[Attempt 1]
Climb through the window
so I can touch your hair.
We breathe into the space
between us so grass can spread
across it without alarming anyone. Continue reading “Tercets for Remembering a Dream by Jessica Beyer”
NoOne
So we [poet + reader] thought some badness was coming
to take away our dreams: leave us without light,
leave us with our darkness. We wanted to exhibit our
dreams even though dreams are archetypes + boring
and it is so invasive when we tell others they have made
cameo in our night-visions: this assures the other
we wish to possess them in a room their body cannot
enter. Continue reading “2 Poems by Candice Wuehle”
voices given to those undeserving I see needles in this tank of water and the reflection goes blind seeing me seeing me rather emptiness than a sign of disease
the world is the world is not what you see what we see comfort and defeat go together exploration is uncalled for experimentation is blasphemous dogmatic traps Continue reading “diagnosis by Darya Kulbashna”
It’s the Wren’s Nest – part housing estate, part nature reserve – it’s the Wrenner to us.
Frogspawn slicks in silica sheets across Green Pool; carrion crow calls; the foxes den – too close to the road – vixens crushed against tarmac; limestone cliffs weathered by prehistoric waves; the underground caves – the fenced off caverns – the canal lines that vein through; rabbits, badgers, weasels; and rusted cans and cigarette buts and flytipped sacks and discarded clothes and the stained knickers of a fallen wench; limes, acorn, hawthorn, bluebell and stinky wild garlic; bell pits, old mine shafts and geological tools; dog walkers amble through slippery tributaries of homemade paths; rope-swinging kids up a height in the oaks; the silence; the almost silence; the rhizomes that pierce through earth’s hymen and tangle, conjugate, apomixis, epitoky. Continue reading “The Ley by R.M. Francis”
Walking with the canal,
flurries of all who’ve been before,
my footsteps on theirs.
Going by.
Going on.
Two swans keep faith.
Mucky water clouds,
one inversion turns another, Continue reading “Going by by Kevin Jackson”
The uneasy feelings began when we crossed the line of wire, past the guards distracted by a white delivery van. No one stopped us as we turned onto a side road. Rydell was driving, Vanya and Tori were asleep in the back. I watched the lights receding, the faint green glow on the road ahead. Continue reading “The Crossing by Voima Oy”
She fell in love with her specimen: took note of his
legs; one, a millimeter shorter than the other, lacked the
purity of hemispheric symmetry. His tiny simple eyes dilated
when the artificial light rays would refract off of the perfect Continue reading “Reintroduction to Anatomy by Elytron Frass”
HOW THE WIND HEELS YOU
Silence is the seed to grow my desire–silence and luck.
A large body of water shares clear clean glaze whispers
hydrogen bonding; its difficulty is holding stillness; that’s not
the fate God gave it. Lake Michigan’s azure nudity faces
forward, echoes difference and distances, says Eden. Continue reading “3 Poems by stephanie roberts”
Wetsuit
this wetsuit
is tight,
too tight
right up to
my neck
i am zipped up
His Body Retold
He abraded marble
Until he reached skin, inner than
Any thigh and equally muscular.
He plucked flowers off vines
And glued them with marrow
To stone slab as it becomes
Altar, ulterior
Motive for fiction and
Its facts: go in too Continue reading “2 Poems by Adam Strauss”
Basement Mother
You married such a sick woman
do you regret it now?
The way I’ve tortured us for years
the way I burned the house down – Continue reading “2 Poems by Elisabeth Horan”
Unless I identify myself, no one’s the wiser. I’m unclassified. What you see is all you never get , or less than you expect. Depending. Mutated, I am two countries with an unmediated border. Continue reading “Are We There Yet? by Joseph Schreiber”
Karissa Lang’s series of manipulated photographs, “I Was Here,” presents snap-shots of hazy memories from her own childhood in which she is the absent protagonist. Lang replaces the index of her physical body with some of the classic obscuring aesthetics of the photographic medium, namely, over-exposure and darkness. The eerie glow emanating from her face represents an inward movement associated with time-travel, as pieces of memories are reconstructed with her true sense of identity missing at the core. In other areas, her body is blacked out into a type of flattened silhouette, another indication of the gap that separates these family records from her physical body and memory.
Cousins Continue reading “Altered Photography by Karissa Lang”
The Lifeguard
And now I have to tell you about a dream. Or rather, several dreams, or rather, one continuous dream over several nights. In the dream a guy I know, who is actually an electrician, was a lifeguard. Continue reading “The Lifeguard by Katie Quinnelly”
(Photographs by Paul Cunningham)
THE WORD IS REFLECTED
there are many storefronts in this mall
and there are many reflections
there is drama there is something reflected
there are mirror columns in this mall
they are for the people they are for the looking
but there are no people in this mall
there is some drama in this mall
there are mirror columns in this mall
but there are no people in this mall
there is a proscenium stage in this mall
a former DEB retail chain store
there is a proscenium stage in this mall
a former DEB retail chain store
there is some drama in this mall
chains and masks and drama in this mall
there is drama there is something reflected
there is something reflected in this mall
but there are no people in this mall
there is something reflected in this mall
chains and masks and drama in this mall
but there are no people in this mall
Xavier had raced across the city in an old car not designed for speed: its gears grinding, brake pads squealing. The car’s suspension was so shot that when he took a corner the undercarriage scraped the road. The car was not to be his only hitch. At the intersection leading down into the Square, a police cordon barred his way. Abandoning the car, Xavier took to the road on foot, pushing through all the protestors, until he found Malka in the middle of the crowd. Continue reading “Inhale to Rise by Victoria Briggs”
WHO’S CHIRPING YER HAND?
(fashion reportage wallpaper theater)
Griselda
wants it
My mother always made her eyebrows on a Maybelline brow pencil
She rarely left the house without mascara Continue reading “Who’s Chirping Yer Hand? by Olivia Cronk”
Theron stands, staring out the window. Through liquid eyes, to another world outside, from another world inside. A hooded figure standing across the street, staring back. Dressed in dark clothes with a cloak, it appears to have come from another time. The shadow man points at him and he feels fear creep in like a cold grip on his heart. Hollow ache in the gut, frozen mind. Theron screams at the shadow man. More of a roar than a scream. When the air runs out of his yell, he takes a deep breath and roars again, over and over. His younger brother comes into the room and puts a hand on his shoulder. Continue reading “Shadow Man by Rob True”
FROM WHERE I FALL
bodies faxed into the earth
hold the ropes tied
to their empty bones. they pull the tails
of the constricted conscience
unwilling to rest with the new black worms.
imagine dry leaves rustling
violently in wet songs, they would
get blown here, not there, by the wounded wind. Continue reading “From Where I Fall by Bola Opaleke”
My Gender is the Fledgling Solo Career of Annie Lennox in the 90’s
Maybe Mom playing “Here Comes the Rain Again” on her tape deck in the shower as one of my earliest memories is why I have such a proclivity to wordplay. Mom blasted music in the shower on her tape deck, even when we lived with my conservative paternal grandparents in the late 80’s. My dad’s mom who made me play her my music in the late 90’s to tell me how “Hit Me Baby One More Time” had dirty messages in it, how a milquetoast hit like “Roll to Me” by the squishy-soft rock group Del Amitri seemed to forebode “roll over me” subliminally, and do I “know what these songs mean?” Continue reading “An Essay by M. Perle”
BURNING HOUSE PRESS 