Issue 11 Full Text
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Paige Sullivan

Crystal Palace

—Raccoon Mountain Caverns, Chattanooga, Tennessee

Drips soft and unnoticed
like passing thoughts.
The light in some places
is only there because
we brought it. The rest:
installed by two brothers
who found this place
and dreamed about business.
Something mercenary,
economic. Some people
don’t want what’s natural
unless it’s a proposition.
You, the bride to be, suggested
the tour. An unspoken truth
between us: that we are within
a pace of lock-step in life.
The guide gestured to formations,
talked about carbonic acid,
tremendous movement, time.
Rock walls curving and soft
to the sight as clouds, ice cream,
sweet things. What we can’t
know is the way we will choose
to build then disassemble.
The guide said some creatures
in here only know the contours
of darkness. The light we carry
would only hurt them. How you
chose the flame, me the ash.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Paige Sullivan

The Fountain

I dreamed you up, mirage.
Gold ginkgo feathers delicately
blanketing the sidewalk,
too beautiful to be brown-bagged.
I made an idea out of you, your body,
studied as many pictures as I could find,
imagined your soft and hard parts,
like marble sourced from north of here.
I stretched across my bed, cold inside.
I held the cat and then the dog.
I leave the Christmas lights on all day, wait
eleven months for a good one, and it’s not much.
You were gone, you were never here, the world is still.
All the things I don’t know just mean I’m stupid.
All those leaves so earnest and open, like a palm,
like a hand with fingers spread, like a salutation.
Like something that comes then goes.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Paige Sullivan

To the girl who insisted she saw a shooting star

flash across the sky,
who said, No really, I saw it.
I swear to god, a shooting star,
who was possibly tipsy or high,
lying on her stomach on a quilt
spread across the park lawn,
her calves touching the calves
of the boy lying next to her,
who was hers, or who she hoped
would be. I didn’t tell you,
but I believed you, trusted
the probable in the implausible.
The next morning my dog nosed
the grass, a small spider rethreaded
itself up to the branches above us.
Each pre-dawn outing I check on
Orion’s Belt, the one familiar buoy
in the dark sea of sky, a party trick:
to know enough about something
to pass for understanding. The flickering
one on the tree line—a planet, right?—
and then a quick beam, a little motion—
stunned with the leash looped on my wrist,
no one but an indifferent dog, no you
to lock eyes with, say I saw it, it was real,
and as if on cue, the sprinklers rose
from the mulch, hissed over the bushes,
the moment dissolved, another star
crept its way toward the horizon.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Paige Sullivan

Each time you happen to me all over again.

—from The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

Blue light of dusk, a chest
of drawers and a mattress heavy
with the last hour’s rain
waiting for someone on a sidewalk.
The thud and click footfalls
of me and the dog. Jasmine,
jasmine is always the culprit, scent
as deep as nose to neck, shirt,
pillowcase, your mouth and the bench.
How many times have I taken
these long, plodding walks, somber
ache of knowing another you
is somewhere out there, thinking
of me, carrying on, the wide window
and the yellow coverlet receding
to footnote memory? The side street,
where you set down my coffee
and insisted on holding me, full
of buds that are now a riot of azaleas
that will become something else
by summer, something I’ll see anew.

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Paige Sullivan is a poet and writer living in Atlanta. A graduate of the creative writing programs at Agnes Scott College and Georgia State University, her work has appeared or will soon appear in Harpur Palate, Puerto del Sol, Cherry Tree and other journals.
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Julia Watson

The Playlist Reaches At the Bottom of Everything

1.

Take me back to the car, lift me onto the hood. Listen          to paint creak.
            The deer are done watching. They are crepuscular,
catatonic at this hour. I slept but did not
dream. As you twined us through the trees. Up the mountain, Dahlonega
                        is reticent. Its stars: dry eyes staring down.

2.

There is a portrait
                        you’ve shredded every night. I don’t ask you
what she’s done, or why, like riptide, you recede
            in morning to repair your hurt. Here, the pencils
are snapped and mended with painter’s tape. Here, the oils

spill only from her lip. I’ve listened to the way you talk
            to her, how you beg her for reprise. Come to bed, I say,
it’s three am and nothing good will come of this. Then, stillness
of late morning. I bring you coffee. Your eyes fix slightly above the rim.

I step over the scraps
            of face, stucco on the floor.

3.

On the highway, we build a city
            underwater. The bus floats by easy. Traffic’s unwedged. People drift
on highway signs, paddling light poles.

We listen to the same album backwards. We sink to deeper waters—
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, oh god, I’m sorry—

4.

We’re apex. Apogee. Washed up in Auraria.
            I don’t need sincerity. I need you
                        to touch me. Rekindle my face in the make
            of a ghost town. A scuffle town. No one
but the deer can hear the ending. Its ending,

            the song. Now rip me open
one last time and we’ll float. I swear.

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Julia Watson earned her MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University. She was a finalist for the 2021 NC State Poetry Contest, the 2021 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize and won the Sassaman Award for Outstanding Creative Writing from Florida State University. Her works have been published in Panoply: a literary zine, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Hysterical Rag and other journals. She lives in Asheville, North Carolina where she plays bass guitar in the band Cardinal Lake. You can read more of her work at juliawatsonwriter.com.
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Chris Cocca

The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways

We could talk about the road
from Allentown to Bloomsburg,
the nuke plant outside Berwick,
the wind mills in Shamokin.
Or I could say what’s plain,
the pallor of the tree tops
too soon against the still-green valley’s
August.

It’s not latitude or elevation
dressing them for harvest.
The civic body pulsing
the freight metastasizing
the emissions of the tourists
come to find themselves
in nature.
Or I could say what’s plain.
There’s nothing in our handiwork
the dying leaves would envy.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Chris Cocca

Ode to Wallace Stevens

I’m not sure how I feel
about this Wallace Stevens, born in Reading
near the Updikes and the Danners
O’Hara, from the famous brewing town,
Doolittle and Benet from what we still call Christmas City.
Sandburg talked about it.

I was born in Allentown,
half-raised in the townships
with the sons of bankers,
the daughters of accountants,
the sleight progeny of academics,
and half-raised by my father’s
kind of people.

And so when Stevens carries on
and Ezra changes Hilda
into affectation
I think about the blacktop
behind my cousins’ house
the drop-off to the alley
the neighbor kids with summer colds
who smelled like smoke,
no light or warmth in
metaphors or symbols
no prattle about tea—
communal three-speeds, maybe
broken like umbrellas,
free camp at the Y,
baseball in the city parks,
the college hill for sledding.

We go to school or war,
we settle in careers,
like Stevens we get licensed
like Ezra we go crazy
like Hilda we are strung up in the trees.

The halo light of street lamps
has burned out in our alley
Like Hart Crane, one of us is dead.

Rested in an urn on my aunt’s
shoddy mantle
forty cantos east of Reading,
eight west of HD’s plot on Nimsky Hill,
a soldier’s fortune from these lives of letters,
these gadflies we recycle,
and these wars,
also never-ending
so we can have our books
they give the light and heat
by which
my father’s people burn.

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Chris Cocca is a writer from Allentown, PA. His work has been published at Hobart, Brevity, elimae, The Huffington Post and elsewhere. He studied fiction at The New School (MFA, 2011) and is a recipient of the Creager Prize for Creative Writing at Ursinus College.
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Dhwanee Goyal

Poem as Grief

In eighth grade, there are so many mistakes
already. You turn to your friend and ask her
what your favorite book is, because you forgot
and she knows the answer. She will always

know the answer. It's been five years since then
and nothing’s changed—the guard tower of
your mind, still and empty. There’s no time to
judge how long until your hands are not your

hands any longer. When mind isn’t mind
anymore. When your mind is a boat. Planks
rearing the sea, rows whittling through the
fish below. There’s a pause in which

no bloodthirst exists—then the birds attack.
You’re in your favorite cafe now, and have been
for decades, disintegrating. Each tile in the wall
has a memory stronger than your own. After

breakfast, the two snakes in your stomach are
nameless, ravenous. You take them to
the very end of Marine Drive, slam them
against the rocks until it seems like the sea has

rained upon itself a hundred times over. In school,
you learn about cold-blooded animals, and
your teacher is shouting at you to stop reading
a damn novel in my class, and you still can’t

remember the name of your favorite book.
Every day is spent tossing on the cliffside
of your bed. There’s excessive drinking,
if only for the want of something to do.

See, how you’ve made a home of your body and
yourself. Will yourself into remembering the
texture of a hand. The shape of an eye, how
her skin feels. All this and more burning in the

pyre, bathed down the Ganges under the current
of millions of people. Come back—it’s okay to
not know your own name.

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Dhwanee Goyal (she/they) is a sixteen-year-old student from Maharashtra, India. An editor-in-chief of Indigo Literary Journal, their work appears or is forthcoming in Claw & Blossom, Whale Road Review, Heavy Feather Review and more. Their Twitter handle is @pparallell, and their micro-chapbook, Kasauli Daydreams, is out from Ghost City Press. She is an Adroit 2021 mentee, and an alumna of Iowa Young Writers’ Studio.
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Paige Welsh

Humility

We lose the best of us in a famine,
chip them up like tree bark each season.
After the airplane hits the mountain,
we’ll paw the overhead bins for firewood,
then burn the tray tables instead.
We won’t savor our lone square of chocolate
nor our thimble of rum.
The frozen copilot is on the table, now.
We eat what is handed to us.
Dressed for a holiday in Chile,
we now peel skin socks
from the people who waited too long.
Should the avalanche come,
I give you permission to dig me out,
cover my face, and cut me to the bone.
Remember the proverb of the fox and the wolf
caught in a tin. The hunter pops the lid,
and only finds one.
Down the hill a crone simmers milk on the stove.
We ball up her robes in our chubby fists.
She keeps the oven hot.
It’s big enough for each us
to take a child’s pose
as we fold ourselves into dough.
The first time you consumed a human body
it was a gift.

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Paige Welsh's creative work and reviews have been published in Narrative Magazine, Bear Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Tinderbox Poetry Journal and Gigantic Sequins. When she's not writing, she likes to garden with her partner Chris, and their cat, Biscuits.
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Caroline Plasket

My Neighbor Totaled My Van and We Were

Still, in the waiting room
while the body shop estimated
damage. I rummaged through

conversation with the other person
in the room who told me
about his time in Iraq and what it was like

in Hussein's palace how they took it
over, how these are things he can't
communicate to his children.

My lover and I have been
reading a couple's therapy book
each night, based on an emotional

technique for reaching, where I picture
him, shirtless, over my body
digging, moving me, burrowing

miles deep until I am uncovered,
a pile that won't fit back in-
to the hole the same way it came out.

No, it must be more like the trees
and the language the roots share.
Did you know they can speak

(through bacteria) for miles? They can
say blight, rot, infested, sharp…
When your tongue lightly brushes my lips

I hear you say that you give
yourself to me wholly, but a little
at a time. I think it is more

like the movie where the man lost his wife,
but couldn't live with himself
for not knowing it the moment she died.

He didn't hear her tentacle language
span miles to utter sharp. Something
is to be said for the chaos

that surrounded the tower of Babel.
We embody all our words fallen out
that will never fit back. As if

the mouth were an open
sore and words infections,
and what if all of the best phrases

have been used
up by everyone else, and we
must create our own language.

We begin in soft vowels and hard
grunts which we tame into an understanding;
a translation of feeling. It must have an epicenter

of want—any inventor only works to make lust
tangible. Sentience is sound moving
in hollow spaces…is the sound you hear

when you snap the tablecloth
straight before throwing it over the table.
In the waiting

room I am listening to my neighbor
apologize softly, and I learn things
of him beyond what I see him loading

in and out of his truck; the groceries and golf clubs.
In the Vietnam War he was overseas
and he didn't know any of it

when he got there, but he learned
how to read the signals, he learned
how to pulse the buttons. The machines

were strangers he became familiar with,
their insides, the wires, how they were broken,
how to touch them into fixed. How to stay

up all night if there were a raid
and tap, tap, tap an echo of warning
into the souls at the other side. And he kept

saying he was sorry he wrecked my car, he let
my children weed his garden and he overpaid them
and when someone means something you know it.

We have all heard stories of the crows
who bring shiny things to those they adore. We have
all seen the way our dogs greet us. Once my lover

and I fought like the edge of a blunt knife
and the next morning he was waiting
at the couch, crying, and he bought a book

for us to read and each night he smooths
our edges with stony words he reads to me
and somehow recommits himself, chronically,

and I tell you one day we could cut
through anything—through any babel,
and I am learning how to know it

when people say what they mean to. I am
learning how to know it when the whetstone
is ready, without looking to see if the bubbles

have disappeared. I draw
stick figure "us" I put
smiles on the faces like

a religion. If I tell you I am the kind
of person who rinses
their rice before they cook it do you

know what I am telling you?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Caroline Plasket's work has been published or is forthcoming in The Night Heron Barks, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, The Laurel Review, Cherry Tree, The Cortland Review, Threadcount Magazine and elsewhere. She was a fall 2016 mentee in the AWP Writer to Writer Program.
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Katie McMorris

Allowing Your House Ghosts to Steal Your Loafers

despite relative translucency their hands
still grasp for what they miss most
candles turtlenecks cranberries every ghost
misses fruit Bartlett pears Cortland apples

ghosts grieve their appetite haven’t you
heard the screaming in your kitchen
it’s not you this time they shake pepper
everywhere you think your kitchen is full

of mites you hate mites you can’t even
sleep without stripping the bed there’s
always a ghost rocking under the sheets
one color-coding your bookshelf a third

begging you to sing her favorite church
hymns do ghosts sleep too or are they
too busy missing their antidepressants
it’s all perpetual fog once you die

do you know how your house ghosts died
do you know about the strip pit the flood
the ATV accident the knife surely they told
you about the knife you probably didn’t

even ask you were thinking about your
children your daughters begin wearing
overcoats buttoned to the neck use
words like thrice draw places you’ve

never been Patagonia Alcatraz the most
dangerous schoolhouses with incorrect
maps of America your daughters won’t tell
you where they’ve seen these images

but you suspect your house ghosts
they’re probably teaching your children
about sex and anarchy and all the weed
they smoked what else is there to do

once you’re dead you send the ghosts
next door to the woman with biblical
cross stitching Judges 3:17 Eglon was
a very fat man you never did understand

such piety she’s putting roses in a vase
for a man who isn’t coming home she’s
putting roses in a vase and you know
why it’s always the reason you’re thinking

your house ghosts stay next door you
hear their weeping perhaps it’s nothing
perhaps they’re mourning Jeff Buckley
even ghosts mourn Jeff Buckley they

must do something haunt something
it’s only fair why else do you refuse
to go to aquariums no one expects ghosts
to press through the glass not even

the seahorses aren’t you excited to haunt too
anything to distract from your lack
of SSRIs your house ghosts trickle back
they’re sad they’ll never taste heartbreak

ice cream again they don your pearls
pretend they’re living they always lose
your loafers you stopped looking for your
lipstick they can’t kiss you but sometimes

you wish they could you saved the crawlspace
behind your eyes for moments like this
your house ghosts need a place to rest let
them dwell near your face where it’s warm

