the lineage of rotting teeth i come from the lineage of rotting teeth- (the cavity capacity divine and endless in my head.) i baptize my back molars with water until they ache- bathed then numbed in longing. my teeth feel the exposed opening hollowed out and abandoned. i memorize the empty spaces with my tongue.… Read More

Written on the Winter Palms Holes in the light-shaft. In wind, lungs cry near Gethsemane, lunge into blue time—handfuls of red seas slake forms wet with war—guests melt in mud. Your Highness, shhhh: I need guesses in my prayers. About the Author John Bosworth is a senior at the University of Texas in Austin. He… Read More

The Saint By the River Rolls Up His Sleeves on a morning of no visible storks, only this steady percolation of red fog…. Mouth full of angel, saint full of pine needle, phantom full of coffee-steam, who among us died to lend me these knees on this mudbank with the signal so low every word… Read More

Fox Bellies Mama ties the tied-together catgut from the gutter to the oak, pins her floral skirts to the catgut to dry in the yellow-bellied forenoon, and prays beside the billows in the grass to her God: God of crayon and cradle, God of stain and stable, God of phantom and fable, Save me from… Read More

Seven Plagues For the first plague, we were given a pomegranate tree we were forbidden from tasting or leaning against. On October nights of wind, from silk pillows, we watched the shadows of pomegranates thrash and shudder through the curtains, a kind of diabolical harvest. The second plague came in the form of an ice-storm… Read More

Croix de Guerre Let me tell you chiefs and chefs, I don’t know, haven’t the faintest idea, how to accept all this honor; how to show, without fraud or display my deep feeling, my gross emotion, and all in all thanes, your gleaming eyes bespeak an honor not mine, but of all those who died,… Read More

swish pan ok listen I know it's cliche but when they talk abt stagefright I think of how ur eyes sear me down like spotlights and how on wednesday u said something profound abt snapping the scripts in half n sucking the heat from them, n i just sat there like a Dumbass n thought… Read More

anamika At age ten I hate being “smart” (Different) But because knowledge gushes from my pores My peers construct a pedestal for me And for the first time I am <Other> (I try to drown myself in the swimming pool–once, twice, fifty times–and my parents just think I love to swim.) At age fourteen I… Read More