Issue 16 Full Text

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Ellery Beck

Augmented Pastoral

There’s the sky, a sinking blue—a can’t-breath, bottom-
of-the-ocean shade—so shiny it must’ve been built
up there, cautiously coded blue-by-blue

pixel. There’s a branch, molded silicone
against sun; there’s the plastic leaves shimmering
in the wind. Watch—there’s the program

that carries opaque clouds across sky, blue
light seeping through, a uniform
drift across our static landscape. Watch the autonomous 

birds, flapping their wings in loops, each following
its script. Didn’t you want this careful reconstruction
of the skyline, one you could pause and repeat?

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Ellery Beck

In Winter, We Tried to Write

It’s November and I’m writing us into snow that hasn’t fallen
yet. There’s a pile of leaves from last year that the earth still 

hasn’t managed to finish eating; I stare at them instead of your fingertips
growing towards me. Here’s the thing about corrosion: it creeps 

in when you’re comfortable. I told you I’d rather skip
December and you told me to stay stuck with you, to stay still 

here in the cold. The seasons come, the months brush
against us, the wind sounds familiar as it burns us. We have no 

control over the weather wearing against us. We’re watching
different versions of ourselves attempt to translate this cold 

into words. We’re watching as the eraser takes control,
as snow begins to swallow itself.

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Ellery Beck

Bight

Let yourself lay           still, fabric
stretched          around frame, a fresh
canvas. You are familiar

with the gentle            sting
of the brush, how the bristles
scrape color over                    you. Let the pigment 

rest, thin          sheets, each shade warm
against your skin. Your body—the fields
sculpted of gently       positioned flowers, the soft

blue                 of sky left behind. Lay            still
a little longer. The mountains rest
across you, my fingers            trace

the valleys. Let me     stay here,
still, even        as this landscape leaves
your skin.

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Ellery Beck

Ars Poetica

Help carry me back
to that body, the blued
vessel. Do you remember

her? I'll rub my eyes, try
to trace her shape
in the dark. I'll find her
figure like the sun as it shimmies 

above the street. Listen:
I'm copying down all
of her small fictions and translating 

them into my own mythologies. This is how
I've come to be. Filling an apothecary
shop with all the ingredients to turn myself

into ritual. Everything becoming  

a spell, a scrap of paper. Yes, we're scrap, possibly
fabric, not yet frayed. You can find
me calloused, creating friction 

with weary hands. You’ll find her
scored, stitched tight, her hair
the thread. Imagine her, sewn in place—body 

blanketed in landscapes, sketched
against each pastoral. Stuck to every page.

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Ellery Beck

Pocket Pastoral

Hey honey—
I’m picking these clouds
from the sky, for you, saving the vapor
blooms in a little bag
for later. Please, honey, be
patient, I’m arranging these bits
of stratosphere into a bouquet, into something
we can carry and keep. Let’s pull down
this heavy blue above us, lets swim
in that simulated sea, looking
for more stars, my love. Here
honey—let’s find ourselves further
into this landscape, further
from somewhere we can place our feet.

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Ellery Beck is a graduate of Salisbury University with a BA in Creative Writing. They have poems published or forthcoming in Passages North, Colorado Review, Atlanta Review, Sugar House Review, New Delta Review and elsewhere. Ellery is also one of the co-founders of Beaver Magazine as well as a reader for Poet Lore.

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Nasser Alsinan

They’re Selling Our Blood at the Dollar Tree

I break my last piggy bank at the cashier’s register
and buy a few of my brothers at a premeditated discount.

We drive back together and I drop them off at their broken
homes. My brothers thank me and then sit down. They begin

eating the rubble with their right hands, offering me some
as a sign of courtesy. Their bones are sticking out of their

skin and I can hear them weeping. My brothers
are eating their homes. They are eating

broken tombstones stained with cheap children
blood. I tell them that no flowers are going to grow

on their graves and then I head back to the Dollar Tree,
where you are watching the T.V. and it’s saying that a premeditated war

has been waged to wage peace and the people on the T.V. that look like us are dying
they’re being killed slaughtered bombed shot they’re all dying again they’re being killed

but it’s okay    these things happen over there to the brown-eyed scum to the
terrorists to the people on the T.V. that look like us.

Because if my mama and baba were bombed right now, if my little sister
11 years old was bombed right now,     I would hear you      cheering on the troops.

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Nasser Alsinan

A Smooth Stone Is an Attempt

Death is the most sane
            constant. The sly man
            walks below the door,
                        not through it.
                        When a smooth
                                    stone grew in
                        my room, I asked it
                        to be more jagged
            because a smooth stone
cannot break a mirror. Because inside
            a mirror maze, every face
            warps into another face
                        and death does not
                                    discern grace
                        from grotesque. So I
            chewed the smooth
stone in my mouth because
I am not
                        a sly man, I have
never seen a door,
            I do not know
what to expect from sanity, and
            I do not know
if the smooth stone will
ever grow again.

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Nasser Alsinan is from Qatif, Saudi Arabia. His work has been previously published in Barzakh and Bear Review. More of his writings can be found on his Twitter page @nasser_alsinan

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Ryan Varadi

The Year of Failed Augury

The year our world died,
I deferred to the government of birds: 

as in, tried to soar above it all, but kept snagging
my sneakers on telephone wire. 

It was the year your sky was filled
with ash, and you sketched the grackles 

enforcing curfew from the safety
of our dusty home. 

Birds are omens, it is said,
and I wanted so desperately 

to be your omen, to guide you
from that forest burning in your mind. 

It was the year of hummingbird
assassins, wings beating the sky 

in terrible arcs. By the end,
I had no more nectar left to give you. 

It was the year I tried to grow
my words in the windowsill 

and the eagles perched outside
swallowed every fledgling body. 

All fall, a conglomerate of crows watched me
from the supermarket parking lot 

and I wanted to tell you
of their dancing in puddles when it rained. 

But when I got home, you were sleeping,
and I could not bring myself to wake you.