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katie McMorris

cannibal ant from special object 3003

In 2013, Polish scientists discovered approximately one million living female wood ants and two million dead female wood ants trapped inside an old Soviet Union bunker. Three years later, scientists created a makeshift boardwalk for the ants to climb out and relocate to another nearby nest.

do they know how it feels
to watch their children grow
smaller and smaller as their
own home inhales them?
no one prepared me for that
gravity, for how it feels to drop
onto piles of your sisters.
your own dead sisters. and
the growling. the growling
from millions of stomachs.
the way we attacked our own.
i believe we can all fall into
cannibalism given the right
circumstances. i didnt even
have anything to defend
myself. no nuclear weapons.
how did i survive? i hid
among the dead.

*

when the scientists came,
they acted like it was our own
fault, that one board would
solve everything. and i guess
it did. but so many sisters
died as we climbed. so much
trampling. some never saw
the sunlight again. others
wanted to stay with the dead.
to eat them, you know. just
couldn’t get enough. but i
made it. they say im a lucky
one, that i can tell my children
about this one day. somewhere
children are laughing. but not here.
and not my children.

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Katie McMorris is a writer and dancer. She lives and teaches in Oklahoma.
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Vismai Rao

Ode to This and That

As a child the world before nouns a chaos
swirling with thises
& thats: bad manners

cloaked in four-letter suits.
Not enough is said in praise

of you who do our vulgar work of pointing.
We grow to learn that some words

like cellophane are meant to remain invisible,
existing

only to carry the specific burden of another.
Like this body:

a perennial carrier
of what’s bodiless inside—

Magnanimous guides
showing us where to look. Alter Egos. Twin Moons.

Illuminating. Despite having no light
to call their own—

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Vismai Rao's poems appear or are forthcoming in Salamander, RHINO, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pithead Chapel, Psaltery & Lyre, SWWIM and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the Orison Anthology. She serves as Poetry Editor for The Night Heron Barks.
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Debarshi Mitra

Morphogenesis

“Your eyes proclaim that everything is surface”
—Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John Ashberry

1.
It is in effect an awakening
a stirring in limbo,
the gradual slipping out of
or into a dream.
We delve deeper into slumber
you and I inside the viscera of a whale
and then the slow descent,
two specks of light quivering
in the mind's eye and I
chasing every shore too distant
look back once and then again.
Eurydice returns, drifts into the continuum.
Sea turtles tilt their heads towards the sky
and I flung so far out into the waters
await my drowning.

2.
In the sky's mausoleum
a monochrome of indigo.
On evenings such as these
the amorphous streets blend into one.
How does one confront the autobiographical?
The one not altogether superfluous
not altogether necessary?
The monolith grows as it must,
in its veiled darkness I return
to the neon underbelly of a woman's flesh.
Muffled screams seep into my blood stream,
among the ponderous legion I seek
in the plentitude of their voices,
a passing glance.

3.
The past quivers like the flame of a candle.
You are now as much a name
as much a thought.
We watch dusk settle on treetops,
examine the hieroglyphics of residual sunlight,
cities rise and fall, empires glimpsed in vanishing light
pass before us, we strain our ears
and hear it call out to us

the unsayable buried in the ambient.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Debarshi Mitra

Abscissa

All that’s here

is already
in the process

of vanishing.
What was once spoken

coils back
into itself.

You remember
the first utterance:

those slender fingers
in the dark

once sighted years ago
through a window,

absently peeling

an orange
in afternoon light.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Debarshi Mitra

the flick of a lighter

       in the ocean blue
of half lit rooms   

       our shadows gather
to sharpen their blades.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Debarshi Mitra

Parallax

I see you now
more clearly than ever.
You shape-shift
at every turn
into a fable
a gesture, a glance.
Now the cold wind
is upon me,
wolf-breath
on my window pane.
Redeem me,
redeem me,
set me free as a hawk
perched up above
swooping down
on its prey.
Set me free as a myth
buried deep
at midnight
knocking on the eyelids.

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Debarshi Mitra’s debut book of poems, Eternal Migrant, was published in 2016 by Writers Workshop. His second book, Osmosis, was published by Hawakal in 2020. His works have previously appeared in anthologies like Kaafiyana, Wifi for Breakfast and Best Indian Poetry 2018 and in journals like The Scarlet Leaf Review, Thumbprint, Guftugu, The Seattle Star, The Pangolin Review, Leaves of Ink, The Sunflower Collective, Coldnoon, Indiana Voice
Journal, The Indian Cultural Forum, among others. He was the recipient of the The Wingword Poetry Prize 2017, the Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize 2017 and was twice longlisted for the TFA Prize.
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Tatiana Clark

Ephemera in F Major

I.
We find ourselves witness to murder, of ebony

plumage lulling in passage with
wind, playing shadow spells
on trees. Barkskin makes ribs

             of our fingers as we press
          into the forest, hidden
         in the thickening
        twilight      baited

             & deer-eyed. We watch

II.
what it means to be human
in their descent:

            bird bones &
           rat guts &
            fern bodies

split by
            lightning & other violence—

threadbare branches
shouldered by tar &
            weighted feathers. God’s
            urgent animals. We see our deaths in theirs,

III.
in the gathering darkness. This, we can’t help. We have
their primordial stomachs, this hunger
curled by two heavens: one of constellations,
the other of earth. Our skin      softens
at the touch; dirt & wood whisper
under our nailbeds      lusts after
our blood      mark us sacrifices
for the stars.

IV.
In our brevity, we search

for the meaning of our lives
in the plight of after-lives.
Coaxed by creatures

            who bare their teeth to us
           from the shadows, so black they seem
            to swallow the moon. We raise candles

to these fated rituals, chase metaphors
lined in poetry. Shape our breaths
in defiance of the

feeding      until it is done.

