Substrate

This was one way to be inside the world rather than outside looking into a bright window.

Dropbox mirror: https://www.dropbox.com/s/8eexi1xb775rmez/Screen%20Shot%202020-08-14%20at%201.09.26%20PM.png?dl=0 The moon wired to the sky the children we’re becoming, / those orphans—

A long time afraid of the filigree of light, what you imagine to be the wing of a bird cleaving your face, air on your eyes before you can shut them. It's the only thing you see. It's the kind of wick you cannot lick your fingers to put out. --- the filigree / of light

of the foot’s silver prayer.

each kindness \ reaching toward another

and every door in the breathing house bumps softly for unlike us it does not resent its faithfulness or question why, for what, how long?

Immense, entirely itself,

I pulled out a bouquet of skyscrapers.

Of the familiar Propitious haze? Of snug unawareness. The dark hangs heavily Over the eyes.

Outside the leaves flame usual in darkness and the rain and breathing in the quiet air

slow regret marbling a hope unflagging the morning

tiny fires blur the sky

I play with an old boyfriend, to tease you out

the night sky into stars, the stars into patterns I make up

I think flowers enjoy their solitude … I think sprinklers annoy them.

let the person kiss the mask instead.

…the dark makes you hear the water more.

…if the world will never stop expanding once helicopters are gone. …drops me a private year wrapped in plastic,

The first thing I learned was to look wide

The sky is open all the way. whose irrepressible birds can’t believe their luck this morning

a layer of birds when the beetles hurry through dry grass hiding pieces of light they have stolen

To uncoil the wild little everything inside lungs throbbed by its own wings

the light moving at its own speed

I wear black turtlenecks. Black panties. My lunch—mustard. Straight from the packet. No one sits next to me. Keep working my skills.

…what did I know of love’s austere and lonely offices?

inside the perfect closeness

A celebration of minor, automatic graciousness within a community, which can shine a penetrating light.

ISSUE SIX features fiction by Christopher Higgs, Jennifer Kronovet, Kyle Minor, Mark Jude Poirier, and Maura Stanton; creative nonfiction by Priscilla Becker, Jehanne Dubrow, and Emily O’Neill; film writing by J.M. Tyree; poetry by Diannely Antigua, Sandra Beasley, Molly Bendall, Jericho Brown, Heat

still spinning its one syllable