This gorgeous plant has a long list of names: Jimsonweed, Toluaca, Devil’s Snare, Thornapple, Moonflower. Datura wrightii or Datura stramonium.  A powerful hallucinogen, it has also led to hospitalizations and death, with one case involving a person who mistook the plant for an herb in the garden and used the leaves in a dinner salad.  The perfume, though, is the sweetest of intoxicants. You can keep your roses. I’ll take the Moonflower blossom. Imagine its redolence as you commune with these freely branching poems, stories, and works of nonfiction.

Ingrid Calderon: “Circus Rant” and “wait till after”

Michael Chin: “Eclipse”

Chloe Clark: “Ends and Ends” and “Questions for Men Falling Through Space”

Lisbeth Coiman: “Spaghetti Western”

Howie Good: “The Body Is a Big Place” and “Golden Minutes”

Stephanie Lachapelle: “Beaver and Other Dirty Words We Yell”

Alyssa Oursler: “spring/break”

Jessica Royce Fischoff: “The Virgin World” and “The American Dream Divided into Pennies”

C.C. Russell: “Speed”

Thaddeus Rutkowski: “Meeting the Train”

Andy Stallings: Three from Paradise

Don Thompson: “Sequence that Almost Succumbs to Loneliness”

Jamie Wagman: “What We Ate“