________________________________________________________________________________________
Tatiana Clark is a writer and moon enthusiast. She studies English/Creative Writing at the University of South Florida and is the current Managing Editor for Thread Magazine, her school's undergraduate journal. Her work appears in Trouvaille Review and Orange Blush Zine. You can find her on Twitter @tatiianaclark.
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Abi Pollokoff

& tonight this is what it’s like

for the heart to be so hardy
so full the body brims over
itself & slips foolhardy out
the skinsheen : ghosts billow
out the husks of stomachs
into a duel with the air their
own individual weathers

& in the day that’s smaller
than the things we’re
carrying this is what it’s like
to be full of lilies full of these
living tongues that bring forth
ghost after ghost : a spectrum
of slipshod thistles & drums a
little different under the
surface

so : to unearth the rendering
of these verbal spaces the
fusses at hand a little need to
think about what the
wristwrapped questions lend
themselves to : a discussion at
the lectern at the knee a
question at most a little
tender a little lost in its
unraveling

& this is what it’s like to be
alive when everyone’s
talking about the night & its
heights & you know what it’s
like to stalk starlings & bully
hunger into its hurting & to
wake up with the tide & its
aches

this is also what it’s like to be
the visible space of what’s
hiding of what you’ve
destroyed & now lilied you
carry each day even on the
day when you’re busy
counting hues careening off
the cheek & heeding its
flushings to know
this is not this
day anymore

& this is what it’s like to have
a pull heckling the left knee
& on nights when the heart
gets full like this is this what
it’s like

to be ribboned into honest
flickerings to be full of these
lilies full of these small things
years & dates & you &
tonight i’m so happy : wrists
tumbled all together knees
ripping the cage of them the
falter the release & what’s left
but a small step outside

the skin all breezehumbled
with ghosts & kin & this is
what the night feels when the
stars haven’t come out yet
but what’s left of the thinning
daysun still warm on the
forearm & this is what it’s
like to know the stars are just
up there waiting to yawn
with tide     &    aching to
wake up

________________________________________________________________________________________

Abi Pollokoff

billow & pulse

what vertebrae’s the one that
makes the tide tremble.
saltspined & ringed in gold
threads. tipsy with light & iron
at the throat.

here in the in betweens this
body all styled with
wildflowers. with lilies.
phosphorescent under
sunmurk. the body the bridge
with its tendons. all aglint. all
a simmering dimglow.

hard things & soft things. hard
things & soft things. hard
things & soft things &
spongesilt in the riverbed. how
to tend to the body when all
that’s left is what’s made to
bristle. to settle in.

•

along the crestline, crushed
oystershells. & within the lungs
a pearl. when the air is an
allergy what’s left but to stretch
it into unexistence. the
unraveling into its grey matter
& softening—

here the body made of all
these gold threads grey now
dimmering & dimmer. beds of
something nettled across
floodmarked calves & pockets
of electric blessings. here,
bless. here, bless. here, river
that knows to contain itself in
neon.

& to contain. to unwrap itself
around its boundaries & warp
itself over. spine split down the
middle & peeled open. what’s
left of the self when the self is
what’s left & there’s no light to
see by. & always leaning.

•

glisten & glimmerslipped. into
curve & clayshape. where is
the tide not seeping. crawling
itself over pebble & silt. hard
things & soft things. hard
things & soft things. hard
things & soft things all
underskinned.

what’s the curve of the knee
without the wrist to mirror it.
what’s left to summon. the
ceiling of the river. the sealing
of the tide. in the dark the
hunger for the boundary. for
the rule to abide by. what
weightlessness in the throat
when there’s nothing to
swallow. to choke on.

even in the measuring in the
measured breath the vertebrae
ties itself with the tidings of
what’s been & been again. the
path now open. the gate now
breached. bankless under itself
& overing. the time is what’s
spoken & what’s missed.

•

lidded or lifted, can’t see the
salt or the blooming. not a
vertebral difference.
tendonbridged & what’s left to
question of it. the body & all its
soft things. skinhungering for
what’s willed at the wrist. what
will it. what it will.

threads & tipsed & flowerfaced
around its irons.

—no. with nothing to see by
but fingerprint & hairlilt the
body is made of eyes all over.
beacon & brimming.
selfsustaining into will &
what’s next. the rivering.
blanketworld wrapped its arms
around. hard things & soft
things. hard things & soft
things this body’s becomed.

saltstarched & sunken & in
every water rerounded. & in
every tongue—

________________________________________________________________________________________

Abi Pollokoff

& today a hull to hold on to

& let the body slip out of itself
into something tidy let the body
silk its way into hinge & delay
hinge & hinge into some
thick threads of lilies

into the haunting lull of birches &
their expectancies the way air
bowhinged wrists around their
bodies the way their bodies
hinged bow to the shoulder & the
wrist

the way their bodies warp into air
like an infant’s fist around an
index : tender & firm &
expectant

& when the air splinters with
sound with breath with the snap
of some ordinary tuesday what
then becomes of the body & its
lilies : what then becomes

of the birchbow the splinter & the
splintered lily : the artery & the
pact the wrist & its hinge the
tidings untidy the grip

gripping the lull lulling into
airtender breaths & eddies

the lessening into splitself & song
: here’s after here’s what’s after
here’s what it’s like to be after
to be

after something lost & found its
skin again : to have something to
shiver in : to be the lily lifted at
the wrist : the birch

unhinging from breathsong : to
unthread &

stretched & expectant
              to let the lilies linger

________________________________________________________________________________________

Abi Pollokoff is a Seattle-based writer and book artist with work forthcoming or found in The Seventh Wave, EcoTheo, Denver Quarterly, Poetry Northwest and Black Warrior Review, among others. She is a 2021 Jack Straw Writers Fellow, and she has also held fellowships or residencies from the Hugo House, the Seattle Review of Books and The Alice. Currently, Abi is the events manager for Open Books: A Poem Emporium and the managing editor for Poetry Northwest Editions, along with many other hats. She received her MFA from the University of Washington. Find her at abipollokoff.com.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Sophia Liu

Heartache

Already midnight. Rain pitter-patters through my cracked
window, moonlight spilling in. A quiet Rembrandt lighting.

With curtains closed, lightning sounds like the last coughs of
thunder. Too disheartening to be from heaven.

Anyways. You once said that religion is a man-made thing
and I told Mama that after her prayer meeting. She grumbled in the

hush of the evening sun. Outside, a shattering sound.
Maybe a man hurtling his last bottle of Heineken. Tonight,

it was a boyfriend dragging his girlfriend by her jacket sleeve as he told her
to just fucking chill. I watched them from my window and saw my father.

Already spring has changed out of winter fifteen times, but like the
dresses I try on alone, only the last two matter.

So you think the stars dance for everyone? Most flowers bloom and
unbloom, others unlucky. In January, their wilting faces

look as if they’re praying and I think that we’re not alone. I pick one and
tie it to your wrist. I finger their ripped petals, thinking of your hair

sprayed across the bathroom floor. I’d say to you that those haven’t prayed enough
as you begin to turn your head, but aren’t we all phototrophic?

I still count time as the highway exits. I’m still young enough to
expect another spring, another bud of lilac to grow between the porch bricks.

Now the fighting has ceased. The girl waits to be soaked as the boyfriend
closes himself into his car and the taillights desaturate. Another tear

in this black sky. & I wonder what the stars think, if they're laughing at all
the poets who write about God. If lightning is just their knee slaps to a horrible joke.

