Karaoke: Encore


My Massage Therapist Asks if the Pressure’s Too Much

Abbie Kiefer

Let me tell you, Lil—I’m here to be borne down on.


Poetry, Fiction, & Nonfiction

Some People Think they're Owed a Bond Girl

Karyna McGlynn

to bend over whenever. This belief reaches / quietly into their bone marrow.

dionysus is the only sober person at karaoke

E.B. Schnepp

super impose me neon, berry-tinged / fingertips left smudges across everything I touched.

My Massage Therapist Asks if the Pressure’s Too Much

Abbie Kiefer

Let me tell you, Lil—I’m here to be borne down on.

Here, a Brindis for All Who Weep Alone

Rocio Anica

I raced past the kennels each time. So many noses pressed against the chain link. Others cast their pink, brown, black noses downward, their beautiful tails curling inward or twitching a sad little wag as they turned away.

Well, It’s Not Like It Used to Be

Patrick Duane

I was born March 24th, the same day as Harry Houdini, so my family used to take annual trips to the Harry Houdini Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

After The Reading, A Man Asks If I Hate My Father

Janiru Liyanage

nother time, a couple pressed me to / forgive my family, they said all the best art draws from love, not anger / but I barely heard them over the Frank Ocean song

When Beyonce Hits, And Sunset is Pink And Baby So Baby Blue

Cassandra Whitaker

What’s beyond the two lights at the edge / of the bay bridge tunnel blinking / out of turn, one a bit more butch / than the other

Last Christmas

Colin Ainsworth

The last time I was here I was really in here. I have been here. I know that I have been here. These people are in my home and they are watching my TV.

Ghosts of Scene Sites Past

Seán Carlson

On an external hard drive stored in a closet somewhere at home, I have a photo from the first concert I set up, a moment captured on a roll of film and later scanned and sent via email.

RUNNING UP THAT HILL (A DEAL WITH GOD)

After Kate Bush
Monica Rico

It claws / it doesn’t begin with an itch / a single hurt / a pointed branch

The Moss Takes Us to an 80s Sex Shop

Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery

But we arrive to find it’s been co-opted by a cocktail bar. / The Moss wants to bounce but we’re already here.

Let’s Play College

Karyna McGlynn & Fez Avery

Alright fine: let’s play Chubby Bunny / naked in the sprinklers, I said.

Entomb/In Tune: Earl Sweatshirt’s Black Lyric Mode

Joy Priest

But for me, Earl’s short poems (sometimes, I’m willing to concede, laid over monotonous beats) are speculative and visionary. They map a modern mind, short in attention, fighting to be audible above our cyber industrial reality—its alienating information storm of iPhone notifications. They take us beyond the day’s meaning-emptied habitual speech.


From the Archives

Potatoes

Marcela Sulak

this once-heretical root, domesticated / for latkes. My calendar's terribly reduced.

Pareidolia

Chris Ware

For a while I thought maybe something was wrong with me, like you sort of hope there is when you're a teenager.

Return

Karla Clark

Back home is wider than my legs lost the beat when viper sting / hid your keys ‘tween his fingers and though he snorin’ I ain’t / lightfeet ‘nough to get ‘em you gon’ have to chain lang along

A Houston Crease in my Brain: A Conversation with Joshua Burton and Anthony Sutton

Anthony Sutton

I have known Joshua Burton since 2014 when we attended the Boldface Workshop at the University of Houston.