The one with the delicate ankles, whom Hadês seized.* I eat my dreams with a knife and fork chopped into bite-sized pieces all six of Persephone’s swallows dark juice dribbling down. Death comes to me, again, pressing her chapped mouth to the door until she leaves a wet ring in the wood mauve arms encircling me like Dawes Gap dim of night following her in on all fours like the lumber of a soft black dog. It’s not as terrible as you’ve been told, she says, taking my cheeks in

The window of Albrecht’s bedroom looked out onto the stone wall of the abandoned building next door. The buildings were separated by an alley so narrow that Albrecht could reach out his window and by stretching hard touch the wall. Albrecht was bothered by how this other building intruded on his apartment. It’s not right, he thought. He told old Mrs. Lopez, who lived in the apartment beneath his, that the two buildings never should have been built so closely together. He was

He tells you to cut off your left breast. You'd better do as he says, unless your nipples want to burn. That breast was just an implant anyway. It can be replaced with a death's head moth or death's door itself. Or an old scratched album of The Doors or a new woman with less scratch marks. Stretch marks create their own dance move in which you want to maneuver your way out of your flesh and all its moth holes. You can’t help but want to move out of the fatty strobe, cr

When I was still very young—before I started school—the first thing I saw when I opened the front door of our home was the front door of the Abu Qasem family residence across our very narrow street. It wasn’t really a street, more like a footpath—it wasn’t wide enough for even a single car to traverse. The Abu Qasem’s son, Qasem, was my older sister Heba’s friend. He was her age; the two of them were two years older than I. He used to play with me because he liked to be aroun

You’re not so fine, swine! While you go out to dine, swine, your workers are suffering at the production line! You act so refined, swine! Drinking your wine, swine! But the only thing you care about is your bottom line! You think you’re divine, swine! You want a shrine, swine! The world will rejoice when you’re pickled in brine! Or will they lament and pine because you’ve warped their minds and turned us all into— swine? Alexa Locksley is an

Thrill-Spike I once lived in a rudely converted horse barn. I was paper, my hands were paper, my Underwood-Olivetti was centered on my desk. Now I live in an apartment in the city. I’m a digital man, and there are no horses outside my window, no manure, no dirt. I live a thoroughly clean environment. Feelings slide off my laptop screen and fly directly down the rubbish chute. The rubbish shoot has no smell. No cooking smells flavor our hallways. I remember the beat poets. I r

When You Hear Music* Some say that the earth will end in fire, swallowed In heat, a waiting inferno gestating inside, and if It’s true, we’ve had lots of close calls- summers When our sun remained unseen through volcanic ash, Summers of golden states blanketed entirely in flame, Summers when split atoms crushed whole cities To dust, and summers when I listened to your body breathe, Struggle to stay. My father created tapes to take your mind Off pain, to another time, maybe th

The year was 1936. I was seven years old. My family like millions of other families was caught in the monstrous tentacles of the depression. We were living in a four-floor walk-up on East Forty-Fifth Street in Brooklyn. It must have been sometime in the spring that my mother told me and my three older sisters - - at seventeen, Silvia was the oldest, Roslyn was a year younger and Gail was either fourteen or fifteen - - that we would be moving in a few days to a six-floor walku

i love you like i love chief wahoo’s ten cent beers. you are the fist and the twenty pounds of hot dogs hurled in wild abandon at the umpire. i am the beer-soaked grass, and you spill another happy barrel on my green. we’re the riot police, and the riot, ten thousand dollars of damages pressed, ten decades of industrial waste, lit up in an instant, extinguished in another ten score. you are the flames and i am the lighter falling out of the shortstop’s hand, the student strea

There’s a statue that quietly ornaments my small town. I only notice it tonight because of the rain. It’s a bronze man sitting astride a muscular horse, his feathered headdress falling down his back, his arms outstretched and head tilted to the sky, embracing the droplets that roll off his bare chest and glisten like sweat. I drive to the address Clair gave me, glad for the rain so no one at the party will notice my own sweat. I wipe my brow and look at the dashboard clock, n

Fossils aren’t anything more than small creatures caught in death and left for millions of years until we pull them from their opaque graves. we display their decayed bodies with gentle hands, aware that muscle compensates for missing skin and bone compensates for missing muscle; but without bone everything sinks back to dust. The City the demon weaves through the city, its path already chosen by narrow tracks I stare straight over a stranger’s head, trying to catch a glimpse

(This impactful piece comes with a content warning for discussion of domestic abuse and use of slurs.) I started really leaving the last time you called me cunt. I would have stayed in bed when I heard the breaking, let you wear yourself out with your anger, but I remembered an anecdote about some poet trying to commit suicide by walking on broken glass. It was something about the shards working their way into veins and floating up from bare feet to a beating heart. I don’t k

Tomorrow is my father’s birthday. I haven’t heard from him since a few days before Christmas, a message in a hotel bathroom in a rundown town a few miles east of Lake Michigan. My mother stood beside the sink and looked at me in the doorway. She thinks it was Scotch and I believe her. There was a different liquid on my face running down and from my body. The walls were royal blue and chipping – my brother found some in his bed that morning. Tomorrow is my father’s birthday an

We are each a prisoner of some design or other. I, for instance, reside eternally in the back of his mind, whispering something he can hear only when he squints his eyes and scrunches his cheeks. I am whispering, “I will forget you.” I am whispering, “I have moved on, I now live and sleep and breathe more easily over in a corner of the universe in which I feel more safe.” I am whispering, “I never needed you, no matter how hard you tried to convince me I did.” He, for his par

on taking 60mg instead of 40— if these pills were people, they’d be as old as my dad, who insists he does not need therapy, but i do— i find a new contact, a cataract. i keep reading license plates on 287 instead of watching the cars ahead— dad told me that distracted driving is just as bad as drunk driving; i was fourteen in a school parking lot, practicing to take my mother to the hospital in case she got sick again— and my eyes feel filmy like some kind of milk, can’t real

look into my eyez i don't cry, i cry sometimes what you wish would come out Artist's Statements: look into my eyez is a piece with a digital background & the photo used twice is one I took in 2017. The title of the piece was inspired by 2Pac's "All Eyez On Me". Aside from that the piece itself is about how intimidating making eye contact is. It's subtly playing on how the eyes are the window to the soul. So the intention of the piece is to make the viewer think of what they s

After the Wreckage, the bathroom I share with my younger sister Maya is no longer a warzone. Between unpainted toenails I can make out the ghosts of bloodstains on the caulking, stuck between the pale tile. Run my hands over the windowsill where I tried cutting the wood instead of my skin and took off paint with desperate hands needing to release emotion and emotion and emotion. I don’t look through the drawers because Maya has reclaimed them since I left for college, but now