Five Poems
Katie Mertz
Tiny Evolutions
	okay so let’s talk
	about the exes we mythologize
	for the wrong reasons   like leave
	a toothbrush at my bathroom sink
	and call it love   and baby
	I’ll promise ring your
I am reading a poem called “George Washington” in a book of poems called George Washington in a bar called The Library in the Lower East Side of Manhattan where I am spending my last twelve dollars on four beers and my last four dollars on tipping the bartender because happy hour still hasn't started.
Okay, so there’s that sound again, and you know it isn’t Tommy or Lindsey trying to scare you, because they’ve been asleep for over an hour and you’re certain the sound is coming from the basement
My friend takes caffeine pills between classes and shakes in the bathroom, on the floor under the sinks.
Tiny Evolutions
	okay so let’s talk
	about the exes we mythologize
	for the wrong reasons   like leave
	a toothbrush at my bathroom sink
	and call it love   and baby
	I’ll promise ring your
Lately I’ve been spending a lot of time playing Candy Crush Saga on the old iPhone Jan gave me while watching TV.
Class Aves
	Anyone that ever heard the call
	of the Rodrigues Solitaire
	is long dead, but its name is trapped in stars:
	turdus solitarius—
	named by a sensitive astronomer.
Does this
Nell did not consider herself a thief. All sixteen lovely pups were better off in her care. She kept them in a large house with a sprawling yard, surrounded by a sturdy fence.
The items on the list had come to her at random as she washed a dish or plucked a hair from her chin or put gas in the car.
piss you one cleaner than your trackshoes, say i / sex toys on lease to i / houses for my centipede, ow / coke that asshole into skinny fleece / clean up with her spate, guy / suck stray dogs in the cock wound, i / lick what your god's got, why / imma mafuckun star boi
Asian Pen Name*
	Mine is Kien,
	which is useful
	in cases
	where I need
	to prove
	I am who I say
	I am,
	like the time
	a cop pulled me
	over and said
	Sir, do you know
	why you
Within its pages, the reader is invited to discover those wondrous things that only great short fiction can offer: an abbreviated window into disparate lives, intense and intricate moments of distress and disclosure, completely self-contained and executed in twenty-five pages or less (Deagler on Gustine's Collection).
Dear Katie
The movie we watched the night you told me you were leaving your husband for a girl with skin rough as a butcher’s block no storm could ever smooth clean. When sharks were falling from
Even his sacred biosphere (of anime, video games, Oedipal and teen porn, poststructuralist psychobabble, and grad school fellowships) can’t save him from the critical intervention of the collapsing world.
He removed a wad of fabric from under the bed, pulling on boxers and an Anthrax t-shirt. I winced at the Anthrax logo—I knew better than to fuck guys into thrash metal—too late now.
Being There
	Describing my body is easy
	because I do not know what it looks like.
	From above, I imagine my face
	when it experiences a thrill.
There could be more to what I’m looking
I wondered what my mother would say about the gun, and then I wondered it out loud. M gave me a look I was too worn out to interpret.
But if it's anything like years passed it'll boil down to something real simple. Start drinking as soon as the coffee is done. Bottles of beer and wine. We'll wrap ourselves up in blankets to stave off the cold. Too cheap to turn on the portable radiators we use to heat our place. Her parents will call. We'll feign sobriety. A hard thing to do at 10:00 a.m. with wine-stained lips.
I had never considered practicing polyamory, so when my girlfriend suggested it to me, I didn’t know what to say.
Her parents, Mary and Don, were overcome first by grief and then by caution: they purchased fire extinguishers and flame retardant blankets, put the fire department on speed dial and plugged the holes in the nursery wall with corks, so that the angry neighbors could not look in and make a spectacle of their only child. Julia was their everything
How Come No One On Twitter Is Talking About This
	The eye   a camera humming across the top of the earth : cavern  
	gully    ravine    gorge    Far below    a tiny man jumps into a tiny
Some hours pass, and nobody has impressed her