Issue 2 — Summer 2019 Full Text
____________________________________________________

Jordan Durham

Meeting My Past Selves at the County Fair

I buy everyone pink cotton candy and the tradition continues
as we grab and twirl and wait to disintegrate slowly through
our own hot and humid crowd. Our mouths soaking in
the strange taste. I still can’t tell them anything
at a relaxed pace, especially of slow burning necessities
of love. The selves I see on swirling hearts ride as red
splays out and out with every spin, as though each whiplash
of revolution could loop me back to another love
-struck life: flash there’s K and me, flash there’s T, flash M, flash
a bad decision made again. Neon bulbs flickering

names of the rides fast as our hearts when held
in boys’ hands: in and out in and out, you love me I love you
not: Tilt-a-Whirl, Gravitron, Tornado Terminator. Destruction
placed on these tongues from above. Calling ourselves
demo-derby dames in the back of pickup trucks and one wears the cowboy

boots with shorts, shorn, watching everything wreck and go
aflame. The two who sweat and run back to Midway from dusk and fields
of cars. Take the husks of our unhomed hearts as nothing
more than which fun-house mirror is you is me. One young and winning
goldfish set to die with pingpong balls bouncing without splash,
another blows a kiss to her group of friends. Bar-fly blitzed
and honky-tonk, they swing to country blues, deep fried mushroom-
twinkie-snickers, auto-tune filling to buzz. Our lightning
storm humid hair, hear a static on the horizon as we blur
our ways back through this electric air.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jordan Durham

Aubade for the Robin Dive-Bombing as I Leave for Work

Two weeks since the sun last shone and faith in what is visible

rights itself in me as a balance—to know something else is wary

of everything that breathes. The air escaping my mouth condenses to droplets

not individually seen. Yesterday a man told me not to be such

a little bitch. Another man said nothing. This morning

as the streetlights turn themselves off for another day, I’m no fool

to what helps their luminescent burn. Our lives are timed

by the largest of sums when we refuse to circle and inspect what is closest

to what we have left. Or the lesser sums are the lives we pick,

smoldering against what encompasses us. I can’t hear the pitch of my voice

anymore, which is to say I burnt the coffee and cried on the linoleum

moments before knowing love could be a swift and angry decline. Tomorrow is forecasted

as a clearing of clouds and rain. Even the earthworms will surface to move

and evade their predators of land and sky. They do what they can

to survive. Distance is perspective with five hearts—fear pulling

their skin to surface before the sun helps settle them back to ground.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jordan Durham's poems have appeared in Blackbird, Quarterly West, Harpur Palate and Indiana Review, among others. She has been a finalist in the Grist Pro-Forma Poetry Prize and the Arcadia Editors’ Poetry Prize. She holds an MFA in poetry and is a Senior Poetry Editor for Narrative Magazine. Jordan currently lives in Columbia, Missouri.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Syntaxes of Conversion

I carry ghosts on my backbone. An omen of seeing
crows gather & devour a dead rat, with its intestine
risen like a carbuncle. I gather my utopias in bereft

corners of a holy city. I hold prayers in a basil leaf
between my teeth. A new name for every fragment
of bone in my body. I mouth swaths of repertoire.

The land eschews parameters & ghosts find firmament.
Call it a horizontal plane of survival, or an uncertain god.
Every stone I pray to speaks to me with its ancient eyes.

The crows peel off the dead rat until there is none left.
Each hand that severs another unthreads into thimbles
of saltwater & becomes a risen tide the moon torments.

The sky is scythe into rain. Another name for the flesh.
The arch of a wingbone. A name for each vital organ,
a blessing for ghosts glowing like a parade of fireflies.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sneha Subramanian Kanta

Displaced

Verb.
Antonym: citizen, belonging.

A midnight treaty signed with red hands.
Losing the count of birds blooming in the sky.

A girl leaving wheat, mustard, & barley fields
distances between unrecognized territories.

Everyone a cartographer until the finalization
of new maps. Our ancestors running on grasslands

with scarves & bags. Their hearts, a reliquary.
The first time they hear the word border.

A broken inheritance of winter & unnamed graveyards.
Walking over unknown margins. A prayer for mercy.

Sitting in silence by the highways, peering at every
passing headlight. A huddle of breaths when sounds

of gunshots arise from beyond the pitchforked streets.
A place from where the flames rise between piles

of newspapers & hay. A deviation toward warmer spells.
Leaning into marrows of frail ghosts that inhabit the body.

The stars have fallen. The stars have fallen, scattering like
unnamed bodies on the ground. A constellation of ghosts.

When our ancestors prayed, the land thawed into a river,
flowing into an ocean. Sacred spells of light overhead.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sneha Subramanian Kanta is a recipient of The Charles Wallace Fellowship at the University of Stirling (2019). A GREAT scholarship awardee, she has earned her second postgraduate degree in literature from England. She is the founding editor of Parentheses Journal and reader for Palette Poetry and Tinderbox Poetry Journal. She is the author of Land: Body / Ocean: Muscle (forthcoming with dancing girl press).

