Issue 7 Full Text

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Melissa Crowe

America you’re breaking

my heart     breaking even my
heartbreak     your stupid
gleaming bulk calving into darkness
at an ever increasing rate     My fists
clench of their own accord     the word
no always vibrating     my mouth
I’ve had a headache for one thousand
two hundred and four days     America, beloved
does every kid pretend to be dead
doing the dead man’s float?
Is everyone comforted knowing
there are creatures in the Marianas Trench
10,000 miles down     creatures nobody’s
ever seen     nobody ever will?
Does everyone think as much as
I do about whales giving birth
in the sea     those massive
babies borne from saline
into saline     Sweet abiding
underwater milk     America, I was
a stranger and you teargassed me?
I was your daughter and you grabbed
my ass    your son and you shot me
in the street     I was a baby and you
taught me to stand on the toilet
hiding my feet?     America,
darling     imagine the quiet
of the sunken city     no panic room no
closet lollies     no ricochet     just that dumb
undulation     that senseless sunlashed  glow

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Melissa Crowe

I cry each time we say goodbye because I know I’m always sending you to war

You the only one doing the speed limit, the other drivers
seem intent on killing you, their unblinkered swerves and also
the way their carelessness makes you feel: unloved, not just

as a man but as a member of the tribe. They hate the tribe?
That’s war. In truth, you feel embattled even when you stay—
one afternoon last spring you napped in the hammock, woke

to a baby jay blinking from the grass, then spotted its wobbly
sibling on the woodpile, testing wings. Though you skipped
dinner, followed the tender pair around the yard till dark,

hissing off the neighbor’s cat, that night she mangled both
while we lay sleeping. What comfort can I offer, love,
other than to say we soldier on together? I read a novel

in which two sailors hack the wings off a seabird
and watch it waddle the deck in terror. The scene’s invented,
so why do I carry that bird’s fear like it’s still trapped there

with that crew, their cruelty? What’s it mean that I don’t
believe in God but I believe in that bird, that the laughter
of those men is real? I think sometimes how terrible

to be a wild creature injured and nowhere to go for help,
no skillful hand to tend your wounds, but then I think of
healing tongues, succor of one warm flank against another.

And of the children who’ve died, penned at the border,
their parents made to grieve in other cages, locked
by hands. What a world we have been given, love.

What a world we lot have made by hand— Remember
last summer, when we drove our car partway up a mountain
so a new friend could cart us to the top in her jeep,

steepest drive to the queendom of her hand-hewn house,
cement floors she’d poured herself and a vegetable garden,
solar panels, rain collecting in barrels? Up there we drank

kava, bitter mud that numbed our tongues, the children
running barefoot in the gathering dusk, then watched
our friend use a shovel to cut the head off a rattlesnake,

just a baby she said, that didn’t know better than to belly
into the yard. She threw its body, both halves,
into the fire pit, its mouth still opening and closing

like a slow fist. I’m not saying she was wrong—
villainy is real, but she’s no more a villain
than our neighbor’s cat. Her nerve awed me, the strength

of her muscled arms, how she could feel sorry for the snake
even while it burned in a hell of her making. As for me,
I feel born on the wrong planet. Or this planet’s just wrong.

Here it’s always like seeing rabbits at the side of the truck-mad
road—us thrilling at their soft wildness, then dread. This spring,
when fledglings scream themselves hoarse for the morsels

their parents drop into their mouths, I’ll usher you inside,
draw the blinds. But come morning, you’ll find on the lawn
one body, neck broken, bury it behind the shed.

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Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), and her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, POETRY, Seneca Review, Thrush and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. She’s coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at UNCW, where she teaches poetry and publishing.

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Lisa Ampleman

There’s a Bobcat in the Neighborhood

Keep your pets in. Sure,
in online photos, the buff-
colored blaze could be
just a large housecat.
But look at its bulk
by that paneled pool,
the storage shed fashioned
to look like a barn.
That’s some cousin of a cougar
wandered up from Mill Creek.

Its screams at night will give you
gooseflesh. I saw it piss
on the neighbors’ play-place,
crawl up the slide to
the pirate-ship perch
as if that’s where it would
make its den. No one’s
seen it during the day.

