Issue 6 Full Text

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Catherine Pierce

Dear Place, I Ask So Much

Canyon me. Ravine me. Redwood me,
roots deep to the wet center. Limb me

cloudward. Fan me out alluvial
and unabashed. My soft heart sediment.

My hard heart anthracite. Lagoon me.
Lava me. Lake me sprawling and still.

Dear beasts in the tar pits, these millennia!
Dear glass-cased specimens, how little we knew!

I dream a tattoo, a cerulean speck
on my forearm: our planet from four billion

miles away. Trench me deep, O
earth-and-more. Volcano me to sky

or under sea. High desert me.
Dell and dune me. Hurricane me

homeward. Whitecap me out
of my small fretting, magnolia me

away from what mires. Oh home-of-lynx,
home-of-grackle, home-of-frog-and-fox.

What incantation can I weave for you?
What spell can I spin to glacier you

again blue and unending?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Pierce

Gestational Size Equivalency Chart

Your baby is the size of a sweet pea.
Your baby is the size of a cherry.
Your baby is the size of a single red leaf
in early September. Your baby is the size
of What if. The size of Please Lord.
The size of a young lynx stretching.
Heat lightning. A lava lamp.
Your baby is the size of every dream
you’ve ever had about being onstage
and not knowing your lines. Your baby
is the size of a can of Miller Lite.
Apple-picking. Google. All of Google.
Your baby is also the size of a googol,
and also the size of the iridescence
at a hummingbird’s throat. Your baby
is the size of a bulletproof nap mat.
Cassiopeia on a cold night. The size
of the 1.5-degree rise in ocean temps
between 1901 and 2015. Your baby
is the size of the lie you told your mother
the night before Senior Skip Day, and
also the size of the first time you saw
a whale shark glide by, its gray heft
filling the tank’s window, and also
the size of just the very best acorn.
Your baby is the size of the Mona Lisa.
The size of the Louvre. The size
of that moment in “Levon” when
the strings first kick in. Your baby
is the size of a baby-sized pumpkin.
A bright hibiscus. A door. Your baby
is the size of the Gravitron, and your fear
the first time you rode it that your heart
might drop right through your body,
and then your elation when it didn’t,
when the red vinyl panels rose and fell
and you rose and fell with them.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Pierce

Baste the Bear

(with lines from The Boy’s Own Book, by William Clarke, 1829)

In this game, the bear is a boy
who sits on a stone. A rope

wraps his waist; at the end
is his keeper. The other boys

strike the bear with handkerchiefs
and the keeper must tag them

without letting go the rope
or unseating the boy. The player

so touched takes the place of the bear.
A fact about handkerchiefs

is that they’re alchemical: lily-soft
when open, cudgeled when knotted

and flung. The boys know by now
that magic is a child’s confection,

but here is a kind they can trust.
The small welts rise as evidence.

Again and again the boys strike.
When finally the bear is freed,

his relief makes him merciless.
He flings his white whip

at the new bear. The sun sinks
and rinses the yard red

and the boys play on and on.
Being bear once, or even oftener,

does not exonerate a player,
if fairly touched, from becoming so again.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Catherine Pierce

The Elements

(with lines from The Girl’s Own Book, by Lydia Maria Child, 1834)

In this game, the girls sit in a circle.
One tosses a handkerchief at another

and calls Air! or Earth! or Water!
and the other must answer quickly

with a proper animal—goshawk,
beetle, whale. If the person fails to speak

quick enough, a forfeit must be paid.
It’s a lively time—the white cloth’s

velocity, the gasping panic
of forgetting every swimming thing.

The girls love the gasping, how it
aches their lungs, makes their hearts

race like the black terrier when he
bullets to the fields beyond the yard.

Their laughter rends the close air.
The girls call Oriole! Tiger! They’ll pay

no forfeit. No one comes to hush
them, not yet. Their older sisters

are stitching in the parlor.
Their older sisters are marrying.

Soon the veal cutlets. Soon
the trousseau. Already the girls know

how to stitch straight, how to coax
the dust from the deepest corner.

Asleep by the hearth, the terrier
stretches. If any one player calls out

“Fire!” everyone must keep silence,
because no creature lives in that element.

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Catherine Pierce is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia 2016); her new book, Danger Days, is forthcoming in October 2020. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry, the New York Times, American Poetry Review, the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day series and elsewhere, and has won a Pushcart Prize. A 2019 NEA Fellow, she co-directs the creative writing program at Mississippi State University.
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Kim Harvey

Sometimes I Imagine You Survived

I see you, not in the home where we grew
up, but in a one-room shack in the hollows

of Appalachia with a glimmering glass eye
that you refer to as your bauble, and you

wear a patch on the other side and read
the Bible in Braille, reciting scripture

to drifters and junkies and runaways,
all of which means your heart never

went to the stranger in New York
and he never had that last Christmas

with his kids before his body rejected it,
because somehow the bullets

ricocheted just right and you won
the pinball game of your life and it only

cost you your sight, is how you like to tell it,
stroking your long beard holding a walking

stick as we argue about God and you heat
split-pea soup in an iron pot over an open

flame after we walk your dogs, a Doberman
named Horse and a Great Dane you call

Danger, and whenever the clock shows 10:10,
the month and day you died, I silently

toast you with my second coffee; 10:10, our lives
separated by two red dots, not even a solid line,

just flickering points on a vertical plane
that we slip through from time to time.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Harvey

Ars Poetica: What I Discovered in the Pandemic

“Thirsty people will find shiny things beautiful,”
Something Jane Hirshfield said on Science Friday. Poets
are magpies collecting images, scraps of words, a turn

of phrase overheard then tucked away for future use.
Random facts, like the first woman to cycle around the world
learned to ride a bike just hours before she set off.

Vervet monkeys make different sounds to warn of leopards,
eagles & snakes. One shriek sends the other monkeys scurrying,
another has them gazing skyward or down at their feet.

A title I keep in my back pocket: Now a Low-Grade Fever.
Something Heather said in Napa when we were delirious
from so little sleep, so much poetry & wine. “You are the power.”

Another line that hasn’t found its time. What I’ve seen
on my way to work: pink poster about a missing puppy,
text alert—missing senior, someone’s sofa on the curb.

I once had a sofa like that, the first one I bought as an adult.
Trump Sucks, carved into the sidewalk. Did you know
a jellyfish has no brain & a cuttlefish has three hearts?

I learned that while riding BART, something I never thought I’d miss.
    Bowie said artists were the original false gods. Remember
this: dogs need amino acids like taurine, cysteine & methionine.

You never know when you’ll want to use that in a line.
     The things I carried through the pandemic.
Or the things that carried me. Maybe all poems are questions.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Harvey

Self-Portrait as 1973

I am an Antarctic toothfish,
blissed-out and cash-strapped.

I swim through the moonroof
of your vanpool, slick with
triclosan, barbed as razor

wire, iridescent caudal fin
writhing, flutter-sleeved.

I taste like caipirinha:
lime, sugar, rum. I thrum
like a slurve sliding home.

I am a gamma-ray bursting
and collapsing in deep space.

You can freeze-fracture me.
You can closed-caption me.
You can fact-check me.

I am a factoid, an excimer laser
of deniability. I am ultraviolet.