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Ryan Varadi

Orion

Once, I boasted that I could kill
all life on earth. In the night sky,
I am surrounded—Lepus, the hare,
Taurus, the bull—but never reach
any prey. We grasp so little
of what we try to call our own.
You had two dogs, as I did.
You came home to find Canis Major still
as a portrait on the kitchen floor,
limbs splayed into a lopsided star. Later,
you learned of decay, the slow chiseling
of time on body. Canis Minor sat on the grass
and you pleaded for her to come inside,
for her legs to work just as far
as the door. Every so often, grief,
the scorpion, still finds you
in the smallest hours, under dim
starlight, and returns to you
that small sting of sadness.
Hold it cupped in your palm.
At least you know this will stay.

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Ryan Varadi is a poet, originally from Indianapolis. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he served as a staff member for Ecotone and Chautauqua Literary Journal.

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Michael Goodfellow

Did Endings Have Shape

The way a ghost, like rust
takes the form of another, 

the way smoke when it rose
turned the color of sky 

or were they shaped like flame,
dim the beginning, coal bright the end

Was it better each morning
to begin in the dark 

and when they said it rang hollow
did they mean in a tree

Was it true there were marks
to show what had been

When we meet the dead
are we covered in rust 

Or was it only about air
and what it did with water

Did metal want light,
did want make it true 

Or was everything iron,
life polish and oil, 

bone crinkle of a keyed lock
Would it be like spring, that green 

would darken it, light salted
as it is underwater

Would you write it backward
then read it aloud 

The ending was true
if not the story 

The house disappeared
but not the ghost 

The leaves stayed green
but the forest died 

The air turned cold
then forms appeared

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Michael Goodfellow is the author of the poetry collection, Naturalism, an Annotated Bibliography, published by Gaspereau Press, 2022, and of a collection in draft titled Folklore of Lunenburg County, which is supported by a Research & Creation Grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. His poems have appeared in The Literary Review of Canada, The Dalhousie Review, The Cortland Review, Reliquiae and elsewhere. He lives in Nova Scotia.

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John Glowney

Crow Eats This Rotten World Every Day, Circa 2022

That cawing. That ragged voice

of old, old earth. Craw gorged chock-full
on discontent, marrow choked

with umbrage. Dandy’s swagger, pitiless frame. Murder
or outcast, doesn’t matter. Cracked

furnace of his throat, coarse call, slag of a song. Oracle
of small deaths, connoisseur of rancid

things, putrid forget-me-nots. Gleeful gossiper of entrails,
butcher of viscera, eater of secrets

pecked. Heckler. King of the dregs, dealer
in tin cans, strut-hopping shop-

keeper of the ripped garbage bag, satiny feathers
riffled to dusk, darker, coal-

dim sheen of dust, lord of the blacktop and all
the torn, spilled miles.

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John Glowney's work has appeared in, most recently: North American Review, New Ohio Review, Shenandoah, 32 Poems, The Baltimore Review, Cloudbank, The Cider Press Review, The Bitter Oleander, Juxtaprose and Tar River Poetry. He is a recipient of a Pushcart Prize, Poetry Northwest's Richard Hugo Prize and the Poetry Society of America's Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. His full-length collection, Visitation, was published by Broadstone Books in March 2022. He lives in Seattle.

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Heather Qin

The Other Side

When a man dies in Shanghai, it is never natural.
Although here, today he might be a body-shaped cocoon
leaking cherry kool-aid. Tomorrow, he might be 

another headline bleeding across the paper. The first day
after we land in Shanghai, Grandpa returns
from the street vendor and mourns the man 

with me. I take our breakfast back to his condo
and we watch it grow cold. Decades before
it was grandpa’s father and another man

they mourned. No street vendors, no
high-rise buildings and no country he could call
his own. When he wondered how to kill

a country, everyone said shoot it invade
it run it through with a sword but no one said
cut it into little pieces, so each slice becomes

a new fault line to tourniquet. The sky still
clear as a bell. His grandson will soon disappear
into America, along the Atlantic coast, the first

to cross an ocean. I wish the distance
between us wasn’t generations, so I would
never need to speak in apology. When I was

younger, loving a country
meant never leaving it. To love and forgive
each time they ask aren’t they committing genocide 

over there and remember they bit into the country
first, bit into it like a rind, a snake stealing
another’s eggs, as dead men littered the street.

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Heather Qin (she/her) is a student from New Jersey. She is an alumnus of the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Besides writing, Heather loves classical music and reading.

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Helen Nancy Meneilly

augmentation through fire

in the pre-life eddy
i capsized, came out all wrong.
dragged the whole ordeal out
along the nape of the morning’s neck.
they gave me a name that i scraped
from my tongue, the way
the sun’s cyclops eye
scrapes colour from the air. lurched
into love with an artist, someone
who would weep with me
when we watched our lady
broken down to a charred skeleton;
what was left when the flames were done
worrying the meat like worms.
we were clearing out the box room;
a discovery of cobwebs and jilted scarves.
watching the spire drifting
in cinders, to join joan in the seine.
discussing the loss, the ash,
the dust. how everything
used to be something else.

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Helen Nancy Meneilly is an Irish poet and MA student. Recently highly commended in the 2022 Hastings Book Festival Poetry Competition, her work has also appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, Gyroscope Review, The Metaworker and others.

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Mary Simmons

I Am Looking for Marrow in These Woods

Tell me: is it worth
all this searching? 

How quickly a downed tree
no longer seems to have ever been alive, 

how softly the bullfrogs mourn
in spaces away from all our hands. 

Leaves do not drown but dry,
floating in funeral marches 

across the pond’s surface.
We do not bury our dead 

but carry them through the meadow,
bearing all these ghosts on our backs, 

walking through aster and wheat
fading into October amber. 

We walk and we do not look back.
Swallowed in pond, we do not recognize 

ourselves. Do you remember
the black birds settling in your stomach, 

how they hollowed out the parts of you
you left to September? 

Do you remember bridges
over rivers the dirt reclaimed? 

We name the trees after great-grandfathers
and call ourselves poets. 

You are rotting, and you will not
stop, even when I ask politely.

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Mary Simmons

The Train Does Not Stop

I am, sometimes, a four a.m. train,
all bell whistle and gaping jaw,
speeding, sideways, against my windowed reflections. 

Where are we going
if I am going nowhere? 

I grind ashes into rails
on which to glide, to lean on,
and I lean, farther and farther,
lopsided fire escape marked “Do Not Enter.” 

