I like you like mischief, an ‘i before e’ moment, the movement of my heart butterflying, battered, flayed and wired up to monitors and X-rays. When you asked me what’s at stake here, I only heard cake, or was it betrayal, the way daylight holds failure in stasis between aphasia and sainthood? The weather is taking a break, is breaking over the lake, breaking news like communion bread, wine-soaked and warming your trachea. Someone just tracked solitude in on their boots, someone ran buckets of holy water until the font dried up. Sorrow sings its own jingle, packs the apple…

but my Sunday School teacher says nix, He’s eternal in Heaven and sitteth at the right hand of God, or was that on, so I say Yes ma’am, but He’s still dead —that’s when she told me to leave the classroom so I did but after class I came back to her all alone behind her desk, her face buried in her hands, practically her whole head, to make her feel better and said Ma’am, when I was out in the hallway I saw Jesus, which got her attention as if she’d seen the man Himself and said Praise God,…

my wife hangs winter clothing in the closet I ask myself if I am ever going to put them on again or should I say goodbye to the seasons of the year, to the parka, to the woolen sweater forever? those clothes remember the war, they’ve absorbed its horror like hair absorbs the smell of cigarettes. they’ll never forget. the destroyed world is irreversible. (translated by Sergey Gerasimov from Russian) Dmitry Blizniuk is a poet from Ukraine. His most recent poems have appeared in Rattle, The Cincinnati Review, The Nation, Prairie Schooner, Plume, The London Magazine, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Pleiades…

i jabbed the straw down deeper and down into the mint and ice shavings the only ice i want to see none on the page and so hats off to that pants too sarong salutes and i did so carefully i thought who are these ice writers these canadians and their hard luck stories hard rock and but the lakes are nice and cry me twice rivers so stark and has beens like i hate skating and sad streaming winter tears on pages and ice spines the leftovers of salmon and trout so freshwater tears i need salt salt shaker…

Shalini Singh has been published in Oberon Magazine, Berkeley Poetry Review, SUSPECT, Hobart and Hayden’s Ferry Review among others. The daughter of a mathematics teacher and an ex-lawyer herself, she is a final year MFA CWE candidate at Iowa State University where she binge feels, binge reads and binge watches stuff while grounding herself in meditative research.

[1] Bulk of the stuff underfoot Becoming the bulk of you Stuffed with its rolled green rug Churning that which turned sun into sugar A patch of clover I sat sifting through Sucking dandelion milk from its stem Milk so named for its rare opacity Bleeding from my woven crown Yellow and delicious.  [2] I was reading Leaves of Grass In the shadow of some beige thing In the lawn of some desert corporation To await her exposed interior The unscrewing of her organ’s gasket The agriculturalist’s hand plunging gloved Into her process pouch, deflated Beneath the surrounding flank They…

One Whiskey Jag West of Amboy, two long snakes of rail stretch, coal-black, into horizon. A dusty, dead moth of a caboose, buckled over iron ore wheels. Warped, greyed— a wheeze of boards. One splintered eyebrow. One cataract eye. Your palm flattened, reaching before I can breathe the word burn, sizzling I leave you standing, fused, your wind-chapped lips cracked to O. Dacia J. Harrold is a queer psychoanalyst living in Arizona where she recently completed an MFA in poetry at Northern Arizona University. She enjoys spending time outdoors and reading and writing fiction and poetry. She tries to write…

Bless the rubber band that holds night around the horizon. Bless the dry rot creeping through its tension. Bless its breaking. Bless the way the light spills out like shiny pennies from a roll. Bless the bank of days where I make my withdrawals, bless my balance in the black, bless the credit of my soul. Bless the stash of candy tellers kept by the counter at Yadkin State Bank. Bless pneumatic tubes that gifted us deposit slips and suckers. Bless you, Doris, favorite teller, always good for double suckers. Bless the Doris who will close my overdrawn account. May…