by Jae Eason

How many times have I prayed in wooden pews &
the echo of my voice answered?

They say: drink this,
                           eat this

and the enzymes in my stomach learn how to break
down Jesus’ blood & Jesus’ body and if you recite
your dinnertime prayers, God will give you food and
let you eat it.

And you will pray & we will continue to pray.

Hail Mary, full of grace
you will recite these words – they’ll web inside your
throat until the Book has stifled you.

by Emily Townsend

The sky is rarely clear during spring
in Willamette Valley, and tonight
there is a star coruscating

through the cloudless canvas, as if to say,
I am still here, please don’t forget I exist
Earlier, daffodils were drunk with rain.

I am your backpack as you fall
asleep. I watch this asterism burn
and dim like a stagnant plane, fixated
yet moving as our planet orbits. I assume

this is the only thing alive in the dark.
You snore loud enough to wake up
the horizon,

by Genevieve Creedon

Paring knife meets plastic meets
index finger amid kitchen preparations
for tomorrow’s chicken pasta salad lunch:

red dyes soft fabric in dim lights
during efforts to contain the stain,
blood meets counter meets

tongue and then water, washing it away.
But blood washes better than brooding
erupting in tomorrow’s chicken pasta salad lunch:

recollection, rising, unleashed,
in the corner of the living room,
a wandering eye meets cardboard meets

boxed remnants of a long past attempt
to learn to draw—the penciled contours
of life,

by Alex Starr

We are ever
ything exploring
itself ever
y spelunking
satellite
unwrapping of
a gift
discover
y of calculus
quarks crème
brûlée
a lei
around a neck
introspection
specks

Alex Starr is a writer in the San Francisco Bay Area. Alex's poems appear in Vallum, Three Rooms Press: Maintenant, Lunch Ticket, Ignatian Literary Magazine, La Piccioletta Barca,

photo by Tony Wallin-Sato

by Ken Been

I write water
Across a worksheet sky
As if its pale color could hold fast
And not rain out
Baseball
The secrets of Little League kids
Revealed in the vocabulary lessons of the clouds on our desks
Nimbus words and definitions
Supposedly matching up
With my pencil line
Dragged
Between them
As the suspense of the window sky squeezes into Room 10.

There is no light passing through the afternoon
And I’m called upon
To raise my hand higher than theirs
Up over the outfield fence
Up,

By Alexander Etheridge

It was long ago now, the way hail
kept falling into the open September street

right after flash floods there stripped back
hickory and willow roots.

This is our lives, how our story vanishes
into memories, into winter after winter.

Our faces blend into night snows,
and the plans we made break apart like

clumps of shadow in firelight.