Good news! Tracy Dimond made us our monster, a monster whose organs are made from the entirety of ILK NINE.

There is Only This One Season

Galileo was the first to ask Whose brain.

I can teach you

about lighter fluid, but

it’s making my brain delirious.

I resent the Internet for telling me

that I am not a plant.

Who do I give this hyper anxiety to?

I dream sporadically of reincarnation.

I wet myself thinking

about the possibility.

In the plural space, machinery is

taught to mimic how a skeleton unbuckles.

An animal dismantles softly,

each taxonomy undoes its seamless structure.

A small impression steams

shirtless and run through with heroin.

I can usually be found

laughing alone in my apartment.

I’ll need it in the original German.

Hopeful for madness,

cover your head with your hands.

What happens if I have compassion on

who we’re fighting?

I snitch on myself in confession,

one night, I follow myself,

who’s fallen from her aircraft

like the classical music station

fucked into cheap thunder by static.

Anna wanted a hospital.

Wanted a handgun and a

shooting range, the target

to be a grey wolf turning blue.

No. I don’t care anymore,

my untrained sympathetic vibrations

a spear in the pool.

Then I would really start to roar.

*

Community Garden For Lonely Girls

redux/remix after Christine Hou

No fancy men dare

climb the fence.

All the women show up

as birds in photographs;

we use the negatives to mulch

each rotten & invasive species.

Pennies make the pond bottom a sun.

Razor blades dot the driveway with fickle stars.

Mania, spells, & ordinary feelings all grow here

as tangled vines.  I have no place in my own dreams.

My goodness is dimming, has become a cat

winding between the ankles of another’s love.

I am alarmed by the dangerous curve of its back.

Nathan Blake resees Zachary Zalman Green’s poem ”Our Concern For the Mess.”

Our Mess

You lumberyard.

Say a person

as snowstorm.
Learning like a

handful of dead chances.

I am ready to be delivered.

Extradited the world

with us elsewhere.
We charts. We ranking.

Joseph Mulholland took Suzanne Marie Hopcroft’s issue eight apocalypse and made it again. We are always post-apocalyptic here.

At AWP.

Watch it.

Listen.

Yep.

*

CLEARLY

the scientific method
exemplifies how the end
is not always the end
and the mind is only
its own property in sleep.

In the after-effects of vocal air
sometimes light wins.

Astronaut of the people,
son of Karnov,
from the sea dark,
tell your children
you tried.

For Chris & myself, establishing ILK after VIDA had begun its great work, we have always been attentive to patriarchal bias, and committed to not putting up with it. Simply put, it is not good enough for editors to give vague excuses about ‘the quality of submissions’ etc, etc. You either give a shit or you don’t. You either take action or you don’t.

How do we take action? Well, it might be obvious that we try to publish an equal ratio of men to women. We also hope it is obvious that by doing so no matter what our submission queue looks like, we are signalling ourselves as supportive of women in the arts. What might be less obvious, but important is that we support trans* writers. While VIDA might break down gender into a binary, we are not interested in that. Indeed, some of our ILK may not identify as ‘male’ or ‘female’, and so (for the sake of facilitating an inclusive conversation) we have included the umbrella term ‘trans*’ as a third category in our count. But to put things into a fancy pie chart a la VIDA and share our own numbers with you, here you go:

one ILK is great, two ILK is excellent, & you always want to know what goes on in the heart of Ronald Reagan. 

so it is imperative that you read NANCY AND THE DUTCH by Nick Sturm & Carrie Lorig. 

*

Brian Foley, Enlightenment

*

Katy Gunn, Lake Erie… / Museum of Science… / Port Hueneme…