23-12-21 Aubade in a Red State Josh Myers Red like the fanned tail of the half-starved hawk mantling over a cat, twelve weeks deep in drought, beak wet with the eyes sweet rot, the liver. Red like the dirt blown loose from thirst-gagged roots, twisting in li...

23-12-21 Citizens Ian Parks Free agents, this is how we made our way, our used car swerving through the new estates. It was late springtime and the fields of oil-seed rapeflashed out their yellow signal to the sky. We travelled incognito and we didnt cast a...

23-12-21 Atomograd Hilary S. Jacqmin Atom City, Ukraine I. Prypiat FunfairThe locked Ferris wheel arcs against the horizon,a honey fungus flexing its golden gills.Suspended from petrified cogs,the cars seed the ash trees belowwith powdered rust. Beeswax caps...

23-12-21 Beyond the Useful Life Brandon Krieg A crow drinks rain from a paint buckets overturned lid.Two teens lie on a rock after swimming, waiting for their cut-off fatigues to dry.Steelhead suspend inside the cab of a sunken Ford where the river bends.A h...

23-12-21 The Dinner Pail Robert Gibb Photo courtesy of Steve Simko Less lunchbox than mess kit, What with that fitted lidAnd handle, the canister set inside it, Cap threaded tightAll got toted off to work in the mills, The pail as much a stapleAs the bread a...

23-12-21 The Purple Shamrock, Boston Rachael Hegarty The manager, a Galway curlew, tells me to swot up on the menu and make sure to letthe customers know its me first day. I get away with that line for weeks.The most important thing feed them drink. No one w...

23-12-21 Back among the Living Dick Allen I. Back among the living, recovered from my sickness or past lives, or both, however you want to read me,I seek out stone fences. I try to amuse. I wander here and there beneath Earths great blue skies.I find a railr...

23-12-21 Roadside Esteban Rodrguez Mexico rises into view like a textbook description of a dead civilization; its silhouette piercing the scaled soil, the streaks of afternoon mirages, the caliche billowing across the windshield as my mother pulls into a roa...

23-12-21 Miles Albert Goldbarth . . . and although the Chinese police refused to allow me into a town so near the border of Tibet, and lifted guns to make their point, that afternoon I played a game of pick-up basketball with six of them: what hoops freaks!s...