A man walks into a bar—but it isn’t a bar: it’s many bars. It’s bar after bar of a ten-page score that in the next eight minutes will loosen a pinched city man in the front row clear through the folds of his skin, like steam from a mare’s lips penetrating the deep creases of an outstretched pale palm. The boy slouched at the exit will pull his hands free of his pockets, tuck his long purple bangs behind his ear, and lean his head against the door frame with his eyes closed. The fat lady with too much perfume and eyelashes like spider legs will cry tears that dig channels down her cheeks, parting the layers of powder and rouge, trickling at long last into the forgotten delta cleavage of her heaving chest…

Anjie Seewer Reynolds' work has been published in The Christian Science Monitor, The Sun, The Writer's Workshop Review, and the Dos Passos Review, among others; her essays have also aired on KQED, San Francisco's NPR affiliate. She is the recipient of an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship and lives in Ashland, Oregon.

there arrives a day when we all
grow old at the pace we choose.
split the winter days open like
blackberries between gleaming
teeth, thread them together like
pearls or pills to swallow down.
death, they say, is optional; like
the lilac bush, we can flower in
every spring. unlike the blossoms,
wilting has been forgotten. come
sunday, we dance in the rain, skin
paper-thin and running translucent
with water. outliving the sun will
be like this: an exhalation that does
not end, the dirty copper taste of
pennies minted a thousand years ago,
an eternal grave in the white sky.

Ayame Whitfield lives on the East Coast of the US and never stops writing (but probably produces too much poetry about the moon and the ocean); thinks flowers and cats and eating berries are the best things in life; drinks far too much tea; and can be found @avolitorial on Tumblr and Instagram.