I rise in-kind. I am done.
Fork-tender, fork-tongued.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Kim Harvey

Transit/ory

a Golden Haibun after Dickinson’s “I Felt a Funeral, in My Brain”

this train      silver ghost moaning       oblong       box               here I
sit      motionless rushing            lump of              endings numbly felt
                    not a plane                 Gladstone.                20 years        a
different street        same name            brother’s body        another funeral
    a kind of transportation.              another                     box               in
                call me                  alive                      every minute my
scarlet              skin              sing                              lung, spleen, brain -
               pulse,      bloom.                                                        fall and
       toward  –                                   don’t call us mourners
We           ushers ushering.                                                           to
     depart       carry                ing        gate                                       water and
blood. We          the bodies we loved                          itself, limitless         fro -
     world        next.            word for                fleeting    what can’t be kept
                                                                                                   treading
                                                                                           treading

                                                                                               it
                                                                                  seemed
                                        one of those movies
                                     with no ending, celluloid
                                          faces melting and –

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Kim Harvey is a queer SF Bay Area poet and an Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net awards. You can find her work in Barren Magazine, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, Poets Reading the News, Radar, Rattle, SWWIM, trampset and elsewhere. She is the 1st Prize winner of the Comstock Review’s 2019 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award and the 3rd Prize winner of the 2019 Barren Press Poetry Contest. She has two microchaps forthcoming this summer from Kissing Dynamite Press and Ghost City Press. Follow her on Twitter: @kimharveypoet & Instagram: @lunajack. Web: www.kimharvey.net.
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Beth Gylys

A Constant Wish to Be Asleep

I don’t have you to talk to
about you. That is one

problem among many, like eating:
not what, but how to stop.

Seems every time I pay attention,
another thing I can’t tell you:

black puppy with pink collar,
its ecstatic wiggling wag,

or the elegant stranger who I offered
an arm, dragging one leg on her way

to a baby shower—her plum
lipstick, her pebbled wool suit.

Things you would have noticed.
I’d like to think—but doubt—

you know.  Here’s another:
thoughts. I tongue them like something

between my teeth. They slip free,
a fistful of seeds, but do not

grow or sprout. They disintegrate,
but never slowly. I want to

remember your hands. Here’s one
more: I can’t describe the sound

of disappearing. Whenever I try,
you are no longer there to hear.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gylys

Tilted toward Bad Ends

All of it wrong, off, the paint
spilling onto the baseboard,
the table stained too dark,
some stale smell in the pantry
with no source. Your ass
keeps getting bigger, you think,
and look again in the mirror
as if that’s going to help.
Words slip from your brain.
You say soap instead of banana.

Though everyone argues it’s not
true, you know you’re lazy. Everyone
doesn’t get it. You think about that
and think about that: how you could
help them understand, spelling it
in all caps, or standing on a chair,
waving your arms like a conductor.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gylys

Remembering the Drowned Darlings

When we try to read, their bloated
bodies emerge like bad songs.
Their faces look alarmingly
like our own, but old, older,
what we didn’t bear to think of
when we were twelve teetering
on rocks across streams, or poking
blades of grass at our pet turtles.

We are so busy the lettuce already
moldering in the vegetable drawer,
thin skim of dust on the dresser,
a dirty bowl—always a reason to
turn away, until something: a lip
like a gorged worm or the draped
remains of decaying leaves
hooked over an elbow like a scarf.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Beth Gylys

Faces

I have loved so badly, there are holes
where there should be pillows.
I travel widely and regularly
to avoid getting stuck. My disguises
are expert—no paper mache,
no Elmers. Peek behind the mask
to find another mask, another.
If you put your hands into the divots,
they will emerge black-sticky—
they will smell of something dead.
Irreconcilable, my legs go numb
with nowhere to stand.  If I stare
down into where I’ve been down
I never stop falling. So I don’t.

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Beth Gylys is an award-winning poet and professor of creative writing at Georgia State University. Her 4th collection of poetry, Body Braille, was recently released by Iris Press. Her other books include Sky Blue Enough to Drink, Spot in the Dark, and Bodies that Hum; she has also published two chapbooks, Matchbook and Balloon Heart. Her work has appeared in Rattle, Barrow Street, Paris Review, Verse Daily and many other journals and anthologies.
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Joshua Garcia

Wet Dream

It wasn’t until I forgot and then remembered,
until their shapes turned like a room through the bottom of a glass,

that I started to question the way I remember things—
the words I still feel hard against the back of my neck. Two boys

pushed me into a bedroom. I’m unsure how far, the memory marked
only by the doorframe, the coming and the going,

and the smell of rain on a human face.
I’ll never use the word queer to name myself, I said,

unable to discern the virtue of ambiguity. How could I after
hearing the way it spilled from their mouths? (I remember their mouths.)

My tongue passes over each of his pictures with a supplicatory please
until dew breaks across all the lawns on my street. I wonder if

it really was him who Sharpied fag on my locker. How easy
it would be to get swept into the spill. I could wash up on Kiawah Island

colorful as any shell of lilac, vermillion, or slate. But I wrap the Q’s tail
in my hand like a rope and pull myself toward the barrel of it, buoying

in the swell, knocking into it with the lift of each wave until again,
again I am breathed back against the not knowing.

I wake and my hand reaches to check, not for the memory itself
but for what remains.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Joshua Garcia

Evacuation

The crepe myrtles are still blushing
with good fortune on Coming Street
where traffic has emptied to the escape
routes rivering east. Today has quieted
with yesterday’s evacuation orders
and news of the Bahamas’ mounting death toll.
CNN shows chest-deep water pooling
from two days’ wind lancing Freeport
like the skateboarder who zips past me,
sinuous and long, one leg planted
beneath him and the other striking
and floating. Striking and floating,
my chest follows as if caught on lure
and line, rippling in the shade of palmettos.
On King Street the bells of St. Matthews
sound off time unattended to, except
by men shouting at a construction site
outside the cafe where I stop for an americano.
A sparrow lands on my table in prey
of a fallen offering, and across from me
a woman leans back under a ginkgo, eyes
boarded up to thoughts of a ransacked city.
Together, as the bells toll on, we slacken
into little fevers if only to savor the still
hot sun through trees unheavied by rain
and warming our faces. How good to look up
at the run of vine on the lattice, to chance on
the god-made and what man made
intermingled, and all of it waiting.

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Joshua Garcia lives and writes in Charleston, South Carolina, where he is pursuing an MFA in poetry at the College of Charleston and is an editorial assistant at Crazyhorse. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hobart, Bodega, Ruminate Magazine and elsewhere.
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Sara Moore Wagner

On Letting Go

No one taught us the word meconium
except related to the birth of our own children,
that brown sticky tar in their intestines
we’d watch for then sigh, the baby
is alright. When the painted lady butterflies
we’ve tended hatch from their chrysalises,
that red liquid, blood-like and thin
is also meconium. It pools on the paper
towel we placed at the bottom of the netting,
and it’s the same, actually, as our babies’
metabolic waste expelled from the abdomen.
I am afraid of anything leaving,
even the leftovers of metamorphosis.
Even the last bit of pigment
collecting in the stomach.
What a loss when the wings harden
and it’s such a nice day we feel bad
if we don’t let them go, six speckled
babies we place gingerly on the tree branch.
Around us, warblers, sparrows, orioles,
we know their names and their calls, can
spot them hungry in the sky.

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Sara Moore Wagner lives in West Chester, OH with her husband and three small children. She is the recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation award and the author of the chapbook Hooked Through (Five Oaks Press, 2017). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in many journals including Poet Lore, Waxwing, The Cincinnati Review and Nimrod, among others. She has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net.
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Kristi Maxwell

Moons

It was the kind of night
where stars had nothing
to say, muted by industry.
We call it light pollution.
It’s hard to think
of light littering
anything, wads
of light, the sun
itself a cup
lid detached
from the full
cup of sky.
It’s invented light
that wounds, carving
night’s moles right
off its skin, without
need or permission, knowing
full well the stars weren’t going
to turn cancerous. Not the first
time caution has been used
to justify a violence.
An article clings to its
noun like a needy light.
What spotlight isn’t
though. That
beam has always
been a straw
we’re drawn up
despite a stubborn
viscosity, a budgeless-
ness. I wonder at the dark
day. When we’ll learn
we’ve exhausted our budget
of light. I hear already what
we’ll say. Let’s just make more.
As if we could boss the factory of stars.

