Karaoke: Encore
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 
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.
Let’s Play College
Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery
Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.
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.
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
dionysus is the only sober person at karaoke
E.B. Schnepp
super impose me neon, berry-tinged / fingertips left smudges across everything I touched.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
From the Archives
The Moral Kicks In
Peter Twal
& after the first course, your corsage flatlines Beautiful convulsions Then, it sprouts wings, thorns, claws its way up
your arm to swallow you goosebump by goosebump
Way of the Gun
Tana Wojczuk
In silence, the women gather. Girls draw together, jostling to get in front of the camera, but once they are there they don’t know how to behave. One chews her hair, the other gesticulates, losing her cool out the ends of her fingers, she fans them like a child searching blind-mole for a lost toy. A woman’s face has collapsed. A mother searching for a lost child. As she speaks of him she strokes her hand against her own cheek.
34.2 Winter/Spring 2022
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Artificial Flower Garden
Sara McGuirk
excuse me this chambray tie / this cummerbund, these plain chops, / these dull lips. I’ve no guilt for gild's sake.