We look up through metal grates,
begging forgiveness from road salt
and the one-legged pigeon. 

I careen, half-asleep, between shadow
trees, between ticker-tape images
of all the women I am, 

and the child I am, like a mountain,
slumbers under snow
in the palm of my hand.

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Mary Simmons is from Cleveland, Ohio and is an MFA candidate at Bowling Green State University. She is an assistant editor for Mid-American Review.

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Justin Carter

We Find a Soup Can from 1989 in My Grandmother's Cupboard

It doesn’t matter what brand it was
or if it was really black beans
or if the expiration date was 1992
& the year this happened was earlier
or later or exactly right—if it was
the year that my grandfather died
or the year my aunt moved back home
to stay with her—& it doesn’t matter—
not much—that I was in a different room
& that the can was in the trash
before I even saw it & that my mother
told me about it on the drive home
& it was meant to be a funny aside
about how she’d never cleaned out
that cupboard & how the years
added up on those shelves.

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Justin Carter

In the Country We’d Lost

The locomotive sings the cracked air,
a hurl of noise, of mystery. Sitting here
in the dirty truck, I wonder how the world looks. 

Perhaps it’s like this: a half-shadow,
an unknown motion
against these gathered storm clouds. 

A lonesomeness here. Universe adrift
inside the rubble. The train finally passes:
more thunder, more thunder. 

I make a metaphor of whatever I can.
Orange glow of headlights, streaks
of last week’s chili on a floorboard napkin. 

There’s something wrong outside.
All we have though is this hope
it won’t last long. Not too long. 

Tonight, I need you like teeth
need something solid. Tonight,
we fight the growing dark 

with these words. Electricity
only works until the next bill comes;
understanding only while the train roars.

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Justin Carter is a poet/sports writer living in Des Moines, Iowa. His poems appear in The Adroit Journal, Bat City Review, The Journal, Sonora Review, Sycamore Review and other spaces. He holds a PhD in English from the University of North Texas.

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Michael Agunbiade

Home

I name this place after the scars
covering the flesh of my mother’s back,
say a man who is yearning for love
opens his body into a room
& finds the picture of a man
roasting the skin of his lover into ashes.
At first, l thought home is the shoreline
where a ship returns to
after sailing through the ocean,
where boys listen to the dunes
talk about the memories of water.
But on getting there, l realized home is not home.
home is not the place l used to think. I mean
home is a graveyard
where the tongue as a dead body
learns about the origin of silence,
how darkness outgrows men
into a cathedral of voices.
Voices which falters on my mother’s lips
each time the bouquet of grief
in her chest sprouts a new flower.
In our backyard, I watched an arrow lurch through a tree
& struck the bird that lives there.
It was here I realized
what my grandfather meant by
death that does not kill outside
will find his way into your home as a guest.

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Michael Agunbiade is a young Nigerian poet who writes from the small hole of his room. His works are forthcoming in Afrimag, Kalahari Review & elsewhere. He was a longlist of the 2021 Nigeria Student Poetry Prize (NSPP).

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Maggie Boyd Hare

In the Shuttle Leaving Earth

I miss the silver fish we watched on Planet Earth while
stringed instruments played and David Attenborough
explained what is going to swallow them. I miss 

tangerines, peaches—anything orange with nectar.
Anything once sliced for me by hands I love. Anything
dripping sunset down my chin. Your chin—the way 

its stubble pricks my cheeks when you lean in
to say coffee is ready. I miss the warmth of your body,
nestled near me on the couch watching the deep sea 

squid light up while David enchants us with its vitals.
The vitality of summer. I miss when it was still
growing hotter, the stretch of all of my limbs 

on the concrete. Miss concrete. Miss my skin
tightening, the warmth a kind of pressure I wanted
to withstand like gravity.

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Maggie Boyd Hare is an MFA candidate at UNC Wilmington, where they work as a publishing fellow and as poetry editor for Ecotone. They have work forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review.

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Maya C Thompson

Louisville Supremum (with Glass)

Please, ignore her when she rambles about the KKK
who shoved their Cadillac toward the brush
and kick-turned their tires as if they were one
skateboarder in a group of free wheelers
near the South African chicken joint I thought was Peruvian.
At the canceled bus stop where the man claimed
cemetery tile memorial, the second lieutenant dripped
the methanol juice as he clutched his flowers

on the bench. The chain residuum is hung in smolder.
What do you want? I gave you the footage
tapes of the copper backward swan at the intersection,
its neck turned to the woman on the curb.
Train a highway to be empty long enough,
you can summon a convention to shout where they died
the first time. How they laughed at the oxygen
on the surgery tables after they handed the tourniquets themselves,

flooded hotel pools with chlorine, and taught you to crave
car crashes so far from home you’d never go back.
Who else could slugger bat these preachers into crystal?
A thug witness who just so happened to be on the sidewalk?
When I pass a wreck, I think of her grills glistening
over Appalachia. I got miles on you.
Mince the bullet in her cheek and leave it there.
Divide the maxilla from the ledger,

a two-way echinacea raised under the lead bud.

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Maya C Thompson

Preterit Eviction C17

Eighteen attempts at steering the curriculum in the carriage,
and it is near impossible to forge the bit with the master

who thinks the Morab should have no time alone in his quarters
to push the steel which opens a channel for its tonsil beetle to flutter,

but I am your mutual friend who was shrunk into the search box
upon the control f window sill as I mean to give you the antonyms

against the centaur in which I narrow your recursive attention,
like the blacksmith quenches the mosaic—this is my final desert.

Before this pilgrimage, I was your earnest trestle
slammed by coal freights that shifted to your wireless sleep.

My rope is tied to my belt and my belt is looped along the darkness.
The more I pull this thinking gadget toward the grommet

that is strung in the closet, my vowels part like an intercom.
Their gallops will soon be mute like sneakers trod on our beaches.

I exile you to the hooves’ abscess when you scout my body,
the last apocopated sound.

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Maya C Thompson is a poet from Maryland. Her work is forthcoming in The Tusculum Review and appears in The Scarab. She enjoys playing instruments and watching films.

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Ronda Piszk Broatch

What Did the Lichen Whisper?