Rain: a quiet tapping, then noiseless if you let it be.
Like a heart, an accustomed half-aching.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sophia Liu lives in New York. Her poems and artwork appear or are forthcoming in the Perch, Storm Cellar, The Ekphrastic Review, Whispering Prairie Press, Underblong, opia and elsewhere. She has been recognized by the National Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, the NCTE, Smith College and Hollins University. She wants a pet cat.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Mia Bell

How the Story Ends

This morning I read in the New York Times
that we should all learn to live with fire.
They mean on account
of the changing climate, of course—600 fires
in the last 3 days alone—but I am thinking
of Doctor Strangelove:
or how I learned
to stop worrying and love you
for the explosion that you are, even if you burn
1,000 acres of me.
          I am drinking from a plastic straw
and warming my hands on the blaze.
I want to be cut
into neat cubes
like an ethically produced block of tofu
and stacked into a pyramid
of order
but your grabbing hands create heaps
      of disarray and I am tumbling,
                                                                  grasping
at pencils. I’m 13
          and I’m trying to flip ahead
to how the story ends,
but the book is long
        and every word is a bruise.
You protract your posture,
head tilted
    at a skeptical 45˚
                           as I hold my red pen
aloft, tearing
through the pages, re-writing
   the ending 600 ways to Sunday,
   and wouldn’t you like to know
what it is. You were always impatient
like that. Even now
as I rip out the pages
       and read them
to your 5˚ eyes, you are cutting me
off, telling me I never
get to the point, but I’m doing it now,
I’m closing the book,
I’m pressing you between pages
599 and 600 like a flower.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mia Bell is a poet based in Ithaca, New York. Her poem “Disappearing Act” has been published in Marginalia Review. When she's not writing, she loves going out for long hikes and drinking coffee.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Loisa Fenichell

The usurpation of belonging

Departure like a golden film. This scattered world is full of punctuated
weather. Early A.M. light, I love most
to witness the orange images spinning dizzily across living room
walls. I need to notice new playthings. The strange brightness
of the local flowers pressing to my throat. I have travelled toyless
to exposed villages, along slated rivers. Have kneeled,
dipped my hands to the waters, placed luminous fish between
my fingers like cavitied teeth. Have given the fish names—
underbelly, merry-go-round, sorrow, first snowfall—so that I
might keep them alive forever. There are moments
in this world made of nothing but spider webs. Words migrating
like stones on a shore. The people to whom these words belong, who also
might leave. Underneath my loose clothes the real weeping
begins. Blood-stained brown. Even ghosts arrive at endings. The morning
I discovered my new house had an attic, its insides were only minorly full.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Loisa Fenichell's work has been featured or is forthcoming in Guernica Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square Review, Narrative Magazine and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, all these urban fields, was published by nothing to say press. Her collection, Wandering in all directions of this earth, is a Tupelo Press Berkshire Prize 2021 finalist. She is the recipient of an award from Bread Loaf and will be an MFA candidate at Columbia University come fall of 2021.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Daniels

This Is the End

The end of growth, the end
of a spider that streaks
from the empty leg

of my jeans, lifted just now
to a hook on a door.
We shall be burned away

like a black star.
This is the end
of mortification of the flesh,

an end to the soft folds
of every body.
The end of windows

curtained with lace. I will
no more smell the decaying
pages of books

nor will there be lilies,
sneakers, lemonade. No winter
leaves, those looped fingers

of white oaks scuffed
on a pathway. Nothing
now will be tethered here.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Lake Effect, Cleaver, Faultline, Small Orange, Meridian and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia McDaniel

From the Dirt of the Dream Orchard

1. 

Our plum tree was dying—full of bleak, blue-
streaked pearls. Not even the birds were tempted.
They sang in other trees, sat in the neighbors’
branches, their wings still as your sleep

in the early mornings, watching me as I picked.
I woke to clasp the berries in my palms. Collecting
my bearings. Stone or fruit or weathervane.
Something to hold before the newspaper, the scrape

of kitchen table, your hands clutching the bulk-
price napkins, a fastening absent of prayer. Outside,
a single bird quavered in its chord. You looked past
at the plums, rustling free, and muttered an apology.

There was nothing I could say. Not: the plum tree is dying
because it’s been deserted. Not even: how soon
will you leave? When we hacked the tree down
the next morning, a nest fell whole among the leaves.

2.

I had a blackberry dream. Kernels of night

burst
beneath the seams of sleep.

You held a crow in your teeth.

It must have tasted like doused leaves: mineral, more familiar than blood or earth—
somehow saccharine, rust caked with powdered sugar.
The sapped edge of

your mouth offered the bird.

But I had no shelter

for a bird. My body was no longer

a body.
Instead an atlas of roots fed by these

diminishing sweetnesses:

fruit we picked
from the dirt of
the dream orchard,
berries an indigo
not yet invented.

A series of words fluttering in the dyed breeze of my mouth—

________________________________________________________________________________________

Julia McDaniel

The Opposite of Gardening

The zucchini blossom in the grit of October, a season that,
despite how people in this town claim to love it, is like drinking
the last bit of cooled-off coffee from the pot, and though I should
be humbled by how life finds a way, what I say to the late joy of
emerald squash is simply fuck you. Fuck you for arriving well after
I abandoned my regimen of water and light and compost bins
and weeding and fought off four or more types of suburban
vermin—so fucking long after I stopped being able to stand
nursing my mug in the harsher, less forgiving air. I could be
softer. I could remind the glossy, spreading skins that I wanted
to watch some small thing grow, speaking to the zucchini as though
my partner or my neighbor was listening. So listen: I wanted to
coax something back from the earth. Instead it is late October
and I have three sizeable, pristine zucchini that survived two frosts
and a baptism of beetles and have absolutely nothing to do with me.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A former community organizer, Julia McDaniel earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan, where her honors include a 2021 Hopwood Graduate Poetry Award, judged by Tommye Blount and Vievee Francis, and 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize. She was also a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2021 Emerging Poet Prize. Currently, she is a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Creative Writing, a writer for the Center for the Education of Women+ at the University of Michigan and a youth workshop leader at Thurber House Literary Center in her hometown of Columbus, Ohio. Her work is forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennie E Owen

Noah’s Wife

whose name once meant beautiful
but is now

keeper of rats

for they out number any other beast aboard;
the clawed, the furred, the scaled, all cower
all bow

to the filth squeaks as they spill liquid
shadows in corners, flow over
sleeping bodies. It is the way now

animals disappear into animals, into animals
I throw what is left overboard, let their names
drift away
drift away

they float out of view among
the lilies of drowned songbirds, stars
reflected from an impossible blank sky.

The sea rots.

Other feathered creatures, try to shelter
they peck angrily at my ankles
as I slip in rainwater,

the rats move among them
taking the weak, the fledglings squawking
into the dark

the guts. They are the only ones who are not sick
they never miss a step of appetite.

I feel like a child waiting to be born
to waves that pull and push and roll

bruised meat, tenderised
marinated breath of filth and piss

and the rats

the rats, they wait and listen.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jennie E Owen’s writing has won competitions and has been widely published online, in literary journals and anthologies. She teaches creative writing for The Open University and lives in Lancashire with her husband and three children.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Strilecki

End-Stop and Enjamb

—After Nicole Sealey

We hover at opposite ends,
the granite plane cold and hard.

Why do we grin like eager houses,
eyeing the strop on the wall?

Misshapen and unfinished
collection of pegs, we fit.

