by Hannah Bonner

art: "Estáticos de Bacuta" by Juan José Clemente

On Saturday I celebrate a friend’s birthday which is also, coincidentally, the fourth of July. I arrive during day; I leave at the torque to night. Over cake, I speak with a woman in the middle of an acrimonious divorce. “No one lives with their husband while divorcing,” she tells me. “No one. This pandemic exposes the cracks of what we never worked on.” I say very little. For eight months I have lived alone; therefore, my cracks and her cracks are different kintsugi.

by Michele Rappoport

art: "El mundo de Anita” by Juan José Clemente 

The Moment You Cease Motion

A person lives within an inch of evaporation.  Every night you die, skin and nails soft.  The heart, that feverish bayonet, pierces the practical bearing of clearness.  Ice envelopes the wound. Blood loiters, wet and exposed.  A vein pulses like a charm more perfect than dust in winter. And in the skin, the perfect quietude of a body close to completeness.
_______

I wrote this piece with words found in The Military Handbook &

By Cecily Winter

art "El Salto de Rolando" by Juan José Clemente 

IN THE BEGINNING loomed the gray above our heads sometimes obscured by mists of rain and snow, while across the ice steppe lapped cold saltwater from which we speared fish small and large

FOR SURVIVAL we wore leathern skins and fish scales strung with sinew even in our snowdomes where we huddled close and moaned the wind music of this land

WHEN WITHERING DEATH ASSAILED US we sharpened long bones to capture an ice floe and launched it bearing the corpse,

by Brent Canle

art: "Solaris" by Juan José Clemente 

World Made Flesh

We woke this morning to find that the world was made of flesh. Skin covered everything. Freckles stained the sidewalk. Cars weave between pores in the road. The skyscraper’s windows were the milky membrane of blind eyes. 

In the buildings, at work, we entered veins and all day rushed around into different orifices having meetings, completing tasks, meeting deadlines. The streets below us pulsed as buses exhaled into the coming night air.