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The First Week in July, Gavin Broom
“While I go to retrieve the Frisbee, wading through the sea like it’s treacle, depending on how far he’s through what he calls his ‘recovery cycle’, he’ll start eyeing up the young women in bikinis until he gets to the point where he’s chatting to them, making them laugh, and I become a fifteen-year-old-boy standing in the Caribbean Sea with a faded pink Frisbee, looking for someone to throw it to.”
Yutu, C. M. Donahue
“After my first lunar night. / I trundle across the highlands / to survey the maria and craters stretching / in canyons before me.”
The Distillation Process, Heather Santo
“I slip the soul of Johanna Schmidt, age 32, into the wash and watch the colors wick out, staining the bath in rainbow swirls. It’s fairly quick, and after several minutes I remove the material, now snow white, from the basin.”
Indeterminate Drives, Askold Skalsky
“When I grew up, I wanted to be a microcluster / and have a safe life, to be incorporated into larger / wholes, part of a clutch, like a hand holding out / its fingers, like globules of stars moving in the same / direction with nearly the same speed.”
Adaptation, Emily Williamson
“If I were to slice a landfill clean as a loaf, / I’d find the thrown-out goods there stratified. / The patient possessions of the past still lie / There, flawless as Pompeii or Oetzi from the Alps.”