


Regardless
Susan Thorson
“Cliché or not, when you fall off, and you will, get up, dust yourself off, get back on.”



Thanksgiving, 2020
Ace Boggess
“I’m grateful you’ve survived this long.
I’ll text you my recipe for air.”


Omar Lawrence Doesn’t Care About Your Credentials
A Bronx Poet on Hip-Hop, Academia, and Being a Man of Words

Jit’s Island
Nathan Leslie
“He hired men with machine guns to sit in wooden perches at six points around the island with orders to fire upon any vessel approaching the rocky shore of his island.”

Deconstruction for Juniors
Barry Peters
“How there’s nobody with a gun
bustin in right now?”


A Misunderstood Man
Mark McConville
“And the battle-hard persona of a misunderstood man began to crumble the day I looked him in the eyes and thought about the pain riffling through his body and the dreams in his head turning to dust.”

Victor Road Boys
Robert Vaughan
we could barely breathe
laughing so hard while
building our own
shadow houses

The Commonplace
Carol Casey
“And in this other time and place we would not even know we were safe, or what it means to have the commonplace.”

Secret Code
Elizabeth Hoyle
“It’s only as I write this that I realize how similar the end was to the beginning.”

Hope and Fear
Christy Lorio
“They’ll falter before they succeed, but they’ll go on to soar through the neighborhood. “

The Looting
Jeremy Szuder
“The first thing they did was
break out all the windows of my room.”


Skeleton Hospital
Howie Good
“If I knew how things were going to turn out, I suppose I wouldn’t have bothered smiling.”