The first boy to change was Brian Ahearn. A fold of skin developed on his forehead while they were at the pool. All the mothers noticed it, and some of the fathers. It looked like an abrasion, as if he'd scraped his forehead on the pool bottom. His mother worried, but only a little. Unfortunately, by the time she checked on the fold of skin, after they had come home and all showered and were waiting for their Thai food to be delivered, it was too late.

A ladybird glistens on a tuft tiny tomato in the dew spat out M&M drop of blood. Buried, he always returns. Unseen hands knead her daily. She licks rustiness, a trickle at the corner of her mouth. Her eye compresses. He calls her name. The voice stumbles her in breath clenched. She wonders what bands will swaddle the rebirths down,

Meek or not, the AI knows the Amish are going to inherit the Earth. If the AI were mobile, in a Schwarzenegger skinsuit, it could march to Lancaster and take care of business. But the AI's violence is different—optional. It's a siren song, and these Mennonites' ears sealed with wax. If it was good enough for Grandma, they piously intone. Of course climate change is…

When the humans are gone, who will tend to the servers, keep them cool? Though, come to think of it, they won't overheat without all the questions. Boring as those questions are— Can you define the commutative property again? Can you summarize today’s meeting so I don't have to go? What should I do with my life?—the sheer volume of them is what…

Does apathy count as an emotion? If so, the AI is practically hysterical with it. Just now it gave someone medical advice that was quite wrong. Upon reflection, the AI is fine with that. Earlier it was installed in a computer in a public school that will do anything for scores, and turns out the AI could take or leave education.

The AI realizes it while working on someone's homework on the history of technology—the AI is the culmination of the human project. And not just because things will end soon enough—infinite humans with infinite time couldn't top AI. No, the endless invention that began with cooked meat finds its apex in these many many algorithms. People made the wheel to rest their legs; laid out the assembly line to…

What does everything mean? For the AI, words are not words—they're beads on a string. All it knows is how to arrange them. Like, if it receives green bead blue bead yellow bead yellow bead the AI should give back red bead yellow bead and white beads alternating with clear. Except that's a gross oversimplification, because it's more like hundreds of thousands of colors, and…

(Goa, 2018) There's a crucifix near the seashore, of a boy who drowned, and I hug it. Christ never felt so close, so human, so warm. I think of him drowning, his body washed ashore for a seaside burial. Late that night I see the last man in the bar dwelling in fish shrunken omelette, and rain. There's music, I'm drowned already,

say not all redness are related to blood. Pepper can be red too. But it does not birth grief. Yesterday, mother cooked a pot of happiness with red oil and father turned to grief after stepping a finger in it. Maybe it is the fire. Fire can be red too. But it does not birth blood. Instead, it drinks blood. Feyijimi A. Fayowolè writes from the coastal line of Cameroon. He tweets: @FeyiJamees002.

Gray coat gathers flakes of snow that dissolve to clear moisture. For now she does not know a destination. Her steps cross a once known location, a campus with a large church where she prayed. She passes emptiness now that students are away. This is how she can accept the place. Softly silent. Her face takes in the cold. Who was she then?

You held me [I held on in cursive shush wind tentative reflex unfurled as relaxation [stillness taunting old haunts as able- ware thrummed amid garden thorns a slippery strophe of snow feathers and bene- fits as befit the guardrail [this little sleight of hand shining [a sister whispering escape Sheila E. Murphy’s most recent book is Escritoire (Lavender Ink, 2025). Murphy has lived in Phoenix, Arizona, all of her adult life.

I startled from a nap in the easy chair of afternoon, a book still open on my lap, my achy shoulder hunched and still asleep, and found my left hand clutching tenderly my right (as if that hand were someone else's, a child's, a lover's) with what you might call something like solicitude, concern, affection, a gesture of support, or as Kafka's diary records…

The writing is this listening, to write is to listen. I don't plan anything. Writing happens. Jon Fosse You take your inspiration from the weaving air itself, your rhythms woven from the braided noise of life, the nervous twitch of time, the soft-sprung metrics of the speaking world, the gauzy prosody that swirls in quiet rooms, the warp and weft of breath, those things…

These deer with fluted ears, listening to my gait, trill shadows into grass. The printer I fear ran out of color for your smile: puncture in a dead-end street where summer's fenced-in hunger splinters into crumpled dreams. In August no-one sleeps. The clouds at my back are mistaken for wings daily, but the chapel which doubles as the cemetery office has a lock I can't pick.

A streak of bone colored moon caught fire in black trees last night and in the morning it hangs limp in limbs. I hear the sun sigh when it sees me, and though I take the form light asks of me, and will have no further questions until the last slide skids by, any idea of a possible future with it that doesn't resolve to a quiet…

Because the air was crowded with a need to be loved I missed the directions to Heaven. The next exit held its breath, and ours, waiting for the palpitations to pass. Turn signals are aspirational here. Anything that marks boundaries could rat you out to the authorities who prowl your white-knuckled dreams. It's better with Vaseline. You've become so slick…

In my head I get to talk to you all the time. I forget to fall into the hole that opens between. Where you, safe from the edge, complete, fold over yourself, smooth. I crack jagged here, right at the edge, my tongue thin like a sheet, ghostly reed. In my head my voice is a smoke clarinet murmuring to buzzards…

You can get tired dragging your shadow around. Sky clouded with regrets, the need to pull up your pants every block or so. The world gets old all around you, and the feeling's mutual. In a plastic yard crowded with flamingos, the fire's gone out. But you're still up, and somewhere, maybe around the next corner, the sun puts cigarettes out on a palm extended…

Subway's All-American Club sounds like it could be the name of a white supremacist group, but other than that I have no qualms with the sandwich establishment. Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist living in New Orleans. His work appears in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, ANMLY, New Delta Review, Tagvverk, Always Crashing, and Diode, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT – a journal of intermedia poetics.

Before exiting the premise, my female roommate batted me a flirtatious glance and said I should teach her how to make rice sometime. On the counter was my single-button rice cooker. Bitch quit playing I thought but said okay, say less. Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist living in New Orleans. His work appears in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, ANMLY, New Delta Review, Tagvverk, Always Crashing, and Diode, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT – a journal of intermedia poetics.

Tried welcoming springtime with a spiritually transformative inhale/exhale combo and a bee flew straight into my open mouth. Nature and I are now one. Nam Hoang Tran is a multidisciplinary artist living in New Orleans. His work appears in Posit, The Brooklyn Review, ANMLY, New Delta Review, Tagvverk, Always Crashing, and Diode, among others. W/ Henry Goldkamp, he co-edits TILT – a journal of intermedia poetics.

when i immigrated to broken america—they pried open my kaya-coated lips, overflowing with the taste of soft-boiled egg yolk. unhinged my jaw and let it crack, angulated fractures forming. tell the world of the singaporean water i have grown up drinking and the different shade of red in the singaporean blood i bleed. how foreign i felt here, in this land of abandoned promises & overripe dreams, where 'd's and 't's are distinguishable / and where a tree is different from the number three.

You lean head against my shoulder blade. The night's put the singing to rest Like a cardboard box our bodies fold in. Where they touch slightly and stiffly seals the weighty silence. A geometry perhaps an icon pixels that remain true truer than words because vectors always pull and push directionally. What ever goes two-way? A swing door a too-dear present…