Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
Gezi
Once again, a newborn cried for the first time. The bald scream carried her voice through crowds in a chestnut-smelling street, rousing the cats from their curbside sleep. The sound stretched farther on to the trees of Taksim as they shuddered with an intensity foreign to them. The cats knew of what was coming before us. They found Spirit in a corner of İstiklal, licked and nursed her. They were the ones who would tell her about the name of the street, about how long before it meant independence, it meant dismissal and rebellion. They told her, as she cried, that she was rebelling even now when she did not know the word for it. They were the ones who decided that the time was right and carried the newborn to a nearby park. The cats, from atop the branches of Gezi, all silent in their knowing, wanted to show Spirit the trees.
Poetry • Spring 2026 - Fear
There’s something to be said about those little birds inside the eggs, with the sticky baby down and bones melted tender. This morning, you call me soup-for-brains and I imagine a boy’s guts cupped inside the feathered belly on my plate—another boy pressed open like a drum, a membrane. I drink the brine from a jar of Koon Chun plums for breakfast. Practice, I say, and you call me Pussy for the first time all week. They say it doesn’t taste like anything. Just the salt of the duck and the blood-tang of marrow. But I forgot you’re tutoring Leah Wong at her place today, so I turn and face your black-feathered buzzcut. No time for a game behind the school with the Chus’ half-popped basketball, which yesterday I poked till it dimpled and likened it to one of her mom’s big fake ones, and you hit me. For a split-second I thought I saw your eyes turn milky and your spine go baby-bent, but I pulled up your T-shirt and you were still hairless as a girl, your skin opaque. So it’s dinnertime and Mom isn’t home yet and all I have is the chick in my egg. He’s just boiled awake, beak parting to call me Dumbass. Soft. My fingers turn to yellow protein in calcium dust, prying you into this wet, scalding kitchen. Walls gum-pink and beating; I take you where heat reigns.
Features • Spring 2026 - Fear
By no means is this a famous story. It takes place in Huntsville, Utah, a small town of under six-hundred residents, located in Ogden Valley on Pineview Reservoir. Surrounded by three ski resorts (Snowbasin, Powder Mountain, and Nordic Valley) there is no shortage of idyllic views, nor a shortage of seasoned skiers wishing to park amongst these idyllic views. This is observed by the abundance of Parking by Permit Only signs that prohibit parking west of 7300 E Street, made possible by the Huntsville Town Ordinance on April 19th, 2018.
Fiction • Spring 2026 - Fear
Big John stood near me with the electric blue above us, screaming out with its shine for everyone to drink it. Lines of neon stretched and twisted into a beauty of advertising brilliance. We were drinking it and the bottles were sweating and it made me feel good for the first time all day.
The fresh online pieces we experiment with outside of our print cycle. Formerly known as Blog.
From the Archives
Poetry • Fall 2025 - Diagnosis
litter the body open will boy / be boat / shudder upon body / be rockabyed / be strangered in body /
lash like slick oil / be boneless / slump downwards / dissect jawbone / be bodied like oil spill / regret
riverboat home / be rowed / into slick summer, street-signed / be eulogized / split film from lip to /
be gutted open / body foolproof / be a bullet home / sleuth sand dunes / be brown-body / hymn
unraveled / be through with desire / fish impaled on foreign language / be proper noun / split his lip
voweled / be harlot / scale the tectonics of teeth / be punch-drunk / slit silt / be three-eyed, spool
open / this cliff / be want / the cusp whole-bodied / be flayed / listerine limericked / be grunt-work /
sex table-salted neural refrain / be kali / war cling-film on tongue / be gutless / scale spliced outwards
/ be derivative / rivered into forest / be orange tree / peeled by sun-shock / be gummed / grapefruit
rot by heat / be heatstroke / snip open livewire of / be lipped / at crossroads / be exit sign / slick-
signed with / be summer-blood / threadbare scythe-cut / be perfect o / lips imitation exorcism / be
cockwhore / fig-fingered on blood fruit / be tongue / slit into silt / be moondust / infinity slid into
encore
Poetry • Winter 2012
1On the curt eve of November to make out of patience a new name.Shale-light, long scythes of it,2slicing through the turbid shadow-impressions of failed snow,pauses at certain angles and, inceasing to carve, deepens the engravingsof wind, hoof-prints, the murky aquatintafter-bristle of ferns iced-over andswept into new grooves...3As if justice cannot beserved to principle if the principle alone does not meltunder the surveillance of*force*—skittish, ever-4truant, this autumn wind ever-whetting itself, andthis light transmogrifying itself—a passing bird like a toss of chopped tobacco.And then, the light reconnoitering—5bossed lardy handfuls of itfallen, then cobbled in groups of two or three,among the yew-cones and in the paunchy creaseswhere the sidewalk abandons plot, sagging a little.And that single gob of it—horse-hair grey, crackling likethe fat toe of a god. After the curt melt of6this evening to wake up ina tree, into a grainin the growth in the upper left finger of the smallest branchin the very reddest tree. To sensehandlessness, then the catch-of-flint roil ofstatic—a canopy of hands. To feel my handstighten—lean—then loosen—and thento feel slenderin an unloosened light. How can one batethe tongue then, how can one judge what to savor andwhat to let turn frail andincendiary? And the light? How can one servejustice to a principleif body is one and the lolling limber light anotherthat lacquers it?7The dead have their lightless islandsand we, each new second,use that second to shuck off a secondself. All the while the small moldedbuhl leaves scattermildly, settling in our hair like cut-out lacunas fromsome fluted elemental music, inflaking November-light.I would not want, I think, in thisporcelain-light, to suffer the suddenness ofanother’s skin—to sensea shade as treacle, grey, curried, or white asleaves. There are still8the unraveling sprigs ofmy topcoat to contend with. And thenthe theater tonight.
