Marlene Olin
Outside, palm trees dip and sway. Tourists snap pictures. An ocean breeze brushes cool but leaves you warm.
Inside, Naomi Leftkowitz stares at four cement walls. To save money on air-conditioning, the school has filled in the windows. Her long blouse covers her elbows, and her skirt hides her knees. Things used to be different.
Home Cooking
Brendan Galvin
I would cut my right arm off
for Magdalena Sacco, Foley said
out front of Ernie’s Pizza. We were
fifteen, of logic and non-sequitur
knew zero, but raised our eyebrows
to concede First Love. This morning
Sudden Empathy
María DeGuzmán
Mystic’s Vision
You open the book to a bowl, a hooded figure cupping fire, rotating updrafts of wind.
Two Poems by Lorelei Bacht
To get lost is to learn the way.
I am a miner descending
for deposits. I mine whatever blocks
the light, whatever pools, sulphurs,
oxides – my task is to bring it to the
surface, inspect: I name, I tag, I list and I
bar chart - this, this and that. Some of us
My heart a road-kill, and I am the sea
My heart a road-kill, and I am the sea
that longs for fish long gone: I grew
him in circles, him in ripples, him gone
by daybreak, by daylight, light-years a line
The Needle
Dmitry Blizniuk
The city has crawled away, like a dog with a broken spine,
leaving behind the dark, mazut-like mass of factories.
Yesterday, they were pulling metal shavings out of my eye,
a delicate spiral, and the eye liquids around it
had already started getting rusty.