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Kristi Maxwell is the author of seven books, including My My (Saturnalia Books, 2020) and Bright and Hurtless (Ahsahta Press, 2018). She is an assistant professor of English at the University of Louisville.
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Dillon Thomas Jones

nine

inside the teachers lounge at paddock road elementary school one
of the billowing twin towers on good morning america looks like
my mom hard shifting gears smoking a camel cigarette late for school

just after the second morning bell a plane the size of a horse fly
glides into the other tower mrs favors & principal mitchel gasp
but im not fooled by clumsy special effects fireballs like that

only happen in die hard why would those people jump if
mom says their hearts will burst before they survive the fall
no morning announcements mrs woodland turns on cnn

says theres been a terrorist attack on america terrorists are bad
people who hurt innocent people but were safe in nebraska
in fact president bush was on his way it was so safe shes crying

she cries the whole day we watch cnn says everything will be okay
only brown nosers tommy john & tabitha believe her todays
lesson is what links all americans big small black white etc

an opaque coil of tension strung through the lower belly that day
on the playground blacktop we played towers & terrorists
tommy john & tabitha played the two planes slash terrorists
i played the first tower smoking my mothers camel cigarette

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Dillon Thomas Jones is a writer living in Pittsburgh, PA. He holds a BA in English (Creative Writing) from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Pittsburgh. He writes poetry, fiction and cultural criticism about television, film and books. His first book of poetry, a study of frustration, will be published by word west press in early 2021. A 2021 Cave Canem Fellow, his work has appeared in Yemessee, The Indianapolis Review, Coal Hill Review and is forthcoming in The Iowa Review. He is currently at work on a memoir about growing up the adopted and black only son of a white single mother in Omaha, NE. Contact him at dillon.jones6@gmail.com.
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Matthew Bruce

Scene

We cut now
to lakeside,
folks. Girl
in white
holds white
daisies and the sun
spills diamonds
on the lake.
The wind
is patient,
waiting. We wait
with the wind. If
only this would end
with waiting.

The sun
is too bright:
white glare
like dying.
The girl plays
with daisies
alone.
The scene
screams OMEN
for all its homage
to the dead
era of silent
screens. But this
is the Age of Screams.

The monster comes
lumbering in
black tatters. The sun
is a sadistic spotlight
and the girl is not
of age. She gives
the monster a daisy.
Wind fondles
the petals, kisses
the brick face
of the monster
with fragrance
and the monster
smiles.

The girl takes
her tall friend's
green hand
and they kneel
at the lakeside.
She plucks daisies
and the friend
gazes at her
small white hands,
smiling
when she smiles,
laughing
when she laughs.

Folks, do not laugh
or crack a smile
when the girl in white
tosses daisies
into the lake
and the monster
imitates and the daisies
bob and spin
in zoom
on the lake of crushed
diamonds and the monster
runs out of flowers
to toss but grasps
a human logic: white
is white is white
and white floats
with ease — sunlit,
soft white.

The monster seizes
the girl who screams
as the stirred thing
heaves her
into the lake. She
refuses to glide,
spin like a daisy
in the soft white fire
called sun. Water
breaks. The white
dress blooms
as the girls goes
under. The monster cries
out. Wind pulls a cloud-
shroud over the lake
in cool ripples.

The monster screams.
Enemies close in.
The monster flees
this bucolic scene
not in terror
of being caught
but in sad error,
duped by the literal
new human world
that sinks poetry,
where white does not
make a girl a daisy
or daisy make her
float but monster
can settle blame
and scream
is everything
that remains
under the quiet
sun.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Matthew Bruce's writing can be found in The Adroit Journal, The Common, Sixth Finch, West Branch, The Cincinnati Review, Bayou and The Carolina Quarterly, among others. Originally from Atlanta, he now lives, more or less, in Minneapolis.
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Lorrie Ness

Body Cartography

I know body in terms of permission,
every part sounding like my mother’s voice
yes-ing / no-ing. She had a judgement
for every sort of flesh. A gridmap
anchored by place. My mother was first
to survey and break my skin
into zones. My whole body
became a cartography of borders.
I’ve lost my way on this map
where every town shares two names.
No label for the gully where collarbone
blends with shoulder. Her schematics
ignore how touching my neck
is felt in my thighs. When I asked her
about my lips, she had no lessons
for the body’s homonyms.
Both of them yes? Both of them no?
It’s her voice I hear when my body is hungry,
grinding its way through the night.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Lorrie Ness

She Spoke with Urgency

we construct our histories         with words
vaguely wet upwellings          of the throat
if each voice                  is a maker’s mark
hers was the sound        of chestnuts steaming
meat hissing          inside their shells

she asked to talk           so that I would listen
pressing my ear             over a tender seam
released her pressure                 left my lobe
scalding pink              she told me what’s swallowed
no longer burns                   inside the belly

language is unskinned           once it is spoken
leaving the mouth               raw and blistered
she closed her lids                   shutting off their valves
to give her voice full volume         fearing her eyes
would syphon away                  stories meant for her lips

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Lorrie Ness is an emerging poet working in Virginia. Her work can be found at Palette Poetry, THRUSH Poetry Journal, Typishly and various other journals. In 2019 she was nominated for a Best of the Net Award by Sky Island Journal.
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C.C. Russell

Translation of the Fourth Section (Part Three)

And so for you it ended
with the sound of jumping—
a rope and its rhythmic slap
against concrete
through the window pane.

You are alone
in a hotel room.

The heft and weight of this.

A concrete thumping.

I see you writing this note
that will never go back
to being a poem.

You are alone in a hotel room.
You are drinking.

Outside of the window,
the scraping of a leaf, its repentance
repeated against the sill
in time to the rope.

For you, it is finished.

The weight, the weight thereof.

You are alone,
this hotel room.

For you, this is finished.
It ended with this.

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C.C. Russell has published his poetry and prose in such journals as The Meadow, New York Quarterly, The Colorado Review and Whiskey Island among others. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net and is included in Best Microfiction 2020. He lives in Wyoming with a couple of humans and several cats. You can find more of his work at ccrussell.net.
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Travis Truax

The Word Missouri Means Those Who Dug Canoes (and Carried On)

There’s this perfect cliff above the Missouri River,
where I wait and wait for meaning. The old forgotten
drift of steamboats. The mess of down cottonwoods.
Anyone here can read the plaques and point to birds,
but I want something built anew, something to uncollapse,
to shake back into place. This riverside used to mean
new life ahead. Now the banks are riddled with nothing
but hope gone missing. Nothing but the rocky possibility
of carefully looking back. What happened here, what
became: just another swiftly imagined city the railroad
failed. So now the big river passes only more retired barns,
more private ranches. Is it living history if the absence
weighs more than memory? More than the myth?

________________________________________________________________________________________

Travis Truax

Movement

In some lonely landscape between
place and heart. Not quite memory,
not quite tomorrow. What I trace
are folded creases across a country
of rivers. So many streams the years
are now patterns I’ve lost track of.
Movement is never made of pure gold.
Or grit. Or grace. There’s disaster
in so many stories. So many mistakes
shaken free by packing up the car and
pointing west. The Donners met their end
in the early winter of the High Sierras,
testing luck against better judgement.
Just like that, a pattern can turn away
from home, and home can turn inside out.
From Pikes Peak, it’s a thin line of
ant-like minutia as a million cars collapse
across the plains, dropping off the cusp
of Colorado only to find movement is made
of mostly questions. What’s gone?
What’s still going?