Poetry • Winter 2017 - Cell
Early morning light: a young red-tailed hawk
glided onto an overhead branch and peered
down at me, but it did not look with your eyes—
a battered and rusted pickup lies in the wash;
Navajo tea buds on the trail—I headed back
and checked, in the boiler room, the traps,
baited with peanut butter—now a gnat
flits against this lit screen: where are you now?
One morning, we walked in a Rhode Island
cemetery and did not look at a single gravestone;
we looked at hundred-year-old copper beeches,
cells burnished purple, soaking up sunshine,
and talked about the dawn redwood,
how the glimmering light at the beginning
of the world was in all things. This morning,
in the predawn darkness, Orion angled
in the eastern sky with Sirius, low,
above the ridgeline; and, before daylight
blotted out the stars, I heard you speak,
*the scratched words return to their sleeves*.
Features • Winter 2012
On the ground rests a slip of paper worth $96. A janitor, mop and cigarette in one hand, kneels down and studies the fine print. CALDER LEG 1: 4, 6, 7; LEG 2: 3.
He stops there. He mops on, smokes on, looks on. Later he returns with a dustpan and wipes up the trash under Seabiscuit’s 1937 MassCap banner.
Outside, the oval is kept well enough, dragged through and through with a six a.m. tractor and a six a.m. man. The enclosing fence defines pristine as white. In the infield lurks a fountain in its off-season.
At the nearest betting window, a sign hangs reading “CLOSED.” In the window next to it, a sign reading “CLOSED.” A third window missing its sign is closed.
On the wall hangs a painting of a horse standing on a patch of grass. There is no one on the horse, but the length of the grass patch in front of the horse is equal to the length of the grass patch behind the horse. Behind the painting of the horse is a mural of another horse. There is a man on the horse in the mural, but the painting is on that man.
A square machine in a hole in the wall prints a slip of paper worth $24. It falls into the hand of a man with a custom-made coat made for someone else in someone else’s era. It will learn if it deserves the ground.
The man limps out to the track and squints at the finish line. No one has crossed it in three months. Not a single loser. He limps back inside.
Twelve TV’s in two rows of six flash odds, pools and payouts. POST TIME blinks on the set simulcasting live from Aqueduct. The horses approach the starting gate resolute and in low-definition.
A cluster forms. All heads turn up, all eyes take in the screen a few feet under heaven. “I know a guy,” the man says. No one mutters an answer. “I know a guy who had a dream about the number five. So he woke up at five and took the fifth train out of the station. There were five people in his car. He shows up at the track, and in the fifth race puts five grand on the five.”
The race goes off.
“Horse finishes fifth.”
2:03:20 later, the race ends. The $24 slip of paper lazily finds the ground, worth nothing.
The man heads for the machine in the hole in the wall. It does not smell like horses.
Poetry • Winter 2009
**1 / Meeting Burt**
Burt Lancaster and I don’t
have much to die for: love
of the game and the gold
and the girl not as much
makes simple to say she’s not
beautiful, perpetually
never quite undressed,
dusty and sweaty under
that scarf, her dress, her
face, wide plain, blessed
expanse glistening daily
above breasts long fought
for, Burt and I, too old
now to care about love.
**2 / Losing Burt**
The tropes gather faster when Burt appears,
he’s lost craps and a woman, broke and rebuffed,
smirking and grumbling that humans make love
face to face, a remark worthy of some score-
settling cowboy in spurs, not you, Burt, your
single regard for time and rock blown rough
in one moment’s furnace of sticks, sweaty, buffed,
refusing objection your fusework near blears
human loss so unsavory
I’m lost, Burt,
can’t tell your face features through the sure
group’s tactics and horses, making calm
ill-advised, more fitting to flail and blurt
guilt in tumid air that soaks these shores
without oceans,
Your hand is creased without a palm.
**3 / Replacing Burt (On Seeing a Different Western)**
Burt and I have had a falling out
I say loud, hoping after a reaction,
eyeing with verve and meaning my now
and new loved outlaw, lanky Gary. Faction
different this time, clean-shaven and freshly
married, on the run not from the long
law but the lawless. Blonde-sweet Miss Kelly
headstrong and stupid—seems he’s on the wrong
side of her Quaker complaints. He stays to greet
a death mimed by cruel schoolboys. A crime
for their sake. Boys scatter. Streets empty. Smutty heat,
smutty Gary beneath the Marshall sign,
moral and certain, leather and tallow.
2026