In rare killing


︎︎︎ Rebecca Warlick Cooke

︎ Jan 14, 2026

You like the look of no corners
The best looking moth flies into my mouth
He's come to sing to me
To free this cocoon body
To feed my hungry tunnels
come here boy and have a seat
Stupidest thing
I want to eat your blood















Rebecca Warlick Cooke is a painter from California. She lives in New York.

Also by Rebecca: White noise






Animal Services


︎︎︎ Emily K. Sipiora

︎ Jan 13, 2026

I can tell precisely when
it’s going to happen
all over again







Emily K. Sipiora is a Mexican American poet and Creative Director of the internet literature podcast VICTIM RADIO.  

Also by Emily: Birthday Puppy





Frankie


︎︎︎ Toby Rant

︎ Jan 12, 2026

She’s inside, dormant, suspended,
but dreaming.
The past— Sand, Star, Mark, Indian Queens.
Futures past, too- flocks of parakeets,
swans that break necks.

She’s trying to understand
where she fits in.
And there are huge concrete towers,
a wide, open labyrinth with her
in its basin.

Yet still there are fountains
in every square,
and plants breach the tops of all
the walls, cascading down to her
like ladders, inevitable.






















Toby Rant is from the West Country in the UK. He likes to walk the dog. 





Field Report


︎︎︎ Marcet

︎ Jan 10, 2026

dilmun lies beneath the waves
avalon across the sea that burns—
Processor, dweller in the caves,
speak now: the wheel has turned

you who long ago did eyeless see
and who knew what croesus had to hear
speak up: the load is on, and we
are full of love as much or more than fear

something is coming out of the treeline, there
something is walking out of the dead wood

submarines and lidar found
megalithic cities drowned
and in pursuit of lights at dusk
the FBI is looking up



Marcet is currently writing a science fiction novel and lives in the middle of nowhere, Illinois.






Quartet For Two

(Do You Want to Get the Girl?)
︎︎︎ C. Sandbatch

︎ Jan 9, 2026

“Dude, four people are involved,”
 says someone else.

Standing plain: the real girl
 sharpens the scene.
 Suddenly attentive to real stakes,
 it feels like I’m the one being hunted now.

Still the real girl,
 standing where my thought curdles
 itself into something solid.

Brightens, suddenly more knowable,
 I catch myself watching, slightly misgiven,
 soften into innocence. Performative.
 No one is doing harm.

My friend names them back:
 “one who is only geometry,
 the real one, the imagined one,”
 as though speaking her reframes
 the frame.

Washed-out morning, spared from scrutiny.
 Still real, I watch while wanting
 to be without; wanting.

Real. I wish she constructed
 me, real, and from a voice inside.

Unadorned again. Returning, smaller,
 almost nonimagined, spotted.
 Angled. “Stand a little closer, please.”

Her frame now looks back at me.
 A quartet after all?.



C. Sandbatch is an American writer.

Also by Sandbatch: Something Awful and Beautiful Is Coming