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Secretions

Colin Herd

‘No I’m not tired I said. / No I’m not thirsty I said. / I’m sassy.’

Power and Privilege

Ken Babstock

‘We do it all day every day until we can’t see. / We do it with a belt between our teeth.’

Poem Written from Inside a Leather Pig Mask

Sam Sax

‘child who dreams of growing into / a swan only to wake in terror at a mouth / filled with feathers.’

Communion

Rachel Long

‘Behold the miracle of afro hair.’

Two Poems

Emmalea Russo

‘I cannot look at you as I cannot look directly at the sun without my hand / covering my eyes’

Amnion

Stephanie Sy-Quia

‘In the place where I grew up there were horses, thighs moving like nudity under their fur’

Three Poems

Shane McCrae

‘I wanted to and then / Remembered why I want to never’

Peak Spader

Ken Babstock

‘Love how unseen / we remain stood undressed in his field of vision.’

Three Poems

Vivek Narayanan

‘half-sunk / into ground for all those years / of negative subsisten­ce’

In Conversation

Anthony Caleshu & Peter Gizzi

‘Words are haunted. Think of it: as long as there have been soldiers there have been poets. I have often felt that being a poet is a form of civil disobedience.’

Interview with B. Tape II

Rachel Long

‘The contrast! − my angel face / against the camo.’

Children in Tactical Gear

Peter Mishler

‘we watched the last / very colorful weapons / coming ashore’

Thrive: A Lyric Sequence

Jill Bialosky

‘Sometimes we could not see / anything before us. That’s what it / required.’

Tissue

Tishani Doshi

‘Even if you could walk through the corridors / of your body, you would not know which rooms / to enter, which were full of stone.’