Something about tardigrades, the intricate mosses, dew.
Sometimes the soul lives like a weed in the dusk-dark
world between red-breasted sapsucker at the weeping 

crab apple and the moon shell in the planter amongst chives
and early spring mums. Show me your mollusk heart
I say to the sea, and why is it impossible to love the dead 

when they no longer call? The lichen in the bag in the box
was waiting for the dye pot. Lung wort, bark barnacle,
fringed moon, Methuselah’s Beard. And what about moss, 

or how the wren sings long solo tones so spaced apart?
Death song, winged minnow, pretty curl, sheep’s teeth.
And who names where the junco lives, the hairy and downy 

woodpeckers? Last night the coyotes sang a song
I’d never heard, perhaps a dirge, or maybe a ballad
to what bleeds between their teeth. I haven’t lived 

long enough to lose wonder, and often I lose the moon
behind the Douglas firs, the hemlocks, the alders.
Who needs to dig a grave when bones are more easily eaten 

above ground? No antlers remain in the forest, for the mice
have had their fill. A lizard hurries its slow legs as it crosses
the path, reaches the safety of the moss on the other side. 

Something about a song, or a wing, or how the lung fills
with spring, how breath repeats itself, changing its tune
as it goes along.

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Ronda Piszk Broatch is the author of Chaos Theory for Beginners (MoonPath Press, 2023), Lake of Fallen Constellations (MoonPath Press). She is the recipient of an Artist Trust GAP Grant. Ronda’s journal publications include Fugue (2019), Blackbird, 2River, Sycamore Review, Missouri Review, Palette Poetry and NPR News/ KUOW’s All Things Considered. She is a graduate student working toward her MFA at Pacific Lutheran University’s Rainier Writing Workshop.

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Chris McCann

Starched, Blue

Light’s return, the storm
and all its flowers
a hole in the sky
where a hole used to be.
In the used car lots
of New Mexico, bright
weeds transmute exhaust
into real estate.
Taking all the pills
together can result
in heightened anxiety
or euphoria, which is what
I’m after, the light
pouring in through all
the tiny holes, the pores
of the body’s largest organ,
desire. And when that yellow
breeze comes to ruffle
the curtains and distribute
the sun’s last glow
on the cracked linoleum floor,
well, my god, that’s the prayer
that will finally bring me
to my knees.

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Chris McCann

Pulling a Thread

When your head hurts
say your head hurts. Or say
nothing. I was saving 

those oranges you ate
to distract you
from the eclipse 

outside our building.
I ride the elevator up
and down to forget 

gravity, while you lie
about where
you’ve been. A dog 

stays silent so no one
knows when the mail has come.
It’s time for a drink 

and so I watch the metals
forged from the sun one
by one fall to the river 

and sink. There are only five
letters in the word you
can’t remember and only 

one of them is a vowel.
On the couch, it is
nighttime and so we lie 

awake, the stars burning
holes in our pockets
the dreams painful, 

real, as quiet
as blue as they ever
have been or will.

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Chris McCann's work has been published in Moss, The Pedestal Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, Noctua Review and Salt Hill Journal. He lives on Bainbridge Island in Washington.

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Margaret M Kelly

Fact Patterns Supporting the Existence of Dragons

I.

We’re responsible for star-charts and dog-whistles and pop rocks.
We’ve mapped the genome down to beach lanes and roundabouts.
We’ve split atoms and wiped out polio. We put two singing rovers 

on Mars. And yet, severed feet wash up on Pacific shores. We find
human skulls in hollowed-out elm trees. Jumbo jets vanish
on flawless days over glassy seas.

And one otherwise unremarkable 20th century morning, an explosion
the force of one thousand atomic bombs flattened 80 million trees
in the Siberian wild completely out of the blue.

II.

We can’t confirm what happened at Dyatlov’s Pass. We don’t know why
we dream. Colossal rocks stand hulking on far-flung islands
in formations we can’t explain. The Bermuda Triangle keeps its secrets. 

In two millennia, we’ve not found Cleopatra. Light eludes us, too, slyly
shape-shifting - wave, particle. Every now and then, one of us bursts
into flame.

There may be Yetis in the Himalayas, and Sasquatches roving
the Pacific Northwest, and a tusked dinosaur surviving
in the Congo River basin. 

III.

There are Howlers in the Ozarks. Leviathans sleep in our darkest lakes.
The stars are burning. The forests are burning. My grandfather still swims
past the breakers. I can see tomorrow in the creek-beds of his hands.

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Margaret M Kelly is entering her final semester at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, in pursuit of her MFA in Poetry. She graduated from Princeton University in 2010 and the University of Virginia School of Law in 2015. She practiced corporate law briefly in DC before pivoting back to her true love—writing. Her poetry has appeared in Hanging Loose and she was a co-editor and contributing author of a law of war anthology called Lifting the Fog of War: New Thinking about War and War Prevention.

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Daniel Dias Callahan

The Reaping

It’s the mechanical hum.
(Or am I waiting?)

Along the freeway
there is a scythed man.

His blade glistens against sunlight,
reflects a mirrored split:
                                        the fall—
dried grass forced away from itself
lands clumped along freeway
shoulder,
                                        the rise—
some catch sail, freed by the wind—
Monarchs
migrating north-northeast.

I envy his machinery.
Its thinning, clearing, cutting away the dead
grass—

Each pendulum slice, a sudden release of breath
            between tight lips
and tongue cupped molars.
            (Does Death look at me? Notice me
                                                                       driving by?)

It’s the mechanical hum
       of years
without coolant air conditioning.
On the radio,
love’s inaudible echo blends
into the freeway’s reverberation. This rusted ’72 Cutlass,
a velodrome of racing thought, dream.

The man—now faded
in the rearview—continues his labored release
because in summer
                                the September nights blend into fall
and the fires return—

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Daniel Dias Callahan is a writer from Sacramento, California. He received his Master of Fine Arts from the University of San Francisco and a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology from the University of San Diego. His work has appeared in California Quarterly, Sonora Review and Thin Air Magazine, among other publications. He is a former Poetry Editor for the online journal, Invisible City, and teaching fellow at the University of San Francisco.

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Katie Tian

The First Derivative and Its Applications on Girlhood

In fifth period calculus I learn that in
the spaces between points, each infinity
is smaller than the last. My teacher
tells me to look for an instantaneous rate
of change—but people like us, we only
know beginnings and endpoints, so I try
and define those instead.

