by Adam Cloe, Derek Haddad, Elizabeth Moss, Emilie Heilig, Frederick Nitsch, Jeremy Yanofsky, Jordan Rock, Megan Bell, Sonia Lowman, Sophia Dookh, and Steve Macone
Three Collaborative Poems

[1]

Watch a woman on a swing
Watch her yellow slicker,
reflected in the eyes,
burning into grey.

Ask yourself why she looks so dark
She knows what you are thinking.
"I am fading away. i can't help it."

Darkness.

"Time for dinner, honey"
says her father. "We
can play existentialist-on-
the-swing more tomorrow."

when she realized that it was a dream

[2]

the stranger suddenly brought me a plate

of fruit like bananas or grapes with spongy
insides full of juice --

delicious on the lips of

a thousand angry planets are pretty

babies' chunky fingers house them all
before the light of reason, no treason

in this land where

the hands were once pure
and white, now old, blistered

chafing my legs as I ran through the cage of

monkeys swing like men in suits crawling down
concrete sewer --

highways to exits unknown twisted like knots on

fingers are physical, nothing but objects of adrenaline
stimulated by

motion

[3]

The artist is thirty-five, his neck poking pink from white buttoned collar, his words arching with trepidation. He looks across the room at one of his latest works and brings a wine-glass to his lips. Later, his cats fed, he will drive his car into the river. He already knows it; he knows that in four hours he will be dead. The patrons of the gallery do not notice the drowned man standing in the corner.

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