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Travis Truax grew up in Virginia and Oklahoma and spent most of his twenties working in various national parks out west. A graduate of Southeastern Oklahoma State University, his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Salamander, Quarterly West, Bird's Thumb, The Pinch, Colorado Review and Phoebe. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.
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Stanley Princewill McDaniels

Blind Colouration

In the dream there was the dream, then
there was the scattering wind, then
there was what the wind
scattered, at which point becomes more & more
indistinguishable, hard to separate the dream from
what happened, harder still
to lay finger to, hold hostage –
& then comes the feeling of not knowing where to
go to, not having where to go to, being water sipping
into the ground, how the ground absorbs you, takes you in
like the prodigal,
& having to watch your life on a train
go in front of you, cabin by cabin, while the dream
kept changing: there was the dream; now
the wind – I have nothing left to say
to the world anymore.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Stanley Princewill McDaniels is a Nigerian poet & 2016 Ebedi International Writers' Residency fellow whose poems have appeared or are forthcoming on Brittlepaper, African Writer, Lunaris Review, Kalahari Review, Bakwa Magazine, Bombay Review, Praxis Magazine, Tuck Magazine amongst others. He lives & roams & drifts...away, away from the harder things.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Njoku Nonso

The Harvesting of Grief

I must be born specially for this kind of dying.
Teach me how to teethe all the boundless skin

of my grief & not break open into sad eulogies,
a small, fragile thing put into the grave

of my mouth like a Mercy. Something bad
must happen, but to whom? Halved by a predator's

basic instinct, a man walks into an empty parkland,
hungry for what slithers through the peephole

of a coffin, & strips naked. There's no God
watching us, he says. He pours ten litres of fuel

over his head & drowns in a sea of shouting fire.
This is how I know what the thirst for happiness

can become when not severed, cut off
like a rotting arm, the ancient theory of loving

a body hard enough to kill it. How long we have
waited for a speeding train, the hot tongue

of a bullet, to save us from this world of
unquenchable thirsts? Nobody knows where

this poem ends because it moves in the direction
of the wind the way a balloon takes up to the sky

________________________________________________________________________________________

Njoku Nonso

A Brief Teething of Grace

I warned you about crossing the border.
The red door stood between your skeleton

of a man & what gave the sea its beauty,
the blackness of it all. You said someone

had waved at you from the six feet depth
of that murky water, tiny, pianoing hands

raised against the blue, frozen sky,

& you believed there must be a lacquered box
of ruptured stars breathing under-water,

waiting for the longest stretch of your hands.
Like a dog reaching for its leash, you'd dropped

a slice of red meat & a befitting hook into the sea's
boundless skin, knees bruised from praying

for a fish to kiss it salvation, a brief teething
of grace. At the road's glorious end: a father

gifting a son a knife, a live fish writhing over
the kitchen wooden table like a fresh heart

nailed to cross. This is not the parable of the knife,
but of the fish who knows the end is near

& reachable when it's caught, like a special kind
of memory: a stray, whalish wolf licking its paw

in predatory wait. Knows this is how memory
grows dead through seeking a home that's

not yours, that can never be yours.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Njoku Nonso is a Nigerian Igbo-born fiction writer, poet, essayist, and medical student, who lives and writes in/from Ojoto as a tribute to the spirit of Christopher Okigbo. His works are featured or is forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Animal Heart Press, Palette, Kissing Dynamite, Praxis and elsewhere. He's currently working on his first poetry chapbook.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Rodoni

Time Capsule: Days of Ash from Elsewhere

And the indoor play

gets darker. Dolls fever-red,               leech-bled. Pocked radiant

with Crayola.
Tissue-wrapped, bed-ridden.

Dolls maimed in scissor-jaws,            monster claws, the moon’s

mute maw.      Dolls slack in the back

of a speeding ambulance.

Vampire-attacked. Raptor-                 slashed, stripped                     and hacked.

Vanished for the bluest hour.

Searched for, forsaken.           The game hangs

on my daughter’s whim

which today tips toward
salvation. We dredge the quarry,

salt the leeches thin. Undress                         the wounds, redress the torsos

in sequin and chiffon. We reattach

the limbs, press every head                back on. We raise the dead.

Understand?
We raise them.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Erin Rodoni is the author of two poetry collections: Body, in Good Light and A Landscape for Loss. Poems have recently appeared in Blackbird, The Adroit Journal, The Rumpus and Fairy Tale Review. Honors include the Montreal International Poetry Prize and a Ninth Letter Literary Award.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Phillip Sterling

Black and Red

If I were a noun,
July would be my sentence
and we would state
the obvious:

The cat’s in the barn.

Foolishly, it would seem,
July so straightfaced
and redundant, a month
without a sense of humor

(unlike November,
that Rube Goldberg,
answering the foolish
with more foolishness:

“The cat’s in the barn?”
“No, she’s
diving for quarters
in the water trough”).

What choice do I have
as a noun? Cat? Barn?
I’m bored, says the boy
who’d rather be a verb,

even a sedentary one
(if there is such a thing,
to be no longer trending
on any of his media).

A cat prowls the barn,

it seems, flavors the month
remarkably. Which is all
to say how tired I am
of the neighbors—

those abject adjectives—
their incessant music
and laughter, their
cicadan lawn equipment,

their happy splashing
in the blow-up kiddie pool . . .
Why, even our tomatoes
in their mute complacency

wish the cat were tawny
or tortoiseshell, the barn
painted in some shade
other than the one it is.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Phillip Sterling’s books include two full-length collections of poetry (And Then Snow, Mutual Shores) and five chapbook-length series of poems, the most recent of which, Short on Days, will be released from Main Street Rag in 2020. He is also the author of two collections of short fiction:  In Which Brief Stories Are Told (Wayne State U Press 2011) and Amateur Husbandry, a series of micro-fictions narrated by the domestic partner of a yellow horse (Mayapple 2019).
________________________________________________________________________________________

William Doreski

Self-Shedding, Ending with a Preposition

Human dust, our own shed cells,
powders us daily forever,
distinguished grime of the world.

How did we become so fragile,
so prone to quiet dissolution?
Does the dust ever become us

again, resuming basic functions?
Or is it debris, spoor, clue
to our most clueless moments?

At dusk the town lights struggle
to illuminate the darkest folds.
Traffic sputters home to house

and child, furniture sulking
after another day of dust.
Someone tries to read a book

as thick as a thigh. Someone pours
a drink the color of starlight.
We crumple into each other

with expressions milked almost dry.
The dust never settles. Lamplight
catches particles breezing

through heated indoor dimensions,
feeling for a surface to smut.
We shed ourselves completely

several times per lifetime. Snow
and rain aren’t so persistent.
Should we be more respectful

of ourselves, and gather our dust
in plastic bags, add water,
and try to clone our modest egos?

Let’s not bother. The lamplight
isn’t entirely honest;
and the town, winking and blinking,

will sneeze and snuffle human dust
until we’ve shed our skins and bared
everything the night sky lusts for.

________________________________________________________________________________________

William Doreski has published three critical studies and several collections of poetry. His work has appeared in many print and online journals. He has taught at Emerson College, Goddard College, Boston University and Keene State College. His most recent books are Water Music and Train to Providence, a collaboration with photographer Rodger Kingston.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Alexandrov

New York

The city, the sacrificial dance.
Our time cropped close to fit.
Vast mouth, stretched streets:
humming well of sound. Circumstance:
scarcity, sacrifice. Talking
and listening replace each other,
the space for silence is filled.
So we replace each other, you and I:
there's not enough for both of us.
Our ornate contest for place
is a dance, a survival routine:
wide well seething, streets brimming,
we dance: replace other
with self, then displace self,
another self, another self...

