art courtesy of The MET Museum

by Keen Eve

Two women
fold their clothes
on a Grecian bowl
—one whispers
to the other,

Beneath us
are silica beads
arranged to trap
the moisture
from her breath.      

For you, I reach
to write a message
in the fogged glass—
the guard tells me,
Please step back.

Keen Eve is a trans lesbian poet &

art by Virgil Suárez 

by Marc Weissman

If he perches on you or shows up please call Ellie immediately ANY TIME. -Ellie

And if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves. -A. R. Ammons

What if he shows up Ellie
but I don’t

What if I find him but he’s no longer
a starling
he’s a star a constellation
the wind

grown beyond recognition
into Horus falcon-headed
god of war sky and hunting

That feels too aggressive for a
songbird

We must find him with haste
he wasn’t ready for release

I pray for him and you and me
I don’t think I’m ready for another Sudanese war
or Shannen Doherty dead at 53
or inflation in the economic or cosmic sense
or the unlikely event your bird was caught
midair by hawk

smaller than a robin
bigger than a sparrow

Like so many posters of signs notices
missed connections
you unleash myth and
more questions

And if I find him
on Independence Day
with dark and light brown feathers
dark legs and black beak

by the blue eggshell
Ford Granada
his trauma
won’t rip me apart

And if I find him I’ll manifest
a dark cover over him
and all starlings
in and under the stars
lost and found
alighting

Marc Weissman is an East Williamsburg-based poet,

art by Trevor Cunnington

by Devin Wilson

We move like ghosts
through the house.

Glaciers glide past
each other in silence.

The low hum
of a submarine

in the distance.
The sound broken

makes. Cracks in black
ice echo across the life lake.

Wallpaper curling
we’ll never fix.

Someone should
empty the woodstove.

Take the bucket out back.
Be careful of the old canoe

and there’s a rusty wheelbarrow,

art by Stephen Ground

by Jesse Wallis

For the bit of moisture in a dove chick’s brain,
the Gila woodpecker has been known to drill
through the soft skulls of unattended nestlings
while their parents gather seeds. Defenseless,
the chicks are still alive while this is happening.
The brooder mourning doves return to carcasses.
Its forked tongue having never tasted the bitter-
sweet, fleshy fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge
of Good and Evil, the woodpecker lives outside
the airy sphere of right and wrong.

art by Trevor Cunnington

by J. Y. Zhang

in black tunnels the world slows to molasses
everything subsonic, the yellow lights drunk and feverish
flickering across the rusted tracks

you—a knife through the city again
blue dot blinking then gone

cutting through, putting distance:
velocity in your tongue and smoke
in your unwashed hair
urine on the tiles, the soles of your feet

the fact of motion is simple:
you are headed somewhere
or your body is—

but there’s a moment on the line
when twin trains run parallel
&

art by Beth Kephart

by Choo En Ting

Choo En Ting  is a Singaporean writer & editor based in Los Angeles. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Sonora Review, Literally, The Foundationalist, Kopi Break Poetry, and elsewhere. He won the USC Undergraduate Writers’ Conference in his sophomore year, and he was awarded a scholarship from the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.