Pete Nelson & Robin Russin The holograms of his father were not enough. Leo shuffled through them anyway. Sometimes he would play them at actual size, and then he could pretend his father was there in the room with him. Sometimes he would play them at two- or three-hundred-percent, and then he could watch his father’s hands in closeup as they danced across the piano keys in some concert hall, and then Leo would playback at half speed to slow them down. Sometimes he shrank the

Annie Fay Meitchik It was the kind of morning where Ingrid’s feet stung as she swiveled out of bed touching the wooden floorboards tentatively, the way one might dip a toe in a swimming pool. She wrapped the duvet around her shoulders and made her way down the stairs. The grandfather clock in the hallway said it was 6:17. Morning or evening, it didn’t matter. The clock had been wrong for years. Ingrid rounded the corner and entered the kitchen. Even though she saw Richard’s

Eugene Navakas I zipped the tent shut and fell asleep. Which was prohibited, which I didn’t realize. Which was unfortunate, because, according to Google’s translation of the website, “there may be a slight gas seepage from the underground in the area.” Not sure how I missed that. When you move to Denmark, there’s a list of eternally recurring Themes: trust, taxes, d’s that sound like l’s at Mardi Gras. Sometimes, though, it’s the smaller things. * * * The troll who shook me a

Brad Davis from a photograph by Dawoud Abu The guitar’s warm wood resonates with each tentative pluck and strum. The child’s shoulders slump forward, eyes trained on the teacher’s fingers— the wall behind them pocked with what looks like bullet holes. This is Gaza City, and the two of them are translating their sadness—the heavy prayer of thin, disappearing bodies— into what gunfire will never drown out. Photograph: Dawoud Abu Alkas/Reuters

Harry Lowther I have to admit, off the bat, that I spent some time looking for another album to review. I write at the end of 2025, as best-of year lists, wrapped, and any other number of reasons to look back over the previous twelve months are in the atmosphere, and Cameron Winter is on many of them at least once, if not twice when you add his band Geese’s album, Getting Killed . And maybe it’s a genuine desire to recommend music to people that they don’t already know, or ma

Sascha Goluboff In a review of Jayne Anne Phillips’ 2023 novel Night Watch for the New York Times , Dwight Garner complains that he “often had little idea what was happening for pages at a time. Pronouns go for long walks without antecedents. Phillips destabilizes her narrative, then destabilizes it again. Reality slides like furniture on an ocean liner during a storm.” However, I found that it is exactly this slipperiness that holds the clue to the meaning and genius of the

N.S. Solonche The acupuncturist asked me to fill out my medical history. I listed all the usual conditions, the same ones I always list -- osteoarthritis, high cholesterol, sciatica, deviated septum. Then it asked about something I had never seen before -- Excessive dreaming. What’s this? I said. What is it? she said. Excessive dreaming, I said. Oh, that means if you dream too much, she said. Well, I’m a poet, I said. Oh, then answer Yes , you suffer from excessive

Marty Newman Orangutans remember the confusion of languages as if it were yesterday, the ruins sinking for centuries. A daddy-long-legs traffics substance the mirror is less but sameness still. At the sight of a U-boat, the octopus (otherwise dour) is overcome by laughter. Held to the sun this lump of coal is crystal: the discord can’t be resolved. Compassionate, in the common tongue the demiurge promises to slay the Faceless One. To lift us from the crowding vermin undre

Susan Shea Is it just me or do you remember seeing your reflection for the first time shocked to see a face that wasn’t the one you were just wearing to share candy canes with your brother on a festive morning did you keep that morphing to yourself is it still too much to understand what happened to the delighted little girl living inside you, movie screen curl perfect smiling, dancing with Bo Jangles ready to burst into song without notice do you carry that moment with you t

M.M. Adjarian Not quite a coat hanger, the boy stands skinny tall in Boy Scout khakis and Converse tennis shoes, hands behind his back, knee bones grinning above his socks. He leads a band of yucca plants, suburban soldiers, spears spine-straight and sharp as quills. My brother is posing, legs apart, halting his front lawn march only for the uncle visiting from France who captured him on film, then wrote the date and my brother’s age in blue curves like tattoos on the