That pack of teens on
their yowling dirt bikes,
a pickup with a segregationist
flag that slowed
as it passed the Allans’,
the savage gesture of
one bus-stop girl to another
when she thought no one
else could see: you can’t keep
the threat of wildness out, even here.

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Lisa Ampleman

Transfiguration

Blindness is not always darkness. My mother
sees, at all times—awake, trying to sleep,
closed or open eyelids—a bright field.

The optic nerve, stretched out by a tumor,
transmits whiteness along its fibers.
It is easy to be bored by all that light,

to drowse in its perpetuity. In the British Museum,
light is posed to make the face
of a sarcophagus shine. The body inside the body

becomes white light in darkness
thanks to the CT scanner, throwing rays
as it whirs in its vast plastic shroud.

Beneath the image of this temple singer
as she used to dance, wearing a one-feathered
headband, beneath the images of two men with bird-heads

fanning her, and the wing of a bird of prey,
are her linen bandages, her amulets
for magical passage to the field of reeds.

“We can see there’s a winged goddess, a falcon here,
a scarab beetle to protect the heart—
and she was given artificial eyes to allow her to see

in the next world as well.” The face inside
the golden face is just as serious,
teeth grit together. The temple singer’s eyes

glow blue in the CT scan’s rendering.
Once, a month after her surgery,
my mother saw a brief glimpse of my father’s

mustache, the glint of his glasses. Nothing since.
How right that it was him, steady guide
and narration for the terrain they cross—

“now a small step down”—putting his hand over hers
on his arm, as if walking her into a grand ball
where we will all marvel at her changed figure.

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Lisa Ampleman

Appropriate Care

The backyard fawn is, of course,
doe-eyed,
something between a baby
and youth. I’d
forgotten they might have
white spots
to blend in with grasses,
tree knots,
sun-flecked ground. If I moved
closer, she’d
smell like nothing,
ghost weed,
snow-in-summer. White-flecked
loner. Her
mother, odor-heavy, has left.
The fawn won’t stir
till she returns. A friend who found
twin newborn deer
was told to leave them be unless
the mother disappeared
for a whole day. All this one needs
is oak shade.
My own baby stood there
yesterday, played
with a water table,
soaked his shirt
with ladle and cup. Even under my watchful
eye, he hurt
his lip when he stumbled.
At his daycare
the toddlers wobble and caper, testing
their balance on bare
feet. What do they do
in the interlude,
when parents don’t observe?
Joyful or subdued
at play, perhaps, depending on the day,
a slight sadness
swelling in their torsos.
They’re practiced
at waiting, knowing the door’s
each creak
might be she returning,
her unique
footfall and smell. Soon, any minute:
the thought thumps
in hearts the size of golden
retrievers’, as they jump
from a small step,
skin a knee,
burrow to sleep on their nap mats,
someone’s sweet pea
darling, dear.
Today, my fair-haired
boy, spoon-clutcher, ooh­-er
is not scared
of the ruminant under our tree.
He woofs,
the only animal sound he knows.
Her hoofs
are splayed to one side.
Seemingly complaisant,
she stares with her thin triangle face,
ears perked, patient—
or wary. At twilight, she’ll join her
mother and
sister, find another yard, park,
grassland.
My son and I wave goodbye,
leave the window,
giving her privacy in this leafy
suburban limbo,
a good-enough way station
with strangers
watching over, able to help
look out for danger.

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Lisa Ampleman is the author of two books of poetry, most recently Romances (LSU Press, 2020), and a chapbook. She lives in Cincinnati, where she is the managing editor of The Cincinnati Review and poetry series editor at Acre Books.

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Susan Rich

The K Word—

from kikel, for circle as signature
drawn by Eastern European Jews

who as they entered at Ellis Island
protested that the X looked kind

of like Christ’s famous Roman cross.
The first time I actually heard the

word was in the dorm’s kitchenette:
Massachusetts, freshman year—

offered like an illicit kiss, kismet—
by an upperclassman I admired.

Kikes have little horns under their caps,
Marianne offered. Her assertion

backlit in September’s window
of burning red and russet leaves.

We lingered over the teakettle.
What more might I have said?

