“Questions should be avoided/about the terms of the will/and whether cremation or internment/is the preferred state for his body./Unless, of course, he was into that.”
[Essay] Glaring White: Class and Race in Chinese Beauty Ideals — Chelsea Xu
“Growing up, I was told the first rule of being a cute little Chinese girl is to have pale skin.”
[Poetry] — William Snelling
“At breakfast, we heard the barely hoped-for words,/‘don’t bother going in, it might reach thirty…’/From then the day stretched out like low tide,/so low you thought you could stroll to France.”
[Poetry] — Oisín Breen
“So it is that we end here, instead,/In autumn, when youth relents,/In the face of lasting death,/And birthing begins”
[Poetry] — Eric Nicholson
“I’ve only inherited a few mementos:/a Brownie camera, poetry and an OS Map/which unfolds to cover my carpet/like a time-lapse film/of a bud bursting into leaf.”
[Essay] After “Life and Fate” — Margo Berdeshevsky
“I rock inside, a child again. Daughter of a man born in Ukraine who always said he was Russian.”
[Fiction] Hinterkaifeck — Eitan Benzion
“These are the timekeeping regulars for this stretch of road, grains in the hourglass, springs in the watch.”
[Fiction] Summers — Maria Schiza
“The summer had ebbed away into autumn and there were no warning signs, although if there were, I failed to see them, and the fact of it was what remained.”
[Poetry] — John Moessner
“Maybe clapping is the remnant of a desperate act/of early humans, drought-worn and itching/for a salve-a storm- inviting it by calling its name”
[Poetry] — Jorge López Llorente
“No, the new heat death from textbooks,/
rather than that intangible entropy,/
arrives – literal, not paradoxical;/
on trees, not paper; cold-blooded, not cold”
[Poetry] — Raymond Miller
“Discovered letters she once wrote/in that unsteady girlish hand;/unsheathe each from its envelope,/ignore the cracking of his throat/for he would not be thought unmanned.”
[Poetry] — Ethan Turner
“I listen to music and I watch sports and I read books and/I’m a bystander in this world.”
[Poetry] — Michael Sutton
“Looking from the pavement into a star starved sky I slither./
The car which from distance seemed blanketed kitschly in leaves/
I soon see bashed with slate and bricks felled by night winds.”
[Essay] A Historical Fiction — Stephanie Limb
“I feel a pleasure similar to Lisa Robertson’s when I read historical fiction. Maybe Cusk is right. Maybe it is pornography; maybe that’s why I like it.”
[Poetry] — Jane Zwart
“forgetting/pushes before it, like a wave, like a broom,/the premonition of loss.”
[Essay] The ‘everlastinge Posterytie’ of Thomas Chatterton: George Rawlins’s ‘Cheapside Afterlife’ — Josh Mcloughlin
“Rawlins’s powerful sonnet sequence of ‘imagined history’ is a fitting tribute to Chatterton’s forged fictions.”
[Poetry] — John Grey
“You could call this chemistry./
But I prefer geography,/rivers that flow together,/form this cozy delta.”
[Poetry] — Luigi Coppola
“The opening of the future coffin
led almost instantly to a tug
of war over tender meat”