TaNia Donatto

Your last breath
will not be
the final time
you are heard.

Alan ten-Hoeve

“I open my mouth to say something like, that just isn’t possible right now, but stop myself. I let her have her fantasy. We need them sometimes just to get through.”

Darshita Jain

“‘16 migrant workers forced to walk from one part of the country to another...’

Three days walking, fell asleep on a nonfunctional train track.”

Rita Valverde

She came to New York hoping to see her first spring bloom. Maybe some other year, when the word “pandemic” is a memory.

Tonmoi Das Kashyap

“I felt as if the world was lost in some sudden turmoil.”

Bill Goodman

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

Donna Steiner

Even the sounds that die out have a way of living on.

Shawn Berman

“i still don’t understand how anyone can have the guts to french kiss another living breathing being”

Nadia Bovy

Lately I’ve been twisting gorgeous seconds

—breathless,

soundless graces of this life

into Myth

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!”

Nila Narain

“my gut: a place i will always be learning to trust.”

Michael McGill

On the Embankment,

the silence between Tube trains;

a widow, waiting.

Justin Bryant

The truth is there is no more value in replacing an alternator than there is in lying in bed with your dogs on a day irrigated with rain.

Casey Dawson

A moment alone in a body.

Noreen Ocampo

the vents in my bedroom like to sing, too: a song

like computers deliberating something

impossible.

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 —

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”.

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.

Kristle Navarro

She wanted to live on her own. This was a bit more isolation than she’s anticipated.

Olivia Braley

Three poems about exes, egg scrambles, and etymology.