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ben Seanor

Invective against Poets

I find nothing funny nor endearing
when you write about your morning
bagel. Nothing revelatory
when you spit shine the lostness
of Eurydice or Persephone.
And I’ve also written a poem
in a dream—it was the most
boring thing to happen to me
in my life. More boring than
even grocery shopping
dreams. At least in those, I hold
a swollen black eggplant
or keep passing a pretty girl
because I’ve forgotten which aisle
hides the olive oil. Have you ever
been woken up by someone you love
grinding her teeth in her sleep?
You know you could wake her,
tell her, but she would only frown,
nod a little, flatten herself
back into sleep. Both of you
knowing what the mouth will do next.
So you get up, turn off the alarm,
let her continue her lunch
with her mother and Jane Birkin.
Breathe in the baby powder
in her hair, the sharpened
scent of makeup remover;
you know what there is no stopping.
When she finally wakes,
her face is unburdened, smiling.
She grabs her phone to show you
the song that was just playing
in her head as her eyes opened.
And you are happy, you forget
the high, incessant sound
of her teeth in the night.
Out the window, the afternoon
is warm and clear and still
ahead of you. A pure, sensuous form.
And you try to let the day
begin as the caesura it wants
and, for the moment, you know no
longing, nothing new drifting
through your head like a yard of silk
through a river. Nothing you need
to say that you then need to say.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ben Seanor is in America. His work has appeared in, among other places, The Collagist; Yes, Poetry; decomP and Cimarron Review.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Rollender

Grow to Love the Vanishing

In a bed of succulents, I dream I’m barren. Dreaming

my son into a white horse. Jangle of shoehorns.

Of eternity, a world no one can own. Woman lifting

a jug, a puff of flour at the bottom. This house,

where everything’s familiar, but foreign. In a bed

of succulents, his eye’s tender pool. I’m unlike women

who save rhapsodic things to pass down: wedding bone

china, silver, scrapbooks of faded summers. Mountain

that outlives me. Why traveling only toward the light

breeds another drowning. Sleepers in your garden,

choiring marrow-glow—who’s to say the baffling lantern

I see in the dark isn’t me, coming for me? Feathering

ill wind. Remembering you telling me to go under

—part otherworldly, shimmer of blue tracks across snow.

Because our bodies can’t stop haunting each other. Crooked

flowering crown, horsefly swarm. Tiny tracks flighted,

the opal-veiled virgin in the medieval painting’s middle

distance, where falcons return, then vanish. Why living

on heaven’s brim isn’t living. Our barbaric virtues

emptying my body of the song no one remembers.

Watch as I grow to love what’s taking me away.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nicole Rollender

Noctuary

Painted wings

knifing all this shimmer. I’m caught
here, yet this can’t last. Bones sprouting

among grasses.

A midwife hanged for lost children. Exposed
lamb sliding out, eyes still shut. Behold, horse

teeth. Slow

hum of an old cat’s heart. An elegy that saints the mother.
Another father smashing his daughter’s

favorite record.

What happened is always happening somewhere.
How what I’ve done today—wrote a few

discordant lines

—a woman’s face, mosaicked in Pompeii—counts
as more than marginalia. How a magnolia

flower still

floats in a bowl. Tell me a story of how
prayer stopped a drowning. Honeysuckle,

ram-trampled.

Tell me why abstaining from meat saves another
from dying. Tell me a story about an aloof

bird coven.

A hunter kneels in a field. Ritual of summer noon, full sun.
Our hands make shadow girls shear

over the lawn. These

smallest, insidious kingdoms.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A 2017 NJ Council on the Arts poetry fellow, Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love (Five Oaks Press), and four poetry chapbooks. She has won poetry prizes from Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal, Princemere Journal and Ruminate Magazine and her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal and Ninth Letter. Nicole is managing editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal and holds an MFA from the Pennsylvania State University.

________________________________________________________________________________________

EG Cunningham

Teleology

and said let there be light
and named every dead animal
especially then
built theme parks to the myth
of experience
ate the leftovers early
painted wet-on-wet

wasn’t an avenue or a parking lot eeriness
neither a shore nor a field
of the bones not of the blood
the past hummed an entr’acte, now black

in the hoaxes and the wished-on eyelashes,
supposed itself done for, disfigured, irrelevant

brought up night again, put the subject to rest
left frontier deposits
changed its name, changed it back

________________________________________________________________________________________

EG Cunningham

Crisis of Quiet Proportions

We wake to razors of nameless flowers
still blooming or else the sun. The middle
way sounds like blue or yellow and has
no time. You said of closeness nothing’s
settled. Farther off our friends worked,
fought, slept. I didn’t forget them though
the seasons kept changing hour by hour.
Sisyphus’s records skip. Makes him think
the world happens to him. We hope a little
wonder could be its own reason, might
summon both cordon and brink.

________________________________________________________________________________________

EG Cunningham is the author of a full-length collection of poetry, Ex Domestica, and a chapbook, Apologetics. Her work has appeared in Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Hobart, The Nation, The Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Quiddity, and other publications. She teaches at the University of California, Merced.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Max Heinegg

A Stranding

Rare for Gloucester, we found the common dolphin’s
frozen body beside a lost child’s hat, fifty feet up
from Lighthouse Beach of Annisquam, the top of the rock 

where to the left vineland emerges- Wingaersheek,
whose name is bird & body in the shoreline, cold
trembling for you. His black tongue juts,

hardened to indignance, the smile only an underbite,
gray hourglass flanks a gift only a vulture can open,
the crows & gulls content with eyes. How did he end up here?

