By Lisbeth Coiman I love you in Spanish because in my mouth your name sounds thick like honey A slow drip down my thighs   Each vowel open                    accented marking the syllables like a poem in Braille My fingers sliding softly on your chiseled biceps   with dexterity on the darkness of your skin The rhotic erres roll from the tip of my tongue onto your robust legs   After a pause               they produce a trill My voice quavering    laughter           relish calls your name with diagraphic elles   Spell love with the friction eñes in the palate of…

By Jed Myers To have breathed all these days and crossed another winter’s start— to have ridden this rolling pebble through the light’s narrows again! To weather the long dark falling on toward the chance of skunk cabbage clean out of the mud— I spotted a hummingbird poking the shrubs for buds in the lean sun, days past the solstice, and thought, let the frackers erode what they must, let Betelgeuse explode if it wants, and those nests of mutant cells in any of our organs’ lobes see what they can conquer. I’m not alone on this heart’s stretch of…

By Miguel Murphy  St. Jerome Writing (1605), Caravaggio   Memento mori as apology for assaulting the lawyer Pasqualone, earning him Papal favor! There, in his brow, not Lear, let’s say, but Hamlet, if he’d survived to annotate his latest on guts, tears, and semen: Some Notes on Treatment as Prevention, in which he’d snigger, Don’t eat the malus. pate. What appears His stylus, paused and feathered. Thumb, forefinger (he needs a manicure) that same hand in the anecdote removed thorn from lion’s paw, curing it. Sometimes, I can’t get in the catheter, said my friend angrily after the plane crash…

By Aïcha Martine i ask for the room by the window   they say, honey, you know this isn’t a hotel, right? but kindly, like i just don’t understand things yet   i heard doctors don’t have a sense of humor, that if they do, it is phone-cord extra-twisted   so i don’t ask about the “cleaning fee” and the “checkout early” discount or quip, “send you a postcard when i’m out”   in fact i know not to ask for much i’m supposed to revel in the multiverses they show me and promise never to scoff at tenderness again…

By Sean Cho A. and everyone else followed. It was December and the trees were bare and unrecognizable. I welcomed the Canadian geese to my back porch with stale rye bread. My past self used to howl for this and that but I tamed him with daily meetings, ugly proclamations, and long prayers.   My body has been silent in all the right ways: motionless as a January lake. The next task: make a list of people to make amends to. Family that gave me too many last chances, friends who by now could only recognize me by my voice.…

By Matt Dennison Don spends his days walking up and down the street, now, for the exercise, with a straight black cane to support his white Bermuda legs. He waves. I raise my hand from across the street. Between the passing cars he knife-motions the black threads stitched into his throat: lung removed. Points to hip, leg, and side: twenty-foot fall at the baseball game. Waves his cane all over: blood disease, manic-depression, slight touch of schizophrenia. Can’t sleep, cannot stay awake. He does not point out the thick purple splotches quickly covering his arms and legs, all that I…

By DM O’Connor  we walk past pears and apples and grapes and broccoli all fruiting in their five o’clock last day of summer fields although I know tomorrow it will rain and the money will be gone I can’t help but count the passing which are mostly work vans or tractors pulling trailers and she says no one walks around here at the edge of town past a cafe and a church we enter a scooter shop the man is wearing a mask and dismantling a two-stroke carburettor and we go around the shop asking prices and remembering Formentera and…