Online Issues
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Shroom Apocalypse
By Richard Schiffman
photo by Mariam Gab
After the deluge, they’re popping up fast,
a pimpled pox of pallid shrooms,puny members swell tumescent
cracking earth-egg’s humus shells,donning post-apocalyptic bonnets,
daisy chains of moonlit domes,gilled as sharks and cute as buttons,
hoisting clods of moldy duff,fungal, Mongol-horded armies,
mountain-moving mycelia,creeping up on sleeping cities,
hoodied toughs on every corner,meek and dapper Mussolinis,
squat Il Duce’s of decaycasting nets in fetid mulch,
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the cinematography of birth
By Savannah Slone
photo by Ivan Babydov on Pexels
we were all born during the slowfast shift of all things, oil on
canvas no time stamp,
among stained glass and wildlife and
a sea of velvet earlobes and disco glitter
pageantry while language swelled
into watercolor during telomere
replication and
extreme weather turned our
nothings into artifacts of survival or
remembrance and colors disappeared
underwater,
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Abecedarian
By Christina M Scott
photo by Engin Akyur on Pexels
At night, she feels for the invisible restraints clutching her throat.
Bound by circumstance, she’s unable to freely breathe.
Coveting the blade in her hands,
Death is her fateful companion.
Everyone dies alone.
Forgotten memories of better moments dance at the edge of her mind.
Guilt has set up home here in her thoughts,
Has taken up so so much space, with no intent to leave.
Inescapable shock paralyzes and pervades her fleshy shell to
Just below her rib-cage, -
The Moment You Cease Motion, and Into the Feathery Lightness
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 &
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Sestina for Disinheritance
By LP Patterson
photo by Alev Takil on Pexels
The world has moved on from its earring,
from its bells, far away silver and gold
that impose, intractably, this burn
in sunlight, the hissing sound and mettle.
The world has moved on as a traveler
that reaches the deepest recesses of its mark.
Disinherit the world, disinherit the markof your crystal knife fashioned in an earring.
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Petty Criminals
by Drew Anderla
photo by Arry Yan on Unsplash
There was a shitty bar I used to go in the East Village to that was demarcated only by a red neon rooster in the front window. Before 11, there would be disco music playing and red lights illuminating the space, but rather than dancing, or drinking, or even making eye contact, men would just pool around the perimeter of the room obsessively checking their cell phones. It was decidedly less like a bar at this early hour than it was like the DMV, with everyone anxiously waiting for their number to be called.