Three weeks ago we drove with the windows
down, highway 465 in someone else’s car,
whipped-meringue wind pooling in our
upturned palms. Warmth billowing
from our throats. We melted bouquets
of cotton candy with spit, sealed all our
sticky secrets in a blue ziploc bag. My plastic
polaroids were copper at the edges, and
I’ve since folded them like quarters
and slotted them into laundry machines
in empty apartments. At dusk we broke
under cover of the kitchen lights
all the porcelain plates on their
shelves. I etched my name
crookedly into the railing.

Today I drive to zero the distance
between points, say a prayer to preserve
stagnancy. Time has forgotten how to
hold my hand, so I won’t believe my teacher
when he says it is possible to evaluate slope
at a singular point, to pinpoint change
in a continuum.

A drunk man under streetlights on the curb
of 7-Eleven calls our names. He gets them
wrong, of course. The half moon’s light
makes dirt-imprints of our footsteps, and I
can no longer know a city called home
or a body that still fits like a body. For the
first time, I gather the frilled hem of
my sundress for safekeeping and listen
to whistles souring the dark. We knot
our tongues into soft pretzels, hold them
until they are raw. Later, the bathroom’s
bright lights wash out my complexion.
I bring an extra container
of shampoo into the shower.

Second semester integration comes quick
as a bullet—means finding the area
bounded by a curve, means infinitely
small slabs and slices pieced together to
resemble something of a whole.

Again my body swells like the flesh
of a pink pomegranate against
my ribcage. Ma scoops oil from a jar and
lathers it on my skin so that I may shine and
soften like a real girl. I’ve learned to
mend myself before I’ve finished
breaking. I want to swallow sunlight
on highways again. I want to unwear
this body. Or to trace its rate of
metamorphosis the way a psychic traces
palm lines. Sometimes, when I am sunken
beneath whorls of bathwater, made all simple
and stainless and lovely: I think
I almost can.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katie Tian is a sixteen-year-old Chinese-American writer from New York. Her work is published in Frontier Poetry, Polyphony Lit, Rising Phoenix Review and Kissing Dynamite, among others. She has been recognized for her writing by Hollins University, Smith College, the Adelphi Quill Awards and the Alliance for Young Artists & Writers. Apart from writing, she enjoys collecting stuffed animals and consuming obscene amounts of peanut butter straight from the jar.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Martha Silano

Why I Want to Be a Noble Gas

Because noble gases are non-reactive, have a low boiling point.
Because they’re inert, rarely involved in chemical reactions.
Because Argon is Greek for idle, inactive.
Because Xenon is Greek for strange. 

Because Krypton has no idea what you mean by recoil.
Because Neon never tries to get even.
Because a noble gas has never
swallowed a dead fish head 

dangling from the end of a lure. Because it’s nice to have a narrow liquid range,
better to have a full shell of electrons than to always be seeking a few
from someone else. Because it would suck to be sodium,
always donating its one electron to chlorine. Because 

it would also suck to be chlorine, always stealing an electron from sodium.
Because to be highly reactive, Francium or Cesium,
is to always need to have the last word.
Because if I were a noble gas, 

I’d be the balloon floating up and away from the Screaming Swing
and the Scrambler, the fluorescent light in my father’s workroom,
the one he studied under
long into the night.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Martha Silano is the author of five books of poetry, including Gravity Assist, Reckless Lovely and The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, all from Saturnalia Books. She is also co-author of The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press). Martha’s poems have appeared in Paris Review, Poetry, American Poetry Review and in the Best American Poetry series, among others. Honors include North American Review’s James Hearst Poetry Prize and The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Award in Poetry. She teaches at Bellevue College, near her home in Seattle, WA. Learn more about Martha and her work at marthasilano.net.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Marina Brown

Holodomor

anyone who did not work for the state joined the collective
of the unburied dead. fruit rotted in piles behind barbed wire.
soldiers scaled the stairs, carrying sacks of grain like newborns,
smashing garrets for rounds of hard bread and tins of beans, poling
the unplowed humus field for last year’s beetroots and potatoes.
it was almost lovely, how they threw flour through the air like snow;
how seeds scattered from the bloodied hands reaching for them. 

we fell back to the tracks, the posts. as before the written word, we skinned
and drank the birches, then the acacia tree, feather-sweet against the sky and dark-
limbed. those who came from the villages began to crumple in the city parks, their eyes
and icons wrapped in cotton; in newspapers not saying Duranty Wins the Pulitzer Prize
or, Soviet Censorship Hurts Russia Most. still telling old stories – ours always of princes
and land-based transmutation. early berry. pond duck. thin fish. frog. cricket.
field mouse. dead horse. leather boot. brew of nettles. spikelet. glume.
everything that you are thinking of, now – yes – we ate that, too.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Marina Brown

An Avenue in Autumn and Photographs of California

helpless gods, we watch the Caldor
Fire ridging the Sierra Crest,
a writhing red fur
that gluts 97 runs and 30 lifts
of the Heavenly resort. 

the final day of August comes
consecrated, flurries of soot
in the waning light
riling into lightning-
leaded pyrocumulus. 

in photos taken from the cockpit
of an F-15, opaque white heads
curdle over masses of ash
like satisfied destroying angels
fattening our hilltops. 

the edges of the all-weather eagle’s
impenetrable glass
cast back the navy dusk and
rest of Nevada’s heavy distance. 

in the indistinguishable
morning of the first of
September, South Lake crouches
and flags. downed poplar-lines 

cross like split railways.
debris in the sarcoline sun
ambers and swirls
with plastic and splinters. 

in familial stands, black oaks
and big-cone pines firework open.
valley gardens spot with embers
that take root like strewn seeds 

as if we named them for this moment
of transformation – arnica,
aster, the blanketflower and torch lily,
larkspur, speedwell,
snow-in-summer,
mountain ash and sierra current.

on the soaked state border, suffocated
birds and dripping aspens blur
like melting coins too indifferent 

to fall. in another image, one
wide, flat house at the end of a lane
swallows its vertical frame, a draft
of sky between the dense old
willows like chimney smoke. 

a cloaked silhouette has left its door
and misshapen windows open.
shrugs away
as if moving through water. 