We are the flame set low
to simmer all day. Our eyes

turn fever bright, sifting the
broken bits. This is a calculus

of measured facts. But the
pendant light doubles: both

sun and inquisitor wresting
secrets from sheets of dough,

tacky on the stone. Secrets in
flesh and fur. I would flay you

to be inside your skin.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Melissa Strilecki has spent the last several years raising small humans and recovering from a career in finance. Poetry is her first love, but she's working on a novel as well. She lives in Seattle.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Corinna Schulenburg

Disassociation

Not even the satellite eyes
of the GPS can say exactly where

she might be inside all this wrong.
Maybe she slipped through the weak force

that binds her half-life to certain stabilities,
hidden amid those intrepid worker bees,

her atoms. Maybe she's into their songs,
like the one that goes, "let's stay together,"

or maybe she's quantum slumming,
some kind of sum over all those paths

except the one called "be." Or could be
it's the other way, deep space, wide frame,

and she's the one eying satellites,
dissipated cutie in her Kuiper belt.

What we do know for sure is
she isn't any kind of there, or here,

and all we have to go on is
this voice that longs for a throat.

Come out, come out, whoever
you are. This is the only world

and its only welcome is velocity.
This is the only world and your ticket

is the body. This is the only way
to breathe, breathe until you mean it.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Corinna Schulenburg (she/her) is a queer trans artist/activist, a mother, playwright, poet and creative partner of Flux Theatre Ensemble. Poems in 86 Logic, Arachne Press, Canned, Capsule Stories, Eclectica Magazine, Lost Pilots, Long Con, LUPERCALIA, miniskirt magazine, Moss Puppy, The Westchester Review and Zoetic Press. https://corinnaschulenburg.com/
________________________________________________________________________________________

Odukoya Adeniyi

A Cotyledon

an ambulance pages in almost immediately father grabbed his crutches
for a short walk
                      I stroke into a whirlwind rubbing

a maestro siren cassocking
                                            this dampened alabaster    behind the door    I stood
as   tightened   lungs    spiked
to bleat like calves
                                  debunking lactation

an ideology creeping out of          a bespectacled study guide—I stood naked
like an erection erasure
                                 I retract into celluloid
                                                            a cotyledon of weak wicks
a starburst
forthwith a war spared                    his face   chauffeured rain     opened a bird of hungry elegies
a distant owl cry waning
I sing   I sang   I sung

________________________________________________________________________________________

Odukoya Adeniyi is a Nigerian poet, author and essayist. He is the author of the poetry chapbook, Preserve This Light, published by PoetsInNigeria. Reach out to him on twitter @adeniyiodukoya.
________________________________________________________________________________________

David Donna

Phase

I'd dreamed of a desert—clear night skies to wander,
pouched foil blankets plumping my rucksack,
trackless, under a new name,
of the barest cirrus wisps flecking
a purgatory blue.

I clung with both eyelids; my muscles held
only themselves, and too briefly at bay
the reddening return,
the violent logic of day—

               The wrong world ended.

I sit up,
tug on yesterday's jeans and stumble
towards the sink / the street outside crawls
like a river / families wade in the morning
light and cyclists in traffic pump
their thighs / the ceiling grins down
like a crocodile / the grid
flickers,

             The             world

then reasserts itself / gaps
around burnt-out bulbs / the toothpaste
disappeared / somewhere.

I wash up with anything at hand.
              I woke knowing
You emerge from the shower, touch
my hip / I startle
out of joint / I woke knowing
we've been stranded
on the wrong side of

                         knowing

I'd been saving cardboard boxes
for little gods to make homes of
so I could carry them wherever I walked.

But when the wrong world ended
the sugar in the kitchen became
      salt / now,
starving gods drag their little bodies
along the sunstruck stretch of windowsill

exposed, expiring / their many
legs curled inward / scattered
glyphs of a stillborn alphabet.

              I need
               A second to recount:

Most of our friends are still online.
Most of the dry goods made it.
I watch you bend down, graceful
with wastebasket in one hand, the other cupped,
brushing the windowsill clear.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Donna

I think I’m getting better, and I miss you

The first time I noticed, I watched
for a while: pallor in the sky,
as of indistinguishable stars.

Small, cold pains frolicked in my abdomen;
my eyes throbbed like light bulbs
awakened roughly by the switch

in a room filmed with dust,
fleck of toothpaste
marking time on the mirror.

I couldn't have told you
what it meant. It was late.
I was up very late then.

*

Nor tonight how I'd be reminded.
From here, the past few years compound
as a chord clearing its cloudy throat,

growing as the quaver slows—
it's blowing up the sky now,
shining over the horizon

your city sinks behind.
I carry a mug out to the porch,
watch the colors harmonize,

try to remember
where Cassiopeia used to sit
low, stretched across the treeline.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Donna

Amber

The day you notice you've forgotten
when the check engine light first came on,
you don't remark on it—

it's not the moment,
maybe hasn't been for a while.
Anyway, the machine drives

like normal, best you can tell—
the half-empty water bottle splashing
slivers of sunlight in your lap,
the sheepish flock of vacant sandwich bags, still

get where they're going, all in one piece.
And every time you climb out,
for however long, the indicator's good
as gone.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Donna's poems have appeared in Radar Poetry, Ibbetson Street and elsewhere (listed at poetry.daviddonna.com). They live in eastern Massachusetts, where they write code and poetry by turns.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Robin Gow

Phonipara Zena

The sun was an orange USB drive that held every photograph from when
we were children: sandbox, slate, pocket knife, bond fire, bone.
We stood back to back then walked the length of our branches.
Yellow catastrophe. Yellow song.
All the old music from when we could
easily download the world. What did I know
about waiting? We were finches.
Flower necks could hold us.

https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47d9-6efe-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

________________________________________________________________________________________

Robin Gow is a trans poet and young adult author from rural Pennsylvania. They are the author of Our Lady of Perpetual Degeneracy (Tolsun Books 2020) and the chapbook Honeysuckle (Finishing Line Press 2019). Their first young adult novel, A Million Quiet Revolutions, is forthcoming March 2022 with FSG Books for Young Readers. Gow's poetry has recently been published in POETRY, Southampton Review and Yemassee. They live in Allentown, Pennsylvania with their two pugs and work as a community educator.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Ben Bartu

As if Because, Goulash

once a lifetime,
    i think, maybe it’s alright.

to place the chicken stock aside, take the vegetable stock down from the shelves.

                quarter the yellow onion; dice the quarters.

fetch the tomatoes that have only known this cruelest of summers from the garden.

cruelest so far. fetch

     the can of kirkland tomato paste. cut the carrots.

                                    mince the garlic. boil the tomatoes.     

                                                                 boil the potatoes.

                             question which herbs to use & the hot air comes from on high.

                        study the slats of light that come from the other side of the window in which i                                            find what’s left of your reflection.

            i’m almost a man today.

                        not almost. it’s a difference. parsley, oregano.

smoked paprika we brought home
    from your home.

                                                            what else to say? people keep being hungry.

                                                                                      you keep being gone.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Benjamin Bartu is a high school teacher, poet & writer. He is the winner of the Blood Orange Review’s inaugural poetry contest. His writing has appeared in The Adroit Journal, The Tahoma Literary Review, Tilde & elsewhere. An Associate Editor at Palette Poetry, he can be found on twitter @alampnamedben.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Linds Sanders

On Discovering a Grave

Down an overgrown trail
store-bought flowers act as a wax seal
enclosing cancer or a car’s blind-spot.

Their pot-shaped roots try expanding
into a forest they’ll never perenniate.
Their petals mistake me for a mourner
cooing in colors radiant to the conifers.

Underneath must be a collection of bones—
eaten around and resting on a rib side,
legs curled as if mid-bound against a dirt backdrop.

