and scouring the bloodier corners of my room
...

Us Included
BY SOPHIA CLINE

You can ask us now
What you should do
But we cannot give the answer you want...

journey
BY LILLIAN AFF

there's great tranquility in traversing a

great...

​Hunger Below the World
​BY SOPHIA CHANIN

At the bottom of the canyon I dream of flowers,
I dream of yellow-studded daisies and​...
​
​

​Closet Camouflage
BY ETHAN WIDLANSKY

I put the straight jacket on inside-out,
holding my selves together.
You look back...

​

Purples in the sky
​ BY LILY ROSS

​The
mosquitoes
lick my hairy
legs with their...

​

i must, however, write
BY SARU POTTURI

these keys, those keys, press into the hardened
flesh of my fingers, rough from metal string and...

This Kingdom
BY MIMI THOMPSON

A shooting star sprinkles cocaine above the ravine where a sack lies.
The wind rustles an afternoon by while I am tightened in dainty lace​...
​

Stained Glass
​BY VICTORIA GOSSUM

TW: self-harm

there is suffering
sunken into each frail wall of his aching
house...​
​

Goat Gala!
BY SARU POTTURI

Hooked nose, broken back
The hag cuts up candy apples with a tack
​Gossip rag, and talking smack...

​

My first year of college I wasn't going home for Thanksgiving instead
BY ADDISON KAY

My first year of college I wasn't going home for Thanksgiving instead
...

​mind of smoke
BY TALYA KALTMAN-KRON

mind like the midnight sky 
thoughts shout out no sound surfaces 
eyes dry, sleeplessness reeks from the room...

Anniversary
BY TALIA R. IVRY

How troubling it is
That the leaves, scattering so...
​
​
​

Forgiveness is a hell of a drug
BY ADDISON KAY

Forgiveness is a hell of a drug

I'm too thin so the river runs icy...
​

relapse
BY ALISSA MARTINEZ

TW: self-harm

words have started to flow again
from unseemly places, forgotten corners
ones i hoped to abandon years ago
but now they’ve returned to focus...
​

i want to count time in the white black holes of my basketball
BY LILY ROSS

when my
mom talks
loudly
...

Sanctuary (On Revolution)
BY SARU POTTURI

Spurn me, and I will spur thee;
Smirch me, Besmirch me, unchurch me...

---

SPRING 2020

Venn Diagram
BY MIRABELLA MILLER

I habitually arrange my hoop earrings in a Venn diagram
...

​

Sunday Poem
BY TALIA R. IVRY

Some Sundays slog by alongside
the road, clogged up with dread.
So dreadfully commonplace, that...
​
​

lineage
BY NATASHA VHUGEN

at the tip of the day, the moon was
almost full, just a sliver shy. silver
sliver. i picked blood from my ear...
​

Broca's Area
​BY LILLIAN AFF

is, and, the, but
stroke of bad luck...
​

Anthropophagi
BY LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

I felt my head - with wings of silk
From off my shoulders fly
It chirped - but once - before the Dusk...

Allergy Season
BY SAM BOVARD

ions of emotion posit themselves in my body
clogging my sinuses
creeping down my throat
​...

call me I was looking at a car on fire
​BY SCHUYLER MITCHELL 

call it fiction then lean in and give 
me the sweetness of your breath, and
I will unfold...
​

Body Poem
BY SAM BOVARD

I peel my blackened toenail 
Back and
It opens like an oyster...
​

This is Poetry
BY LILY ROSS

This is
​Poetry.
​

Last Lament of a SoundCloud Artist
​BY LUCAS CUNNINGHAM

Upon my waist a Gucci belt
Upon my hips a Glock
And likewise on my RAFs...

view
BY NATASHA VHUGEN

if you’re looking hard enough,
you’ll see the yellow, the reckless
sunshine of...​
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alphabet soup
​​BY EMILY LU GAO

​today my mama called me her zìdiǎn
and it made me realize how
words have always bloomed from me...
​
​

King's Speech
​BY BRYNN PARKINSON

How do I explain
in the most playground fashion...
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At The End Of The Day
BY SCHUYLER MITCHELL

She reaches into the weary sky            
Plucks clouds like figs
And rolls them, supple..​.

---

FALL 2019

Growing Up
​BY ELEANOR FURNESS​

Family gatherings include
         Swallowed by comments like
                   Baby shrimp which...
​

A Hymn
BY MADISON YARDUMIAN

Fragrance drifts
through the air
like worship...

A Spell for the Living
BY EMMA DUGGLEBY

Sip blood like honey
from the wells of deer teeth,
age stained into streaks...
​

Boggy
BY JAMARQUISE HUSTON

Look, o’er the fog, 
Salvation is a slog, 
Soft, we shall, we will...​

Grocery Store
BY ELEANOR FURNESS

I'm up next in line at the grocery store
I start laying down my items on the small conveyor belt...
​

In Memory of Paul Ehrenfest
BY J.J. SHANKAR

Time is a blanket dragged through grass
smeared with ever-longer streaks...

---

SPRING 2019

Signpost
BY TIFFANY MI

When folks drive past they read, COUNTY LINE.
Sometimes they read,         CITY LIMIT.
Other times,                KEEP OUT.
​

I Would
BY TALIA R. IVRY

If I could reach inside my chest
and part the pinkish pulp within,
I’d crack pale arcs and toss aside...
​

The Moon
BY ALEXANDRA FISCHER

​You and Earth
have been best friends
for billions of years...
​

​

Lemon Tree
BY CHAELEE DALTON

Out behind your house
there is a lemon tree. It sags
with yellow bulbs. I think of the tree...
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the airplane didn’t crash but she landed in a graveyard anyway
BY ANDIE SHERIDAN

the air draws her  
in as she was born...
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Noise
BY COLIN ADAMS

​Restaurants are funny places...