crosses a bridge made of dirt
and pressed shadow. the cut
of the blown path nearest
our eye is struck with
deeper hollows like thumbprints.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Marina Brown is a poet, editor and translator. Born in Ukraine and raised in California, she holds two bachelor’s degrees in International Relations and Russian from UC Davis and an MFA in Poetry from SDSU. She is an Editorial Assistant for Poetry International and a recipient of the Graduate Equity Fellowship, Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship and Savvas Endowed Fellowship. Her book reviews have been published in Los Angeles Review and Poetry International.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mike Wilson

Faces on Milk Cartons

She speaks as if something crawled inside
her skin, settled into the driver’s seat, and
drove away
                      while the true owner wanders
lost in musty hallways, trailing her fingers
along the wall, someone who in the middle
of an errand to fetch an object forgets why
she got up
                    Or maybe it’s me stepping
outside the frame of my picture, leaving
empty a painted canvas hanging above
a brass label that reads “Hi, I’m ____”
            in
a gallery persistently empty, no matter how
many bodies sleepwalk in their graves
                                                                  a
hall of animated headaches vandalized with
laughter and penknives
                                       a nude landscape of
nuclear shadows, Hiroshima with a cash bar

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mike Wilson’s work has appeared in magazines including Amsterdam Quarterly, Mud Season Review, The London Reader, The Ocotillo Review and in Mike’s book, Arranging Deck Chairs on the Titanic (Rabbit House Press, 2020), political poetry for a post-truth world. Mike is a past winner of Kentucky State Poetry Society’s Chaffin/Kash Prize. He resides in Lexington, Kentucky, and can be found at mikewilsonwriter.com

________________________________________________________________________________________

Anthony Gabriel

Crop Study

There are no billboards to line the roads adjacent that skirt the outside of the pecan 

groves that dominate the beginning of the drive east on I-10 to El Paso. In New
Mexico, the once proclaimed “wasteland,” the stubborn, rigid land produces

a laminated chart that shows the kids where the fruit they eat comes from—
where it is grown locally:

bell peppers, beans, asparagus, chiles, carrots, cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce, cabbage,
corn, onions, potatoes, and pecans. In the same lunchroom where the chart exists is 

another food chart showing that the future needs farmers and workers to fill
their plates: one part grain, one part 

fruit, one part protein, one-part veggies: one-part
digging dirt from the fingernails of family hunger: because more people 

are needed to do the labor: meaning it is better to
be prepared—

________________________________________________________________________________________

Anthony Gabriel is an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University. He is the current poetry editor of the lit magazine, Puerto Del Sol.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher Citro & Dustin Nightingale

The Island Designated Yes

You, across my chest, asleep. Looks like you've landed.
Clover touching words in a dictionary. The light is sour
honey on indigo cherry drops. That hum coming from the
forest, it has something to say and we better listen. Sway
little window, sway little window. A bee carries the sun
along its hairs. My skin warms where you exhale. Please
exhale.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His awards include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for Poetry. He lives in Syracuse, New York.

Dustin Nightingale is the author of Ghost Woodpecker (BatCat Press, 2018). His poetry has been or will be published in journals such as The Florida Review, The American Journal of Poetry, New Ohio Review, Cimarron Review and Coal Hill Review. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Hardwick

A creature prone to violence might attack you

Hidden in the cupboard, what is unbearable.
Your life arched in a ribcage. A toddler climbs
the counter one more time, a composition of
Gerbera daisies in his hand. You—his
mother—on the phone discussing ghost particles.
Life left you desperate. What is unbearable
in the cupboard? A deep growl. A glint of teeth
in back left corner. Two creations & you—orbit.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Hardwick's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Gulf Coast Journal, The Texas Observer, The Missouri Review, Four Way Review, Salamander, Sixth Finch and Passages North, among others. Hardwick serves as the Editor-in-Chief at The Boiler Journal.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kevin Roy

Colony Collapse

Once there was, and there was not:
We make a tale of a last bee tracing 

loops under the only moon.
The order of things is erased each day. 

Before sun up, the birds disappear;
I cull the orange petals of mariposas 

and loosen abandoned nests of mud daubers.
A strongman tells a crumpled paper wasp to leave. 

The days of rallies are long past
as one by one, our organs fail us. 

A gardener pollinates the few orchards
with stippled dust and a paintbrush; 

bud by bud, mutant fruit pocketed
with too many stones; the clouds banished 

and take the rains; where I plant nails, razors,
a ball of pennies to coax blues from the earth, 

bruising wells up. The laws make exile
almost organic, the air ashamed.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kevin Roy is a family scientist in public health at the University of Maryland College Park. He has taught, mentored and conducted community-based research using life history interviews for over 20 years. He has been an active poet for even longer, through participation in writers’ groups and workshops. His first poems were published this past year in Broadkill Review.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jay Brecker

The Way He’s Moved

Half out of the water.
Half out of the tub. Blinded
—soap in his eyes; grasping
for the white waffle-towel, somehow
knowing it has fallen;
feet slipping and he is
falling, aware of the rush
toward the off-white
glass-tile floor. A fine life, is
what he thinks, living here
among low buildings. Here
where light is never blocked
until the marine layer rolls in;
a place where architecture does
not create canyons, yet one exists
on the edge of his small city where
—trailing down its walls
—houses are built like swallows'
nests, where cars park
on level rooftops, gray-weathered staircases
lead down to cedar doorways; windows open
to vistas of white-capped waves. And it would
take only one shockwave,
or heavy rainfall to send them
sliding or tumbling,
as he is sliding and tumbling,
downhill toward the ocean
—the ocean where the white sun bleeds
red on the horizon, as his left arm
finds the toilet, plunging
halfway in; crooked elbow
—that angle-joint—leveraging
his body like a brake,
breaking his fall; his head
coming to rest, tangent
to the white cotton bathmat and all
is white            is silence          is star.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jay Brecker works and writes in southern California. His poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Rattle Poets Respond, Permafrost, Lily Poetry Review, Ocean State Review, The Inflectionist Review, South 85 Journal, I-70 Review, RHINO Poetry and elsewhere. His manuscript, A Ceiling is a Wall Seeking, was a semi-finalist for the 2020 Wheeler Prize for Poetry.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Badillo Milici

On the Last Good Night

before you left & I left

and the mountains soured everything—

rain came down     on that weird little hill

where your father built a house

and I, the last good woman, proof of myth,

carried you off to bed, of course.

god sent a flood, you said.

then a plague, then a fire. sins and all that. apples.

do you know it? I only know what you never

told me: how the body must starve     before

it’s small enough to take

the shape of leaving.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lauren Badillo Milici is a Jersey-born, Florida-raised poet and writer currently based in the Midwest. She is the author of Final Girl from Big Lucks Books. When she isn’t crafting sad poems about sex, she’s either writing or shouting into the void about film, TV and all things pop culture.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Grant Schutzman

[We live in the cemetery]

We live in the cemetery
the center of the city
and we watch the morning
strike itself against the graves
the stones are the same color
as the sky and the paths between them
are like playground slides
the branches of trees make arms that reach
for windows on tall buildings
the day is but a sleepy relic of the night
what I mean is that this body beneath
the earth breathes just as a sun would
a light that you only notice
at its end.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Grant Schutzman

[You move as if with poems in your pockets]

You move as if with poems in your pockets.
The folds of the day like a bright iron skirt.
Every morning is spoken from your mouth
to the sun and with it birds return
like songs in the throat. The ocean
is an empty space
the absurd avenue
in this city’s heart. I stare at its border
and know that one day we will walk
the same path from one end to the other,
lined with the light you carry
in your mouth.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Grant Schutzman is a poet and translator. He is fascinated by multilingual writing and that which has been deemed the untranslatable. His poetry and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Rust + Moth, The Inflectionist Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Asymptote, Ezra, Exchanges and Your Impossible Voice.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Monica Cure

A Country of My Mother

These narrow streets are the hallway
to the kitchen. Sarmale—steam
from ground pork wrapped in
cabbage, the scent mixed with lemon-
bleach and the feeling of grownups
I was told to come downstairs to meet.
Bay leaves from the soup that had
to be eaten first. I run past
a whiff of baked stuffed peppers,
the dish at the edge of my limits.
An old woman stops to chat
at a neighbor’s half-opened gate—
knowing what Bună means
is like being able to read minds.
I’m heading to the closest
office-supply store, a small
cramped room where
I have trouble telling
which boxes are holding things
and which ones are for sale.
All I need is an envelope
to mail a card I’ve held on
to for too long. They only
come in two sizes, too big
and too small. My card is
non-standard. Last week a mailbox
here disappeared without warning,
but I will keep looking for
an envelope that fits. I squeeze
past cars parked on the uneven
sidewalk, under ornate old
buildings that are crumbling
but proud. They put up signs:
The plastering is falling
so if a chunk brains you,
you have only yourself
to blame.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Monica Cure is a Romanian-American poet, writer, and translator currently based in Bucharest. She is a two-time Fulbright grantee and her poems have appeared in Plume, RHINO, Rust + Moth, UCity Review and elsewhere. Her poetry translations have appeared in journals such as Modern Poetry in Translation and Asymptote, and her translation of Liliana Corobca’s novel The Censor’s Notebook was published by Seven Stories Press. She can be found on Twitter @MonicaCure or www.monicacure.com

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brandon Hansen

Earth Yet Again

Well I was mystified when the total solar eclipse
didn’t end and Allison turned to stone. Strange.

In her half-curled hand her tea went cold
and her big grey eyes gazed outside
and there was Larry, also cement, dog bouncing
on the leash like a fish on the line. Nuts.

Anyway I wandered for years and years. You all
turned to dust and like my first peek beneath a lifted shirt
I saw the entire Earth. Unbelievable.

Multitudinous truths erupted
in maple leaf veins and the stopping of my watch
and it started making sense
why nothing made sense.

I mean before. Now in constant semi-darkness
brook trout kiss fireflies
from the river’s swell and muskrats
snuggle on the dash of a Prius
half-stuck in the brook. On the rotted power pole
two owls coo for hours. Once,
one shitted on my head while I napped
beneath a willow. So be it.
Time like a long sigh
when you’re all alone
can unspool
all it wants. It’s best that way.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Brandon Hansen is from a village in northern Wisconsin. He studied writing along Lake Superior and then trekked out to the mountains, where he earned his MFA as a Truman Capote scholar at the University of Montana. His work has been Pushcart nominated and can be found in The Baltimore Review, Quarterly West, Puerto Del Sol and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter: @BatBrandon_

________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Wilson

Theme and Variation

i. 

Winter solstice,
I sit in the darkness of morning,
a dove in the palm of a quiet giant 

ii. 

Winter solstice,
what is this liminal holiness?
Which way do I step through the door? 

iii. 

Winter solstice, I can't see you;
why is it you feel like sperm and ovum?

(a boot drops to the floor in the darkness)

iv. 

Winter solstice,
am I paranoid?
I don't want to break this sacred circle

(hangnail, dirty hair, empty coffee cup) 

v. 

Are you a country,
winter solstice?

diaspora, diaspora, diaspora...

vi. 

Winter solstice,
as I leave you, I approach you again—
walking the Ferris wheel's circumference

________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Wilson's poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in december magazine, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, Reed Magazine, One and in numerous other publications. Her first collection is At Home with Disquiet. Her latest collection, Blue, is about depression, grief and the transformative power of art (both with Circling Rivers). She lives in a small town on Robinson-Huron Treaty territory in Northern Ontario, Canada.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lucas Dean Clark

Crossing

With rusted river at my throat,
I hoist a cheap fishing pole
and a trash bag of clothes
over my head.

Through water I shiver
quiet enough
to not offend crawfish
asleep under sunken logs. 

Black minnows nibble
on my thin ankles,
but I want them to remember me
by words, not flesh. 

I wish my words
sounded like raccoons
brushing their teeth on needles
of fallen pine branches

without craving anything sweeter.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lucas Dean Clark

Ohio After

I have gone where crows circle
below gray clouds.
Only mosquitoes miss me. 

In a cornfield that couldn’t grow,
barbed wire sown into furrows
hardens my foot soles. 

There, the scarecrow
whose body is stuffed with dead hornets
holds a secret 

underneath the breast pocket:
a hibernating squirrel has chewed a burrow.
The heart is a cornered animal. 

