POETRY:

• Sara Tracey
  • And After This

• Larissa Szporluk
  • Villain Horizon

• Kevin Simmonds
  • Elegy for Castrati

• Peter Schwartz
  • humanology

• W. F. Roby
  • cuff chasin / skirt chasin
  • my brother the janitor uh huh

• Joe Plicka
  • hymn to a thing that I knew and still know to some degree

• Laura McCullough
  • A Man with Soft Hands

• John Loughlin
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Per Diem

• Jason Koo
  • How Would You Rate Your Lodging Experience?
  • Standby at Chicago O’Hare

• Rose Kelleher
  • Hackles

• Jason Fraley
  • prelude to something ordinary 9

• Brian Foley
  • Changing Lightbulbs

• Mark DeCarteret
  • Supertraining

• Lisa Ciccarello
  • At night, inside the house:
  • At night, the perfect inside is outside:

• Travis Brown
  • Bobwhite
  • Hobble-Horse

• Nicky Beer
  • Octopus Visiting Your Garden

• Brian Barker
  • Love Poem for the Last Night on Earth

When they ask me to account for my time on earth,
I will confess: I loved tomato pie

& too much beer, waking up in the blue
beam of the television, my head in your lap,
how I could hear the last birds
gathering beneath your skin. You smelled like mint

& the cold blade of the kitchen knife, & our laughter
left teethmarks those long July days,
as the dark beyond our door culled its armies,

a combustion of insects & heat
hitching our house to the blind grasses, the pasture
sliding away like a calm sea.

Love, what leaned in & drank from the eyes of the horses
as their silhouettes passed like slow ships?
What folded its thin wings & sank into our hearts?

Brian Barker’s first book of poems, The Animal Gospels, won the Tupelo Press Editors’ Prize. His poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in such journals as Poetry, Ploughshares, Agni, American Book Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Indiana Review, Blackbird, and Pleiades. Learn more here: www.brianbarker.net.

Your fishes, violet and yellow-gilled,
bob on lengths of green twine in the light.
Bait or catch? I ask.
You cannot answer.

Your air is so very sad,
sadder still these winds, these staggering ponies,
these weak cousins to my moving waters.

It’s like the touch of unbodied souls.

It’s the difference between the oily surge
in your chest and the dish of blood
under the surgeon’s table.

I will never understand your stones.
They seem shucked and stunned,
like they’ve forgotten
how to talk to one another.
They wear the faces
of senile men staring into the sun.

I love your grass, though, the way it tastes
in my arms. Pastoral, you say.

Nicky Beer’s first book of poems, The Diminishing House, will be published by Carnegie Mellon University Press in early 2010. She teaches creative writing at the University of Colorado Denver, where she co-edits the journal Copper Nickel. Read more of her work at www.nickybeer.com.

Buckshot,
thank God,
it got me not.
Farmer John,

the Budweiser
boys, sure
as shit, they hit
the broad side

of the barn.
Of course,
they swore
there were six

tits on a boar.
Whole hog,
summer’s hot
hodge-podge:

bachelor button,
creeping jenny,
forget-me-not.

Harm, Sir—
scarlet geyser,

dead inroad,
the entrails’ ode.

O Mother Mortis,
you bitter, rigorous

toad, your tunnel
blind as the mole

who went before.
Dr. Onlooker,

what for this wet
wound unloosed?

Wooden Tooth,
Broken Star,

& forget
the hare.

Travis Brown lives and works in Portland, Oregon. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Fence, Third Coast, West Branch, Conduit, Hayden’s Ferry Review, diode, Puerto del Sol, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, and Sixty-Six: The Journal of Sonnet Studies.

the bowls are the color of bone & the bone is shaped like an egg. To make the bowl you must break the shell.

My mouth is a bowl: shell & yolk, egg cream, water glossed. I know the difference between full & filled.

This heart is a mouth. It only looks like heart. A heart is the color of cupcakes & that color is many colored.

A candle makes a heart-heat. A candle gilds what shines. Put this light behind you. I see through the skin.

I’ll bring you the skin of a heart with a candle inside to break the bone like an egg. & this pink shell of a mouth, mouthing the words.

We light the room by fire, by candle & wood, we light the room by reflection, by mirror & polish, we light the room by prayer & drawing open the curtains. We light the room by huddle & condense, by bringing together the bright & silver, by widening our eyes. The light is always dim.

& also with song & a joyful heart & painting everything white & getting down on our knees & needing less & going to sleep when we’re told & when it should be time for sleep.

On, off. On, off. These are words we don’t yet know.

Lisa Ciccarello received her MFA from the University of Arizona, where she was a poetry editor at Sonora Review. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Glitterpony, elimae, Thirteen Myna Birds, Mud Luscious, and Robot Melon. She has a chapbook named At night: out from Scantily Clad Press.

Mark DeCarteret’s work has appeared in the anthologies American Poetry: The Next Generation (Carnegie Mellon Press), Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poets (Story Line Press), and Under the Legislature of Stars: 62 New Hampshire Poets (Oyster River Press) which he also co-edited.

Up all night shuffling
through pictures of people
jumping from tall buildings.

The last moment
perfected unwired limbs
could be made still,

frozen into a shape
like a bent nail
on which nothing

can be hung.
How I wish I could
whisper desperately to you

as if our lives were about
to become extinguished,
instead of floating.

Each moment I must choose.

Brian Foley is a poet living in Boston. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LIT, Caketrain, MiPOesias, Sleeping Fish, BlazeVOX, and others. His chapbook, The Tornado is not a Surrealist, is available from Greying Ghost Press. He can be found at eunuchsblues.blogspot.com.

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Jason Fraley works as an investment advisor and compliance officer in Columbus, Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Forklift, Ohio, No Tell Motel, The Hat, The Pedestal Magazine, Caketrain, and Fifth Wednesday Journal. He has a mini e-chap, Apropos of Nothing, online at Gold Wake Press.

Moles vibrate the world.
I lie in the soil and wait.
There’s a military reason
for their holes. Golden
Alexander, Golden Alexander,
your little golden head
will need some protection
when the heavens crumble.
A fish would tell you water,
but ask any mole—
darkness is the helmet
when darkness is the culprit
that will guard you most.
The trees step in close.
There are towers in their
shadows, full of forest flowers,
and beyond them, a whole
city built by blind things
that I govern with an eyeball
lest a modicum of sunshine
creeps in to untie you.

Larissa Szporluk is the author of Embryos & Idiots (Tupelo Press, 2007), The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind (Alice James Books, 2003), Isolato (University of Iowa Press, 2000), and Dark Sky Question (Beacon Press, 1998).

Now you’ve done it. See her hackles
rise. The narrowed eyes. She bristles,
sprouting tiny spikes, a spiny
porcupine, or prickly pear,
her hair a nest of nasty thistles.

Hisssss! She bares her teeth. She sputters,
sprays your face. The milky spittle
stings. Her fingers, tipped with rusty
nails, a tetanus threat, won’t let you
go. You must be needled, nettled,
nagged until your debt’s been settled.

Better let her win. She’s bitter,
battle-hardened, barbed. She never
drops her guard. At home she huddles
in her mud-hole, one eye open,
dozing, twitching, itching, hoping.