Contents:

America

 by Danielle M. Rico

laypeople

 by Jenna Snyder

take care
of the people living
in my head—
give them a bedtime

now drink me—
your whine is my divine
part we are

    falling like prayers
    back towards the Earth
     where small deaths
     await I’m sorry I

spend our sacred
time trying

Scrimshaw

 by Madeleine Walker

The whales you
carved into
my bones and
how they bellow.

Taylor

 by Sasha Leshner

In 2nd grade she told me      sex
was kissing underwater
                   fish tongues slipping
        open eyes glinting like green scales

we’d pretend in her pool
licking the chlorinated water
our love spilling out of our tiny mouths

and catching in the filters
with the pink noodles and dead bees
    their legs limp and wet after kicking

Fluxx

 by Jade Conlee

A winter night in dumb, dark Idaho,
five or six o’clock & we are back from pizza for dinner,

I am six. My mother & father & I are in a hot tub, mist
rising from the surface though we are already

walled in by fog. Snowflakes half melt & scatter
on the black water. We have just received the news

that someone has died, suddenly.
I have brought outside a card game: Fluxx

the game of ever-changing rules!
My mother’s face through the fog is like wallpaper.

They have been having a secret conversation
that flickers at me through the fog, should we

drive home tomorrow, should he go to Illinois.
They have lost track of the game!

The goal has changed from rocket to the moon
to death by chocolate & no one has noticed!

My father keeps dropping the plastic-coated cards in the water,
blind little rafts bumping into one another.

Only later did I learn the two entwined meanings
of flux: there’s the unpredictable one, & there’s

the one where things flow away,
the one where I ask my father

how much of me do you remember?

a handful of birthdays, &
how you would practice scales on the piano

while I snorted painkillers in the bathroom, &
how you made me tell my secret over and over

Less & More

 by Amy Moore

Less Than $400,000

sunken   herringbone
     maintenance
tax-deductible
live-in       laundry
       maintenance
 tax-deductible
     100 by 120 ft
.32 acre
 full
50 year
          of
glass   living

$900,000 or More

keyed
             commercial
grade
          Time
 old brick        sun
 old brick   breakfast
exercise     wine,
pool,
hall
w/             20 stalls, 3 ponds
42 acres;          listed at $1.55
million
Demarest         million
     cathedral
     million
         mahogany
         million

Poem for Animals

 by Andy Sebela

—I used to never get old! Some time ago
I lived in a bughouse with May beetles.
At evening parties they asked me to sing
one hundred songs past my bedtime.
I danced with a knowing smile,
the revolting servility of a child!
Back then my claw tooth was loose.
My appreciation for Egyptian cloth
was unknown and undeveloped.
What does one do with that knowledge?
Better to be a cat in a sunbeam.
Better to be hugged in a wing.
I am the kind of animal who dies
flapping and braying for company.
Soon I will be a rugged thing
chewing its mouth and scorning spring.
I am not the colt that will run next year.
My last breath is pawing at a screen door asking,
“What do I do?” Mark it on my grave.
He reared and bucked,
he loved and got blue.