When they asked me / to describe myself / I said I am / the opposite of an onion.
The architect’s website for my hometown prison features wispy watercolors of blue skies, blotted cotton clouds, a border of poplar leaves above rings of razor wire.
How often at night the mouth works / Its own words by itself for no one’s hearing / Not even our own. Grain sleep of dreams / In which snow again buries the river and fields; / And also, the …
You caught me up / old world / in obsolescent fabric / stiff & / loosely shaped / tabbinet, cambric / martin’s hide / lace
My inheritance is the names/ of flowers, my tongue / a red headstone speaking / the names of lilies.
...these little unnatural bodies of water popping up across the country were glassy turquoise eyes opening on the future, each one a proof, with its modern chemicals and synthetic color, that …
This is a rock-throwing war / all of their pockets bulge Keoni holds a big one / in both hands At some point the rocks are thrown / They must be
I am the keeper tells Me the most popular exhibit You might not think this cheers me but it does I’m given many opportunities I like especially to ask the groups Led by fat white men I …
The word is in another language. / It means: Custer’s last stand. / It means: Ozymandias.
Though perhaps he never debated it at all. Perhaps he was only waiting for the right stretch of road, a field with grass tall enough to hide a body.
The birthing-dying galaxies shined through them so that their inner lives—their most intimate memories and dreams—were as visible as the organs of a gecko in the glow of a porch light.
Where virtue / is bone-starved of pretense, / or fattened on the suet of sentiment. / Clear the streams, clear the air, / severe the politics, chalked harsh / the nail-head souls of women. / Fences …
Sometimes their shoes start sinking. The mud starts sucking. It swallows calves, kneecaps. And that old word arises like a black-and-white horror movie still, letters gory and dripping: Quicksand
“Have fun!” they said, and the girls stood on the porch in sandals and cut-off shorts and tank tops, smelling of shea butter and bug spray. Their mothers’ cars clouded the driveway with gravel …
He says it’s snowing & his sister is pregnant & his mother is dying so they probably won’t be able to go on as many rides at Disney. / I say okay & I see but neither is true. / The sky shuts its …
I’m no mango or tomato. I’m a rusty yawn in a rumored year. I’m an arctic attic. / Come amble & ampersand in the slippery polar clutter. / I am not the heterosexual neat freak my mother raised …
But what if I wish to sit still next to you / every morning and tell you what I really mean / when I say I can never go back / is that I know that country no longer exists, / not those brown waves, …
Imagine when she learned how to kiss / she was fascinated by lips & reached for them. / Her first love sported an elephant’s trunk / her second an owl’s boney beak.
I keep pulling my hair out and starving— / a tongue at the end of my hunger. / I want to be turned inside out again— / a deep purple that bone and fire make.
When the first boy called me a wetback, / I filled his mouth with the bees that have died in my house. / How good it must have felt before the small village / echoed its grief in his throat, before …
Towers of cloud / stuff the mouth of sky. / When she stops thrashing / they wade out and walk up the dirt hill to the roadside / and make their way back. The sister returns to the rippled edge / and …
The gourds explode—gutted of their seed and splayed / against the sand like infant skulls. / The waves a wide-armed sweep, broken game chips / tossed off a table. No prints, no handwriting / to …
He’s resistant / to decay, he’s stubborn, he’s / soft—he’s so soft a child’s hand / could crush his skull like a tulip.
I’m sorry. I apologize. Excuse me. I beg / for forgiveness. Under the torched / gown of sky, you ride me like a donkey. / And I let you. My screams are nothing / but windows painted shut.
“To be honest,” Eduardo wrote when we asked him to write a short introduction to this selection, “I’m weary of intros. I’d rather let the work do all the talking.” In that spirit, turn …
"…the grace of the black tops spinning out of control … both ominous and startlingly human” as though committed to “edging each other out of the picture”
Let it drive down your throat / Coolly, effervesce and let it / Conjure a full-grow’n fantasy—o’ your / Future. Get it / to sound / [bite] your name like bluer blood / comingled with fortified …
and everything here smells gutted— / bloodtide, sea grapes in thick bloom, / our smashed plates and teacups. Dismantling / this grey shoreline for some kind of home, scared / orphans out bleating …
But the trains of San Marcos are addicted to eBay. / But the trains of San Marcos support local gatherings / such as rallies, bake sales, watering the community garden. / The trains of San Marcos …
Excuse me, but I must say a few words, / for the backyard Bradford pear has finally bloomed / on this day, the nineteenth of February, a bright / Thursday afternoon. Here, where weather / avoids …
Sinuous, frenetic, hard, malleable, still, Britney dances. A parody of a caricature, a heroine, a victim, a killer, the whole Spears shtick. Dante was still exclaiming, “A demon! A real …
At twelve years old we had already burned our way through the rest of our father’s porn collection, a small filing cabinet packed with VHS tapes from the early 1980s, when he and our mothers were …
She is tired, this panicked dreamer at the edge of the wood. The white hairs in the cups of her ears have caught the yellow of bulldozers, yield signs, the puddles of piss men dressed in orange leave …
Your best friend Tina has three Taylor Swifts swimming in her pool. She has a miniature Taylor Swift she keeps on a perch, a Taylor Swift with wings. You’re so jealous. She’s not even paying …
As she drives Georgette home, she can’t resist saying, when they’re almost there, Such pointy cheekbones, aren’t you afraid they’ll cut your husband? Georgette laughs coldly. I wish they’d …
In the family story, his father tells him not to take a swim: / the shark net is down. Everyone knows not to swim / without the net. He dives from the cliff. From the air, a fin. / His flesh unlaces. …
On the nigh- / naked tree some voice in the management of / their own affairs: O what a mask was there, / what a disguise! Instances of displacement of / leaves...
1: Genesis, or, God is a man/and he owns you. You were bad. Put on some/got-damn clothes. 2: Exodus, or, you would still / be a slave if it were not for men. Also, magic. / Magic or, never question a …
A tourniquet will work unless it doesn’t. They don’t tell you what to do then if the artery is torn behind the soft pocket of an armpit, or thigh …
The pink bellies of stones feed wetness to the ground. The underside of / eagles, owls and sparrows, the embarrassing buttock of moon—this is my / upturned monarchy: the inside-out views …
but there were stars above me / too many / out of habit / I groomed the sky / once they multiply / good god won’t give a nod / we’ll have to throw / the whole sky away
let the summer tremble before our door / don’t open let it die from desire / we will laugh naked and tanned / and keep trying on the lady’s dresses / we will dance all day little girls / by the …
Nowhere is the sprit of “The Archive Issue” more clear, however, than in our special folio of eight writers responding to items held in our Special Collections. Through their arresting, original …
