Poetry

Everything in the World is Open

By Johanna Skibsrud
Everything in the world is / already open, extended. / Waiting to be known. /   / There is nothing hidden, / no secret impulse; nothing /   / ravenous, as the...
Contest Winner

Lyme Regis

By Frances Boyle
I walk the Cobb Jane Austen strolled. The old Assembly / Rooms are gone, where once chess players and marriageable / young misses each played their gambit. Sea-bathing machines / no longer...
Contest Winner

Ella & Marilyn at the Mocambo

By Jenna Butler
It’s a mad gambit, but she knows down to the skin / the workings of allure, pulls rank /   / in the slope of her shoulderblades / against formica & chrome....
Contest Winner

J’adoube

By Sile Englert
i. gambit /   / the rags still half-soaked with turpentine and resignation / petal the floor beside an antique dresser or / perhaps contentious puddle of cooking oil slowly dripping /...
Contest Winner

Tyne & Wear Criminal Gallery, 1871-1873

By Medrie Purdham
Roman, Kirk, Grieveson, Workman, others. / In for thieving. For false pretenses. For more thieving: / money, boots, a donkey, another donkey, more boots / and clothing. Their own coats (buttons all...
Contest Winner

Vegas, Baby

By Cristy Watson
Debating between trading vows at Goratorium, where jaded gargoyles / guard the procession, or a 24-hour drive-thru wedding; Eros / missing in action. /   / To wear remnants of an old...
Contest Winner

wakefulness

By Danielle Kostrich
the critics are all out tonight, a plaid lump of them / has festered in the corner, reciting headlines and statistics / flinging hyperbole from their intellectual trapeze /   / drawn...

fugitive

By Chelsea Comeau
spring: the river swells unabashedly and / takes what it doesn’t own, pulling the soft / earth into it, taking, taking. / soon we don’t recognize what has always / been familiar:...

Kelly Block Fire

By Jesse Matas
A man is cuffed to a / wooden ladder. His body / transfixed as if the old / hag is sitting on his chest. He / cannot run or act. A piano...