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Issue 1 Poetry

In a Time of Want

I’m so sorry. We didall we could. Another mothermight cut off all her hair. I grow mine longand longer. When I lean forward,it cups my face like a lover’s hands.I’m in St. Francis’s cave praying on my kneesin the dark: tell me what to do.I am nine again under the dining room table,peering out through a wall of laceat my father’s high black shoe.He never told us what he did in France,if he killed anyone. He had thick wavy hairlike my son’s. Mine’s poker …

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Issue 1 Poetry

Visibility Signals

Pulled from the Anacostia,a remora hitched to the Potomac,Sligo Creek draws its stomach away from the sculpted cageof its ribs, dupe for the trickle-downof everyone else’s appetite, loosening and tightening its beltone single, seasoned notch at a time.Withstanding the wash, neck outstretched, the turtle is engravedlike a cave wall, filled with the fleshof adaptation. We have come from where we have replaced the birdswith sun-phantoms, their woven poucheswith semaphores dripping from …

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Issue 1 Poetry

poem of questionable decisions

Giving intocircumstancewe find ourselveslike chains we clasptogether hurrying thislanguage in our limbs ourlips our fragile nerves in paleattempt to cross the expanse wehave failed here to define not surehow much a question of such magnitudewould cast a shadow over this our tender momentyou pause and shift sculpting the silence like a tunnelI count the line breaks as you breathe and let the questionweave into the nest we’ve made letting it go unanswered nothing isbetween us but thin sheeted …

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Issue 1 Poetry

Compānis

David Felix is a youthful septuagenarian English visual poet who lives in Denmark. For more than half a century his writing has taken on a variety of forms, in collage, three dimensions, in galleries, anthologies, festival performances, video and in over sixty publications worldwide, both in print and online. Born into a family of artists, magicians and tailors, he was raised on oil paint, sleight of hand and Singer sewing machines. …

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Issue 1 Poetry

Tie Dye

The bottle tips downwardand dye purls horizontal. Before it hits the tableI remember how the elk falls: blood runs across shoulder,vision floods with blindness. Ink rips through skin andchildren begin to yell. The white cotton,bundled into nests, cannot be saved.The hoof still twitches. I remember crying, pleading,will we be red forever? The next morningour shirts are strung up in a line, shot from long distance. Serena Deng is currently a junior in high …

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Issue 0 Poetry

The Absent

or 0, emptinesslike the stars in the distance—placeholder the other side or 0, the shell of the circlewashed onto the sandwho plays no ocean songwhen conjoined to the ear or 0, the ring without it’sfinger, waiting to be filledwith the act—matrimony or 0, the racetrackwhere decisions orbitthe cavern, the centerpieceof grass like kidsspinning dreidels or 0, the glue,the seamstress of the industrial,and .com boom—we crowd around you,spell out our lonelinessin google search bars …

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Invisible City

Literary Journal of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco

Note: The contents of Invisibe City do not necessarily reflect the views of USF or of the MFA program.

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