Christina's World
BY AYA BURTON

What makes a body
this tired, this removed...
​

​

Reclaimed Witch
BY ADDISON KAY

When she talks to plants, cottonwoods to succulents,
their fibrous stereocilia relax. She...
​

Gut Flora
BY SELENA SPIER

Stars in their bedsheets struggle to breathe.
My dreams have been keeping me awake.
Down the stairs and through the hall...

there will come a time
BY EMILY DIAMOND

sometimes
there is nothing you can do to stop it
it stands there in the doorway...
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​

On re-tethering
BY CHARLOTTE MORRISSEY

Slaughterhouse in an earthquake,
The threads grow too weak to cage the flesh.
Carcasses come untethered, uncorked...

Bookmarking the Hate
BY ELENA DYPIANGCO

As I went in for the killshot I decided instead to go in for a nightcap...

2/23 Haiku
BY HANNAH ORRAHOOD

Today I am clothed 
In conversation starters
And a bit of hope
​
​

Event
BY J.J.SHANKAR

The pigeon ate the candle.
The candles tipped over
and caused the tip jar to hit the floor...
​

​(an) on (ymo) us
BY CHAELEE DALTON

“if you could write to any historical figure who would you write to?”
                                “I would rather write to...
​
​

WORK MAN SHIP
BY CHAELEE DALTON

bits become
                        your reality
                                               removed and...
​​

Objects in Mirror
BY AYA BURTON

Something quiet now
             parked car in the cul-de-sac
metal glinting silver in the cold...

---

FALL 2018

smallness or starness
BY .jhh

​coming out of a part of my own life 
like taking off a tight shirt:
too happy breathing to lament it...
​
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The Mind of a Writer
BY ALICE GIUFFREDI

Devotion.
​From the early 13th century, old French
Devocion, meaning "devotion, piety" ...
​
​

House Dress Day
BY ANNA MITCHELL

I call it House Dress Day because today
I wear a house dress
and I think of all the...
​

The wood shed
BY ELLA BOYD

for a minute, he thinks, this is it,
the start of a conversation with God, or something

​

emergencies
BY JAY SCOTT

maybe black baby
skin
at age ten...
​

America
BY ELLA BOYD

Our malls scream we sell heaven--cutting edge, as new and
expensive as your last body...

​

Hometown
BY MADISON YARDUMIAN

Dear Hometown,
 
I started writing this...
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In a bowl of seize yeux
BY TRINITY CHAPA

I encounter
a militia of cynics
who hate...
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Elegy
BY CARMIN SHERLOCK

Father, tell me about the taste of sweet corn.
Tell me about the sky in 1999, on the pier, at the lake...
​

Incense
BY MALCOLM YEARY

Lazy relentless chaos flows from the origin.
Their mysterious beginnings release, 
Rising rivers from falling bits of time...
​

Don't speak to me of iridescence
BY copper rain

Don’t speak to me of iridescence
When talking of the sea
You and I both know it’s not...
​

Tumbling blues
BY .jhh

two blue birds tumbled
                          through the bright sun-thickened breeze...
​

"@" lymnal #2
BY .jhh

"isn't this pretty & calming & relaxing"
mother asks
                                         father & 2 girls don't...
​

The City
BY CASEY GOODWIN

All the good boys carry empty little coffins
As they walk across the town...
​

Wilting
BY COLIN ADAMS

He must have felt like a flower in a forest of clothes,
surrounded by peacoats, jackets, ties, belts...
​

Tender
BY ALISSA MARTINEZ

my momma warned me about this
told me to quit the nicotine boys
never let them rot my godly lungs...
​

A Generation
BY VIVIENNE SHI

A carpenter builds scaffoldings around
A piece of handwriting. He waits patiently 
Until rosemary, lavender and garlic sprout...
​

Burnout
BY NHI PHAN

a candle and i
feverish, mad flames flicking atop
as the fire of our ire burns...
​

The Garden
BY AYA BURTON

This is what I have to give you:
two blistered hands and a garden undone.
Japanese beetles with soft blue shells...
​

The Orange Tree
BY MALCOLM YEARY

A feeling of knowing, without knowing why,
Drops down from flowers
And hangs from fragrant skies...
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Thinking on a Summer Day
BY PASKALINA BOURBON

The sun reaches down an arm of light--
an octopus
beating the earth from its celestial cave...
​

Milk Teeth and Dentures
BY VIBHA ROHILLA

It popped out of my mouth
like a jagged pearl from an oyster, 
into the palm of my hand. Shredder...
​

The Odyssey
BY e.feleke

​my quiet confidence,
has turned into a quiet sense of apathy and consequence...
​

Animating the corpus
BY TRINITY CHAPA

the meat of my heart says no.
but you shook me from quiet
and my sexuality...
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​

One Year Later
BY AYA BURTON

Even after forgetting their names
she can peel a plum with a paring knife
and sit on the little circle rug...
​

The Morning After
BY ANONYMOUS

​It will always be the morning after
And there will never be enough soap
And there will never be enough water
And there will never be enough
To wash away the morning after.