Down, crows come,
down, perching on my fingers, each one
asking, would you like to hear my voice?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lucas Dean Clark is attending Bowling Green State for an MFA degree in Creative Writing. He writes about his dreams often and has a reoccurring nightmare where he is chased by black-haired dogs. He also walks in the woods like a ghost.

________________________________________________________________________________________

M Cynthia Cheung

Forms of Water

A friend tells me if I were desperate enough, I wouldn’t settle
for any of this—wave of the hand. Perhaps she means
the middle-aged sagging of my core, where I once believed
I needed to sweat. Or maybe that I ought to act
more grateful. That I don’t have, for example, cancer,
and can do whatever people
without cancer do. 

Reading the headlines to my girls: Siberia has melted,
and a graveyard of long-dead reindeer is spewing anthrax.
Havana Syndrome isn’t new; during the Cold War,
“Operation Hello” used microwaves to make people think
they were hearing voices. How can you hear
something that doesn’t exist? 

I take my mom to her appointment. We forget
her glucometer, and the doctor reminds us
about diet and exercise. I take myself
to the grocery store—black plums are in season.
Dad and the girls like them. They take the stones
and hope for seedlings. But I feel cold 

remembering January, when the ditches sank
under the weight of rain, and people
sank under the weight of their lungs. I cannot
forget my grandmother’s eyes in the monochrome
photos, when she was still a medical student and didn’t know
that in seventy years, in the bed she’d never
leave again, she’d ask me
when she could go. 

The trees on our street haven’t recovered
from the winter freeze. It’s possible
they won’t.

________________________________________________________________________________________

M Cynthia Cheung is a physician whose writing can be found in The Baltimore Review, RHINO, Salamander, SWWIM, Tupelo Quarterly and others. Currently, she serves as a judge for Baylor College of Medicine’s annual Michael E. DeBakey Medical Student Poetry Awards. Find out more at www.mcynthiacheung.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Leland Seese

A Walk Home from the School Bus Stop, November 9, 1967, 3:43:34 p.m., PST

Wear the rain,
cow-eyed soft and wet,
kind as flannel. 

Wear it happy
as a worm moving through
its dirt tuxedo. 

Roadside
with no sidewalk.
Rivulet of water 

coursing down
the channel,
shovel-dug. 

Set a single
pine needle to
race the rapids. 

Can it skirt
the tiny logjam
in an eddy? 

Soaked,
untroubled,
follow it 

the length of
several neighbors’
houses. 

Your life
a pine needle,
a giddy eddy,

halfway home.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Leland Seese's poems appear in RHINO, Juked, rust + moth and many other journals. He and his wife live in Seattle with six foster-adopted and bio children they have launched into adulthood.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joey Wańczyk

Dead Deer

after Jean Valentine

I’m carrying the dead deer
like all those before me—

twine tied around
my shoulders, straining my neck.

Deer blood, red as rust,
falling through gaps

in white deer teeth.
Passing through a cold river,

slipping toward oblivion—
I’d rather be sleeping.

Then I, no longer
drowning, stand up.

This river water,
this tugging tide,

merely a shoal
a foot high.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joey Wańczyk is a poet and writer based in Bloomington, Indiana. His work has previously appeared in Hello Mr. Magazine and Indiana University's Canvas Magazine. You will not find him on the internet.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kimberly Ann Priest

Intermission

My husband jostles the lamp,
frustrated with the damn switch that only works part time. 

My mother’s lamp, I ask him to be gentle with it
please, its shade half-cocked and feathery. 

In the morning,
sunlight splits the surface of a pool of humidity
in the center of the bedroom, dust particles floating
like a dispersed school of minnows.

I watch their ephemeral bodies dance
in a saturated sea and become aware of my own breathing,
now alone. Outside,

the grass is not moving; there is no breeze.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird, finalist in the American Best Book Awards, and chapbooks The Optimist Shelters in Place, Parrot Flower and Still Life. She is an associate poetry editor for Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and assistant professor at Michigan State University.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Dahut

My Third Hurricane Season in My Twenty-Fifth Year

The current picks up speed around the bridge,
and the moon draws us as animals 

when it spills from its cup, brimming with an evening
story you told me when the power went out. 

You held me close the day we put her down,
and in the corner of our bedroom, a cobweb 

becomes a labyrinth that catches conversation
about our guesses for hurricane season, questions 

we can’t control, asking not for answers,
but a closeness only our bodies can exact. 

Under the bridge, a tarpon eats on a strong outgoing
because she has to, not because it pleases her. 

What pleases me will eventually kill me,
I thought, as the sun came up over the Gulf. 

I flip on my truck with my eyes closed and surprise
myself when I wake up in the same bed I make.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joe Dahut is a poet, essayist and educator living and writing in the Florida Keys. He earned his MFA in Poetry from New York University, where he taught creative writing. Joe's poetry and prose can be read in Saw Palm, The Drake, The FlyFish Journal, Clade Song and Little Patuxent Review, among others.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Vanessa Couto Johnson

I’m all dewclaws

The beans are
walked to a boil. 

I thumb a clause,
unsure if up 

or down. If truth
be trodden, 

the general finds
a specimen. Or 

the general
-ization from 

specifics. Form
homology forelimb 

around the lumber,
sleepless in settled score. 

Punnett square
predicts the recesses, 

so relax your
droppings as you cross. 

What else are we
outside for. Trail crumb.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Vanessa Couto Johnson (she/they) is the author of the full-length poetry books Pungent dins concentric (Tolsun Books, 2018) and forthcoming pH of Au (Parlor Press, Free Verse Editions Series 2022), as well as three poetry chapbooks. Most recently, Vanessa's poems have appeared in Abandon Journal, Angel Rust, Pine Hills Review, Star 82 Review, and Superstition Review. A Brazilian born in Texas (dual citizen), VCJ has taught at Texas State University since 2014.

________________________________________________________________________________________

taylor d waring

Art

________________________________________________________________________________________

taylor d waring is a poet, musician & photographer living in Spokane, WA. When he's not inventing wild conspiracies about the big riff industry, he's hiding in his studio making lo-fi goth music. You can find him on instagram @taylordwaring and at taylordwaring.com