by Sam Moe (Content warnings: Mentions of blood, sexual violence, emotional abuse, mentions of food/disordered eating) TemperatureA small burning fire at the center of your core. Nights spent sobbing in the walk-in freezers. Chilly wine-key, blue frost growing on boxes of wine glasses. Beer stashed behind buckets of sauce. Sticky blue tape, peeling from heat. Burns on the backs of your hands. The man who requested you sauté his clam chowder until its temperature peeled the flesh off the …
by Dana Stamps II “When I say I want to photograph someone, what it really means is that I’d like to know them.” —Anne Leibovitz Objects, subjects, the brazen anonymous porn star, whose audacious nudity is not faked. I wonder what brought her to pagination, and no clutter of tattoos, no butt inked—classy, probably the poor kind—and I wonder how she is coping with her life after the shoot, …
by Christopher R. Vaugha and it remains scrawled on her cheeks in red, as if having scratched her there. Giggles, I have a plum beard! I ask, Will you have to shave? She shivers her head twice, We’d never do that, that is so silly! In this house, there’s no word for cleanse, or pit, or blade. We only sense things, the words for them are birds concealed and chafing against branches. Fruit perishes twice—first stem-snapped, again when …
by Paul Vermeersch In the end, the Reverse Wolf enters another body. Firstit coalesces in the compost of leaf litter, from mossesand fruiting bodies, from masses of fungal filaments knitting subterranean threads, flowing now into its wolf form. The coat of the Reverse Wolf sprouts outside its body and grows inward, piercing its hide like five million fine needles. The Reverse Wolf regurgitates little girls wearing red outerwear and sees them safely home where it is killed and …
by Sarah Cavar ( top : scar ) At this most excellent brink where the body meets the flesh of stirred Air a leaf drifting Turns waning moons against my gaze –– We diagonal dance I, a small pupil child by ær crackling hood rocked by the gentle cradle of wind a muscle Flexing relaxing A project of vocal …
by Susan Cronin Let’s imagine a liver lives forever. 15-year, no-nonsense proof.Bite of orange, a caramel on toast—on the nose, as one expects—beforea sip slips a hintof hummingbird tearsharvested with care andexquisitely measured. No reason why she hadn’t sleptwith the hot crew teamguy across the hall in college,the one with a Raggedy Annand Andy pillowcase.In his dorm room they wouldlie on the …