What happens to dreams once they’ve hatched?  Those fledgling visions all scrawny down, hunger, and voice must be fed, and what better meal than the present tense.  Feast your eyes on these poems, gorge yourself on these stories, sate your ears with these essays!  Soon you’ll be the branch, the stand, the copse of twilight and birdsong.  

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Contents

Kitty Anarchy: “Vero,” “Because of Boys.,” “Double Standards,” and “Triggered by Trump” (tw: rape, sexual assault)

Ray Ball: “Inheritance”

Jack Bedell: “Nuage,” “Exhumation,” and “Dream, Distraction”

Michael Begnal: “Feathered Cape” and “Palindrome”

Christopher Bell: “Mama Didn’t Raise No Tool”

Lana Bella: “Beginning When It Is Always Ending”

Derek Berry: Triptych for My Father

Jessica Beyer: “Questions for a Waning Gibbous,” “Fragments of a Shredded Screenplay,” “Nephelae,” and “Meliads”

John Brantingham: “Endless Summer” and “Ontario, California”

Jeff Burt: “Crow’s Astronomy Lesson” and “Rodeo Gulch”

Carla Chacon: “A Saga of Blue”

Holly Day: “When It’s Over” and “On the Other Side”

Jack Hernandez: “Questions”

Donald Illich: “The Shopper” and “Escorting the Dead”

James Croal Jackson: “Whale Fortune” and “The Appointment of the Special Counsel”

Kendall Johnson: “Standing on the Eve of Endings”

Elisa Carolina Martinez Salazar: “Ars poetica”

Tammy Peacy: “Some Misunderstanding”

Natalie L. Peterkin: “The Meaning of Life Is in a Pile on the Floor”

Terry Wilhelm: “Insomnia #16”

Tara Isabel Zambrano: “Voice Inside the Closet,” “The length of our wishes,” and “birth”