Abraham Lincoln #1, edited by K. Silem Mohammad and Anne Boyer

CA Conrad:

When Mother first grew
tentacles from her
shoulders Frank found a
path of ink across his
breakfast and went
to school sick

no one believed him

she arrived at school in a
long cape and burned the
principal with her eyes from across
the desk until she left with his apologies

her tentacles continued to grow with
a sharp smell of salt and fish


Alli Warren:

We sought adequate funding
to remember the rules of animal behavior
the realm in which one is permitted
to enter and exit in every type of society


Rodney Koeneke:

eyes & a moon and silence
rivulets outside the theaters
filling with evening cerise
there is no syntax
to carry this light
light isn’t syntax
it just holds everything


Sharon Mesmer:

Former Trotskyite right-wing chicken-butt Kingons


Nada Gordon:

Rise up, spirit goslings
and clap your beaks
at the awesome magnitude.

…

Ann Margret keeps coming
of age among the Shiners--
upon her forehead,
a little barcode:
barracude
"for all your camp needs."

…

Tigers fuck on a carpet.

You must eat your neck.


Sandra Simonds:

all the neurons poured through a diamond-shaped keyhole
of black shards that bleed black light.


Shanna Compton

What I'd like to know is
how come books insist different when you open them &

why can't panties be out aids in math?
Oh rules're made to be counted up & swept

clean with the clear button before
all of us end up talking like ET


Michael Magee

Sorry. Really. My head just works that way. My boss
tells me that. He also says that I am just the opposite down

at the massacres. I'm not foxy but I am foxy lazy. Just choose
the added weight of nipple shields, start ranting, and voila,

you've established a little church. War's definitely foxy
but its politics make me shrivel in a very important place.

I'm probably just pissed that war doesn't play for my team.
The Copernican revolution placed the hegemony of the Church

in GIRLS' sports, such as hot oil wrestling, foxy boxing, sacrificing
underprivileged children to Karl Rove's idiot gods, etc.

The animal on the globe is a fox. This is not just a north
Eugene problem: this affects me in southeast Eugene.


Bill Luoma:

he unleashed a bad disease upon the people and shiny dog
he downshifted the farshooting marshallers of men