________________________________________________________________________________________

Emma Alexandrov is an aspiring mind scientist and writer splitting time between Atlanta, GA, Portland, OR, and Poughkeepsie, NY, where she is a junior at Vassar College.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Jay Kophy

A Short Sermon

I cannot say something in my mother tongue
without un-filling my hands with the need
to pick up
a weapon
to rebel

how easy
it is for us
to destroy the things
that have nothing to do with our grief

lately
I've taken to quieting my native voice by translating
the words into less denser ones

to stop myself from turning the taste of home
into a fire that cannot distinguish a frown
from a smile

and translating
I've come to learn is not only the rebirthing
of words but also of self

for example
I became a stranger to the burden
of starvation when I read in English about how
my village leans

on faith for food       instead of plants

is there a way we can unbottle our anger without
becoming the very things we want to flood with our wrath

when the compensation to the victims of a man-made
disaster was not forthcoming

we planted our knees into the earth
and spoke softly in our own clasped hands
to ask for manna to fall into our wounded mouths

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jay Kophy is a Ghanaian poet and writer whose poems have been featured in literary magazines such as Glass Poetry, Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, Eunoia Review, Tampered Press and many others. His poem “If the Body Could Speak” appeared in the second issue of 20.35 Africa's Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. He's also the editor of anthologies to grow in two bodies and How to Write My Country's Name, two collections of poems and short stories from emerging young African writers. You can find him on Twitter @jaykophy.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Ajay Kumar

The Falling

had hair like snakes in a braid
then loose over her face like longitudes
mapping the change in time by degrees.

eyebrow all the trees blurring by
on a train ride to the next station.

the shape of her bones.

tears late rain   the shape of commas
full-stops growing tails like tadpoles
smudged by a wet touch.

not goddess anymore   her name
is muttered half-mouth   the distance
of vowel roundness at a certain age
all the hairfall   the autumn of mouth
& all its sounds going inwards
at the machine of its birth
in a mechanical wave.

the roundness reduces
a rock pebbled in a river.

a soap touched over & over again.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Ajay Kumar lives in Chennai, India, where he's currently pursuing his BA in English Language and Literature from the University of Madras. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Praxis, The Bangalore Review and Vita Brevis among others.
________________________________________________________________________________________

David Greenspan

Language for the needy thing in your lungs

There are countless ways to practice smoking
out of your bedroom window. Perhaps
the most popular is to be sad
and hold a Marlboro Light delicately
between your thumb and index finger
as night is born kicking, harmonica shrill,
full of opossums themselves full of
a tender, dew like sadness. Draw
only occasionally, say once a minute,
and spend the remaining fifty-seven seconds
staring at clouds that look like cat’s feet,
your eyes fat and shining
with something close to nostalgia.
You can replace sad with young,
which is also popular,
though you’ll then have to replace
nostalgia with yearning
(avalanche is acceptable).
This is easier said than done.
You can practice
lounging at your window post-sex,
elbows jutted at a painful angle,
jutted like a humid road climbing
a hill, like an August spent
riding bikes with your best friend
who will one day die though so will you
so why shouldn’t you build the ramp,
play in the crayon rich dirt,
touch each other’s legs
with wonder. After several cigarettes
your elbows will thicken,
your pulse will settle comfortably
between moonstruck and banjo.
Use a pillow to ensure modesty.
Watch out for dog walkers
and, if you happen to live
in a city, bike messengers as well.
You can now move onto advanced techniques,
what we’ll call the Don Draper,
the Amory Blaine. These involve
a certain self centeredness,
a languid slink of body and mood
which is hard to describe in words
(think daffodil and honeysuckle
bent stemmed in a field itself
covered in cough syrup). Your partner
will find this pose repugnant,
but pay them little to no attention.
You’ll want to smoke Kools. You can practice
heartbroken smoking after
your partner stops returning your texts
for obvious reasons. This involves
entire mornings spent nervous,
cold in bed in a bright room
with a cat curled up
close at various times
on your stomach, between your legs,
against the small of your back. It’s difficult
to smoke without bothering the cat,
but remember this is practice.
You’ll fail. The cat will leave with a puff
of disdain. You’ll question
whether you are lovable in any way.
There’s not much to say about these hours.
You may find yourself later on a patch of grass
brimming with cigarette sprouts.
You may find yourself wondering
if you’re more lithium or the hum
of insurance bloated patients
politely discussing the weather.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Greenspan

Portrait of the ocean as a young artist

I’ve been translating the ocean
into thatched straw dolls.
This work isn’t so different
from translating the body,
the hair between my mouth
and nose, the space
between my ears packed
with gnats, the creep
of heart disease my family
seems so fond of. Yes,
I will turn all of this
into many straw dolls.
They will sit with each other,
hold hands, smile,
make polite conversation,
discreetly rub
each other’s thighs
while hundreds of seagulls
above black out
on lust. Oh ocean,
I think in a rest stop bathroom
on the Massachusetts border,
why do you take up so much
poetry? Who was your mother?
What color dress did she wear
to church on the days she went?
Why do you fill lungs so casually?
Is this something I can learn?
Will you teach me? I’ll pay
in straw dolls
made in your likeness,
hundreds of thousands of miles large,
bright as a cigarette and weak
in the knees, scared
only of plastic. Oh ocean,
you wonderful mess, I think
in a rest stop bathroom
covered in graffiti that reads
call the ocean for a good time,
the ocean was (never) here,
the ocean is a myth. Anyway,
it’s getting late and I need to get home
to my pages of your translations,
my piles of straw
heaped and smiling
large as a child. I walk
to my car and think
about rain, your sweet
second cousin once removed,
and how I used to meet her
on boardwalks, in rest stops
like this and oh, ocean,
look at that billboard,
a stupid, lonely picture
of a lemon as real
as the lemon I’m holding right now.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Greenspan is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and serves as Promotions Editor for Slope Editions. His poems have appeared in places like BathHouse Journal, Laurel Review, New South, The Southeast Review, The Sonora Review and others.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolyn Supinka

The Heron

After Elizabeth Bishop

This is the time of year
when the wind combs the trees
with cool, thin fingers to tug
the last leaves loose, like my mother

loosening tangles from the nape
of my neck, and I remember
that negative space exists:
between the shadows of branches,

the mountain’s shoulders. Memory expands
like the ice lacing the pond seeks its limits.
Between the dry bones of fence posts,
empty sky is everywhere.

Once the fog lifts, the fox slips
beneath the bridge, its muddy fur rouged
with blood of the possum lying on the path,
its body opened like a spilled purse.

This morning I stood on the bridge
and the field ahead shuddered
and turned into a flock of geese.
They rose with one mind

in the sky, then scattered,
a gray wave breaking
into a sea, urgently calling
as they spread, to each other

in the same voice.
I wondered what told them
to fly. There had been
no gunshot or blare of traffic

from the highway.
The field was asleep,
unchanged through it all.
It offered no answers.

Its voice was the voice
of a field of grass. I am a field
of grass it said. The fox under
the bridge spoke a dark love

song with its lips of blood.
My thoughts, unbidden, spoke
in my voice, which is also the voice
of my mother. I am your mother

she said. Come home. A heron
remained in the field
and spoke to no one. Its body
was busy in its silence.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolyn Supinka

In Her Hoot

On your birthday we stood in the desert. A horned owl swooped overhead because she was trained to swoop. I wore a big hat because my skin burns easily. We silenced our phones because a sudden ringtone would disturb the bird, send her wheeling away from the observation field into the shimmering desert. The edges of the world curled with heat, and because I wanted you to see how happy I was, I looked at you each time the owl looked at me. Because you asked to see the owl food, we got to see the guts. The owl trainer held out the little white yogurt cup, and the tips of her bare fingers stained and streaked with pink and a purple that felt interior. Because I learned that bald eagles were no longer endangered but gray wolves were nearly extinct, I wanted to see the one pacing the same path in her enclosure again and again. Because I wanted to create an enclosure around this memory of you in the sun, looking at rat guts on the first day of a new decade. Because the owl trainer told us you could learn about an owl from her hoot, who she is, who she’s searching for. Because I was afraid to picture love as a single note shivering across the desert in the night. Because I want to know what you can learn from the sounds I can’t help but make.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carolyn Supinka is the author of the chapbook Stray Gods (2016, Finishing Line Press) and is a writer and visual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She holds an MFA from Oregon State University and was a Fulbright Scholar in Pondicherry, India from 2013-2014. Her work was most recently published in The Sonora Review, Arcturus and The Recluse and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Carlo Rey Lacsamana