Chasing fish in the wading pools? Stranded on the ebb
until he lay beside the Irish moss in the driftwood’s brush?
Below him, we see the small holes in the sand from birds’

beaks, the wider ones breathing clams my nephew crushes
with his sister’s yellow toy shovel. The side of the good
mammal peels, only the season stays his disintegration.

Did he miss a flood that would have returned him
with its rising, or did hunger tell an irresistible lie,
that he had enough time before the falling tide?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Max Heinegg’s poems have been nominated for Best of the Net, and The Pushcart Prize. He’s been a finalist for the poetry prizes of Crab Creek Review, December Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Cutthroat, Rougarou, and the Nazim Hikmet prize. His poems have appeared in The Cortland Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Glass (Poets Resist), Tar River Poetry, Free State Review and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. Additionally, he is a singer-songwriter and recording artist whose records can be heard at www.maxheinegg.com 
He lives and teaches English in the public schools of Medford, MA.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Austin

At the Debbie Reynolds/Carrie Fisher Estate Sale

Hand-painted saints in gold-bound pages
sell for the highest bid. Their faces

in wooden frames,
on VHS covers softened by age,

miniaturized as cookie jars,
sneakers,
pencil cases—

value increased by inertia. Hundreds of white
hands loosen their pearls, sleep in shallow

boxes. Feathered boas hold the shape
of arms, count their fallen.

Two picnic baskets are the first to go,
a matching wicker set.    I try to imagine

their last occupants. Wine or water,
chicken salad or turkey sandwiches.

A day unrecorded, their bare feet
rubbing the green off stalks of grass.

In a galaxy far away, the sun is another star
a mother points to as she braids

a daughter’s hair. They dance in the light
of a moon’s moon, converse

on the mouth of their god. No one knows
what was said.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Austin

Autosarcophagy

i. mouth

Fire-breathers & sword
swallowers: drink paraffin to

sound out dragon alphabets, line
their throats with butter.

All they need to say in six
seconds of expectation—

what I sip, mithridatic.

ii. stomach

Contest
of thorns
& wheat. Which
rises to claim a castle?

iii. lungs

the only love/              poem

            is a memory

receive             /           release

pollen from a frond

            wind from a sea

iv. brain

Some cannibals believe
they gain the traits of those they eat.

Which part of me is a feast?

v. heart

This first.
This last.
Repeat.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Shannon Austin is a writer from Baltimore, MD, with an MFA in poetry at UNLV. Her poems and translations have appeared in Colorado Review, Interim, Profane, American Chordata and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bob Sykora

I Have My First Vision in the Middle of the Night

A few more hours. The longest night
since the last longest night. Eyes faint

as feathers, but a stirring, a stirring.

I replace one obsession with another.
In this room made for falling—where I carve

new ways I fucked up into the trees

of that summer. An entire ballet of memories
to mutilate. I try turning my thoughts to history,

not love. Thoughts of a country without fences.

Where hearts could be replaced by marching
out to the woods, marching on and on

in no particular direction, where—and when—

a country could still be invented. My heart
won’t be held down by history. It doesn’t care

for war stories. I want to look in the mirror

and see myself as I was. As what I could be.
As if love hadn’t led me here, so awake

with all this time to hold and nowhere to put it.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Bob Sykora is the author of the chapbook I Was Talking About Love–You Are Talking About Geography (Nostrovia! 2016). A graduate of the UMass Boston MFA program, he teaches at community college and serves as a poetry reader for Split Lip Mag. He can be found online at bobsykora.tumblr.com and @Bob_Sykora_.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rachel Small

(Lush) Ocean Salt

I scrub your face with sea salt
while I try to wear away dead skin
and imagine butterflies pinned
softly.

You have stood unmoving beneath
rain and sun. I felt timidly hopeful
because you would have been a monarch
if you had been stained with color.
as the scent of coconut oil

lingered in your hair. Some days
you vanished. Tucked beneath

plain sheets
while hiding from entire world.
I think about you on milkweed beneath

fresh skin that slowly emerges
from beneath salt and silken tofu.

I wash your face clean and you
look suddenly different beneath
bright sky.
light that hangs from ceiling.
Hopeful

as faucet drips.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Rachel Small writes and lives in Ottawa. A post-undergrad student from Carleton University's History program, she is currently a writer and editor for AtticVoices. Her writing has appeared in SPINE, Pulp Poet's Press and Marias at Sampaguitas and she has work forthcoming in The Hellebore and Bywords. You can find her on twitter @rahel_taller.

________________________________________________________________________________________

JK Anowe

An Outpatient’s Night at the Psyche Ward

First, a man burns faster than his country
& I mistake for a light bulb his reflection
transfixed on the windowpane. Body, they call
you parish; I call you parishioner who
encouraged to approach the priest, is
excommunicated for its confessions.
Let’s say I check in & for small talk
Anne Sexton, this time a night nurse, greets me
in all three languages I’m fluent in
silence being, let’s also say, what punctuates
each, wouldn’t silence then be to the hearing
not the one thing most spoken but spoken of?
I’m here because I want to die & have no better way
to mean it. My thirst drenched in a torn flag pooling
at my feet, like bathwater. An orderly waits
with a towel. Anne Sexton samples beforehand
my last supper for tastes of anything betrayal.
Body, you’re so thin I think you’re fleeing
yourself. I see from the room’s centre the rest
of the house looms, tightening into a fist
around you—curved foetal, as if hungering
for rebirth, for paradise, beside my cruciform.

