Frontier of My Self-Consciousness I by Lezhang Wang
“Of course the hunter-gatherer’s atlatl,”
Of course the hunter-gatherer's atlatl,
crudely hewed by a flint and notched
using maybe a bleached tine of antler
for the thinner ancestor of the javelin
to sit in, which then hurtled far better
toward one forest-dwelling mastodon
after another, was brought to daylight
for its greater simplicity of killing; that
and out of hunger, a desire to fashion
an object well from the yielding world.
Erick Verran is the author of the nonfiction collection Obiter Dicta (Punctum Books, 2021). His
writing is forthcoming or appears in the American Poetry Review, the Georgia Review, The
Drift, the Harvard Review, On the Seawall, the Michigan Quarterly Review, the Cortland
Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. He is also an independent scholar of
aesthetics and digital games. He lives in New York.
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ON NONATTACHMENT
Glass is good.
Cool the light slashing down in diagonals from all angles,
silent the pope’s scream across a plain of paint.
Let the eye see plainly
how pain might be stripped from paint:
how light and glass will never marry.
Suji Kwock Kim is author of NOTES FROM THE DIVIDED COUNTRY, which received the Addison Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters . She is 2023 Poet-in-Residence at the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, and 2024 Writer-in-Residence at the Gladstone Library, Wales.
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Confession
There were so many people I wanted to tell about the fire
on the way to hear the famous poet read from a book of grief.
It billowed from every open space & made from smoke a house
of the street, its smell a word that failed to reach consensus in the crowd.
Some who stopped to watch the family, silent in their pajamas, pointed
their wrists at the scene to remember it. I resisted the urge, not wanting
to appear graceless. The smell was everything in the house.
Elaina Friedman is a writer living in Queens, New York. She reads fiction for Electric Literature and
reviews books for Kirkus Indie.
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Civil Twilight
opening the window
to smoke billowing
from the corner
of our building
apricot flames
lurching at the fatted
air because this
happens in my dreams
these burning
buildings
opening up to me
engulfing this
adipose my
indistinct friends
in the top
room screaming
these fated encounters
in the projection
booth plastic smell
black plumage
because I dream
of being
extraterritorial
away from here
from this hypertrophy
on a real I run
outside to watch
flakes of ash and
windborne litter
as three engines
tackle the blaze
and think synecdoche
metaphor
because I can’t
abandon the head
rummaging
around the possessions
I packed ready
to be unhomed
like a glowing stub
in civil twilight
what will be made
of this combustion
what artefacts
fire is an event
a spectacle
not a thing at all
people gathering
like wildflowers
breathing in
the same particulates
coughing for days
hacking up soot
assuming no one died
in the top room
of the corner shop
or overnight
in factories
and shelters
east of this fat globe
videos of war
glowing on our
phones civilians
of the ground
lips annexed
grit-split
because dreams are
of this now this
irreconcilable now
opening the window
to see what changed
overnight
people gathering
at borders
like wildflowers
Tom Branfoot is the writer-in-residence at Manchester Cathedral and a recipient of the New Poets Prize 2022. He organises the poetry reading series More Song in Bradford. Tom is the author of This Is Not an Epiphany (Smith|Doorstop) and boar (Broken Sleep Books), both published in 2023.
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Farewell to a City
A man in a "Salvador Dali for President" shirt wrote a farewell letter to a city. He had a brief affair with her skyline. Her bridges. Her moon. The city was good to the man in a "Salvador Dali for President" shirt. He couldn't deny it. The city was seductive, addictive. The people, warm, approachable. What better way to commemorate a visit than with a letter, a poem. After the man in a "Salvador Dali for President" shirt finished writing the farewell letter to the city, he drove on the iconic bridge and threw the letter out of the window on the way to the airport. Farewell, until next time, sweet skyline. Farewell, city of trees and bridges.
Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020) Bad Mexican, Bad American (Acre Books, 2024) and The Parachutist (Sundress Publications, 2025). He teaches generative workshops for Hugo House, Lighthouse Writers Workshops, The Writer's Center, and elsewhere. Additionally, he serves as a Poetry Mentor in The Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program.
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nDada (11/14/23)
Whiskey Radish started writing poetry daily on March 10, 2009, and a year later began to add visual art. The nDada style began on a train ride from NYC to Boston on August 23, 2022. She and Meinzer are now working on an anthology of nDada poems written by people like you – see nDadaPublic.org if you would like to join the fun.
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Ungelīc
Your fates are forked, says the bird on my roof.
It looks and it sees skies trembling with chemtrails
And clouds parting for them. Your fates are forked,
It says.
Smoke rises from my roof, over forests,
Leaves, over more houses, their people
Not alarmed. The bird on my roof grows
Intoxicated, wrenching, from my smoke.
It turns to me. You are otherwise, it says,
You are both otherwise. My roof begins to shake
with the force of a flying bird: away now,
Ungelīc, not so nearby.
Flying to you, where skylines fracture
And nests sink, further, far out,
To sing of you to me.
Jess Hind is a first-year English undergraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford.