In “lumpenproletariat blues for MonteQarlo’s platinum blonde wig,” poet D. Musa Springer (@halfatlanta) memorializes “the last true drag queen I knew” and meditates on the urgency of anticolonial struggle.

Poet Jonathon Todd’s “Shift Drink 8-4” explores the underbelly of working-class Philadelphia.

In “Type One,” poet Emerald Anastasia traverses the “eugenics spine” of privatized healthcare and its predatory relationship to disabled people.

Rebuking those who “dip the poem in oil, occupy a country for it,” poet Justin Davis explores the intimacies between the literary-artistic world and institutions of policing and imperialist expansion.

In “No Longer Alone,” poet Howard Moon invokes his ancestors in the Sac & Fox Nation as comrades in the struggle against capitalist alienation and imperialist violence.

In this gorgeous elegy for her “first no-hassle lover,” poet Joan Mazza reflects on desire as a mutual experiment, a test of “heat and pressure” unbound by marriage or monogamy.

Using declassified documents from the CIA’s MKUltra project, poet Patrick Blagrave explores the terrifying violence US imperialism wages upon its subjects.

In “Job Security,” poet Umang Kalra twists the language of work around the present apocalypse, asking: “what does it mean to name / the thing / that will kill / you?”

In “RE: UPCOMING ACTIONS **CHANGE OF PLANS**,” poet Tiffany Katz twists the unglamorous language of the email blast into an acidic critique of political complacency.