WALKING ON WATER

By emet ezell i bought her a shitty ass chicken sandwich.
$18.59 and dripping with oil—
my grandmother. she blessed
the meal for ten minutes before
taking a bite. poured out devotion like
gasoline. like pepsi cola. we knew then
that she was dying, but i lived
in the first paragraph, unprepared.

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Patients

By Aurora Levins Morales Why do they call us "the patient"
We are not patient. We endure.

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Ode to Jacob Blinder

By Janlori Goldman His face stared out into the living room
of my grandparents’ walk-up on E. 13th.
After they died my father hung him

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89 Lines on a Bruise

By Shira Erlichman The Former Poet Laureate of the United States
wrote an eighty-nine line poem about clouds & I

want to write about clouds but all I can see
is this bruise on the inside of my inner-elbow the needle left

when posing a question about my toxicity level.

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Miracle

By Elana Bell What else to call the way the bare branches
I’d bought at the neighborhood bodega
came back to life that winter.

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Onomástico

By Jonathan Mendoza You ask me for my name,
and I say, “It’s pronounced Mendoza,”
and again, the Spaniard spits it out my throat,
pats me on the tongue,
tells me I have been a good subject,
and again, I have traded this empire
for my former one.

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In a Thicket of Body-Bent Grass

By Jessica Jacobs Arkansas is aspic with last-gasp summer, making running
like tunneling: the trail’s air a gelatin
of trapped trajectories.

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impermanence

By sam sax sometimes i wonder what happens to people’s hands when they disappear
in their pockets. of course, my rational brain knows they go on being hands
but there’s still the question. i wonder if object permanence isn’t the biggest
trick of them all, a scam, a way to ground the brain in its thin bath of liquid

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