Issue 4

Pre-Heroin My sister and I follow the wood planks of the railroad tracks downtown. We bought a box of crimson Manic Panic, split two ways,…

When Amalia was born, my body became/ a pandemic; I believed I would kill her/

All of my childhood/ was this: gorging on neglect, praying/ for my eyes to glow golden

You don’t remember/your own birth, but somehow you remember/ the city’s

Why couldn’t she wet all this ground, like a man, and make any space ripe with her want?

A woman marries him despite what she knows he has done.

It started with/
a question, curving punctuation./
It started with the thought/
of whittled wood.

foxes don’t know a lot/ about history but neither do painters

Go with the wolf hat, the skull ring,/
the pants with the fringes. You will/
never in your life wish for more khakis.

The cops sometimes play war games in the nature preserve. The cops sometimes play war games on campus. The teachers sometimes write letters professing their disapproval. Most people walk around/

One Polynesian creation myth, which supposes our universe to be the latest in a cycle, identifies the octopus as the sole survivor of the previous universe.

I once held a weaponless man/
that didn’t belong to me./
He was young, eager.