Say a witty line, watch it dance
on the lip of a wine glass. Peck at the cannoli
though you are not hungry, have never known
hunger. Judge everyone at the table, the policeman
nonchalant as he flips an envelope
over and over in his hand,
the waiter’s toothy grin when no one is watching,
the grandmother doodling on napkins,
wondering what to do with the zygote
no one will believe is inside her.

You are hiding Ibsen’s lessons,
how what it is that brought you to this table
was buried long ago without fanfare.

Jeff Calhoun’s writing credits include The 2River View, Lily, Softblow, Poetry Midwest, Stirring, and Triplopia. His recent chapbook, Navigating the Throes of Concrete Ravines, is freely available online from Lily Press. When not mining genomes for patterns or found poems, he’s probably dreaming about banana pancakes or chocolate milkshakes.

Your coming here, pure accident. Dodging. The barometer was wrong; it promised grey and wet. Heavy skies. Instead, it is black and on me. Some sun in my ear. I feel it in the back of my eyes: the confusion to focus. How close? How much to get closer? How many slowly rolled before you said, “Come here. You’re getting too wet.”

Maybe you’ll always see a window. I can’t stop myself from looking, and looking again. And maybe again.

Mackenzie Carignan lives in Broomfield, Colorado. She recently quit a steady and lucrative desk job to teach, bought a king-sized bed, and completed her Ph.D. in Creative Writing. Her poetry has appeared in Fourteen Hills, ACM, MiPOesias, and Dusie. She teaches at Metro State College of Denver.

Dawn: two down, one up.
I’m a blown-out tire, limp,
scuttling to roadside diners,
sipping coffee alone, both
hungers hung like posters
in chill blood-contours,
sputtered past me, paste.
I took them on in haste,
so close behind me they
lay, laid, lying in wait to
do it all again, leave me
without a pump, means
of being full. I feel dull.
Memento mori means eggs.

Adam Fieled is the author of two books: Opera Bufa (Otoliths, 2007) and Beams (BlazeVOX, 2007), as well as two chapbooks, Posit (Dusie Press) and Funtime (Funtime Press). He has work in Jacket, Dusie, Rain Taxi, MiPOesias, Cordite, Nth Position, Big Bridge, and elsewhere.

Exquisite me. Angelic me.
I never say I’m sorry for anything

(one of us thinks). I can’t remember
the present, for all the unthinkable

future reversing back into me.
Tentative. Me in suspense.

The art on the walls is hanged
at nefarious angles;

a boy at the counter disappears,
or I can see through him.

How does my x-ray vision
know when to stop? I

was trying to get to the way end.

What are you looking at, dog.
OK, I don’t belong in the park,

with nature: I’m not enough rich,
not enough poor; the fluff from a tree

makes my heart sore. I’m not crazy.
I just prefer the feminine remove

of a reproduction, of a living room—
the miniature texts exquisitely real,

if you had the means to read them.
Tiny poison in the wallpaper

in theory would eventually kill you.
Did you know fruit flies can have sex

for twenty minutes? That’s like half
their lifespan. There’s a couple going at it

on the parquet floor. The future
of the species depends on it. Unless

they’re just writhing in death throes—
hard to tell at this size. Either way

I’m not traumatized.

Elisa Gabbert is an editor of Absent. She has work in Boston Review, Pleiades, Cannibal, Meridian, and LIT, and a chapbook, Thanks for Sending the Engine, from Kitchen Press. She is author, with Kathleen Rooney, of Something Really Wonderful (dancing girl press, 2007) and That Tiny Insane Voluptuousness (Otoliths, 2008).

[ discovery ]
Behind cat’s eyes hide mirrors. At night the reflections of torches burn inside them.

[ pixels ]
The cursor taps its thin impatient finger against snow.

[ broadband ]
A photographer in Spain invites me to compose captions for a documentary about the war, pressing the SEND key like a doorbell.

[ proof ]
A webpage printed on paper. Hyperlinks underlined blue. The proofer sharpens her pencil, reaches for the department dictionary.

[ mouse ]
The error message asks Are you sure you want to proceed? Every day I enter Yes without second thought. A red line questions if I’ve spelled my name correctly.

[ cube ]
First the batteries in my desktop meditation fountain drain dead. Then the water trickles dry. The Buddha figurine kneels in an empty basin.

[ happy birthday ]
My father posts another anonymous comment.

[ inbox ]
A hunter-orange rebar mast rises behind my rural mailstop. In winter, snowed over, plowed in, the black breadbox door freezes on its rusting hinge.

[ coaxial ]
The Indian Wetland Tiger swims up to 2 miles a day. A diver captures how outstretched paws shape quite efficient paddles. The narrator explains how big cats swim the same way they walk, walk the way they swim, chins skimming water.

[ privacy laws ]
I mistakenly Reply All to the message questioning your absence.

[ charter ]
A single wire connects us to the world. Stretching for miles to the horizon, a clear-cut swath of forest towering with crosses, thin black lines slack between.

Brillo pads get rid of most of the dirt on your hands.
And Lever soap. Forget Ivory or Olay. Hand cream
covers the smell of hot dust, of metal. Try Country Apple
or Passionate Peach. Some girls like the smell of lavender.

Wear red polish. Color hides dark stains and dirt,
especially grime that gets pushed back where hard nail
meets soft skin, that place a metal file can’t find.

Wear light foundation. Water-based. It keeps your pores
free from dirt. But don’t bother with loose powder.
The dust in the air will take care of the shine.

Forget eyeliner. It will stain the shadows beneath your eyes.
Forget mascara. It will run. Even the waterproof kind.
And don’t wear lipstick. Ever. Chapstick will do.

Vaseline is even better. But Cover Girl, Revlon, even Almay
sucks all moisture from your lips, making your smile,
like the rest of you, crack.

Brent Goodman divides his time between a view of a long hallway, cleaning litter boxes, and tuning other people’s guitars. When the sun goes down and his ears flood with sleep, sometimes he dreams good news on a train somewhere is heading his direction. For a free fortune email wronghoroscope [at] gmail.com.

I don’t know why, but I think of him, though he’s a minor player
in the Aeneid: Ornytus the huntsman, a Tuscan soldier,
one of a hundred more colorful characters. Out of the blue, I

          think we can implement the feature by
          next Wednesday. They’ve agreed to

picture the guy on horseback, wearing his wolf’s-head helmet.
Twentyish, maybe, his first real fight. Those jaws form a kind of
backwoods crown with their ivory fangs, and the hide drapes down to

          provide a read-only interface to
          their database, but I told them we’d

cover his long black hair. When he grunts, you can see that he’s missing
one or two teeth of his own. His armor is nothing but cowhide,
probably sewn by his mother, and as for his shield and spear, they

          need to be able to add records
          directly, as needed. So they

show he’s a little bit out of his league, a rustic homeboy.
Spirited, though—only twelve when he killed the wolf. Then I think of
his bark-brown eyes, and the uncomprehending look in them as he’s

          asked for a workaround. They just don’t
          get it. The dropdown lists have to be

speared by Camilla.

          updated instantly.

Rose Kelleher lives in Maryland. Her poems have appeared in Anon, Atlanta Review, The Dark Horse, and other publications.

And I found your kidneys in a shrouded booth filled with firearms and sea-shell bracelets. A man hovered and haggled the price of a knife, so I slipped the kidney jar into my jacket and ran through the streets, an entourage chasing and rattling rifles behind me. Thank you, dream, I said, when the buildings blurred into my living room, and, safe, I placed the jar on my mantel. How long have you had a mantel? a friend asked, noting the Victorian air of my living arrangements. What will you do? another inquired, concerned you might be bathing in ice, waiting for an endocrine return. We called your old numbers, sent parcel post notices, but nothing. The jar gathered dust and gleamed in the glancing sunlight. With no response and too many dinner guests unnerved by the fleshy parenthesis, we invited a minister and held a ceremony: I placed the jar in a shoebox in a divot in the backyard. We gathered, shared wine and stories. The hole was filled. Many held back tears and had to return home. Then the sky blurred with another time-moving transition, but I was still in the backyard. Dammit, I thought, as a hand pushed through the top-soil. I grabbed the thin wrist, pulled the body up, and watched you shake silt from your hair. Another stunning entrance, I said, and poured you a drink. You sipped your mimosa and spoke of mitosis. I placed a hand on the small of your back as, above us, two planes scarred the sky.

and still we wondered why the bodies
of birds fell around us. It’s an omen,
you said, and soon dust stirred

in the streets like a Western. Horses
walked into the vanishing point
and music swelled while the sun

tucked itself into hills. A lasso
appeared in my hands, and, unsure,
I threw the loop through the night.

The audience erupted, and, odd,
you said, I hadn’t noticed them before,
but there they were, the bleachers

bustling and full. The director declared
the evening a wrap and the crew
formed a caravan of Civics, unwound

into Interstate. If I had known my lines
were scripted, you said, I would’ve
improvised more. Or maybe asked

for an encore. At least this explains
the windows, I said. Another bird kissed
the ground. The stars were color bars.

Tim Lockridge is an MFA candidate at Virginia Tech. His work recently appeared in the Backwards City Review, on Verse Daily, and is forthcoming from Redivider.

Listen, I have a blue pain
inside of me. You don’t see it.

Because it comes in slowly
                    as a sound.

You’re not listening:
it enters like a hand

up a skirt. It is my letter to you
without a single feeling in it.

The hand is connected to a man.
And I don’t like the way you look at him.

Maybe you don’t like it either. The hum
of the amplifier begins

as a drone in the
corners. It is the hum that

gets louder but still you don’t hear it.
I do not know how to show this to you.

Sometimes I don’t see it
either (on a roadtrip through the shadows and

mountains, hooked up
in the lining of your bed). And why would I

show you when the drone goes down
reduced in the simmer of love or art.

I mean to say that you’re
perfect for me, etc. No, no.

What I mean to say is I am submerged
by the desire to make or create.

Can you hear me? You’re not listening.
We’re all, after all, just light & sound.

There is a hand going up your skirt.
Can you hear me? Maybe you don’t like it, either.

Joseph Mains lives in the southwest and is Chief Poetry Editor for Sonora Review.

Now listen to me good. To be dreaming
of the cove, the light pink cottage
that was always on the edge. This being the year

my jeans fell from my frame. You said I was closer to God
but he wouldn’t concur. Weeds

grew up on bales of clean white salt. All summer
everyone wondered

where I lived, watched the carpenter ants on the rocks.
When I wasn’t in my body, I was dead. Cops

circled, paraphernalia swirled
inside my lonely purse.

There was nothing to do but wait.
Contraband, will you
turn to silk again? Tilt his white, Atlantic
throat up

to the shy-eyed puffins?