9 January, 2018
is a New Haven, CT playwright and director. Prior to New Haven, he taught playwriting at The American University in Cairo, Egypt. Coash has won numerous playwriting awards, including the Osborn Award from the National Theatre Critics Association, the Clauder Competition, and an Edgerton Foundation National New Play Award. His plays have been produced worldwide. Coash currently teaches playwriting at the University of Southern Maine’s Stonecoast MFA Writing Program.
9 January, 2018
make eye contact when I nod
as I recognize the Spanish
word for lunch.
He makes special jokes
for the Spanish speakers.
I know enough to know that.
He stands at the front of the bus,
in English tells us the Mayan word
for Jaguar, the four types
of cenotes, the ways we
will experience the fresh water
source of the Yucatan—zip line,
canoe, snorkel. Later, he helps me
with a body harness, tightening
straps around my tanned thighs,
my waist. He gets low to adjust
my helmet and speaks in Spanish,
asking if I am scared and I nod,
because I do not understand
more than two of his words,
but his dark eyes match mine
and today I must be dark
enough to pass for belonging.
9 January, 2018
Alexis Kruckeberg is an M.F.A. candidate at Minnesota State University, Mankato where she teaches composition and creative writing. She has served as a reader for The Blue Earth Review and Bull: Men’s Fiction. In her spare time, she cooks more food than is necessary for two people and daydreams about Mexico. Her poetry has appeared in Polaris, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Into the Void, and is forthcoming from CAYLX.
9 January, 2018
I wear my brother’s grief
with the story of
my past: the character
in a hospital
gown spinning around
pretending to flip
pancakes, being told:
“You will not remember
this.”— People still
claim: “He does not
remember much,” but
no space held there
for me to reply, no
air to fly, ground to
land or stand and I
want to dance it off,
this resting in the valley
of post-surgery memory—
forever a distance
cut between me and
the world—in me,
the disease cut out,
drowned into nothing,
but where does nothing go
in the body and what
does it look like?
It looks like a young boy
on the playground not
being picked but picked on,
nothing in the shape of
a head without hair,
varicose veins, saran wrap
over a broviac, until
the boy’s older brother
makes it something,
standing up and stepping in
and the bully backs away,
vanishes, because these
are things I do not remember,
it’s just the story of grief
I wear when I hear
my brother has cancer.
9 January, 2018
9 January, 2018
I know this
from looking
into store fronts
taste buds voguing
alight from the way
treasure glows
when I imagine
pressing its opulence
into your hand
I want to buy you
a cobalt velvet couch
all your haters’ teeth
strung up like pearls
a cannabis vineyard
and plane tickets
to every island
on earth
but my pockets
are filled with
lint and love alone
touch these inanimate gods
to my eyelids
when you kiss me
linen leather
gator skin silk
satin lace onyx
marble gold ferns
leopard crystal
sandalwood mink
pearl stiletto
matte nails and plush
lips glossed
in my 90s baby saliva
pour the glitter
over my bare skin
I want a lavish life
us in the crook
of a hammock
incensed by romance
the bowerbird will
forgo rest and meals
so he may prim
and anticipate amenity
for his singing lover
call me a gaunt bird
a keeper of altars
shrines to the tactile
how they shine for you
fold your wings
around my shoulders
promise me that
should I drown
in want-made waste
the dress I sink in
will be exquisite
– for Dominique
9 January, 2018
is the author of Reasons For Smoking, which won the 2016 Seattle Review chapbook contest judged by Claudia Rankine. She hails from rural Ohio, and inherited her grandmother’s fear of open water. Xandria is the poetry editor for Honeysuckle Press and the curator of Love Letters to Spooks. You can find her poetry in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Journal, Nashville Review, Ninth Letter, The Offing, and elsewhere.
9 January, 2018
is the author of four collections of poetry including Cloud Pharmacy, The Alchemist’s Kitchen, Cures Include Travel, and The Cartographer’s Tongue, winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry. She is a recipient of awards from Artists Trust, the Fulbright Foundation, and The Times Literary Supplement of London. Rich’s poems have appeared in journals such as: New England Review, Poetry Ireland, Plume and World Literature Today. She lives and works in Seattle, WA.
9 January, 2018
is an MFA candidate in poetry at Virginia Tech. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review, Sycamore Review, Sierra Nevada Review, Tampa Review, and elsewhere.