A Recipe for Drinking Life to the Lees after Tennyson’s “Ulysses” Wait until after two a.m. to start cooking. After work, after you and Jax have a few rounds of pineapple rum and sour beers at The Local. After you see Cassandra there, the flesh of her forearm tender-fresh with a tattooed cactus. After the barman calls last call, sense with a wet fingertip a subtle shift in the headwinds. Wade from ankle- to waist-deep the summerly waters, dipping into the fuming, cicada-laden

Listen to Monica Youn reading at the Jerome Stern Distinguished Writers Series.

Ballistics In a ballistics lab in Maryland three artists known as The Propeller Group aimed assault rifles at each other and fired them simultaneously into gel blocks constructed to resemble human flesh. Fragments of the projectiles, fused on impact, float suspended around a flower of smoke. Shot through with light, the resulting twenty-one gel blocks, like this one elegantly displayed inside a custom vitrine, enchant. On a flat screen hanging on the wall like a black canvas,

Danez Smith's poem "bloodnectar" was originally published in The Southeast Review 34.2. bloodnectar brother our blood intersects in too many ways in our blood a choir of boys shamed out of church boys too proud for a condom too broke for the pills I buried a boy & was buried for it he was the dirt packed into my mouth he was a worm discovering my spleen he was a maggot blooming from my eye when I look in the mirror I see his shape I am boy shaped boy drunk boy ill