The Spring Issue | 2024
Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
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Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
Our Spring 2024 issue is packed with poems, stories, and art from around the world and we hope you enjoy the pieces we’ve selected as much as we enjoyed selecting them.
Role play is harder / alone in the hotel room, / it being more difficult / to suspend disbelief / single-handedly.
W. H. Auden once said that poets should dress like businessmen. Thom Gunn preferred leather and chains.
And because I was not good, I did not step inside / the ark. The flood came and went and my body, // in rebuke of the enemy, became one with ground.
What is there / but great silence, waiting, / and serving time in the body / before returning home
We called it chemo brain—forgetting the names / of people, places, familiar objects
At the theater we recognize the movie is us. / All kinds of awful things are happening. / The ocean has covered houses so they barely stick out / like broken teeth.
These four poets and their recent books are representative of the poetry currently being written in Southwest England and the country more broadly.
Philosophy of Life 101
Summer 1985
Exams are due by 1 pm Thursday, February 17, 2067.
When they call her name, he kisses her, and she tastes his salty lips. The nurse, unsmiling in her brisk white uniform, leads her into an examining room.
We remember, wrapped in black ropes that swayed / me, a cradlesong in the embrace of the snake, / our hearts cracked to cast together better.
Once, a teacher / told me—Need is a bad word. She // stood in front of the class, frowning / at its long ‘e’ sound, as a mother // might frown at her young child / who’s just peed her pants.
I’m five years old / again, refusing to wear Bermuda / shorts, begging mom to buy only / long pants, long enough to hide / my iron brace
For instance, I cup my hand over his heart / and it’s like a hand over a heart. // For instance, outside a couple of / night birds / are singing like birds singing at night. // It’s beautiful enough / to name this world —
You must think that I am handling this poorly. My sister taught me that, too: how grief seizes us, paralyzes, renders us speechless and seemingly dumb. How in such a state, it’s best to look one’s best.
You can’t recreate the first taste of an orange. Which is not just sunshine, bright and radiant, bursting in a mouth but the shock of it and the moment just before the peel, the seal is broken. Every orange after chases memory.
I am a bird. I have a cloaca. Piss/shit/eggs rush out / the one hole. Cock goes in that hole too.
I have never had a particularly good imagination. Really, it’s kind of dire. It irritates my wife that I can’t imagine a future. I’m not sure how much of that is aphantasia and how much of that is growing up with an imminent Rapture …
they have her anyway, laugh about it in the locker rooms, student / center, and physical science room, hawking globs of tobacco on the / tile
Shopping center. A boy of about six trailing his parents—skinny kid with tousled hair, three of them heading toward their car.
“If we weren’t in this parking lot I’d slap the shit out of you,” the mother says to the boy.
The / brute of war engorges man / and beast, the clash of iron / on steel makes loud / even the less-endowed organ.
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