Maybe the fur still remains—
softness that wrinkled noses when wet,
that burrowed into couches, car seats, and pant legs.

Fur ringing with metal tags
of vet visits and a name with a story.

Fur rising at squirrels and the neighbor's terrier.
Fur hand-polished down the back.

Fur fossilizing on ephemeral memories.

I pinch a petal—thin and rubbery—
nothing like fur at all.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Linds Sanders (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist living in her van which she strives to park on level ground. Her writing is published or forthcoming in FOLIO, Fever Dream, Rising Phoenix and elsewhere. Outside of galleries, her artwork is featured or forthcoming in 3Elements, Bracken, Leavings, Harbor Review and elsewhere. While her whereabouts are ever-changing, her work can be found at LindsSanders.com and IG @resoundingbell.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Neumire

It's not as if you haven't heard the news

There’s no safe
word, no failsafe, & across the way they’re burning
brush, boxes of Blue, last year’s paper
chain of days til Easter, drinking heavy for a Sunday

like they’re not sure Monday comes
this time,
but it’s not as if the friends didn’t come up
yesterday in the 92-degree afternoon
with Keystone & Hoffmans
& back tattoos of bonsai trees                        & didn’t we glisten
in chlorinated splash? Didn’t we guilt
out on the guilt-free menu?

Full, we pray the way orphans pray:
what is there?
so-so ambient radio? gravitational ritual
of wanting? some hugs? a History
Channel history?

In fact, a heart packed in ice can last
a few hours in the roseate dawn.
This is not a psa; it’s an elegy
for the mouse inside the shop vac tube
who dashed scared into the lawn’s cover
until you screamed & told me to stomp it out anyway.
Later, we found its pile of babies, one still
squeaking, in the folding chair.
Come on, it’s not as if everything
we love came free.

There are nights, more now,
when I think of the generator, ammo, medicine
expiration. Not zombies, but what survival will make
us. Like the widow neighbor who leaves her light on
all night, taking her glasses off, putting them on.

We’re a franchise
of 30-second thoughts, but tell me again
about your specialness. Tell me again how you taste
while the ice cream truck’s sun-drunk tune
slowly scans the streets
like a SWAT van looking for traitors
as solar lights dimly redeliver
the eternal day.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bill Neumire's first poetry collection, Estrus, was a semi-finalist for the 42 Miles Press Award, and his second ms, #TheNewCrusades, was a finalist for the Barrow Street Prize before being accepted for publication in 2022 by Unsolicited Press. Poems from this collection have appeared in Harvard Review Online, Beloit Poetry Journal and West Branch. In addition to writing, he also serves as an assistant editor for the literary magazine Verdad and as a reviewer for Vallum.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Aaron Sandberg

Bike Locks

What they don’t expect adults to do
is steal the whole bike rack,

to worry about the locks later
at another place

with curtains drawn
once unloading the rental truck

they used to carry their haul
miles and miles

from the crime scene sight
after crashing into bolted polls

like a charm bracelet dangling spokes,
ripping it out of its concrete that night

the way your folks once tore
your young boy’s heart from its chest

when they told you back then
they couldn’t afford any of them

on display at the store—
their chrome flashing bright,

reflecting blue and red light
looking like police now on your lawn.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Aaron Sandberg is fording the river with low rations at a grueling pace. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in No Contact, I-70 Review, Space and Time, West Trade Review, Asimov’s, The Offing, Sporklet, Right Hand Pointing, Monday Night, Unstamatic and elsewhere. A Pushcart-nominated teacher, you can see him—if he doesn’t see you first—on Instagram @aarondsandberg.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Leah Claire Kaminski

Vacationer

So I keep quiet, and things
don’t clink and crinkle: circle
under the eyes unnoticed.

And if I walk careful like a drunk
the fountain’s burble stands in

for my still blood. Cruise-slow clouds
for the movement of my eyes.
My veins miss
when I’m moving sideways from them.
I’m
one foot to the left. My head is one foot

to my right. When I see the aching trees
and mountains I fake sick

because they make me ill.
Because I can’t be there when I’m
there, only being ill makes me feel them.

I’m in a field and I could be doing anything:
next to me I’m smiling.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Leah Claire Kaminski is the author of two chapbooks: Root is forthcoming from Milk and Cake Press, and Dancing Girl Press published Peninsular Scar. Poems appear in places like Bennington Review, Fence, Massachusetts Review, Prairie Schooner and ZYZZYVA. Some of her recent honors include Grand Prize in the Summer Literary Seminars Fiction & Poetry Contest and in the Matrix Magazine LitPOP awards judged by Eileen Myles and a residency at Everglades National Park.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Justin Lacour

Sonnet (Holy cow!)

It’s the foggy season here. The Channel 8
Morning Edition reports: at an animal
shelter in W. Virginia, a pigeon that can’t
fly & a chihuahua that can’t walk have
become friends & I am easily moved
by this news, maybe b/c there’s a stone in
my chest where my sense of proportion
should be. I read old diaries & books about
art to bring the thin spark of culture into my life.
You could fill Lake Pontchartrain w/all I don’t
know about abstract expressionism & that’s a
problem b/c I want to talk to you on a superfine
level, the level of brushstrokes, putting aside all
that’s not color & light for a minute.

________________________________________________________________________________________
Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. He is the author of My Heart Is Shaped Like a Bed forthcoming from Fjords Review.
________________________________________________________________________________________

AD Harper

No mountains, great lakes, cliffs,

the sublime did not stop here on its
glacial journey north. I am a one trick
horse in a town of single horses, except
for the deceased who are led by two,
if the bereaved are crazy for a gesture.

I wasn't. I got a lift from the vicar,
not following the coffins but suburban
rat-runs to beat the traffic, and their ashes
won't be scattered anywhere majestic,
just planted in a hole the sexton will dig

in the grass, but if you've never seen
grass you will think it magnificent,
the spread and quiet ambition of it,
the tended squares like ermine trim,
sub-sublime, though when I die I want

a huge fuck-off stone angel peering
over a wall, watching the trains, the
romantic loneliness of witnessing
InterCitys and commuters, wings
frozen, the rain making tears in rain.

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AD Harper

The Gallery

Dead dukes and queens eight-feet high stare down,
the varnish cracked, the memory of school-trip
sick depression while other better schools
take notes towards essays on tempera and we're
more interested in the professional disinterest
of the guards supposedly immune to goading,
or is that the soldiers at the palace, red
leather sofas, tourists ticking off a sight, scenes
from the Bible I can't name, dragons without
wonder, muscles fake as marble, these rooms

I am where I am when I am dreaming

so I walk through to the nineteenth century
instead of the stern dogoodery, the lesson plans,
why can't I dream this? I ask the audio guide,
but it murmurs on about the scandal of non-realism,
the crowds outraged, the tiny sums the pictures
sold for, how there is another better world
to wake into outside, the mimes, the bagpipes,
the smell of death by burger van, non-native lions
yawning on their plinths. I check my phone for messages
and walk into the drizzle. This, I tell myself, this.

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AD Harper's work has appeared in Strange Horizons, Rattle and The Manchester Review, among others. He tweets as @harpertext.
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Ellie Altman

Inventory

She cleans most mornings,
surveying her house’s wood floors
for her life’s inventory of scratches and scars.

