By Gary Mesick

Everyone is guilty. If not
Of one thing, then another.
Grand schemes may pass the time
Between betrayals, whether by
Co–conspirators, unlucky
Coincidence, or plain bad
Timing. But your penance is
To be left to brood with no company
But your miserable self.

So why not just wait it out
In relative comfort and be betrayed
By a faithless spouse like the rest of us?
It comes to the same thing in the end.

And Devil’s Island has its charms —
Once you give up hope.

By Emma Read

dear viewer,

I am tired of the camera’s overhead drool and the fake white
blare of the spotlights,

dear viewer,

I feel your eyes like flies on a disaster site, kissing the prey’s
wet pulp,

dear viewer,

are you hungry for the glamor and thrill? do you crave the
sweet allure, the sparkled magic, the enchanted obscenity ?

dear viewer,

do you imagine this to be a luxury — to be young and pink
and bare and filled? to be soft like an
abscess swollen over the weight of a hundred thousand
eggs? to be cleaved open like the
world’s first entry wound?

dear viewer,

attention demands constant performance, the glitz burns on
the tongue,

dear viewer,

I live on ridges between crisis and boredom. I forget
everything immediately after it’s over,

dear viewer,

my schizophrenic mother had herself hospitalized again, she
tried to jump out of her third story
window in a mystic frenzy of nerve ending.

dear viewer,

I was too young to speak much when I first became used, my
dad’s boiled and pitted little fruit treat, his teething and wailing
dessert, he locked my older sister in the closet to stop her from
protecting me. when I looked at her knuckles after he let her go,
they were scabbed and bloody because she knocked so hard to be
let out. her voice had rasped over after she screamed so hard for
me.

dear viewer,

I no longer speak to her.

dear viewer,

I miss her.

dear viewer,

I sometimes think of this while you watch me on the screen,

dear viewer,

in the violent excitement, the restless haze, the ecstatic
trance, sensation will only extend so far
before the snap

dislocated at the inflection point of selfhood and
deprivation, all feelings are seized
action is over

dear viewer,

are you ready to repeat the drill of your life?

By Georgia M. Brodsky

He said he could name the fourteen bones
in my face, so I dared him, and he delivered,
touching the skin where each lived.

When I write us like that, we’re a movie
shot in close-up. Under the covers
in the late afternoon: Dimples! Eyelashes!

Light! White teeth! I can’t help the white teeth.
He is a dentist, now, after all. But see,
there it is. Not a movie anymore —

just a girl and a boy, and dental school,
and the anatomy notecards she’s helping him
study from, and the long slants of sun

that mean it’s time for her to start the drive back
to New Jersey, and the traffic on 1–84, and
the huge swaths of roadway between them.

By Georgia M. Brodsky

taught me what longing is

but also how to fall in love
and keep falling

even when it’s just me
(especially then)

sitting in the dark
before the story begins

willing the sound
the light to find me