By Brent Schaeffer 

art curtesy of The University of Chicago on Unsplash

When we got off the train in Paris it was late.
Gare Du Nord looked like a Monet: black
and gray with strokes of gloss. We were lost.
Athena and I slipped into backpacker backpacks and set out
across the city. I had to piss. Like ugly Americans
we stopped at McDonald’s, my ankles killing me,
… We were broke. We took another train north,
hoping it’d be cheaper than Paris. It was.
We got a room for a week—fucked and ate kebabs
from a taco truck thing—just like L.A.—
but colder and somehow romantic.

by mic jones

art by by Rachel Rava

a pronoun can be an emergency
exit a map an experiment
in emancipation like fire
embalming coordinates

let’s make new names what would the world feel
like if gender was understood
the way we understand
a name:
singular
subject to change
sounding different
depending on
through whom
the sound is made

amid mountain ranges
screamed like names
our genders’ echo
sublime as the valley
amplifying bodiless-ness
&

By Anders Howerton

photo by Colin Remas Brown on flickr

“Vulnerability. The ideal state of a painter. You have to cultivate it.”
– Francesco Clemente

The light has shifted since. It isn’t rushing through the glass
the way it did the day you swirled the cayenne like tiny flames
in the lemon-filled honey jar. It circumvents me now
with its set of parallelograms,

kicks pebbles down my avalanche back.
You are no longer you but a ferryman instead, taking your time
to deliver me at the edge of the blazed bird sanctuary,

By Richard Schiffman

photo by Mariam Gab

After the deluge, they’re popping up fast,
a pimpled pox of pallid shrooms,

puny members swell tumescent
cracking earth-egg’s humus shells,

donning post-apocalyptic bonnets,
daisy chains of moonlit domes,

gilled as sharks and cute as buttons,
hoisting clods of moldy duff,

fungal, Mongol-horded armies,
mountain-moving mycelia,

creeping up on sleeping cities,
hoodied toughs on every corner,

meek and dapper Mussolinis,
squat Il Duce’s of decay

casting nets in fetid mulch,

By Savannah Slone

photo by Ivan Babydov on Pexels

we were all born during the slow 


fast shift of all things, oil on 


canvas     no time stamp,


among stained glass and wildlife and 


a sea of velvet earlobes and disco glitter


pageantry     while language swelled 


into watercolor during telomere 


replication and 


extreme weather turned our


nothings into artifacts of survival or 


remembrance and colors disappeared 


underwater,