Daniel Thompson My gentle lover with her tongue to the rain. Her mouth carved into the minutes of the day. Her form slinking into evening strings. Her voice, the symphony of the cold woodwinds, A sonata through the cypress below the spheres. She is the revolution of the sumptuous air cycling, In the halo of sun-streams, the glorious revolution. She is firmness, rootedness, and husky depths. She is the moment where tree meets ground. She is the great garden, the ever-unfolding

Elizabeth Huey Originally published in 1960, 10:30 on a Summer Night captures Marguerite Duras at her most cinematic, where the erotic, the existential, and the storm collide. Two love triangles, a double murder, a crumbling marriage, and a crying baby in a Spanish village just beyond the French border. The world of this short novel is small, but it breathes like a storm. The space feels pulled open by rain and roofs, thunder and chimneys, and an endless search for safety th

Leonydes Matis His native language Romanian Garlic breath Which spoke above me I didn’t understand I was told you were wise That God spoke to you You wrote letters of prophecy I write letters of feelings What did you say to me All those years ago When you and her were alone In that apartment With all the other old people We visited you every other day What did you say when You spoke Was it another prophecy Or happy to see your first granddaughter All grown up I

Sean Thomas Dougherty The man in the corner lifts his hands to mop the floor. No one knows his name, but they call “hey you.” He does the labor no one wants. He hums a half-broken song as he wipes the blood from the floor. The song is older than the building, older than the song his mother sang while folding sheets at the motel. His shoulders hear her voice, her labor without a day to rest, her smock stained with light. She smelled of soap and bleach. He watches the nurse c

Craig Constantine I paste on a moustache You rat out your hair. Let’s cosplay! Let’s Vogue! I’m Sonny! You’re Cher! Pile into the pink Caddie, Show a little thighplasty skin, We’re all going to the Madonna Inn. You merchants of clickbait You crypto-fluencers, You armchair zillionaires Who have all the answers. You Christo-Kardashians Clutching pearls at my sin, You’re all going to the Madonna Inn. The first time it’s tragic, The second? A farce. First the posh wedding And

Ethan Mershon i don’t know what it means when a hawk flies over my windshield as i’m driving out of the valley of the shadow of suicide into some blank Eden waiting to be painted. Thanksgiving Day and i am stopping at a fast food restaurant for a burger in a field next to the highway after three months of rehab food and whatever i picked up on the weekly trips to walmart. the Sun is different somehow. more self-assured. or more delusional. somebody at rehab told me i’ve got s

Stephanie Pushaw I have a long-standing rule: my family does not read my work before it’s published. Not drafts, not half-formed ideas, absolutely not the version tantalizingly close to the finish line where I’m still bargaining with sentences, flipping words around like tongue-tied cherry-stems. Even after publication, I prefer to keep my work at a careful distance. It feels both embarrassing and raw to promote it. If someone asks what I’ve written, I’ll say the truth: i t’s

Aryan Kaganof Together, these poems construct a poetics of broken circuitry . They foreground the instability of language in the digital era, revealing how the human voice becomes both archive and error. Meaning is no longer the goal; instead, the process of breakdown—of losing semantic coherence—becomes the generative site of posthuman creativity. In these untitled poems, syntax behaves like a living system infected by code: self-replicating, mutating, endlessly reorganizin

Sean Thomas Dougherty The foreman says we’re lucky to have light at all. The fuse blew again. We set up by instinct in the dark, by the ghost of a song we once danced to in a bar called Love Don’t Live Here Anymore . My father taught me the dignity of labor: how to find beauty in a drill-press, how light can live in the cracks of calloused hands. He was a quiet man. He never said “I love you,” but he taught me a minor tune about a welder who married his flame through temp jo

Ethan Mershon tw: suicidal ideation the reptile in me isn’t good at math, it cheated its way through algebra, chilled in the high school air conditioning, desperate for some sunlight. whenever i see a knife, i want to stab something. this is America- how much can you carry, young soldier? whenever i see a rainbow i want to believe in something. this is America- if you can’t pull yourself up by your bootstraps go into debt buying new boots. whenever i see my reflection i get c