by Mark Smeltzer
A wounded girl sneaks through the algorithm.
A bullet burrows under the root of her ponytail,
Copper tic swelling at the base of her skull.
A blue glove bears her arm to give or take fluids.
She faces, stony, away on a rare hospital bed.
by Emma Williquette
EXHIBIT A: GREAT-GRANDMA ON DAD’S MOM’S SIDE.
Indianapolis, Indiana. Sometime in 2007.
I only remember the day in photographic bursts now at twenty-one. Mom was putting my hair half-up in a little ribbon as she always did. After that, I was in someone’s arms going somewhere. Suddenly I had shoes on. Wanted them off. Couldn’t take them off. Lastly, the backseat of the car, left side, on a purple floral booster seat.
Read More »by Jeffrey Zable
Of course we’re all in different stages of dying,
but it seems that those who are closest to it
are mostly the ones talking about it.
by Doug Raphael
There are days
Adam and I would walk
by the sawdust silt banks
of the Medway River,
to a patch of grass
by Scott Bethay
1.
Profane, breathless June
air thick with perfume
of cigarettes and makeup
by Margaret E. Gillio
After reading Jordan Salama and Adrienne Rich
See the dark trucks
across the street.
They encircle a man,
pin him down.
Draw the blinds, stop
answering the door.
We watch in a silence like a rushing river
where I drown. I fear this silence.
by E. L. McKee
Impossible to separate them;
like the grain of sand around which
a mirror-bright pearl is formed,
Read More »by H.T. Reynolds
A mother strokes her daughter’s hair,
carefully avoiding the ventilator tubing,
humming You Are My Sunshine through
tears and mechanical breathing
by Stephen Mead
Every Wednesday it has rained since the rainy Wednesday of your death,
those nights, that rain – comfort, comfort – bringing you again.
I fast to this but for fluids, my body’s parched plains thirsty for each teeming bead
& all that hush of shimmering liquid slate.
by Émilie Galindo
Her advice –uncalled for and diagnosed from across the 9-to-5 arm’s length desk–was to crank down my features to a wary cinder block wall. To water down my hyperbolic & cartoonish emoting to tepid and tight-lipped detachment. If I had a cup, it’d be filled with years of those unbegged for two cents.
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