________________________________________________________________________________________

JK Anowe, Igbo-born poet and recluse, is author of the poetry chapbooks The Ikemefuna Tributaries: a parable for paranoia (Praxis Magazine Online, 2016) and SKY RAINING FISTS (Madhouse Press, 2019). A recipient of the inaugural Brittle Paper Award for Poetry in 2017 and a finalist for the 2019 Gerard Kraak Award, he holds a BA from University of Benin, Nigeria. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Fresh Air Poetry, Agbowo, Palette Poetry, 20.35 Africa: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Brittle Paper, Elsewhere Lit, Expound, Enkare Review, Gnarled Oak, Poetry Life & Times, Praxis Magazine Online and elsewhere. He’s Editor: Poetry Chapbooks, at Praxis Magazine Online. He lives, teaches, and writes from somewhere in Nigeria.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Vismai Rao

Pursuits

Mother says she hasn’t found herself yet and there’s
little time. She holds an old ceramic mug in one hand

a drill bit in the other and is intently watching a man
on YouTube put holes into things:  it’s how you make vessels

suitable for saplings, apparently.

Her windowsill is a long row of wine bottles
with no wine, all sorts of ivies and ferns pouring out

her bathroom mirror a bay of newly acquired post-its
with little messages to self—  beyond is where she looks

to put on her day cream.

Afternoons                 she trades sleep

to sit with her sketch sheets & HB pencils bent over houses and fruit,
hillsides stark with shadow & light, drawing herself

out of a canvas of abstraction.

From old photographs she copies faces & hands, draws tall
vases with still dahlias, seashores

and roads—
miles & miles of roads, it’s how she masters perspective—

all her roads pointing to dimensionless dots
at their respective horizons:  here on paper,

how easily they reach their ends—

________________________________________________________________________________________

Vismai Rao grew up in Delhi, India. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Indianapolis Review, RHINO Poetry, Salamander & elsewhere. Her poetry has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Louis Duckworth

Fragmenta II

the ballerina
encased in Baltic amber*
mid-pirouette

I keep playing the record
again & again
until Sinatra, tired**, pleads for a smoke

“here be dragons” the map reads, because
this is less frightening*** than a tract
of nothing

“where have all my friends gone?”
“the Hidebehind got them”
“how do you know?”****

the architecture***** of joy
affords no scaffolding, no buttresses,
it rises; it stands, or it does not stand

* succinite, commonly found washed on shorelines of the Baltic Sea; the ballerina will have asphyxiated

** according to thermodynamics, eventually even the memory of you must fall to entropy

*** the chemical formula of fear is 75% hydrogen by mass, 15% elemental carbon, 8% oxygen, 2% argon

**** answer: “I am the Hidebehind”

***** when they saw the wall was finished, the engineers cheered: “What magnificent bones we will leave; the spine of giants.”

________________________________________________________________________________________

This Living Hand, Part II

After John Keats

“This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.”

In the dream he is as dead
as he is outside the dream.

& yet he holds a hand, warm & capable,
to me,

& I want to tell him how he is loved,
remembered.

But I think the dream is almost over—
my aching spine or my dry mouth

or the crowing trailer-park rooster will reclaim me
as the long nothing must reclaim him.

I wake,
touch thumb to wrist,

feel the earnest trickle of blood in vein.
One whose name was writ in water

quickly evaporates in morning sun,
& yet still I think of him, so brave,

he who would not wait
for death, who with his own hand,

when still capable,
dug himself a grave in paper.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Jonathan Louis Duckworth received his MFA from Florida International University. His fiction, poetry and non-fiction appears in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, Whiskey Island, Meridian, Tupelo Quarterly, Jabberwock Review, Superstition Review, Flash Fiction Online and elsewhere. His chapbook, Book of Never, was published by Finishing Line Press.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Chloe N. Clark

The Time I Saw the Earth from NASA's Mission Control

I’d spent the day staring at ceilings,
trying to find patterns to replace
spaces in my mind

memory is funniest when it comes
back to you—the memory of a joke,
of a friend’s voice, of a slice of cake
you ate as a child and which you thought
you’d make one day

I never made that cake, the recipe
gone, though I dream in it still sometimes
like I dream sometimes of people
I’ve lost too—they welcome me
back to them, with laughter, with

their voices tumbling out
no one I’ve lost ever forgets
what they want to say

When I stare at ceilings, I lose
track of the times I don’t say what
I want to, to you, to myself

After ceilings, I tour NASA,
imagine echoes of discovery in every
corner but its actually mostly
just cubicles, just rooms without views

anything could be happening here
but maybe that’s the thing about everything
important—it could be happening anywhere

In Mission Control, the Earth has just
disappeared from view, but you say
“wait” and so we do, sit at seats I can’t find
the edge to

I’m always most nervous when I’m most
comfortable, but then you say “look”
and the Earth is coming back

a shine of light, of blue, and then
this: the world from far away
all that ocean, all that land
all those lives infinitesimal
and extraordinary

“I can see the Earth” I say
but what I mean is: I can see
everyone from here

________________________________________________________________________________________

Chloe N. Clark's work appears in Apex, Booth, Glass, Little Fiction, Uncanny and more. Her chapbook The Science of Unvanishing Objects is out from Finishing Line Press and her debut full length collection, Your Strange Fortune, will be out Summer 2019. She is Co-EIC of Cotton Xenomorph. Find her on Twitter @PintsNCupcakes

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nishat Ahmed

At Virginia Scenic Overlook #2

Four states lie in our tailwind,
one more to cross before we touch

the coast and you call this place home
for the next two years. Atlantic air

piques the nose with salt;
the pollen here is foreign.

I am burying your love
in me; my heart, your garden,

in bloom with wildflowers:
asters and fire-wheels, bursting

edge to edge, pennyworts
and primroses. Among the racket

of trucks and children prodding
their parents for gas station slushies,

you kiss me and car horns trumpet,
voices become bells. You’re the first real

morning; if light touching skin had a sound,
it would be my name on your tongue.

We climb back into your car,
head towards the hands of mountains.

The sun dips between their shoulders.
Everything, everywhere, a flourish of gold.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nishat Ahmed is a Bangladeshi-American residing in the Midwest. He’s an Illinois native with a deep love for Fall Out Boy, The Notebook and Chipotle. He received his MFA in poetry from Old Dominion University. His work has been published by Words Dance, Sobotka, Mochila Review, Blue Agave, The Academy of American Poets, and has been performed at TEDxUIUC and AWP. His chapbook, “Brown Boy,” is forthcoming in late 2019 from Porkbelly Press.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jack B. Bedell

Serpents and Insects, 1647

—oil on canvas, Otto Marseus van Schrieck,
New Orleans Museum of Art

White moths hover in spare light
and snakes coil around mushrooms
growing at the base of this tree.

All life must escape the darkness
of these leaves to feed, or to fight.
Even the blue trail of a fly

moves away from the leaves’ black
veins toward its own end. Everything
close to the tree’s trunk reduces

to textures, hiding places
where fangs flash against each other
and the darting tongues of frogs

spear wings straight out of the air.
Ground hard rock, and sky gone
dark—a single vine in memory of sun.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jack B. Bedell is Professor of English and Coordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, fall 2018). Currently, he has been appointed by Governor John Bel Edwards to serve as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William James

There Are Precisely 2,946 Trees in the Lake

Invisible needles are falling out of the sky. The birds are
not singing. A jazz musician wearing a red hat is playing
the saxophone to a river filled with leeches. Fan blades.
Pine cones. Pikes with three mouths, each one singing an
elegy in a dissonant key. In the air, feathers. Everywhere.
Cascading. A barrel-chested man is pulling a rope down
from what simply has to be heaven. Nothing is on fire.
Not even the fire. I take pictures of my insides with a tiny
microscope and send them as postcards to strangers. My
lungs to the God of Shouting Dangerously. My kidneys to
the Patron Saint of Silly Prayers. My gallbladder, I send to
no one, because it isn’t interesting. Every creature in the
forest calls me a coward. I sew myself up with a crow
quill, and a strand of spidersilk stolen from a web.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William James is a poet, aging punk, and train enthusiast from Manchester, NH, and the author of 'rebel hearts & restless ghosts' (Timber Mouse Publishing). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in literary journals such as BOOTH, Forklift OH, Hobart, Gravel, & Five:2:One, as well as various punk zines & the occasional vinyl LP. You can find him online on Twitter (@thebilljim) or at http://www.williamjamespoetry.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Charlotte Covey

snapshot in blinks

sometimes, you go minutes without
blinking. i try and catch you,
if only to know you
are human. my body always remembers
your body. it has been
so long. somewhere, your girlfriend
is wishing you home. when
i ask about her, you kiss me
quiet, and i let you. i am
trying to be a good person. you
hush my lips with your drifting
fingers. i am afraid of being
alone. the walls watch us,
and you press inside me. i keep thinking
of the way your lashes strain for ceiling,
refuse to close. the way we
are always looking for things
we shouldn’t.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Charlotte Covey is from St. Mary's County, Maryland. She currently lives in St. Louis, and she earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Missouri-St. Louis in Spring 2018. She has poetry published or forthcoming in journals such as The Normal School, Salamander Review, CALYX Journal, the minnesota review and Potomac Review, among others. In 2015, she was nominated for an AWP Intro Journal Award. She is managing editor for WomenArts Quarterly Journal.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Satya Dash

Slow Rapture

Spit drips from the underside of my gaping mouth–
this is my response to the day’s merciless dulling.
I’ve been a man in love who once tried to fit
too many flowers into a bouquet.
They were too few to bloom into a garden.

On long winding highways when stray animals are folding
into barren skin on the sides, I suddenly think about
the loveliness of your nostrils, how scientists are studying
shy spiders, how ants inspire social behavior.
The inanity and gross irrelevance lactate my eyes.

