Karaoke: Encore
After The Reading, A Man Asks If I Hate My Father
Janiru Liyanage
nother time, a couple pressed me to / forgive my family, they said all the best art draws from love, not anger / but I barely heard them over the Frank Ocean song 
Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction
Some People Think they're Owed a Bond Girl
Karyna McGlynn
to bend over whenever. This belief reaches / quietly into their bone marrow.
Entomb/In Tune: Earl Sweatshirt’s Black Lyric Mode
Joy Priest
But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible above our cyber industrial reality—its alienating information storm of iPhone notifications. They take us beyond the day’s meaning-emptied habitual speech.
dionysus is the only sober person at karaoke
E.B. Schnepp
super impose me neon, berry-tinged / fingertips left smudges across everything I touched.
Let’s Play College
Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery
Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.
RUNNING UP THAT HILL (A DEAL WITH GOD)
After Kate Bush
Monica Rico
It claws / it doesn’t begin with an itch / a single hurt / a pointed branch
When Beyonce Hits, And Sunset is Pink And Baby So Baby Blue
Cassandra Whitaker
What’s beyond the two lights at the edge / of the bay bridge tunnel blinking / out of turn, one a bit more butch / than the other
Self Portrait. A Boy in His Mother’s Clothes Singing Madonna’s “Live To Tell”. At Night. Alone.
Cassandra Whitaker
A bag of snakes, the hole inside / me.
Well, It’s Not Like It Used to Be
Patrick Duane
I was born March 24th, the same day as Harry Houdini, so my family used to take annual trips to the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Last Christmas
Colin Ainsworth
The last time I was here I was really in here. I have been here. I know that I have been here. These people are in my home and they are watching my TV.
My Massage Therapist Asks if the Pressure’s Too Much
Abbie Kiefer
Let me tell you, Lil—I’m here to be borne down
on.
After The Reading, A Man Asks If I Hate My Father
Janiru Liyanage
nother time, a couple pressed me to / forgive my family, they said all the best art draws from love, not anger / but I barely heard them over the Frank Ocean song
The Moss Takes Us to an 80s Sex Shop
Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery
But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.
Here, a Brindis for All Who Weep Alone
Rocio Anica
I raced past the kennels each time. So many noses pressed against the chain link. Others cast their pink, brown, black noses downward, their beautiful tails curling inward or twitching a sad little wag as they turned away.
Ghosts of Scene Sites Past
Seán Carlson
On an external hard drive stored in a closet somewhere at home, I have a photo from the first concert I set up, a moment captured on a roll of film and later scanned and sent via email.
From the Archives
The Traveling Coconut
Tashima Thomas
The spindly stalks creep out from the nexus of the composition like arachnid extremities. The pronounced compression of space pushes the roughly hewn roots into the forefront for the beholder’s contemplation. The sharp points and scraggly edges of the root system prevent easy entrance into the scene. Oller creates a kind of coconut Noli me tangere: we may look, but not touch.
Astros Sign Osuna Despite Local Outrage
Iliana Rocha
It means to want so badly. / How close win is to want is the distance / between his fast ball & her face.
Time Oddity: A Retrospective Review of Zeroes Were Hollow by David Larsen, Kenning Editions, December 2022
Jared Joseph
The 1967 song written by the enigmatic David Bowie famously dramatizes a call and response between Ground Control and Major Tom, except that we don’t know whether the call goes through, and we don’t know whether the response is actually a response.
Low-End Theory
Kendra DeColo
Love, I’m a musky vermouth, palm of discount / stars, instruction manual for low-end vibrators / which is to say, my frequencies have slowed / down to the flutter of a junebug’s libido