Alex Carrigan 12/5/25 Alex Carrigan 12/5/25

The Fruit Hopes That Each Seed Will End Far From Its Own Body

“because it knows just how unfortunate it is / to die in the shadow of something greater / than itself”

Helen Victoria Murray 12/5/25 Helen Victoria Murray 12/5/25

I don't want to have sex because my body feels dead

“no body-illusion left in these flat layers / in my sodden tissue, everything said of trace / thins distance, lines unassertively drawn depths”

Patrick Holian 12/5/25 Patrick Holian 12/5/25

Slow Pony

“after the third or fourth cry, / I should be able to stand. my mother gave me a ram’s skull for my 18th birthday, / ordered me to wear it for a year, / sleep and eat and shower and seduce in it”

Patrick Holian 12/5/25 Patrick Holian 12/5/25

Side Pony

“we’d hidden the hiding places far too well, I had stowed the / manual of eroticism in the back / of my ever-expanding waistband, I had forgotten myself, but I hadn’t forgotten the slaughter”

Tom Nutting 12/5/25 Tom Nutting 12/5/25

Interbeing

“In this trembling network, / I am no longer; we thicken / with restless porosity—/ otherwise known as love”

Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe 12/5/25 Marvellous Mmesomachi Igwe 12/5/25

Primal

“Framed as it was, there was no difference / between the tree & the angel. & everywhere / there should be feathers there were leaves”

Gabrielle Bates 12/5/25 Gabrielle Bates 12/5/25

Afterlife

“When I was a child I believed heaven was a place / where one could say exactly what they needed”

Mirta del Carmen Fernández Ilharreguy trans. Amira Plascencia 12/5/25 Mirta del Carmen Fernández Ilharreguy trans. Amira Plascencia 12/5/25

Searching

“I searched for / a street’s / memorable sign / in an enabled / passageway”

Elizabeth Galoozis 12/5/25 Elizabeth Galoozis 12/5/25

ode to an adolescent niece

“you’re blazing / hot pink-orange, / an angry sunrise / through wildflower smoke”

janan alexandra 12/5/25 janan alexandra 12/5/25

Ontology

“perhaps one must begin small / as a grass seedling / or yet a speck of sand”

Rishi Janakiraman 12/5/25 Rishi Janakiraman 12/5/25

Games for Children and Keith Wilson’s Experiments With Flight

“There’s obvious risk to including both a childlike wonder and a grim political reality in one book of poetry"