Fugitive Poem in the Time of Plague I

It will be a long short story
our gasping century
running out of breath

deep in its hollow ribs a billowing virus
spreads like grass like flames nursed
by the unwashed hands of history

this too is an old story
the panic lockdown the ghost towns
houses shut in fear

the morning music in the air
a moonlight sonata played by three hands
the sick the dying the dead

these days
our only life-saving instrument
is to stand defenselessly on the balcony

to marvel at the unwrinkled beauty of the sky
the divine indifference of its blue
its generous expanse

to glimpse the phantasmagoric faces of our neighbors
behind windowpanes who in our everyday life
we ignore now are radiant as rare stones

to smell the castaway breeze which is sweeter than ever
despite the homeless wails and deserted
landscapes it carries on its back

to admire the ageless rooftops dressed in moss and sunlight
carry the remorselessness of the seasons
and the unfathomed wisdom of birdshit

maybe we are finally learning
learning what is final
the vocabulary of ending

how abandoned we are
in our need for each other
in our unwelcomed solitude

as we wait for the shadow’s death
settle at the dinner table of life
we say our grace

give thanks for bread and wine
for our hushed exile for the measured days
we run in circles

for the campfires in our windows
where we sit by with our eyes wide open
while the stars watch from a corner of the sky

how lucky we are still alive

________________________________________________________________________________________

Carlo Rey Lacsamana is a Filipino born and raised in Manila, Philippines. Since 2005, he has been living and working in the Tuscan town of Lucca, Italy. He regularly writes for journals in the Philippines writing on politics, culture and art. He also writes for a local academic magazine in Tuscany which is published twice a year. Some of his articles and poems have also been published in small magazines in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. Visit his website or follow him on Instagram @carloreylacsamana.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Maya Lowy

Registry

Fox doesn’t use Jump bikes, likes
to pay damp cash. At diners she orders
sides of skinny fries, a beer, the strongest
IPA on tap, or sometimes an Anchor Steam
in the brown bottle. In the DMV she scowls.
She rides a Vespa, or the bus, or jumps
in the back of people’s purple station wagons,
crawls over passenger seats to lean
on back doors that won’t open.
Rarely is she the second one picked up.
She spreads her legs wide in the back,
accepts offerings with a nod. Prefers
not to smoke outside. Ducks at corners
with security cameras, or pulls up her gray hoodie.
She’s got several of these, all the same,
all the same as the ones everyone else has.
Wary of trackers, she downloads no apps,
texts like telegrams. Lists of street corners.
Swiping singles online, you’ll never find her:
no name or confirmed age, unknown miles away,
and in photographs she turns
or lunges so her red-eye ruins the whole shot.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Born and raised in Santa Cruz, California, Maya Lowy received her MFA in poetry at the University of New Orleans in 2016 and currently lives in Bristol, UK. Her work can be found in Bacopa Literary Review, Triggerfish Critical Review, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Infection House and other publications. She tweets @mayalowy.
________________________________________________________________________________________

John Sibley Williams

The Peaches

It’s not that I love them
you said

bruised overripe                      all the sweetness
bled out turning           pulp in the high grass  under

a relentless summer sun
us boys took                to mean an eden

ready for ruin       that we’d ruin the moment our
parents looked away (lost       in their own lost

paradises) no
the story I prefer         you told me that night

our neighbor’s daughter didn’t come home    is
that nectar the bees have worked over tastes

too bitter to not take                into my mouth
(like a man for once)   & own

the way we’ll never own anything
pure again

________________________________________________________________________________________

John Sibley Williams is the author of As One Fire Consumes Another (Orison Poetry Prize, 2019), Skin Memory (Backwaters Prize, University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Summon (JuxtaProse Chapbook Prize, 2019), Disinheritance, and Controlled Hallucinations. A twenty-three-time Pushcart nominee, John is the winner of numerous awards, including the Wabash Prize for Poetry, Philip Booth Award, American Literary Review Poetry Contest, Laux/Millar Prize, Phyllis Smart-Young Prize, Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize and others. He serves as editor of The Inflectionist Review and works as a poetry editor and literary agent. Previous publishing credits include: The Yale Review, North American Review, Midwest Quarterly, Southern Review, Sycamore Review, Prairie Schooner, The Massachusetts Review, Poet Lore, Saranac Review, Atlanta Review, TriQuarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Mid-American Review, Poetry Northwest, Third Coast and various anthologies. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda Pendley

crack me open and I will pour out lemonade

I quarter-turn into a sliver of light
and crack lantern ribs open to half-sun
and there are still coal mines in my chest
but we are slowly extracting the good from me

and I believe the leg extension is an olive branch
and the supporting limb a lamppost
gravity sinks its palms into the soil of a roll-through
in bent knees and back arched in grass tunnel
and I am no longer longing for the absence
of someone to look up to in tree nest

I am origin point of my own shaking feet
there are no more corsets to be forced together
I break without bleeding
willingly

________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda Pendley

honey, rhythm is nothing but a collection

of tinny things from youth that have been held
within the time capsule of a resurrection

and we listen to the bottlecaps clank
and hear glass on teeth and windchimes
made of soda tabs as if it were the very day
we were first cracked open, how we watched
fanta sizzle on concrete as we guzzled it like
helium gas the day we met a girl called
gravity and we went up
and we went up and

we fished out friendship
bracelets and let
the loose threads tickle our wrists and tied
ourselves too tightly together that when we
heard the hiss of the garden hose late one
night we tip-toed up to the spout and watched
the mouth trickle and run down the slope
in two separate directions and our eyes met in
moon glow and we pinky
promised and I still

know that the click of the
flash light means
morse code and when we wanted to go unseen
we would leave messages on the walls with spy
markers that only revealed their words under false
light and the glow in the dark stars we held hostage
in our mouths as they unhinged to become planetarium
and the awe that would slip out wouldn’t be an eraser
of past but it would make the room into something safe
because these four walls knew long before I did that
they would crumble if I so much as pressed mouth
close to keyhole and practiced the art of confession
through incantation instead of

dangled keys held on
necklace chains who knew
who’s tenderness they belonged to, buried below
and heaved so loud as they were dug up from
ground with hands covering muffled
mouths as to not get caught while I
caught my breath as it snuck
out the back door

I was snagged thread on the edge of a
hand-made casket,
and even more so I was the sound of the fabric’s rip
and once the lid closes it will never reopen and once eyes
close they will never reopen and once I am repressed I will
never reemerge until I hear the chime of memory fade into
the prickle of uncut fingernails sliding across ridge and I
breathed in sun and I breathed
and I was music, drumbeat of habit
held in inhale of women in waiting
to resurface

________________________________________________________________________________________

Amanda Pendley is a queer twenty-year-old writer from Kansas City who is currently studying creative writing and publishing at the University of Iowa. Her recent and forthcoming publications include The Hellebore, Vagabond City Lit, Savant Garde Literary Magazine and Storm of Blue Press. She often finds inspiration in Lorde songs, movement and obscure art history.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Dorsía Smith Silva

Dark Matter

They don’t really care about the black bodies that go missing,

Victoria Shaw / Teandah Slater / Areall Murchinson / 36.7%
64,000

snipped beyond the wind-dried dandelions. They’re not like
the loaded discovery of cool candy-cotton exoplanets.

