By ANGELA VERONICA WONG, AMY LAWLESS
Let’s just see if it fits, and your voice blurred, your hand brushing away mine, me laughing because seriously who says that? I flashed out of my body picturing you saying this to other girls, and laughed again.
Dear Johnny,
In your last letter, you requested
. Take my photograph down, you wrote. Disremember.
Yesterday M started talking. All at once, as if inside, she had alphabets that ached to break
out. We were and relieved. We it would never happen. Johnny, the
tomato plant takes water as if in love, and a map upside down is still a map. The arrows,
, . I’ve
. placed Europe above the . It hangs like our .
Every morning, I
. I trace where you could be: Newbury, Canterbury, ,
Maidstone, Kent. will bring you to another place: Merville, Pas de Calais, Caen,
. You are pushing through fields. In , one cloud like an apology. I
think the word verdant, and it brings me closer to . I the word tomorrow. It
a falling body. . Johnny, I am busy history.
We were climbing a hill in . The ice soaked through our mittens. I
. You . Johnny, the ocean has salt
enough without your blood. I feel your hurried fear, tendoned and tight. You make your
body small. We split at what seems . We
. Johnny, .
There are so many spaces my body needs filled. Love, your dark-haired
doll.
i
By the shadowless, lion-bluff of Pigeon
Island, you have gone swimming, a clear
afternoon, children’s faint play noise ring
in the yard
It was a boy named Pierre Powell
that was in charge of the atlas
in the cabinet. He also ended days
by shaking the iron bell from principal
William’s window, a work we grudged
him for very little
By SETH PERLOW
Dear future self, when you read this
will they have abolished the yellow
light, or merely changed its function?
Where I come from, we have a color
for Sort-of-stop, but no way to express
Sort-of-go.
It was not death, for I stood up,
And all the dead lie down.
—Emily Dickinson
Late
last night
[on way back
from hotel]
I walked
into the mouth
of a long empty alley
full of dark liminalities—
By DANIEL TOBIN
Translated loosely from a lost Akkadian tablet
discovered among the ruins of Kush.
God of the first waters, Ea, listen,
You who parsed chaos with a net from the day:
Unfasten your knots, let the swells replenish
From subtlest channels, from the seams of flesh.
The galaxies circuit in their bright delay.
The least wind tempts me with what might have been.
By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTA
Wearing loose clothes, light cottons,
you sit and fan yourself with a newspaper
supplement, a glass of tepid
fennel-flavoured sherbet by your side.
By ARVIND KRISHNA MEHROTA
Fortysomething, slight of build,
he lived next door with his parents
in an Art Deco house with garden to match
and tall trees that came up to my third floor flat
from where I could touch their leaves. Squirrels
ran up and down them all day, squeaking.
By DANIEL TOBIN
Despite having no lungs and unable to breathe, the second
head displays signs of independent consciousness….
The first fiction is
I’m talking to you at all,
the more amorphous
of my own Janus head, the god
alive and compassing
what has gone and what
is coming, though
which is which is
hard to say. Did I say
my own? I meant ours, my
sister twin, the comelier
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