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Black Rot and Mildew

Leontia Flynn

‘a look I’d managed to accessorize / with raw dermatological distress.’

Cassette-tape

Javier Zamora

‘I will etch visas on toilet paper and throw them from a lighthouse.’

Civilization Spurns the Leopard

Solmaz Sharif

‘To step out of my door and hope to see something like a life, something passably me.’

Discipline

Jane Yeh

‘Her / Secrets play on continuous loop, // Like a B-movie.’

Drama Lessons for Young Girls

Tara Bergin

‘So the young girls, / cast as naughty young girls from the Acropolis, / left – / just with some things missing.’

Eight pieces in imitation of Thomas A. Clark

Matthew Welton

‘what it is about the earth / that it won’t absorb the stream’

Enjaracon Sponaeda

Will Alexander

‘how can all the pressures of surveillance / fail to describe me?’

Fly

Feng Sun Chen

‘Every day, I see a monstrosity in the kissing hole.’

Force Visibility

Solmaz Sharif

‘Full or empty / was impossible to see.’

from White Butterflies of Night

Jaan Kaplinski

‘I don’t remember whether I believed that I could just / abandon one life to begin another’

Heavily Redacted

Luiza Flynn-Goodlett

‘Syllables are excised by / X-Acto, fed into a shredder / for good measure.’

I Used to Go for Long Walks in the Evenings

Stephen Sexton

‘My celebrity accumulated like a kidney stone: / children, pets, even some corvids recognised me’

I’ll Come Later Tomorrow

J.V. Foix

‘all in black, her arms raised in the air, their shadow sketching some malign bird I couldn’t recognize’