Poetry: “dear Coney Island” by Gia Shakur
Dear, the book pried the water with a door stop
petitions were offered to the blackened swell.
Whittled spirits and last bones rabbets wind…
Poetry: “Mt. Tabor” by Rhienna Renée Guedry
You were a combustible thing. This overcast morning I ascend the site of a volcanic vent, where the neighborhood crows roost atop cinder cones….
Essays: “Cleo and the Queen” by A. Brown
“‘Queen Latifah is sexy.’ It really is an accident. I don’t think much of it when I say it. It is the truth.”
Animals: “my neopets die and i somehow go on” by Paolo Bicchieri
“filling Lowe's bins with soil and zucchini and no blooming brings my painted poogle back from the pound…”
Sex, Kink, and the Erotic: “Spectra” by Dare Williams
“climbing toward / the night / my body / shatters / into stars. “
Sex, Kink, and the Erotic: “Tears” by Mordecai Martin
“I don’t like writing about sex. I’ve done it, of course. I mean, yes, I’ve done IT and I’ve done it, that is, write about it. And I’ll probably do it again, write about sex, I mean.”
Valentines: “12 Seconds” by Jess X. Snow
“At 4 am, on your bed, I turn to you and say, if the robot in me malfunctions–here are my twelve seconds for today;”
Hybrid: “The Jaw is a Trapdoor” by Ashwini Bhasi
“I have found that the complexity of the suffering that pain induces impossible to capture fully in one dimension, using a single medium. Pain is multi- dimensional, hyper-subjective, and defies definitions. It requires a multi-modal approach for translation.”
Animals: “Crow Triptych” by Monique Quintana
Three is the lucky number of our hearts this V Day. Here’s Monique Quintana’s “Crow Triptych” in three lockets.
Poetry: “Fractals / Fractions” by Vincente Perez
“This math has a vivid history. Fractals
become fractions in the alchemy of race”
Valentines: “General Theory of Relativity, in Two Sections” by Timothy Gomez
“i worry sometimes of the ways these lives, thin like papel picado, muddle together.”
Poetry: “How I Come to Grief #24” by Amanda Hawkins
“m i n o t a u r h o o f
b u l k h o r n e d a n d
b e n t o n d e s t r u c t i o n”
Animals: “The Most Comforting Thing I Know” by Nicole Mitchell
“Desire is no foreign thing to immigrants
or queers.”
Hybrid: “The Beauty in Falling” by Lorna Campo
“But sometimes you need to fall to find yourself.”
Poetry: “Vinegar Ceremony” by Cleo Qian
“I bury my hatred in the graveyard
I water my hatred with vinegar
I fertilize my hatred with salt”
Hybrid: “A Taste of Honey” by Joel Sedano
“manufactured as distillations of minerals, amalgamates in a vortex of alloys breaking the latticed molding; “how doth the little busy bee” improve multiverses as invader and reciprocator.”
Animals: Two Poems by Eben E. B. Bein
“…Oh if you insist Mrs. Funnynose
I will sit to tea and mudcakes
with you, soaked to the drawers
in the warm shallows
of this pink, cloved,
round-bellied afternoon.”
Animals: Two Poems by M. Cynthia Cheung
“My best friend said the only way she’d find God
is if she got locked up in prison, & she’d pick
Jesus over the rest because he has the most
subscribers.”
Poetry: Four Translations by Zackary Sholem Berger
“And as the foam bubbles up in its foam agony
The sea’s gallop is here again, a naked symphony”
from Diary Poems