So sure her truth was true—
I felt my own skull for signs.

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Seattle poet Susan Rich is the author of four poetry books, most recently, Cloud Pharmacy (shortlisted for the Julie Suk Prize) and The Alchemist’s Kitchen (Finalist for the Washington State Book Award). She has earned an Artists Trust Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, the PEN USA Award for Poetry, the Times (of London) Literary Supplement Award and three 4Culture Grants. Rich's publications include Harvard Review, New England Review, Poetry Northwest and World Literature Today. She has two collections forthcoming: A Gallery of Postcards and Maps: New and Selected Poems (Salmon Press) and Blue Atlas (Red Hen Press).

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Taylor Byas

Sleeping Weather

The sky commits to reopening. Empties its water
like two palms uncupping. The sidewalks freshly

mopped with rain. Somewhere in a neighbor’s
house, a sneeze is blessed once. Twice. Your mother

calls to check if the winds are picking up
two states away, if you’ve remembered

to roll up your car windows. The phone hums
into the mattress as if trying to recall a name.

It’s too loud to think of loneliness, how long
it’s been since a body’s dip on the other side

of your bed has sucked you into the eye
of a coming storm. Two fronts clashing. Wet.

You imagine a body there in the flashes
of white, coming closer with each blessing

of lightning—their hand breaching the imaginary
line down the bed’s center, the space between

your thighs. Then rain. Heavy and loud, clamoring
at the window as if there is something to see.

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Taylor Byas

You’re It | Golden Shovel

—after Tamla Horsford

“You are a Black girl, but don't know. you sleep
next to it. crooked bone, split-open head.”
            —Joy Priest, “Nightstick”

The sleepover nettles itself into a frenzy from everyone’s restlessness. You
sleep yet?—tossed like a horseshoe to snag on the poles of your breaths. The birds are

trilling each other into silence to hear the grass sink its blades into the sole of a
bare foot. The soft crunch of lost battle. Outside, you huddle under the black

tarp of night with the others, shock someone with your body’s static. One girl
dares you all into the woods for hide-and-seek. It will be fun, she says. But

the thick foliage of the trees chokes out the moonlight. A voice tells you Don’t
peek as they lead you into the brush, two hands over your eyes. You know

how to play right? And sure you do. You close your eyes and count to 30. You
listen until there is no difference from their clumsy skittering and the sleep-

crossed frisking of squirrels overhead. When you open your eyes, you are next
to nothing, night unfolding like a black hibiscus in each direction. You call out to

the group, Ready or not, here I come. Taunt yourself with the echo. It
takes a while for the eyes to adjust, to unlearn the shape of a killer from the crooked

branches, to hear anything but the papered leaves snapping like bone
beneath your steps. You are a fawn then, your jelly-legged steps testing the soil, the split-

second freeze when suddenly the girls reappear for a different game, yipping into the night open-
mouthed—a flashlight shining into your eyes, your back kissing the ground, a bounty on your head.

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Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist from Chicago. She currently lives in Cincinnati, where she is a second year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. She is also a reader for both The Rumpus and The Cincinnati Review, and the Poetry Editor for FlyPaper Lit. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Hobart, Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review and others.

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Joely Byron Fitch

Virginia Woolf’s First Novel Is Called The Voyage Out

Rachel dies at the end—
Sorry. Mostly it takes place
aboard a ship: they’re going
to America. How thin the walls

were between them I’m thinking
(the walls of the cabins, little rooms
at sea) as we’re balanced here
against ourselves           against

the edges of ourselves (trying
to leave our bodies through
our bodies)            wondering
if I can always hear

the neighbors’ baby crying
does that mean they also
can hear us or me making
these earnest worn-out sounds

