THE SURRENDER OF MAN (EXCERPT) by NAOMI FALK

March 18 2025
You should know that we bring our baggage to any interpretation of a work of art; any interpretation that matters, anyway. You recall your exaltations and sufferings, once-shapeless memories are kicked from the silt and their details strike like lightning before your eyes. Perhaps you cringe before an abstraction of rosy reds and soft whites because as a child, you once ate a bag of peppermint saltwater taffy and vomited at a Californian Wax Museum...

5,000 FOLLOWERS by JOHN DOE

March 14 2025
So I say these fucking prayers
When each day brings its challenges
For a new experience
And to see the truth

As a crisis prone person
I think I was surprised
You took my writing seriously
And cared what I had to say...

BREAKTHROUGH LESSONS by MAXFIELD FRANCIS GOLDMAN

March 7 2025
The sunrise from my fire escape is alright. The bunsen burner sun wedged between two rows of buildings. A backlit murmuration of starlings mid-migration. The slow drip of yellow sedans creeping up 7th avenue. Tepid winds blow my hair. Clouds roll in from Jersey...

CHOKING ON CHRYSANTHEMUM by MELISSA VIOLETTE ALIZ

March 4 2025
choking on chrysanthemum merciless chamber fragrant descent promise rigid decree command forsworn lovers fragrance tidings holy lament scathed knots inharmonious lark vaulty heavens dismissed from thee harsh grey iris grey pearlescent spheres grey matter visceral potent growth embalmed torn woe hysterically moaning a sweet farewell a field a dust bowl a drought i cannot lick the sword i cannot drink from this scurvy latched fervently minimized some supernatural intention a periwinkle bouquet thrown upon stars upon cupids courting to breathe thin atmosphere of mars...

KMS by DANIELLE CHELOSKY

February 28 2025
We were on a date and I made a joke about wanting to kill myself. “You really shouldn’t talk like that,” he said. “I’ve had friends commit suicide. It’s a terrible thing.” We were smoking cigarettes on the back patio of an art gallery that hosted live music shows. That night an experimental pop band was playing and the synths leaked into the outdoors.

“Sorry,” I said as if I’d tied the nooses around his friends’ necks. I felt a strange jealousy that he could say I’ve had friends commit suicide and I couldn’t because I hadn’t had any friends commit suicide, which made me feel like I had fewer friends than him or something...

APPLE (PLEASE CONSIDER) by SAMUEL PLATTEN

February 24 2025
OK here is the timeline of apple

-----Ipod-----ipod (with camera)-----ipod
touch (just like iphone
without the phone part)-----iphone-----
ipad(iphone except
larger)...

MAUI BABE BROWNING LOTION by RYAN PETERSEN

February 20 2025
I admired the hairs on my chest. Gathered together in a small tuft. Made flaxen with applied bronzer. And from a small slit in the blinds—my Dad watched me. I saw my half-naked image in the lens of his Oakleys.

Good god my son is tanning, he probably thought. In nothing but his briefs. The downstairs thermostat was set to a chilly sixty-eight degrees. And outside? Another scorcher. Chimes, hung from the awning, nuzzled each other in the weak breeze...

INSIDE OUT 2 by KIAN KERMANI

February 7 2025
grinning viscera amused with lock shattered
spoiler for Avatar 2 Way of Water spills out
in laminar perfect stream every 0.71 seconds
interrupted by spleen, colon, kidney—

filter pyramids built before painkiller scars
now allowed to topple out crumbling fleshy
bits sighing into retirement...

TWO POEMS by FIONA BRUCKMAN

February 4 2025
He wears an orange leash
His mom wears heavy glasses
There’s ground bees on the side
OJ died when I was in the back
I’m hooded and the leaves
Move together away
When you become a critic
Everything is stupid...

THE IDEAL JUNGLE GYM by STANDARDIZED POSTER

January 15 2025
Picture the ideal jungle gym,
made according to the designs
of an Ivy-League architect. He
spent his formative years on
campus, of brick, grass, and
clocktower, and late in his car-
eer was ask to design the ideal
jungle gym. Would you like to
play with me? Don’t laugh. I
hate it when you laugh, some-
times...

FOUR POEMS by CONOR HULTMAN

January 7 2025
soilwashed deteriorated burgundy leather jacketcoat black knitlining sweater
striped longsleeved dressshirt
jockey underpants
thick woolen gray pants
socks
one pumpstyle leather shoe sidebuckle
rusted .32caliber pistol...

ALL THE BLOOD TAKEN AWAY by YATES CESSNA

January 3 2025
There are black clots in the corners of every room in the house, black clots of cluster flies. When I turn on the light they nest into my hair to find their shadows. They circle as a collapsed racehorse around the haloed ceiling. It is a white cylindrical room with no door. I watch as two figures ascend and descend from wires attached to the sky. One in red stripes, the other in black, sort of how bank robbers look in those old timey cartoons. They hurl themselves into curlicue flips, mail carriers in the thinning air. A flat stone sinks at their feet. The question itself is crowded out by memory. Just as soon up floats another...

THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING I HAVE SEEN by STEVE GERGLEY

December 31 2024
On Friday night, I eat a sixty-three ounce bag of assorted chocolates while watching a mediocre action movie from the 1990s. For the next nine hours, my stomach roars like a silverback gorilla. While lying on the cold bathroom floor in agony, I swear I will never commit this horrific and indulgent transgression again. But two days later my sadness and hunger return with a vengeful fury, so I buy another sixty-three ounce bag of assorted chocolates. That night I throw the bag away without opening it...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

SCUT MONKEY MIDDLE by NICHOLAS WILDER FORMAN

September 19 2024

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...

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