Great week for new lit on the internet tube machine.

Here is (Issue Four contributor) Katie Cortese’s RULES FOR COMBAT, from Passages North:

I watch the checkers on my stomach rise and fall with each breath. Tomorrow I will trace the bruises they’ve left behind, deep and ridged and none of them overlapping. “I’ll wait up,” I say, then listen for too long to the flatline of her dial tone. She is cold, according to him. She is needy. She is brittle. She is everything I am not.

There’s a new issue of The Collapsar and it’s phenomenal and you should read every piece in it. But, there’s this essay by Deborah Taffa, ON DELILLO CULTURAL HYSTERIA, AND THE FEAR THAT MY WOMB IS A LIST:

I’m thinking a mother, like a good list, arranges and organizes, creates meaning and irritates everyone with her talky lack of depth. Both a list and a mother fight entropy and disorder.

It’s now Nat’l Poetry Month, which means 2 things: 1. You should read all the poetry; and 2. Birds of Lace and (Issue Three contributor) Carrie Murphy present 30 days of poems. Here it begins with Christine Hou’s COMPUTERS PLAY COMPUTERS IN THE AFTERNOON.

Jill Talbot (editor of the (Letters from) the Road Theme Issue and Issue Four Contributor) has this raw and beautiful essay-in-fragments about her brother, Rodney, over at The Rumpus – THIRD DRINK DECISIONS.

There’s Cloud Rodeo 4 this week and Caroline Crew has 2 new poems over there – INTERNATIONAL KLEIN BLUE IS A LIE and STOCK EPILEPTIC TREES:

blue is a chemical lie                      and god is the liar
if he were a chemist or at all      blue would not be uniform

Lisa Fay Coutley has ERRATA, a poem, up over at Black Lawrence Press as part of their National Poetry Month spotlight.

It’s April. So, that means baseball. That means tons of great baseball-inspired stuff at Hobart. Here’s (GAMES issue contributor) Amorak Huey with THE FATHERS AT THE LITTLE LEAGUE FIELD.