When the iron fell from the ironing board,
leaving a huge gash
on the laundry room floor.

When three cans of coconut milk
slipped from her arms
making half-moon dents
on the pantry floor.

When she was drying it,
she lost her grip and the butcher knife fell,
making a big ding next to the floor mat
at the kitchen sink.

And when the dog barks uncontrollably
and races full tilt from the front door
to the porch door to the back door,
scoring a pattern of scratches that marks the path
for warding off attack from the mail carrier,
lest she dares to enter the house.

Her whole life carved out
on these floors, yet
no blood spilt,
no pain felt—
only the pull of gravity
and its everyday violence.

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After retiring as director of Adkins Arboretum (Maryland’s Eastern Shore) in 2014, Ellie Altman began writing poems. Her first published poem, “How to Peel an Egg,” appeared in The Broad River Review. She is seeking publication of two chapbooks, Within Walking Distance and Thin as Air.
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Ben Kline

Bonfire

The burn high
in my belly, left
of the dangling
rib, the fire semi-
circled by grayer gays,

a boombox, processed
meats on buttered maple
twigs, beer foam,
green luna swarming
disappointments our mothers

abandoned in creek silt–
I’m watching the others
undress, their cocks
wiggling. My skewer gnarls
and chars, promising

relief, its ashen lumps
caressing my hiatal
until I’m empty again.
The circle begins
to spin. My medicine

lasts hours, cold milk
minutes, beer elevates
belch to aria. I’m not
tragic every day.
I join the dervish,

throw my underwear
into the flames, our chorus
leaping the plume,
my belly a sizzle
to a sear. I’m not

sure how this ends.

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Ben Kline (he/him) lives in Cincinnati, Ohio. Author of the chapbooks Sagittarius A* and Dead Uncles, Ben was the 2021 recipient of Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry. His work is forthcoming or can be found in Southeast Review, THRUSH, CutBank, fourteen poems, The Holy Male, The Indianapolis Review, Limp Wrist and many other publications. You can read more at https://benklineonline.wordpress.com/.
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Catherine Rockwood

For Abandoned Pets

—After A.E. Stallings

Did someone rescue what we couldn’t?
The rabbit left in the courtyard in D.C.,
two orange yearling cats I numbly drove
to a shelter in Branford, or Milford.
Anywhere on the Post Road.

It fixes nothing: us, abandoned too
in our own way by parents over-young
and under-taught, never meaning to hurt
but horrified by life, dropped in their hands
to raise.  So we could barely find a room
within ourselves, sister, each year since birth.

But didn’t we at last unerringly
together reach and, through the cold, lift out
of her small berth over the restaurant
her desperate howls disturbed, this gangly hound
now sleeping by my feet?
                                            Have we learned
how to love a fearsome high-ribbed creature
running after trust that flees from her?

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Catherine Rockwood is a former academic and martial artist, a current literary magpie and walker in the woods. She lives in Massachusetts with her family. Her poems appear in Reckoning Magazine, SWWIM, Rogue Agent Journal, Moist Poetry Journal, Contrary Magazine and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Endeavors to Obtain Perpetual Motion, is forthcoming from the Ethel Zine Press in 2022.
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Rachel Small

Bayview Station

I appreciate the rain. Some days it takes hours to come,
a slow pulse from the base of the skull. An echo on
the horizon. I have a habit of expecting to see water
when I look out the window, crossed instead by the
beginning scar of a project. Land taken to by a razor,
barbed wire mouth grinning at dry skies. All high
rises come with a beginning. The rain will come in a
day or two. All times come with a beginning. We gave
up the ocean and the river to carve out a patch of
new earth. We gave up it all, in case of rain.

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Rachel Small is a writer based outside of Ottawa. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in magazines including blood orange, Anti-Heroin Chic, Thorn Literary Magazine, the winnow magazine, Ample Remains and Northern Otter Press. Her upcoming mini chapbook will be published with Whispering Wick Press. You can find her on Twitter @raheltaller.
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Nancy Lynée Woo

S.O.S. with Warble and Cell Tower

I’m remixed and slumped
over a log in a swimsuit,
                        network of wires
            grieving the ants and the grass.

Casting lines from the tower
of Bitcoin, I do the robot dance,
            inner landscape full
of white space and cows.

Finally, I’m tidying and pouting
            about tidying. I give
                        the cold shoulder
            a cuddle, A/C on arctic
blast, jamming to space
            tunes, celebrating a new
                        sweater. I notice

            something, bobbling in the horde—
a hand of silk
selling us the pixelated remains
of elephants in a museum

with ivory doors. If collapsing
the wall around the moat
resets the radio signal, let’s

un-collar all criminals
who have committed no crime
and keep grasslands wild
for giants to roam. Listen

to coughing from above,
rough sound. Find its origin
            in a tree across the street,
un-shampooed, hunched
and in command of her call:

a squirrel. I grab a didgeridoo
from the dictionary
and holler, tossing and turning
                        discount crackers into the cart.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nancy Lynée Woo is a poet, writer and community organizer. As the founder of Surprise the Line, a community poetry workshop, she believes in the power of the arts to bring people together. She has received fellowships from Arts Council for Long Beach, PEN America and Idyllwild Writers Week, and is an MFA candidate at Antioch University. Her third chapbook, Good Darkness, was named a Semi-Finalist in the Sunken Garden chapbook contest with Tupelo Press. Her work is largely inspired by the magic and power of the natural world. Find her online at nancylyneewoo.com.
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Cady Favazzo

Litany for My Long-Dead Tooth

deciduous, gleaming, fresh cut spring yarrow you
planted or buried the husk of the jewel of you
hollow Saguaro, bird teeming hole of you

replaced with a chiclet, with French tips, the faux of you
filled half the gap, the dead space, the no of you
swallowed, dissolved, Dawn to the grease of you

magic wand, sand timer, trickling myth of you
shell of a bug, sucked hollow, the skin of you
chitin all snapped, the crackling baguette of you

socket of salt, unfurling hot gauze of you
slit and unflapped, stuffed oven pizza you
wobbling sweet lipids, soft to the slick of you

aperture gasping, hick grinning slap of you
countertop ice cream, soured wax seam of you
fluttering carpal crease mineral song of you

white blitzed against the sharp and the flat of you
violet hewn crescent moon sick sorry shadow you
mold cast across the yolky black gone of you

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Cady Favazzo

The winter we were in love,

you made pizza with the 99 cent
blue box crust slurped
to the bottom
of the pan and propped
me up against the foot of the couch
to eat it. I added strip
to Yahtzee, to Candyland, flipped
colored squares and lost, gleefully,
my socks and my borrowed red bra.
When you untied me, I stood
at the window, letting in diesel stink
and dry swallowed purple dice
like candy, edges smooth
against my throat.

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Cady Favazzo is a poet and teacher from Wyoming. You can find some of her recent work in Phoebe, The Columbia Review and elsewhere. She is the winner of the 2021 Five South Poetry Prize.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelsey Lefever

Art

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kelsey Lefever is a traveling photographer living in Lafayette, Indiana. She explores how film parallels memory in its dreaminess, roughness and imperfections. Typically, she can be found developing film in her darkroom bathroom or planning a future mountaineering expedition. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Purdue University in May 2020. Her work can be found at https://kelseylefeverphotography.com/.
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