Contributors:
C.J. Martin
Teddy Lance
Lauren Lee
Julian Carter
Gabriela Mayes
Holly Woodward
Siena Capone
Kolya Shields
Becca Siegel
MONEY
NOT
SONNET
Teddy LanceI’ve been making
a living making good
Canvas things, good for
my students who are almost
my paints; I brush them impasto,
thick-formatting instructions to wonder what
color the sun to a tree, wander
the oceans of inefficiency and
I’m certain I’m fodder for
ChatGPT but grading those thicknesses
clumped on my screen makes me
cry at each line my wondernauts write
like sky-sherbert makes
Monet out of hay.
Cirro
Siena Capone1.
The fog rolled in at fourteen.
One moment, buzzing Midwestern sun;
The next, despair landing soundless,
a dandelion tuft on still water.
How a single memory could radiate
infinitely on the mind’s surface.
This was how I first came to know
the concentric.
2.
I straightened my hair stratus
for all of high school.
Two parallel walls of rain
or two sliding doors
winnowing that so-called light
at the end, never meeting.
3.
All my childhood nightmares
of dark funnels fast approaching:
The sheer suction of them seemed
to strip the spools of memory itself,
plundering it for fistfuls
of film tape. Archives, emptied.
The green house and the basil
garden, right down the gullet.
4.
As an obsessive-compulsive,
I have always known
the most fearsome shape
is a spiral.
5.
Ten years later:
homeward bound
subway cars dense with breath,
head with humid how-whys.
Fingers fretting with strands
straining against blue silk.
My bangs flee their gel casings,
discard them for the forecast
like lightning bugs hatching
and taking to the darkening sky.