painting courtesy of the MET Museum Archives

by Leah Skay

something in the air calls for soft peaches

and slow forgiveness.

the rain catches us smitten and selfish with cherries,

misting us to spare the downpour of yesterday.

I hold up two fingers and dare you

to spit the pits of sweet fruit through the goalpost

to challenge your aim, where you’re going. I

hope you miss and hit me so we’re square.

strawberry seeds fly with flesh shrapnel,

art by Jacelyn Yap

by Kirsten Chen

When I came here
            I said I wouldn’t bring death with me
                         but it snuck into my suitcase

and now it’s all over my clothes.
            Death wears me like a period stain.
                        Death wears me defiant

and obvious as a long night the next day.
            There’s a well beneath my eyes.
                          There’s a motorbike in my brain.

It’s distant and spinning
            and at night I am the emptiness
                        its highway craves.

art by Jacelyn Yap

by James Croal Jackson

Industry

So much industry in your mouth– fake a gasp
as you unzip your pants. Another binge.

At your worst, you are greed
and restless enough

for the pizza to come, for the beer
you gulp & burp from plastic cup,

a heap of chicken wings to devour
without tasting a thing,

squeezing a flood of ranch out of plastic
to smear on your lips like ChapStick

every day but it is only brunch
on Sunday

25th

I wore a gray-black striped shirt.

art by Amari Becker

by Susan Wheatley

No feelings attach to this sentence.
That's a wonder, not easy in this
medium where lines break and fall,
as when the ropes of early English
coal miners broke in the shafts.

The miners dreaded the goblins
on the tunnel walls—but those were
only fossils, something they didn't know
then. They only had candlelight.

The wonder is that they kept
going down. O dark, dark, dark.
They all go into the dark,