All the body’s creaks fed into
a single head. The history of
my mouth wicking out:

Maiming the best ant so she couldn’t carry.
Cackling at the roan cry of Eros when he fails.
When he swallows a rifle.

Naming every wrist Eve.
Cracking a brief witchy madrigal first before
tattooing portraits of people who could have been used.

Making love to a malnourished gypsy girl.
And the men who refused to watch.
And the ones who watched.

A crackling earth, swept clean of cardinals.

A premonition of Venice sin piedra, sangre flotando…la nuestra

And the baby, too—the one clothed in musty orchard grass,
I mistaught him nakedness,
each hour a different species of

which snakes in because I watch.

Angels, be kind, consider
auctioning off lesser beasts.

—Justin Wymer is a staff writer.

see it all through a telescope
the way my sister tip taps goodnight into my back
in fingertips and softer breaths as she falls asleep at my side
yes i am way up there above the bunk bed
and things are small and simple
she exhales blue and dreams of a stampede of elephants
fingers tighten around me
we are closest in silence
when the house is all dark and sighs to itself
dryer rumble tumbling in the basement
and my mother sings lullabies to calm the youngest
two plastered walls away
i remember big friendly giants and the alphabet song
how words seemed less than important and everything at once
one summer i fell in love with a sentence
the period stretching on and on and never
ever stopping. at the window of a darkened room
i declined a kiss, and again at the porch stoop
the following evening. this was not my country
the dirt crumbled into zigzags i didn’t recognize
such dry heat – the best sunsets
the most unfamiliar stars
on most nights we dressed up as dragons for supper
to sit at long long tables in the hall that serves military men
during the school year. eating rice and unpronounceable oddities
but i recognized the texture of oatmeal in my bowl
and the way things just melt into one another
in the morning. maybe i’m still sitting beneath the tree
that fed me in spoonfuls. twigs and leaves and words that poured
into one another without breaks
the idea of leaves above and scratchy blanked below
and nothing to worry about but letters and pages
and how ever they might get together

—Devi Lockwood is a staff writer.

It is all waterlessness,
weighted, sticky,
suspended in, un-
able to roll down, a bead of water and
peel away, grasped, released.
Whales

have a fascination with human
hands, can sense
a long ancestry,
prehistorically they swim
to our painful momentary
suspended selves,
the clicking of our
keyboards, clicking and clicking
in the room, suspended,
their noses (round—how embarrasing).
it is all waterlessness, un-

able to roll down, release
(webless/space/matter). The girl
before the heavy door,
as she reached became all
loose skin and cartilege,
the shadow of the whale-skeleton
suspended, we
see it intimately, the
clicking of our keyboards, the
reverberation of each
cartilege, each cartilege-web,
each vein-finger
around my heart, (round
—how unoriginal). Sticky,
weighted. I

have a fascination
with my human
hands. They will become all
loose skin and cartilege-web. I
have always been good. I

have always been good at
asking the questions. Is it
the reminder of themselves? Is it
the echo
of something lost?
Is it the need for touch or
am I just human?
The need for completion?
Have you heard the clicking?
The clicking that coral makes
underwater? The clicking of our
keyboards in the suspended
stillness?

like cherubs drowning.

wet cinnamon
on the hair of a girl

who has always feared
the taste of
her own hands.

the teal open
mouth of an omega,
inked between the ribs of her

the distinction between
them a narrow-lit blur of
flesh-

tinged lace caught under
the shellacked nails of her,

the loud crushed pull of
mahogany silks, her

legs bodiless beneath
those unprovoked out-
bursts of breath

barely holding in
their throatfuls of beads,
the tiny pinched dec-
orations in cloth-

currents. but you
would have me focus–still–on
the slow-changing syntaxes

of her hair, shell
of fuchsia bequeathing moon-
tinctures. as if skin

should not unclose its
gates to let re-exit
silks.

as if diction should
suddenly in-
fuse the eye,

then cower back
into nerves like timid
floral cinders.

—Justin Wymer is a staff writer.