I’ve fought with my lover over a feather
because everybody wants something immeasurably light.
As if owning bestowed on you the benevolence to share.
So much of it is such ridiculous algorithm, you wonder
if God is also learning, surprising himself everyday.

I’ve been so fascinated with the peach emoticon
that I’ve forgotten I’ve never tasted a peach my entire life.
By tasting I mean–mastication, slurping, even tearing–
the sort of thing that shakes your soul, that evokes
the memory of withering muscle, callous cell.

For instance, the jangle of your thigh’s insides
and how it nudges me towards ecstasy
as I lie like a half awake transistor
sending out sporadic odes of static
wisping into the country air.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Satya Dash's recent poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Magnolia Review, Prelude, The Nasiona, Porridge, Barren Magazine. He has been a cricket commentator, dabbled with short fiction and has a degree in electronics from BITS Goa. He lives in Bangalore, India and recites his poetry in the city's cafes. Find him on Twitter @satya043

________________________________________________________________________________________

Melinda Ruth

Granddaughter Left

Silence ascends from bottom
up. Or rather, from tips

of toes, fingers and ears. Silence
falls before dying. We are told

silence is pale blue, but it is
ochre, the color of piss and jaundice; old

linens uncleansed. Silence is
hazel, dimmed above your

rigored torso, your seized heart,
your rippled skin—leave me

with nights of knees on stained floors listening

to Johnny Cash cassettes at bedside—forgive me,
I lied. Silence spills

from summit down. The space left unoccupied
by what once was.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Melinda Ruth is a Baltimore transplant and graduate Poetry MFA candidate at the University of Central Arkansas. She is an Oxford American assistant, poetry editor for Arkana, and helps lead writing workshops at the local juvenile court. Melinda has pieces published in Pleiades, The Evansville Review, Red Earth Review, and more. Follow her on Twitter @_Mel_Ruth_.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Terin Weinberg

Spaces

I’ve turned June bug infested
kitchen tops into barren
and bleached surfaces.
I’ve boxed and bagged
my belongings for years;
found crawlspaces
and corners to place things
and replace them. I’ve tied
bows to goodbyes, covered
them with paint and spackle.
I’ve thrown clothes out
I once foolishly considered
heirlooms, ties to past selves,
lands I’ve briefly called home,
briefly called me.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Terin Weinberg is an MFA candidate in poetry at Florida International University in Miami, Florida. She graduated with degrees in Environmental Studies and English from Salisbury University in Maryland. Her most recent poems are forthcoming in The Normal School and Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A. Prevett

Gender as Riddle with No Solution

I am scented as a clementine and have no breasts.
In my hand I hold the opposite of an umbrella.
Sometimes I rattle when kissed. Other times
I fold myself again and again
just so I may watch paper flush with jealousy.

In my heart is a house with walls of wet muscle.
On the walls hang pictures of houses in fields
and only houses in fields. And over the fields are suns
the color of clementine and with sunglasses and isn’t that funny.
In the rooms of the house live the bodies I would place the house in
if I could pick up the house and move it somewhere else.

Really my skin is clementinish, which explains the scent.
If you saw a clementine from a distance
you may not know what to do with me. If you tried to fold me
it would be difficult and messy. You would probably want
to give up. At the supermarket, the stationery section laughs
as I walk by.

I am the furthest thing from fruit.
I am the centerpiece of a wake of vultures.
I am the god of worms, and Jesus,
do they love clementine.

Actually, I am the vanity mirror
with a bird pecking at its reflection in it.
I’m the bird, too. I am water and oil
and I cannot say when I am which. I refuse to.
I am the entire lingerie section
with caution tape wrapped around it,
and you cannot spell lingerie
without clementine.

All of these things are in the house,
which you’ll remember is my heart,
which you’ll trust is the shape of a letter folded thrice
then ripped up, the pieces flushed clementinely down the toilet.

________________________________________________________________________________________

A. Prevett is a human pursuing an MFA in fiction from Georgia State University. Their recent work can be found in or is forthcoming from Redivider, Booth, Five:2:One and several other wonderful places on the web. They live in Atlanta with Patches, their chubby, cuddly, calico cat.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alejandro Ruiz del Sol

When I Dream of Laundry, This Tether Sways above Me

I’d fold for my tether, I’d
sleep on the wooden floor
below my tether. Use my finger
tips to teach myself routines. I
feel rhythms when
I dream of laundry. When,
when can I feel free? How,
how do I learn to say hello?

again and again.

This is dedicated
to when memories
beget memories. Dedicated
to bedsheets on floors,
a neglected kid who lies
about having bad days.

I’m with you, I’ll
climb my tether.

Kid, would it be terrible to hear
how I occupy rooms?
How I pick the green off bread?
Lay on floors just to imagine
a tether swaying above me?
I’d love it if I could
snore slowly. Instead

I wake up to a sea of
backwashed beer cans and
the buzz of streetlamps,
knocking sheets around
wondering how much longer?

Wondering
how much soap? The delicate cycle?
The laundromat? The quarters? The road
I walk to get home?

I’ll climb my tether, kid. And,
it might break, and

I’d only know the world
ended if there were no
more sheets to fold.

