Lisha Ruan

The apples drip like paper
onto a bony stomach

The throats whirl like seas
or locks or red hooks

Elephant-spun webs
fall like rain onto the grass

The diamonds whir like tanks
in a blurred kitchen

We spill wine
over a list in neat letters

The stars glint like oaths
inside insects and cold meat

LISHA RUAN is a Computer Science major and writer at Princeton University. When she’s not writing poetry, she likes to learn languages, and she’s also curious about philosophy, the future, and artificial intelligence. Her work is forthcoming in Sweet Tree Review. She grew up in Rockville, Maryland.

Zackary Sholem Berger

City, this Baltimore.
Nearer the campus
bird houses ride
three to a tree.

Dogs raise eyebrows
at stroller’s cargo:
baby, toes dangling.
Off to a coffee.

Shot on a block
not far from here:
Our black neighbors.
I doctor some later.

City is shuddering
Blood on its buses,
its work and play shirts.
Crying in sleep.

Poe did not mean
The tale of these hearts.
Infarcted bodies
Flame in the sun.

Belief is concrete.
Something yet
To build, pay for.
To make, love for.

A mild mannered physician by day, ZACKARY SHOLEM BERGER writes in Yiddish and English and has been known to translate himself for kicks.

Eric Fisher Stone

Bacteria fulfill the mystery
of my flesh. I bequeath myself
to meekest inheritors, to mites
loping like planets through darkness,
gnats glinting star-forged wings, clusters
of toads and slender newts, Junebugs
smashing through the jazzy plum
of the night air, sugar ants creeping
in cupboards, olms blind in black water,
amoebas dripping fingers through
raindrop lakes, millipedes prickling
earth’s worm-work, pious crawdads
praying in stock-tank chapels,
microbial angels ticking and gnawing
at the Parthenon’s stylobate,
Lascaux Cave, the pyramids of Giza.

ERIC FISHER STONE is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas, where he graduated from Texas Christian University and works at a PetSmart. He is also an incoming graduate student at Iowa State University’s MFA in Writing and Environment program. His poems have appeared most recently in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Yellow Chair Review, Zetetic: A Record of Unusual Inquiry, Uppagus, Third Wednesday, Eunoia Review, New Mexico Review and Turtle Island Quarterly.