There’s no NASA team to pinpoint their endnote existence on flash bang
satellites. Instead, they are throwaway slick monosyllables,

contorted algorithms, desperate silences that go hungry,
rainwater flecks succumbed to hardwired alleyways,

liquid names cast out in the undertows’ peripheries,
the runoff layer of things brimming in the permanent cages of TON 618.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published in several journals and magazines in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, including Apple Valley Review, Portland Review, Mom Egg Review, Stoneboat, Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender, Culture & Social Justice, Moko Magazine and elsewhere. She is also the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and the co-editor of six books. She enjoys poetry by Joy Harjo, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Rita Dove, and she is currently mastering the art of making rosemary bread and spiced carrot cake.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau

first visit

the train halted & he walked out with everyone.
if you clap your hands together & flap them slowly,
my mother might mistake it for a bird, if you fold
your arms, she could name it after a rebellion. one
night, it rained so hard the winds blew off our roof.
if your papa was home, she cried. the windows open like
hands, the possibility of light filling a room built from waiting.
as he walks out in his yellow suit that asks the sun to go home,
my sister jumps, i grab her to be still. once, after losing
the dumpsite job, my mother said, what is yours is folded in your palms, even nothingness.
that night at home, my father rocked his old bamboo chair, looking
as emptiness ached from inside the echoes. my mother fetched a bowl of
eba with her longing hands wrinkled from the absence of touch.
i begin a poem that night by saying, & he walks home in a yellow suit.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adedayo Adeyemi Agarau is a human nutritionist, documentary photographer, and author of two chapbooks, For Boys Who Went & The Arrival of Rain. Adedayo was shortlisted for the Babishai Niwe Poetry Prize in 2018, Runner up of the Sehvage Poetry Prize, 2019. Adedayo is an assistant editor at Animal Heart Press, a contributing editor for poetry at Barren Magazine and a poetry reader at Feral. His works have appeared or are forthcoming on Gaze, Glass, Jalada Africa, 8 Poems, Hellebore, Headway Lit, Nitrogen House and elsewhere. Adedayo was said to have curated and edited the biggest poetry anthology by Nigerian poets, Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry. His chapbook, Origin of Names, was selected by Chris Abani and Kwame Dawes for New Generation African Poet (African Poetry Book Fund), 2020.
________________________________________________________________________________________

Brooke Sahni

The Sensuous Woman by J

A woman   gets eaten


out    by a tiger   and the unnamed    author assures


the readers      that this fantasy     is perfectly     natural—


natural      that a woman   might want to    be

tiger and

woman—satiated in either form.     We’d found the book in my mother’s old

high school dresser        amongst

yearbooks    photos     diaries    locks of my baby hair.


A holy thing    we pass it. Read rape     read pleasure     read outdated language

— be the woman every man yearns to make love to—the woman you yearn to be.

It’s summer

so many things are calling us    into and out of    ourselves    so we close it   gently

place it

back in its darkness   position it


so it looks untouched.

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Brooke Sahni's writing has appeared in magazines such as The Missouri Review Poem of the Week, Spillway, Cave Wall, 32 Poems, EcoTheo Review, River Styx, Southwestern American Literature and other publications. Her poetry chapbook, Divining, is the winner of the 2019 Orison Chapbook Prize and is forthcoming this year.
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Caroline Shea

Ars Poetica with Burnt Coffee

I come home sticky-sweet, wrists ringed
with dried whipped cream. Nails caked
with coffee grounds. Go ahead, lick me clean,
scrape the syrup off my cheek.
That’ll be $2.50. I am most myself
in pieces. In active shooter training,
our manager tells us:               Run first.

Instead, I shrink, make a smaller target.
Rain nickels into so many open palms.
I’ve touched your softness, plastered
a smile on my face just for you.
My brew swilling in your stomach,
that small warmth
the one thing I’ve made today.

I let the phone ring.
Dear Customer, I married my fear. He treats
me like a queen. Never leaves my side.
Slips me from bed with sweet nothings:
not enough, not enough. My self
a pit I throw my voice down. Training my ear
to stitch something from echoes.

I am a body first,
a person second. Yes, I would run
if I had to. First, let me take your order.
The arches of my feet ache into moons.
Train me to be satisfied. To satisfy. I forget myself
daily. The second rule, after run:
I must leave you behind.

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Caroline Shea

Baby’s Breath

Certain scents still undo me—
blacktop baking in the juneday sun,
stale hospital scrubs, laundered thin,
the acid ache of blood on a Barbie-pink razor
(though it’s been years since a cut
was anything but accidental). Another way to say:
I’m sentimental. Sticky as an infant.
Daily, I strip and scrub myself pink, peeled
from the shell of sleep.
I dab perfume into my skin
in small circles, pressing my wrists together
as if bound, the way I’ve watched my mother do it
for years. The woman who sold me
the bottle said this suffocates the scent,
crushes it, to instead let
the jasmine and cardamom mingle
slowly with sweat. Even the way I adorn myself
a mistake and an inheritance. When he told me
he liked my perfume, I wore the same scent for
a month. Perfume from the Latin, “per fumus,”
meaning through smoke. Meaning,
I still want to shape the way my lover sees me.
On late, hazy nights, I miss the plume
of his cigarettes, the way I’d wake and find him by the window,
jittery and angelic in the morning sun slanting off the snow.
It’s true, I wanted him to quit. His breath comes easier, now.
But some comforts linger past logic—the itch
of smoke in the back of the throat,
my gilded bottles clustered by the sink, the satisfaction of an injury
that feels earned. The guilt, I think, was always there.
They say Cleopatra soaked her ships’ sails in perfume
so her lovers could smell her
coming. As my mother clears
the attic of her childhood home,
I swallow gardenias. Liz Taylor’s
kohl-rimmed eyes stare from a staticky TV.
In my dreams, I am always the one
who ruins things. Overripe and sugary with rot.
Lately, I can’t decide what I fear most:
To bear a child or to raise one?

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Caroline Shea

Ode to the Lady Detective

You make me ache for a world
where disaster is averted
in heels            lips painted in a bright red bow

All hard edges & sweat through silks             I bet your mascara never runs
You’ll hold a man’s heart
in his chest while his breath stutters               then stops

You never slip
until you curl your knees to your chest          let the blood slowly soap off
in the belly of the tub              I claim you

for every girl
who wanted to fix the world               & was too damn small
for every woman waiting                    for answers that never come

Patron saint of             what went wrong?
devotee of                   tell me.

Sure, you go dancing into the small gray hours
of dawn           drape yourself in crimson velvet        & French perfume
You spar with the best of them
ready with a quip        a lockpick        a pistol

but the camera never pans to your face
until your lover’s left
you tangled in sheets              high heel dangling
from the chandelier                 O, Modern Woman
O, constant aubade

They always forget                 you went to war too
the blood on your hands         of all you couldn’t save

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Caroline Shea is the author of Lambflesh (Kelsay Books, 2019) and an assistant editor for Washington Square Review. Her work has appeared in Crab Fat Magazine, The Pinch and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among other publications. Recently, she received The Pinch Literary Award and was a finalist for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. She's currently an MFA candidate in poetry at NYU.
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Luke Johnson

To My Son Who Asks about Baptism

If you wake
and want to wash your feet

in a river,
reach above the baskets

in the bare garage
and pull from darkness

a folded flannel
to drape across your arms.

Follow where the stones
were pressed

and place your hand
on wire fence

to feel if rain is close.
Come to where

the road stops suddenly
and squint. Scan the space

between two poplars,
where swallows weave

to gouge persimmons
and a river carves

the canyon’s sand
drags behind

drowned lures
mummified trees

lamb skulls hacked
and smooth. Listen: If you

want to wash your feet
in a river—don’t. Rise before

the freight train
shakes the floor

and walk the fields
with blossoming hunger

to gather up wild berries.
Fill a bucket

with bleach and salt
and scrub the skins

to cut the tannins    cracking
them with your teeth.

Spit the husks
and scatter the seeds.

Suck until the juice
runs down your chin.

