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Satsuma

Poetry Miki Byrne A pastel ward. Walls smooth swathes of eau-de-nil that flow into grey. White lights haze against pale paint. Wash everything in clinical blandness. I hold a bright Satsuma, vibrant as...

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Four Poems

Poetry Erin McIntosh deep sleep / the curse The spindle is a turn on. Just imagine— one hundred years of sleep. Nobody entering your home or your body. What kind of world, when peace is brought on only...

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April and My Plastic Sunflowers

Poetry Sonnet Mondal The four plastic sunflowers in my bedroom- The way they swayed in the ceiling fan’s air Were the functional-year-long-April for me. Fallen twigs of meditating winter And the...

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Transitional Spaces

Poetry Lauren Scavo I fall in love with these impermanent places, For my skittish heart is willing to call a place home If it has been there for a day— Eager to find a corner to nestle into, Burrow...

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Five Poems

Poetry Lana Bella Life Flight I traverse through this shitty place, stepping on the vertebrae of my own noisy ghost, its fingers yawn with exposed skin scraping across the asphalt beneath my feet like...

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This Is a Psalm of Pavement

Poetry Jeff Burt This is a psalm of pavement, of switchtrack-abandoned graffiti and graphic arts, coffins, chain-smoking, knives of a meth-man’s ribs, needle stuck in the arm of open soil between two...

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Two Poems

Poetry Theresa Kelly When I told you I was thinking about going to therapy, you told me to suck it up. Your sadness was not worth more than mine, simply because it had been around longer. You should...

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Three Poems

Poetry Wern Hao See Resolutions We scratch an inventory list of promises, made at the end of another year, broken like the lesser reflections of ourselves which we do not dare to cast eyes upon. The...

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Three Poems

Poetry Bobbi Sinha-Morey   The Faint Scent Of Lemon My father sits on the porch smoking his weed, his skin clean as the morning with the faint scent of lemon. Brownies beside him, walnuts and pork...

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Two Poems

Poetry Diane Webster   Frozen Flat Valentine’s Day the deflated snowman and Santa blobs lie frozen in the lawn like stepped-on chocolate pieces still covered in wrappers after the Halloween frenzy to...

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Shame

Broker’s Pick Colin Dardis Regurgitated coins, I am the worm. A nest thick with people, twigs of passing nods, a muddied thank you and God bless. No one else does. Colin Dardis is a human thing,...

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The Curse

Poetry Marchell Dyon In her prehistoric thinking if no one stoned her She would throw herself against the rocks From her arriving spring into the night She ran away from the moon’s light hunting her...

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Pocket-Sized Compliments

Poetry Theresa Kelly I keep your compliments in my pocket On the bad days, I pull them out and wipe off the dust to remind me. On the good days, I try to write you a poem, but the words … Continue...

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Color Blind (For Real?)

Poetry Marc Livanos Why is my race your foe needling you to lord over me, saving me from my own savagery? Why is my skin color a phobia gnawing at your innards, making door locks snap as I approach?...

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We’ve Changed Grammatically

Poetry Lauren Scavo We were a compound sentence: two subjects and their corresponding predicates, joined by nothing but a monosyllable. We could stand alone but chose not to, and our souls, though...

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Wish

Poetry Judith Taylor I don’t want death driving something delicate, like a carriage: I don’t want Gentleman Death in his long black car shimmering by to take me away. To have to maintain polite...

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Alcaics: on a hashtag

Beaver’s Pick Judith Taylor What happened? Who knows? No one can read a mind scroll back the thoughts like seismograph traces, see just where the quake struck. We are left here sifting the wreckage for...

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Night

Broker’s Pick Richard Dinges Flesh and breath, sweat and oily sheen, bald head, freed from hair and gray, muscles bulge then fall flat, sag into flatulence, hips once were hills to be explored, now...

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Emily as an Attempt at Gun Control #17

Poetry Darren C. Demaree Under her bones & in the middle of making love to me with her lithe body, I am confronted by the idea, that though I am experiencing pleasure, it’s pleasure enhanced by the...

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ChicagoProtestsMarch2016

Poetry Rose Knapp Stale cold black coffee rings Disintegrating ceramic cups Ghostly pepper spray mists Burning blonde-haired chills Molten smeared ink blotters Rose Knapp is a poet, novelist,...

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