A Plate of Bones, by Terrance Hayes

My silk slick black muscular back-
talking Uncle Zoe driving me and a school
of fish corpses to Church. The sick-eyed
gap mouthed bass, the kingfish without
kingdom, the sliver thin silver-fish each
dead and separate in a cool bucket. Gilded
and shapely as a silk tied Sunday
morning, the fish. Sit upright, he said
and I sat right up, riding shotgun
looking hard at the road. His boots
and his black truck black with gut mud.
A clump of tiny maggots in a trout’s brain,
flies lazing like the devil’s jewelry at our backs.

Last night a white boy’s arm swanned
his daughter’s neck and my uncle
said nothing until they left. At first I tried
the anger I heard was a birthright,

a plate of bones thin enough to puncture
a lung. But the words did things in my mouth
I’d heard they killed people for. They went
to a movie and sat quietly and touched
or did not touch in the darkness. My uncle watched
the news with the sound turned down
until she came in, my silk slick black back-
talking cousin, his daughter. He went to work
beating a prayer out of her skin.

The Magician’s Girl, by Amanda Auchter

This is what will be left of me
when I die: bones, slices of body, two parts

that will never reconcile. Halved in a box,
all spangles and boas, my fringed gold skirt.

Handfuls of dirt, glitter, a feather. I will
remember a saw in midair, light-struck,

how my legs spun from my arms, the round
of applause. The magician who tapped

the air, my rise from smoke. This is where
it will all end: stage and magic, canary flutter,

someone’s awful scream. Later, the mirror,
the dressing room, the cotton ball stained.

Graveside, even my skin is a prop—
the harlequin scarves

of my voice still trapped up his sleeve.

Pegasus, by Robert Pfingston

Francisco, by Michael Berryhill