Son, lay in the laps of lavender
and admire the grasses

that shadow
and sway, sweetly,

when the rain erupts—

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Luke Johnson lives on the California Coast with wife and three kids. His poems can be found at The Kenyon Review, Florida Review, Narrative Magazine, Thrush, Valparaiso Review, Nimrod, Tinderbox and elsewhere. He was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize, and his chapbook, :boys, was published by Blue Horse Press in 2019.
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Liza Katz Duncan

Love Song: San Diego

Strange that I am still possible, still exist
three thousand miles from home without a bay
to remind me I’m in disaster’s path.
Without floods in spring, storms in summer;
in November, that unpredicted first snow.
San Diego tricks us tourists into thinking it’s the same
season all year: 70 degrees, so bright it’s as if you’re drunk.
All year, sea lions yawn on the promontory.
Bougainvillea burn against low white houses,
their shadows impossibly thick.
But look longer, look closer: everything here
knows its own season.
In early spring, the yellow brittlebrush,
desert lavender. The barrel cactus opens into flower,
then the beavertail, then the Joshua tree and Mojave yucca.
In May and June, El Niño brings the morning rain and fog,
and with them penstemon, jacaranda, larkspur.
Strange that I am possible even here. Here,
a photo: me in the desert, cactus
flower in my hair. See how real I am.

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Liza Katz Duncan

Vessels

On the bulkhead, someone has made a line
of horseshoe crab shells, a dozen or so
in neat single file, facing the bay—
or at least, that’s where I thought
their faces would be; in fact
the horseshoe crab has nine eyes:
top, sides, belly—
facing, then, everywhere but
the home that did them in, and their
once-inhabitants. At some point, every vessel
has to watch its contents die:
sinking ship, vase of cut flowers,
a tumble of crows from the nest.

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Liza Katz Duncan is a poet and teacher in New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, The Cortland Review, Vinyl, Phoebe, The Journal of New Jersey Poets and elsewhere. She is an MFA candidate at Warren Wilson College.
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Connie Wasem Scott

I come to know thirst

can be stuffed in a bag and carried
beyond the city’s rock walls, beyond the desert
arroyos sealed in cement and the alleys
where broken names and bottles
glisten like fresh paint.

My dogs sleep on the sandy cement
porch, far from the streets that never stop
grumbling, where the asphalt covers the ancient
seabed that perished long ago and
buried its bones in the sand.

As far as you can see a craggy range
of rocks butts the sky. Sunshine
hardens the landscape and grows
like lichen on my skin. I see the desert’s smaller
hands – tiny cloven leaves of the creosote bush,

a sand dune’s puckered hide. People
on both sides of the river dream
of crossing her bed. The sky
takes up more room here. A bride on the edge
of town rips off her lipstick and cries.

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Connie Wasem Scott

To Protect My Young Child

1. Take the ring-necked pheasant feather your aunt mailed you,
a blue columbine you grew from a seed,
a sprig of a creosote from the desert near your house.
Grind them into a poultice for her wounds.

2. Clench seven smooth stones in your hands to warm them.
Picture your desert daughter picking them from the shallow lake.
Arrange the stones in a circle, set her inside until
they flare into torches around her.

3. Open your mouth. Let go
of the salt, those tiny silver scales. Collect them.
Sprinkle on the crown of her head.

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Connie Wasem Scott lives in Spokane, WA, where she teaches the gamut of English classes at Spokane Falls Community College and enjoys the great outdoors with her Aussie-American husband. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Cathexis Northwest, Minerva Rising, Eclectica, Sycamore Review, RHINO and other journals.
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Brenda Edgar

Snow Globe

Every day that crystalline winter,
we walked along the roaring river.
Icicles festooned the trees like
transparent daggers; frozen moss
crunched underfoot. As our son took
root in my belly, weasels slid
into the cold whitewater after small fish
who glinted silver in the glare of the sun.
Our daughter, sparrow-light, leapt
over fallen trees with her small narrow feet.
We found the place where the whitetail sleep,
their concave nests formed in the stiff rushes
by the weight of their brown bodies.
Deer sleep shallow, but not shallow enough:
one of the hollows held the skeleton
of a doe, relieved of her flesh in the dark
by cunning coyotes. The remaining deer
must have bedded down each night
near the carcass as it was slowly cleaned
by maggots, dried by wind. Our two dogs
scavenged the bones, gnashed the jaws
and hooves with sharp teeth, argued
over the skull in a charade of a successful
hunt.  When the black dog died a year later,
we released her remains into the rapids.
Generations of deer will dip their
warm muzzles into the water
and drink deeply of her bones.

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Brenda Edgar is an art history professor and emerging poet from Louisville, Kentucky. Her work has been published in the Comstock Review.
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Michael Lauchlan

End Time

On a sharp night, we walk
by the park and the sky opens up.

We can’t know it, but one distant
visible star has gone cold

and continues--a carbon orb adrift
through nights that soon

will imperceptibly dim. Light
pours toward us like water
from a hose cut off mid-stream.

It may have been a splashy exit.
The air is crisp and traffic hums.

All is quiet in the park tonight--
not even the innocent detonation
of a backfiring truck. When havoc

on the Tiber made Rome
a center of nothing, how long

did the stubborn scan provincial roads
before they learned new words
for hunger and dread?

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Michael Lauchlan

An Ache Like

a wet street’s midnight gleam
recalling the walk home
after you spoke your last word

to the first woman you loved
and a song that trails you
like a stray       Like your tires

rumbling in the gap between
radio news and the shrill
of your own monologue

Or like a river swallowing its bank
after a storm and a blank road
gaping from the new-made lake

Or your face looking back
from the usual mirror without
a hint of recognition    Not those--

but water hauled down a block
a flame in the shoulders of a woman
lugging the five gallon pail

a wire handle creasing her hand
as it sloshes and she fights
a small war against gravity

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Michael Lauchlan has contributed to many publications, including New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The North American Review, Nimrod, Sugar House Review, Louisville Review, Poet Lore, Southern Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland. His most recent collection is Trumbull Ave., from WSU Press (2015).
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Natalie Shapero

How Do You Like Me Now

Had been lukewarm on seeing the movie rehashing the shocks
of ten years ago—who wants to live that
twice?—but I ended up sitting there rapt.
It all felt new—I remembered nothing—that must’ve been the era
when I was too focused on harming myself to really take in
all the scandals. Trying to recall that time was like missing
a step on the staircase—my mind would just skip it
and offer instead some memory from way before—
a supermodel getting her legs
insured by Lloyd’s of London, or someone’s attempt at interjecting,
at all available intervals, the suggestion that God
is a woman. HE’S GOT THE WHOLE
WORLD IN HIS HANDS— or HER HANDS—
Ok, so God is a woman. I don’t give a shit. Or I guess
I do, insofar as I can’t not care about God’s insidious use
of Her womanness to obscure and soften
Her scorn for the factory villages, Her support for consolidation
of wealth, Her condoning of the breaking
of strikes and the sprawl of jails.
I mean, I know incredible women, but also I’ve seen women
wall off the greenway or order the city to drag
the sewers with magnets to recover their misplaced metals,
touching nothing until someone lesser has cleaned it.
I’ve seen women construct high homes,
insisting it’s all for the balcony view, but it’s really about the staff.
So that, when they fall, they’re finished. Out with the trash.

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Natalie Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Hard Child and No Object, and her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine and elsewhere. She teaches at Tufts University.
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Katie Delaney

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Katie Delaney is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, installation and fiber. The focus of her practice involves the deterioration of memory and the relationships created from and within the body. Plaster, sawdust, tulle and thread reveal themes of sexuality and mental health throughout Delaney’s work. During her time at Towson University, she has been awarded the C.E.E.P Scholarship, the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts Scholarship, as well as the Beulah M. Price Scholarship. Delaney has exhibited her work in various exhibitions throughout the DMV area including VisArts in Rockville, The Delaplaine in Fredrick as well as at the John Fonda Gallery and Maryland Art Place in Baltimore. Delaney currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD.
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Cleo Jones

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Cleo Jones is an artist from the eastern shore of Maryland. She is currently studying illustration at Moore College of Art & Design in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Besides visual arts, she has a deep love for animals, psychology, and musical theater. She hopes to share her zest for life and emotions through her artwork.