

Downpour amid Lockdown
Tonmoi Das Kashyap
“I felt as if the world was lost in some sudden turmoil.”

Alabama Summer
Bill Goodman
“Maybe moving forward is digging down. Sidewalks crack, roads buckle, hair becomes two-toned, and sweat stains our best shirt.”


YES WE ALREADY KNOW THAT I HAVE A LOT OF FAULTS SUE ME
Shawn Berman
“i still don’t understand how anyone can have the guts to french kiss another living breathing being”

Sonnet for the Fireflies
Nadia Bovy
Lately I’ve been twisting gorgeous seconds
—breathless,
soundless graces of this life
into Myth

Everything New
Sean Ennis
“What a stressful, enormous expense to keep out the rain, stunt the black mold in the room labeled “office,” and keep the house from a total dangerous collapse!”


After Escher
Michael McGill
On the Embankment,
the silence between Tube trains;
a widow, waiting.



Black Boy, Dreaming
Kehinde Badiru
I want to remember the little
Black Boy Dream: black eyes,
curly hair, clear wishes, red lips, new shape.
I want to be proud of that legacy —

Not Getting It (or $433 a Can)
Nick Vidal
“In 2019, artist Maurizio Cattelan sold a banana, taped to a wall, for $120,000.
I don’t get why these things happen”.

Sheltering with Late Husband
Annecy Báez
Many of the items in the house were gifts from my late husband to his then best friend, who is now my fiancée. Throughout the years, our used furniture had migrated here, one piece at a time--mirrors, table, chairs, rugs--but who would have known that one day I would live here.


in the story your ex tells himself
Olivia Braley
Three poems about exes, egg scrambles, and etymology.


You Weren’t Always a Hypochondriac
A. G. Maxwell
“Your late twenties have been a slow education in the frailty of the body. Before, the only time you really focused on your vessel was in quick pleasure or acute pain.”

How long has it been?
David Nemat-Nasser
I’d love a bowl of Grandma’s chicken paprikash
a plate of saffron rice

Friendship Day
Kyle Tam
We’re good at celebrating what the liberation washed ashore with the Americans, and even better at overlooking what they left behind