WHEAT FIELD AMBIENCE & FREQUENCIES | 396 HZ + 639 HZ CLEANSE by DREW MOSMAN

December 17 2024
There are sigils painted on the I5 southbound on-ramp. They were covered a month ago but you can still see the outlines, the curves. If you time it right, at that spot, before the flow of the commute, a single prayer can change the course of your life.

Sitting on the interstate, right in the thick of it, I can sense the heat death we are moving towards, collectively, and from my observations, enthusiastically. This is Americana, this is our nation distilled down to a few miles of porous asphalt. The single mother next to me, the Norwood four HVAC man next to her, we melt into one amid the rising heat waves of our vehicles. Love is the union of two people, two objects. Briefly, on the federal road, we are ecstatic...

WEEKENDER (WEEK ENDER) by MADELINE MILES

December 9 2024
You confessed that your second beer
was your third and I was only pocket
watching once I felt your hands needed
forgiveness so I drank too and laughed
about it before asking what he did that was
so awful and
we laughed
some more
50k for Berman
Tide in, tide out

MOLES by CHRIS CARROLL

December 2 2024
A HUMAN, high on human drugs, has been working on a POEM for months. Another HUMAN, high on human drugs, passes him a swishing red bottle of wine that he chugs, as they dance in a tunnel where they zip in and out of space, small points on a collapsing and reconstructing grid.

The POEM includes words he typed into it frequently, words that formed into verses, the verses resembling a POEM within a POEM. The POEM within the POEM is the POEM of a character who is writing a POEM, which describes the POEM of a POET who is writing a POEM about his POEM. At a certain point in the POEM, after a line break, the POET meets a READER, the HUMAN he met in the tunnel, the HUMAN who he had exchanged numbers with in the tunnel. ..

TRILOGY by CHLOE WHEELER

November 27 2024
I. desenllaç (denouement)

three olive flies fighting
for their trite, tiny fly lives,
struggling against the slick ice
cubes in a glass of crimson sangria.
affirmations: i attract abundance.
i attract change. i attract good health,
therefore i really hate the Marlboro pack
w/ the picture of a tongue tumor, which
is a bit much, like, what a way to go...

STRIP CLUB by NICOLE SELLEW

November 22 2024
I watched as one girl danced even when they cut her music. I watched the girls on their knees, scraping the money into bags. I watched a boy in a Patagonia puffer jacket try to take a Snapchat video of one of the dancers.

Are you taking a video, asked the dancer.

The boy shook his head. A bouncer came over and shoved the phone out of the boy’s hands. The video, if there had been one, was gone...

WHAT YOU’RE BUILT TO BE COMFORTABLE WITH by ALEX ROST

November 15 2024
I’d been back too long, doing all the things I used to do and living with a girl who’d spent the past year in the psyche ward for killing her family cat and trying to kill the dog.

She floated through this free fall, enamored with the mistakes she’d made, said, “God gives every person a little piece of His soul, so each person’s soul is already God’s, just this one grand soul, but God gets addicted to giving himself away then feels empty and wants some of it back. Eventually God’s going to feel empty all the time and call back most of His soul, and that’s what the apocalypse is all about. No big deal, nothing to get worked up over, really. We’re all pieces of one, so it doesn’t matter...”

YOUR FAVORITE BAND by CHARLIE ZACKS

November 13 2024
Your favorite band just killed a guy

SNAKE FOOD by MYLES ZAVELO

November 6 2024
Mice in the freezer. Next to the ice cream. This month last year. So tightly packed into each other. Translucently spooning.

This month last year, too: when that hoodlum came to bleed right in front of my house.

Decomposition, psychiatric consumption, and how there wasn’t even a snake.

Not any longer...

WRITING PROJECT by EMILY SLOTTA

October 21 2024
I can guide you through the beats of this, it’s pretty simple.

First pretend you’re girl Hemingway in Bushwick. Take a sip of hot black coffee. Write the sun also rises in miniature, over and over again in small concentric circles, but do it without any war.