What are my options then? Paint
model cars? Press
flowers into books?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Alejandro Ruiz del Sol is from the Tampa Bay area. Currently, he is an MFA candidate at New Mexico State University where he is Assistant Poetry Editor for Puerto del Sol. He has been previously published in Barren Magazine.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nancy Mitchell

Fallout

Life’s Pictorial History
of World War II, cans of beer
that made Milwaukee famous
sweat rings into cocktail
tables. JFK's blood splatter
black against Jackie's pink
Chanel skirt—oh, that pillbox
hat!—a Pollack painting
in reverse. Friday's fish-sticks
safely chafed, cafeteria workers
wait for the air-raid siren
to shut it's mouth, for the first
and second graders to unfold
knees, elbows, and crawl
out from under desks and come
to lunch—mushroom blooms
looming the horizon forever
to be paid forward—blasted,
bombed, blown away.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Nancy Mitchell is a 2012 Pushcart Prize winner and the author of The Near Surround, Grief Hut and The Out-of-Body Shop. Co-editor of Plume Interviews 1, her poems have appeared in AGNI, Green Mountains Review, Poetry Daily, Washington Square Review and other journals and have been anthologized in Last Call (Sarabande Books), The Working Poet (Autumn House Press) and Plume 3, 4,5, 6 and 7. She has been an artist in residence at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in San Angelo, Virginia and Auvillar, France, and at Spring Creek, Oregon State University. Mitchell teaches in the CELL program at Salisbury University in Maryland and serves as Associate Editor of Special Features for Plume Poetry. She is the Poet Laureate of the City of Salisbury, Maryland.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Molly Likovich

A Song of Cups and String

I need to write you down. Quills, ballpoint pens, hieroglyphics, weave you
into each tapestry. You are a message meant to die

in mouths. The King beheads anyone who knows your
truth. I just need

creamy paper, your fingerprints, your irises telling me time. I forgot
how to read. I memorized your blood vessels and

poured them out like milk from my bosom. Paper-
made tombs in every color. The sky

taunted us back then. The King’s
crown, smaller now. The painters learned your curves, and

angles, and lies and passed them onto me in alabaster
jars I smashed on the first day. I learned how to find you in whispers.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Molly Likovich is a poet, educational documentarian and BookTuber. She has a BA in English with a concentration in Creative Writing from Salisbury University. She is the producer and writer of the docu-series, Hidden History, the founder and editor of the online zine, The Elephant Ladder, and her poetry has appeared in publications such as The New Mexico Review, Bluestem and Rust + Moth.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Tyler Truman Julian

I wait all day for Jeopardy!

once The Price Is Right is done
because the next show
is a soap and a bad one.
Wheel starts at 6 and I
always get the answers
wrong. So it just plays
in the background while I cook
and drink, beer
until it’s late enough to drink
something harder, and that’s maybe
after Wheel, 6:30, Jeopardy!
and that’s what I’ve waited for,
some sort of danger, and by then
I’m a little drunk and drinking whiskey,
answering answers with their questions:
What is drunk? I ask. What is loneliness?
And the answer: Experience.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Tyler Truman Julian is originally from Wyoming, though he currently resides in Mesilla, NM, with his wife. He is an MFA Candidate in New Mexico State University's fiction program and is the Managing Editor for Puerto del Sol. His work has been published in Burnt Pine Magazine, Oasis, Wyoming Magazine, Cigar City Poetry Journal, Barren Magazine, and his full-length poetry debut, Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer), is available from Finishing Line Press. For more information, visit his website: tylertrumanjulian.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joshua Young

Weekends of Sound

We huff through the neighborhood. we look for
traces of you, give you the shit we think you
deserve. pathways of mirror-cracks & ladder-
frost. this headache is a hallway, metronomic.

plough the cabinet for hours, in the particle
board & salt-spill. you have rows of VHS on
your bathroom floor. we will strip in the fog &
cut through it, between the dead lawn & chain-

link, just ferns & cedar branches. this storm is in
a hurry. the freeway drone of engines, the couch
is quiet, your body is sinking.  generations will
erase what you laid, casket. the planter boxes are

sprouting skylines. if there is only one stoplight,
then the tides will leave a forest, the grange, the
occasional punk show. this is common
knowledge. the boats do not belong to us, but

they will remain in wait—who cut the brakes to
our bikes. I want your entrance back. I want
your shoes. the crowd surges—you’ll show me
the bruises collected on your calves. this was

not sexual, but I was moved. you wanted to take
skyline photos, & the moon slit a hole in the
surface, as though the river’s stopped chugging,
& there’s something youthful about waking, &

wanting to see. this modern age left hours ago,
so obsessed with trying to hook the past & reel
it the moment anchors, but your sister keeps
talking about that ship that surfaced

in the harbor, & your father keeps talking about
the axis the world is barely balancing on, & your
wife keeps telling you to stop forgetting the
grocery bags, & he doesn’t care about the depth

of your pockets, you’re still a fuck-up. the parking
spots barely hold us—the garage-steam, that
hum & roar. home is just through those giraffe
necks & cranes of the shipyard. sleep, my son,

we will be too far out to see their expressions. I
want to know how many skeletons rest in this
concrete & what each death meant. it takes
hours for the ambulance to arrive. there is

a pride of boys talking—blood brothers. a
collection of rodent bones, that is a carcass on
the swing set—the gulls are at it. our neighbors
put your father’s guitar to pieces.

