Sun Fungus

I haven’t said my skin is ash. I hyperpigment where the band of my sports bra rests, where a racer back runs rigid between my blades, where my favorite strand of pearls wants to lay. I sliver tiny shavings of my skin where these polka-dots amass. I fragment, and I flake, but I fold myself…

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Fourteen Years Before

A straightened line of cold rounded sand still manifests itself in a circular formation of lost privileges and guarded chances, falling, tumbling, surrounded in a broken mist of past ignorance, sealed by hot assurances of  desire  and want, hidden by incremental degrees  of solitude and hope.   by Joseph Buehler   Joseph Buehler lives in…

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As Young

and green and fresh as a cucumber pickle, sharp in the mouth, and soft green too, soft and new as the sweater you bought me, holding me young.   As young as love, a humble sip, the smallest sip of warm green tea, grounded like gymnasts learning to stick fast to the landing.   As…

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Heart-Song

This blood is a waltz at dawn. A soul splinters on the ground, a thousand red vessels smashing   to pieces. The doctors take pictures instead of putting it back together. A human soul—the honeysuckle   leaking out. The janitor comes instead, leaking capillaries brushed away beneath a Bauhaus mop.   by Ruohan Miao   Ruohan…

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Rochelle Shapiro

The Dying Sister   You fell in slo-mo like a mimosa petal caught in a small breeze, sprawling, nearly soundless, on our parents’ speckled linoleum. I, five years younger, didn’t know you held your breath to make yourself faint. I didn’t know you’d whittled yourself down to taut skin over sharp bones by spitting meals…

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Ann Robinson

Notes To Myself When you are an American in a Middle Eastern country, do not walk alone; your bare arms will betray you, your sandals become stone.   Walk lightly; the shadows behind you are not yours. Anyone can change in the blink of an eye.   When in another country, do not fall in…

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