Features: Bonnie Hoda Boyer, Liz Brent, Margaret Garcia-Couoh, Christopher Cunningham, Taylor Graham, Julie Lechevsky, Lyn Lifshin, Ellaraine Lockie, Gerald Locklin, Richard Luftig, J. Michaels, Milo Redwood, Amy Trussell, Tara W. Zafft.

Read our Silty rave reviews. Sample poems from Issue Eight:
 

Practice in Losing

taylor graham

By the time the two of you
lost your home in the fire,

he’d lost his father, his first wife,
a happy family by divorce.

You’d lost several dogs, a lover
and a horse. Your mother lost
her first husband, then her mind.

Your father lost, as well, his wife—
the mother of his daughter—your
half-sister you never really
got to know before her mind set sail.

The first of so many losses.
 

The Sad, Sad Saga of My Sagging Breasts

margaret garcia-couoh

When my lactating breasts
Are once again mine,

I’ll stay out late,
Wearing something
That doesn’t button up
Or zipper down the front,
No flaps or wet stains.
I’ll be wearing something
That doesn’t come off so easily,
That confines and constricts
And pushes them up pretty.

I’ll go to Japan or Mexico.
I’ll say that I’m going to write,
But I won’t.
I’ll leave for a week, maybe two,
Long enough to remember
What it was like,

When what I had defied gravity,
When they fed armies of men
With not a drop of milk,
The miracle at the Wedding in Canaan.
Gods could not have done a better job
Than my sweet babies,
Always ready to greet them,
Head held high, enticing. Smooth.

Oh, and remember what it was like
Before these midnights
When I wake in a pool of milk,
Baby goat mouths suckling,
Churning sour cream and snot flakes
By the pound.

Oh, and remember what it was like
When I awoke
On floors of train stations, airports,
Borrowed boyfriends,
When we were style over function,
Bad girl bent over lap,

And then I shudder,
Ready for these tough titties
Sporting their National Geographic
Centerfold smiles
To go another round,
Feed the world.
There is no famine here.

Reading

liz brent

There was the book about the girl who had to wear
a back brace from her collarbone to her tailbone for
three years, but in the end she got kissed leaning
up against a washing machine in the basement of a
party; and the one about the girl who got pregnant
and decided to keep the baby and she was so poor
she couldn’t buy her favorite brand of shampoo any
more until finally she changed her mind and gave
up the baby for adoption; and the one about the
girl who was in love with her high school history
teacher, but then she got gonorrhea from some guy
in another town and her teacher came to the rescue
by driving her to the VD clinic; and the one about
the young woman in a plane crash that was based
on a true story with her boyfriend and some other
guy, and her boyfriend died right away, but the other
guy was injured and couldn’t move except he kept
trying to slide his hand up her thigh until he bled
to death, and it took her three weeks to climb down
the mountain by herself without a trail; and the one
about the girl who had sex with her boyfriend in
her best friend’s rec room one night, and when she
came home at four o’clock in the morning her dad
called her a slut and beat her, and she ran away
then ended up in a juvenile detention center and got
raped by a group of girls with a broom handle; and
the one about the girl who insisted on combing her
hair straight down over her face so no one could see
her eyes or mouth and always had to touch all four
corners of a room clockwise then counterclockwise
before leaving it; and the one about the girl who got
totally hooked on drugs like speed and Quaaludes
and angel dust and heroin but kept writing in her
diary until she was homeless and wrote on scraps
of paper bag, and one time she and a friend went to
these people’s house to get some drugs and they got
beat up, then she disappeared and her family found
only the diary as evidence of her decline; and the one
about the girl who got her period and joined a club
where you had to make a list of ten boys you liked
in order of preference then try to kiss each of them
and also had to do exercises every day to make your
boobs bigger; then there was the one about the girl
who always skipped gym because she was fat and
made stupid excuses until she got addicted to diet
pills and then didn’t mind gym but had to go to a
rehabilitation center to get unhooked from the pills;
and the one about the girl who had sex for the first
time in her senior year of high school, but when she
went away to college she and her boyfriend drifted
apart, and the next summer she was working as a
camp counselor and this slightly older guy named
Theo liked her and when her boyfriend came to
visit, her body would not respond to his touch, it felt
numb, and in the last line of the novel she’s home
from the camp at the end of the summer and her
mother says, “Theo called”; and the one about the girl
who went schizophrenic at the age of sixteen and was
in a mental hospital and became functional enough
to live on her own but was never completely normal
or happy; and the one about the young woman who
tried committing suicide every chance she got till
finally she succeeded by sticking her head in the
oven at the age of thirty-five when she was married
and had kids; and the one about the girl who had a
lesbian relationship with her best friend, but then her
friend went off to college and broke her heart; and the
one about this big party, and the night of the party,
this one super-nerdy guy that everyone ignored got
run over by a train and they weren’t sure if it was
suicide, and all the kids who’d been at the party that
night felt guilty, especially the girl everyone knew he
liked who said she’d go out with him and then didn’t,
and she went to his parents’ house and discovered
that his hobby was photography and he had taken all
these really interesting photos that were hanging on
the bulletin board in his bedroom; and the one about
the girl who had sex with three fat hippies in the back
of a yellow VW micro-bus to get them to buy her a
bottle of whiskey; and the one about the girl who
got raped by the high school football captain while
she was babysitting one night for her neighbors,
but no one did anything about it because his father
was a doctor; and the one about this woman who
was totally bored in her marriage and then had sex
with her therapist on a bear-skin rug; and the one
about the girl who would only have sex with guys
in exchange for brand new angora sweaters, which
is how she got the idea to become a prostitute; and
the one about the man who was obsessed with this
twelve-year-old girl and then her mom got hit by a
car and died and he had sex with her in a motel room
one rainy night; then in tenth grade my brother said
if you want to make friends you can’t just sit there
and read between classes, you have to talk to the
people sitting near you while you’re waiting for the
bell to ring, that’s how you make friends.