By Ma Yongbo

The sea is grey and misty, a realm of chaos,
where sky and sea merge, rain ushering in early darkness.
The square prow rises and falls with the waves,
one cabin at the bow, lit with a lamp,
another at the stem, with a swinging hammock.
Tin lanterns weigh down tilted nautical charts,
below deck, bundles of books serve as ballast,
ropes, knives, canvas, water buckets,
an albatross drags its wings.
Perhaps there’s even the skull of an old friend,
emitting a slight shuffling sound.
The wind blows, causing the concave sails to rebound,
beating against the slightly swaying mast.
The sails at the fore and aft have merged,
a solitary lamp atop the mast replaces the lookout.
I occasionally set down my pen to listen,
or go to the deck to check the wind’s direction.
A white whale glides past the bulwark,
in the distance, a lone iron chimney rises.
The crew’s whereabouts are unknown,
perhaps they’ve joined a jungle expedition to venture inland.
Only I, from time to time, glance at the binnacle,
or pull on the capstan pulley, then return to my desk,
letting my punt drag through the dark fog,
glide, brushing past all the world’s coastlines.

By Angela Rona Estavillo

Blade
for C

Somehow I saw better like this:
eyelids heavy with your

curdled mascara, unvexed by
both his desertion and my recurrent

neoplasia. Never not armed against
the cold front, you could barely

masquerade as an islander.
So what

if I happened to take after
my namesake and appeared

to you as ophanim? You’d find a
way to faultlessly trace

my hundred waterlines,
you and your choleric precision —

teaching me that this
is how we autolyze,

engulfed by our own palilogy
and remembering

always the gratitude
for the edge.

By Alisha Goldblatt

By the airport where jet engines riff and fly

humdrum in the background, you’ll find the

cutting room floor. There’s bloody gauze and
extractors on hand, eerily cheerful nurse–escorts

shuttling the wounded out of the lot. Their heads

are wrapped in ice diapers to ward off the swells

One after one they exit without those
hard vestiges to remind them where they began,

when chewing was a job for the decisive hunter. After

coming back to consciousness (the stupor itself an

outtake cut clean from the film), my daughter woke
laughing, drank texting until I took the phone and

righted the gobbledygook of fat, anesthetized thumbs.

She quiet–roared with a mouth that wouldn’t open wide,

a little girl growing soberer and soberer. Already she
was missing the drugs and those nubs in the back of the

mouth, ancestral and taken from her just as she

begins to cut her teeth on this very knife–edge of life.

By Alisha Goldblatt

Insurrection may take many forms, but
a son rose to full height when

still in plain sight was his
father’s shouting hat and double barrel

shotgun —
nothing but a proxy for his lagging dick —

the very same member,
tip of the spear,

that fertilized the egg
who, once cracked and grown,

weaponized his own cell phone.
Traitors get shot

Dad texted his own children,
swearing the riot was a preface

to lawmakers held by the hair, their
skulls clattering down the granite

steps. This man who had held
his son’s head and studied each

vein and eyelash, hip–checked
all playful, told oil–rig stories.

When parentage sewed him into
a fold, he sliced the stitches clean.