Here’s how it sounds. Short sentences interspersed with a few run-ons, integrating the traditional and the sensitive in fragmented pieces across your observations of modern everyday life. I’m bedazzling a telephone pole, gluing mirrors to a gas pump. I’m touching lightly on abjection or gore. Some people do this better than others...

an atom is mostly empty by OWEN AVERY

October 7 2024
I’m ten. We are at Momom and Popops’ house. Django and Luna are there. Me and Mom and Popop and Elias walk through East Rock Park. The dogs come with us. Luna loves to run. I think she could run forever. She jumps and she glides and she cuts and barks and she’s happy. I'm grinning. Elias and I help each other over the fallen tree. Django goes under it. Elias and I place bets on which dog will get home first. Elias bets on Django and always wins. Luna loves the dirt too much to ever win. I’m thirteen. I was wrong. Luna can’t run forever. We walk East Rock Park with only Django. Sometimes he stops moving and Popop yells. He tries to scare him. But I know he's just sad. We go on the sailboat. Elias and I went to sailing camp. We feel pretty confident now. Popop is still better than us. He pulls the ropes and the boat moves like it's an extension of his mind. I want to control things that way...

TWO POEMS by FARYAL RASHID

October 2 2024

Facts are bigger in the dark! If you lie on the floor very straight the temperature(s) of all the pulses in the world coarse right through you
Suddenly the distinction between a loon and a regular becomes much less important
Lying down means you can read and understand the loon book
Slipknots and silk and
a pistol auto 9 mm fashioned out of unimaginative heavy metals
Stainless steel starting more than it can finish...

REBECCA by LAMB

September 27 2024

I come alive when she says her mom is dead. I stare at the green wine in my glass long enough to bead my eyes, then I meet hers and hit her with the perfect line.

What is her name?

Like I said, the perfect line, erasing every other guy she’s ever been with. Oh, are you sorry to hear that? Are you so sorry for her loss? I want to know her name. Not what it was but is. That I rarely get to use it, though more often than you’d think, makes it ultra perfect. After she gives me her mom’s name, I’ll hit her with the perfect follow up, the most wooing sound a woman knows, the sound of her own name...

ASPIRATIONAL by ADELINE SWARTZENDRUBER

September 23 2024

My summer aspirational vibe is coming together quite nicely
on my Pinterest moodboard, but unfortunately I am running out of summer and running out of steam.
My summer aspirational vibe is
Lana Del Rey with cursive Nabokav Whitman tattoo
My summer aspirational vibe is
the Ginsberg and Bukowski in his bedroom, evidence of
an undergrad girl’s presence, it’s the ecstatic glimmer in virgin irises
scanning pages, Blake’s revelations, suddenly resolute
in the desire to write poems that work like music...

SCUT MONKEY MIDDLE by NICHOLAS WILDER FORMAN

September 19 2024

INT: BOTTOM LEFT CORNER

Everyone is three to ten years old but I’m the best at it. I think coyotes means grandma, I think coyotes are packs of grandmas that have grandkids that live out of state, so the coyotes that’s why,

that’s why
*turns to the infinite morphs of my little brother*
that’s why theyre in the backyard at night.
thas why i cant even fine bunny. Bunny gawn...

ICE BREAKER by MADLEN STAFFORD

September 11 2024
Every morning I drink water, from a glass jar, spiked with three spoonfuls of chia seeds. In bed, on the phone, soaking in the sunlight, my chia water spills on top of me. With my hands I spread the seeds thoroughly on my dress. With my hands. I leave my dress crumbled and wet on the edge of my bathroom sink. I won’t look at the dress for another day. When I do go back to clean the dress I will notice the seeds have sprouted little glowing roots. My heart is frozen. I will dampen my dress again, and shove it under the sink to the dim-lit corner...

I LOVE LIFE by SAM ROBINSON

September 9 2024
I was the hottest guy in the office, and I burned it all to the ground.

Now already, if you know me, you’d be calling me a liar. “But Sam,” you’d say, “you’re bald, you’ve been smoking since you were 16 and avoiding sunblock. You’ve got beady eyes, flesh-bony protrusions on the forehead from raising and furrowing your brows so much in quizzical self-satisfaction, a fucking cleft lip and palate, a facial birth defect, for Christ sakes. Not only that, but you’re just impotently complaining and venting your power fantasies...”

BOOF AUTOPORTRAIT by ISA LOCSIN and CORY VILLANUEVA

September 5 2024
i will keep pushing you until i have to go into witness protection. dark wooden furniture is better.

i wish there were panoramic screenshots. iridescent artificial fishing bait is just as enchanting to humans as it is to fish. you're an ashtray, i'm a machine. my love language is wearing a strip of masking tape around my wedding ring finger. i drink salt water in my room to feel closer to the ocean. loneliness is greed and i would never wish for that much. everything is funny. i have to realize spontaneously, i don't accept conscious contributions...

SUBMISSIONS CLOSED UNTIL 2025