neighborhood cats following, calling after us.
the heron stalks, & you said your cats delivered
baby rabbits—I’m as curious as you are. cross
the lawn, baby in your arms, & the needle’s

shadow covers the basketball court. inside, the
bedroom-light dampens, the freeway seizes &
you yawn when the room is pregnant. the desk
cracks at the center & I know you’ll say

otherwise, but I can see the exhaustion in your
eyelid-flutter. we ask the wrong questions there
are bird-baths all over the lawn, again. I want to
say Ballard, but I’m thinking shoreline & pellets

of salt. grocery bags caught in the sewer drain,
dark clouds over the peninsula, & you're a few
hours late, asking what is your legal obligation. I
want to feel contempt when I say this name, but

there’s nothing surfacing anymore: it didn’t have
to spin the way it went—the rabbit hole is
flooded, but it didn’t matter. my mother says,
you can’t be a democrat & be a christian.

around the pool table laughter kicks forward,
over the piano & record static. you want
another story about Cruces, there's dust in my
teeth, glass in my shoes. at different times

in our lives, we've been here, our families
making scenes on the shore. tree-lights were
flickering & the bouncer at the club blew smoke
in our faces, told us to move on. a band inside
throws

cassettes into crowds. see the telecaster shadow,
boys will blow out windows—Aberdeen is a
collection of dim lights & salted air. have you
heard of Hoquiam? cross that bridge, Cobain

didn’t matter to us then, there was a storm &
we wanted to watch

the waves collide with the breakers.

where does this opening get me—

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joshua Young

The Can’t See

The shoreline carves its way up
into the next state.

Let’s pretend we’re scientists
& not indulge in conjecture—

Give me the density of your understanding
in the morning, describe the implications.

We deal with it,
don’t we?

When I feel a moment & its silent
& my brain is quiet, I’m gonna write something.

I gotta get going but the headlight
keeps flickering & the road is lined with cops.

See, the way a film flights a hallway
feels fake till the horses come.

Sometimes, a blurry photography tells us more
about a person than a fully-lit close up—

this blood & emotion is visceral.
Bone in the rockwall, mass in the shadow.

Idealism like a dirty window,
coffee breath & seagulls yakking over the alley.

Lapse of judgment extended for years.
Recycle your last ditches,
talk to me about this bone shard.

What have you decided?
What have I allowed?

How many times will you strike me
before I leave?

Excuses I stack up to defend you
& for what? Another layer of blame?

There’s a good reason why a lot of people
Watch Netflix & never make anything.

I’m not sure what that is, but it’s heavy.

In the first year of our marriage, I walked around
the apartment with my hands over my ears.

*

I like these little frictions.
Flare in the window, I can see my face—
only space & color.
Outside Seattle unfolds into October—
the train speaker is static for two sentences.
What can happen between a sentence?
What can happen between two people?
I keep dancing around it,
but I’ve lost count of all the times I was struck.
Everything happens between a sentence.
Everything is another way to record
the loss we can no longer speak
or the joy we craft inside a comma.
So what now—now that it’s final
& I’m out & answers are always
the most disappointing part of recovering.

*

Through the wall
a piano trickles through
a melody.
I half-knew—

Trust doesn’t mean the same thing to everyone.

Feelings sometimes drive trucks into crowds.

When a lover touches you
for the first time it feels
like the world is humming.

Being angry is OK.
It’s what you do with it that matters.

I remember cleaning pizza off the doorway,
watching a squirrel claw its way into the apartment.

I was so tired to do anything.
When it saw me it froze
& I said, yeah, me too.

*

What is poetry without constraints?
The heave of my chest
when summer touches down.
When you carved a person out of your life,
the narratives get cloudy.
I can’t even look at the notes I took.
What we do for what we think is love.
We should’ve known.
John Cage was fired—
Success is relative.
Pull me from the helplessness,
water brings me back to safety.
I’m afraid of the wilderness of doubt.
I just want a conversation about
what fairness looks like.
In here, together we can make.
Sometimes it ends well.
Sometimes you leave broken doors
in alley way when you move out
hoping the landlord forgets.
A car coughed, sounded
like an airplane landing.
The bridge stretches across a dead river.
The clouds keep killing the day’s aperture.
I grasp the good parts & dear god,
what a collection of perception—
witnesses call it fiction.
A piano chord still rings out.
So what of it?



A new you enters a poem.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joshua Young is a poet, playwright and multimedia artist living in Seattle. He is the author of six collections, most recently, Psalms for the Wreckage (Plays Inverse 2017) and was recently awarded a grant from the Reva and David Logan Foundation for his multimedia work. His films have played at Seattle International, Athens International, Toronto Independent and Montreal International Black Film Festival, among others. He works at Cornish College of the Arts. joshuabrianyoung.com

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katie Chavatel

Issue 2 Art

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katie Chavatel is from Baltimore, MD and graduated from the University of Delaware with a BFA. She works mostly in mixed media and currently lives in Fenwick Island, DE where she works as a middle-school art teacher.