## Showstopper  
There I was  
torn chiffon & tarnished silk,  
the spotlight froze it all–  
dust settling from the warm light,  
eyes of serpents or fox or both,  
mouths agape & the announcer’s stuttering words.  
one hand over my breast,  
the other holding the remains of my gown;  
I still feel

## Mood Swings  
A tear  
(drop)  
through my eye lands  
on the machinery of my cheek  
And sparks shoot off of my crackling face  
The mask distorts in unnatural twitch  
A pole in my brain spins  
and spits ribbons of storm  
as a  
giant  
flying  
carousel  
rises from the top of my head

## The Best Laid Plans  
Robert Jakucs

## Godsend  
Davor Mondom

## Sepulchress  
Digging beneath the dirt of my body is the only  
way I know to escape it: its fatal birdcage, its sung  
prison of bones. And as I labor You tell me of all the women  
who failed to listen, how now they are enshrouded  
in salt pillars & sunken in

## The Bubble  
Philip Dean Walker  
An ekphrastic of Roberta Hahn Edward's 2025 watercolor of a "Little Creature"  
She started when still quite young,  
creating little husks of life  
on watercolor paper, bringing them  
into being, wringing them from pores  
in the sheet, bright and strange  
little monsters, never mean or dirty

## Severed Hearts / Murdered Brains

## Ecdysis

## Still Life

## Her Plastic Heart

## Disintegration

## Dinner

## Desire in Ten Parts

## Landscape

## Scattering, Over and Over Now

## The Poetry of Ma Dai

## Gowpen & Undertow

## Paper Birds at the Crosswalk

## Equilibrio Instabile

## Observance

## Swimming

## Leadore

## The Word Made Flesh

## With Every Classmate I’ve Lost, I Feel like I’ve Failed a Test

## Inflection Point

## Here To There

## A Conversation with Salvator Rosa

## The Poet as Thief  
“Donc le poète est vraiment voleur de feu.”  
— Arthur Rimbaud  
Was Prometheus a poet?  
Rimbaud says he was, stealing fire  
from the gods: technology, knowledge,  
human arts and sciences. He paid  
a terrible price for his audacity.  
Whatever was he thinking?  
Look what we have done  
with what he gave

## Three States Triptych

## The 7th Burial Mound

## The Forty-Ninth Year

## Unraveling

## Mi Vida Loca (My Crazy Life)

## Live from the Hadal Zone