18.1 / Spring 2023

Mom didn’t like to cook and rarely did. One night, Dad had it. “I’m hiring a cook,” he said. “Three nights a week.” “No,” Mom said, “you will not.” She removed that night’s dinner from the freezer, four boxes of Swanson’s Turkey and a bag of Ann Page Krinkle-cut French Fries.

Dramatic Monologue as Wendy Carlos I do prefer cyberpunk mermaids because they’re realistic in terms of rust and advancement. not impossible to attain. yes, it is the tech of the future but the windows are grimy the hyperspeed button falls off, and the shipwreck’s hinges squeak.

Ass, in fact, is death The return of ABBA, is death In beautiful increments Kittens grow, leaf twigs snap Now the moon hovers above. Tease.

When it rains, I am in love. I like it when the water drops get big and heavy like pulpy segments of a pomelo. They crash onto the black pavement of my childhood ranch home, the sweet runny juice spreading across the driveway and leaking into the open carport.

so you want a story, a story, a sequence of events, a lei of events I will lay over your head please bend your head ever so slightly to receive the garland a wreath of flowers many out of season plucked from the blooming sometimes crushed by wind and flattened by weather garden of my

You said you were happiest in my tree eating coconuts tossing peanuts at passersby I thought I could roll summer back the lies, not the bananas didn’t care you’d been peeling your layers for the ogling of withered men a bit of fantasy play you might be the naughty schoolteacher Or even a monkey Like

Luckily, I died a few months before the film was released, so I never had to field any questions about what it means. —Stanley Kubrick   For this shot we’re going to have you start here, walk through the door, across the room, and stop over there. Yes, right over there.

A woman devised a skincare routine which may have sounded complicated to some but was not any more complicated than the thousands of skincare routines completed daily by the women in her city. She first scrubbed her face and neck with a jet-black charcoal scrub.

Am Cone What a way to say where am dented.   Protrusion affects what affects the protruded, and the protruding.   So am must be seen to be believed: am infallible.   Flat face, round face; edge, round, edge, line.   Am touchable, am touched. Am not felt. Am not feeling.

and greenhouse and topsoil and basil greens and cowshit and snowfall and spinach knife and woodsmoke and watering can and common thistle and potato digger and peach trees and poison parsnip and romaine hearts and rockpiles and spring trilliums and ramp circles what song of grassblade what creak of dark rustle tree and blueblack wind

The snow didn’t know, but the sheer could have shaved the shapes off your face, you off the mountain, your memory from anyone in its path.

Les désert déroulait maintenant devant nous ses solitudes démesurées – From François-René de Chateaubriand’s Atala (“Now before us, the desert unfurls its immeasurable solitude.”)             We soon came upon a cloud.

FEAST   At night I eat a garden, though I keep this from my sister.

___________ Emily Hyland’s poetry appears in armarolla, The Brooklyn Review, Palette, and The Hollins Critic, among others. In 2021, her poem, Ashes Arts and Crafts, placed third in the Frontier Award for New Poets. Emily earned her MFA in poetry and MA in English education from Brooklyn College.

The lab results record flags on an unspoiled landscape as coup d’etat. Children draw to her ferrous scent. Men side-eye temporary breasts. They get blamed. She’s spent too much time missing the seasons tapered to nights you were mistaken for an unmet condition or worse, stickiness to wash away. Redact any magic.

i shuck the oyster of my life and it is foul; listening to Kate Bush while the poodle takes too long to pee, instead sticking his snout between frothy hydrangeas— he is prancing across the yard now and i am mincing on the sun— i call to him, standing in the doorframe, besieged by a

the children can’t help / but puff out their cheeks / when the first numb nose of fall / makes them feign to kiss the wind / back to back / like a promise to dying flowers / matters amidst the mulch / like our neighbors that layer plastic / over their bushes / might

  trees dangle upside down from a sky which is no longer sky but mineral gem earth insulating us from the various problems of birds   singing below     singing below a reminder of the past kept in the folds of distance   as I walk through blue & discarded clouds I examine tree canopy’s swish

  _____________ Carlo Saio, born and raised in Kenya. Studied a Poetry MA at the University of East Anglia. Currently 6 months into a walk through Africa and writing a book about the wild journey.

Once upon a time they used to think Miasma was the bad air from the rotting of organic waste that was going to make you die a horrible death. It was the fear of bad air, like the fear of the boogeyman wearing a stinky, second-hand coat made of breath.

SYMPATHETIC MAGIC   Let me tell you about this magic world    surge of snowsound    small Birds streak across the sky   First   you must bury what you brought with you You must bury  Find    the light and find the mirror You are not outside The astrocytes     the combination   We have now created   a language together Slow