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POETRY


no one can kiss you wrong if you're dead

By Temidayo Okun in Issue Fourteen, March 2024

i drew a smiley face on a blank page & gave it legs / there is no wind strong enough to destroy something that only exists on paper / there is no hurt powerful enough to tear

apart this cage I call a body / i have made this shell for you with my hands / & maybe death only comes when our souls outgrow our bodies / like hermit crabs — we drop


Soot

By Abdulkareem Abdulkareem in Issue Fourteen, March 2024

do not forget to drag your feet, my darling,
for the road is long and the trees cannot protect you here
and though their hands may urge you forward
look behind,


After they blasted your home planet to shrapnel

By P. H. Low in Issue Fourteen, March 2024

you could still pretend for a while. Perhaps it wasn’t even pretend—your body still remembered home as a pause between your third and fourth ribs; remembered an absence of walking across a bridge, in this city you’ve chosen as refuge, and keening the surface tension of water."


The Frida Train (a golden shovel)

By Russell Nichols in Issue Thirteen, January 2024

“Pies, para qué los quiero si tengo alas para volar?”*
― Frida Kahlo (1907–1954)

The blueprint was hidden under Frida Kahlo's bed, where she rested her feet,
after the accident. Engineers puzzled over the design, knowing not what


To market, to market

By Anna Quercia-Thomas in Issue Thirteen, January 2024

do not forget to drag your feet, my darling,
for the road is long and the trees cannot protect you here
and though their hands may urge you forward
look behind,


Star Stitcher

By A.J. Van Belle in Issue Thirteen, January 2024

I sew behind time
and feel too much
in the dusty yard of the seamstresses’ house.
Space fighters scream across the dark dome of sky overhead.


Tell Me the Story of Something Ending

By Matthew Roy in Issue Thirteen, January 2024

Tell me the story of something ending, she said at the campfire,
The story of something that tastes like vinegar
And crunches like beetle shells between my teeth.


hu li jing 狐狸精

By Wen Yu Yang in Issue Twelve, December 2023

they’d tell me
how much a fox’s honour is worth
without weighing it so why not
steal a boy’s honour
braid it in as
another triumph
bask in this
demonic glory


Interstellar Catalog: Romantic Interlude

By Shana Ross in Issue Twelve, December 2023

On this world all the colors are named anew
with each child. I have a word for yellow &

a word for blue, but it will not help me talk
to another soul in this city. We point to


Ourasphaira giraldae Awakens

By H.V. Patterson in Issue Twelve, December 2023

Gods writ microscopic,
we are the children of extremes
chitin-clothed, long-dead spores enduring still,
ghosts of ghosts
a billion years dead