Mown hay to the sun after rain. Otherwise you’ll find it in the middle leaves of bales, the mold that sickens them, that cures them. The tangle of things, the horse thistle in trumpet vine, Arabian roan doubled-over, retching, dying in a municipal park. The non-local stertor of its death. Where the rain doesn’t fall, it slashes across the plane of plains where ungulates look like windblown sticks in a field, inviting us to believe any recombinant number of impossible facts. C

I did not like to be held as a child trapped in my mother's lap. Her arms constricting, every fidget of my body. Nowhere for my head to go, except the shallow blanket of flesh and bone cradling her hummingbird heart. It beat like a windstorm. It shifted And could gush like molasses or spit like lighting and no matter what I could not move just lay there eyes wide open, feeling everything a child shouldn’t It did not mean I did not love her I just hated thinking, that’s al

“Unhand her, vagabond,” was my one line in the school play. I had the part of the cop, a minor role compared to Beth Levine’s, the heroine, or Billy Wiesenkopf’s the vagabond. Still, I took my part seriously. So although he forgot to take her hand, right on cue I yelled, “Unhand her, vagabond,” and it struck me and everyone else that my line made no sense. Then I knew: this is the kind of mistake that will end the world. A question of bad timing will hang in the air like

High above Locarno’s port with outside eyes to east at midnight: fires of the skies come speak to me in staccato forks flashed seconds apart. All people down, radio silence around, except for sonic summer booms that trail up to five beats past of lightening strobes in code to lake black heights. A Norse god’s gift to pinch the south. I doze to rolling burst and durm, and wake upfreshed before the dawn. July-November 2021 Lake Maggiore, Switzerland Rob Bunzel lives in

Porch light haloed in moths, house leaking into the night. Inside, my father drinks, dark rum cleaving memory from throat, I take it all back. We do what we have to, to stay alive. John Pring is an author and poet based in the UK. His work has been featured in The Passionfruit Review, MONO, Oroboro, Dolorem Ipsum, Letter Review, Qu Literary, Banyan Review, Tomahawk Creek Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Rising Phoenix Review, and others.

Bodies heavy with rifles, we gorged on meat, fresh from the river and yellow fields, just boys learning to carry death on our tongues, marrow to spit back into the world, pale bones leaving the throat like a prayer. John Pring is an author and poet based in the UK. His work has been featured in The Passionfruit Review, MONO, Oroboro, Dolorem Ipsum, Letter Review, Qu Literary, Banyan Review, Tomahawk Creek Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, Rising Phoenix Review, and othe

Like supernovae artists, clouds disperse behemoth art,

Look out, Ophiuchus, Voyager’s near! Earth has randomly shot some gold your way. We hope our sounds and music suit your ear and you’ll get back to us without delay. The complete instructions are included for how to hook it up to get your tunes. Note that, if depiction seems deluded, we tried to use the simplest of runes. We showed ourselves as naked, but, in fact, much of the time, we really do wear clothes, and we omitted fingernails, for tact, since claws convey predation,

five thousand feet above Sing Sing, you talk of your father, how thieves left him to die

Figures sprawl around the fountain, stretching out Like cracks across gray stones,

A city with no factories smolders in the afternoon, Above it, a dome of exhaust rises without a train

Golden brown parasols clustered near oak stumps, as if an artist

The dark woods invite me in to walk on pine needles between tall spruce and fir,

Without a hope of getting it right, the lake, calm and round, like a patch of mirror...

the week before you should have returned it you died without warning, the last pages