Samuel Prince – Fer-de-Lance Trafficker
Fer-de-Lance Trafficker Coco was a teenage biopirate, carrier for black market pharma — exotic molluscs, translucent frogs, baby anacondas — or some faceless collector’s grim menagerie. By nightfall she’d wait for the three-tiered bus to the airstrip, her booty bag slung, bulged with critters, and the condors mooning over the canopy, the still-warm roads. […]
Maria Rouphail – Pandemic, 1918
Pandemic, 1918 (for MR, who lived and died in another century) 1. Wind-waft and a brown leaf lofted from a dry forest floor. Bone-scrabble of dry dirt— a forewarning, and the story two generations told again and again about the microbes’ fatal power, and the grief of the young mother whose sibylline brain […]
Emma Trelles – I Have Been Dreaming of a Time Machine
I Have Been Dreaming of a Time Machine To come and come in the abandoned garden skin vines a way of beginning to stay up all night with you again young and blind to the spectacular death of each minute how something has bitten the persimmons while we rolled […]
Rafael Jesús González – Terafines/Teraphim
Terafines Son abandonados, enterrados, tirados entre tiestos. Y nosotros, desterrados del espíritu, alma-velas agitadas y enmarañadas en las adujas de nuestro hablar, el pensar un trapecio embrollado, colgamos en el espacio. Esperan nuestro regreso o nuestra caída — rechonchos, sólidos, graves, formados de la tierra. Teraphim They are abandoned, buried, lying […]
Jim Natal – Étude in the Form of a Crow
Étude in the Form of a Crow Crows punctuate my life pierce slice swoop dive origami folded enter my dreams disrupt subvert from within cardinals magpies jays the whole extended corvid clan anthracite feathers rouge feathers blue-speckled and barred camouflaged by pinons junipers madronas more cousins than my wife’s family the few I have I […]