(like the neighbors on the other
side of the wall of some other
poem—) (somehow in three
consecutive apartments always

a baby on the other side
of the wall) so here I’m both
the poet and the neighbor
and the woman in real time

enacting this gasp or moan,
some wordless affirmation—
alive and astonished at it,
at everything— pretending

we invented this— meanwhile this
barely-there plasticine
barrier is the only thing
between us (meaning me) and a possible

baby— a kind
of potential energy (so you
could calculate it; I forget
the formula)— and I

can’t remember the end
of the quote— how thin
the plastic— how thin
the walls— I’m thinking

intersubjectivity I’m
thinking, no, saying
yes         right there
please     I’m thinking

how tired language is I’m thinking
how nice to ever really
stop thinking and maybe—
for a second—  I do— then

a body              breathing
and how thin the walls
and I want to be alive
at the end of this book

even if it’s only
an attempt at something and I feel
so, yes, porous and I feel so
historical and I feel

like the end of the song,
like montage (that speeding-up)
like the light like the new
red buds on each spindly branch

of the tree outside,
blossoming, approaching
full bloom—which, yes, means Molly
too who’s maybe been here

all along since the yes
is that classic, breathless
yes (that no woman ever
actually wrote)

(In 1922 Woolf writes:
I dislike Ulysses more & more
that is think it more & more
unimportant) (She also

describes Joyce as ruined
by the danger of the damned
egotistical self) but I’ve
uttered this yes, lived in it—

(as in yes I’ve said it, yes
I’ve meant it, mean it
and yes I’ve read it,
written it, been written

by it even) and the word—
Woolf’s word—suddenly
retrievable from some
newly-unlocked mind-cabinet—

was never walls but partitions,
and her point was dreams
travel, are not singular,
can transfer, float among

interiors, fly straight through
the walls that separate us—
that people can be lifted
off the earth— lifted

to what? To see each other—
maybe, for a second,
rightly, maybe clearly,
maybe through to something

secret, hidden, something I want
to call true—meaning
what? Real? Then that pause.
What are you thinking?      and I

smile, kiss the thin skin
of his eyelid,
thinking the sea,
            the sky.

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Joely Byron Fitch was born in Ohio in 1993. She lives and writes in Moscow, ID, where she's an MFA candidate at the University of Idaho and the associate poetry editor for Fugue.

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Emma Aylor

Distance

            “The human being is never truer to himself than when he is in motion.”
—Gian Lorenzo Bernini

Why, here, is the yellow half-moon low?
I try to start a fire through the misting night rain
that’s come. My image of you feels still,
a little small—scarcely larger than a peach stone,
like the mineral women made and held in hand and left

in sacred places, underground. Now you become yourself
a place of pilgrimage, an icon I travel to see, the impulse
otherwise to believe. The thought of you
moves me: what of you is other.

I keep stilled images of our gestures
drawn like flashlights before a lens, years ago,
the friends who carried them invisible now and saved
not in memory but behind thick summer night—

and we move there, beyond record, dark spine of distance rolled out—

The photographs show just slashes of gold
where the hands had been.

Note: “scarcely larger than a peach stone” comes from Philippe Comar’s description
of Upper Paleolithic Venus figurines in Images of the Body (Abrams, 1999).

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Emma Aylor

Stonefruit Season

Begin with geomancy, that old divination of oldest earth.
The startle of August rain in this city cools a narrow lane
of watered sky at a creep through the window. What makes a grace
makes a kind of cure, a wraithed mercy thickened at the sides
like milk left out in a yellow bowl.
It is not fall yet,
it looks nothing close to fall, but still the wind carries
on thin. Consider interiors. On the grass
of the park I close my eyes to leave trees
drawn as outlines in lidded dark, and little else;
eat a peach, a plum, a nectarine, and leave their light to unroll
flushes down my arms, unroll shine and copper, the stones in a circle
around; put my clothes on backwards and name three things
that do not reflect a face.
The silk of mimosa blossoms smears
the air in oil paint—the tree whose leaves fold like saved papers
to sleep through the night. And I remember
a scar on your arm made of melt and fire, a crater, what’s left
when what’s burning is taken away, and I write a letter, I bury
a letter, I throw a handful of dust down to the dust
and know it says something, but it isn’t for me.

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Emma Aylor

Daydream

It finally rains. The gray softens
and drops, goes vegetal, touches
ground. My window faces empty street,
swept sidewalk, the close hill
forever fallen away. The longer the rain
the deeper the need. Only the water
and crows move, backward, rising
together like a leavened sin.
I sleep alone with all my rings on.
I wake with your hand in my hair.

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Emma Aylor’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Pleiades, New Ohio Review, the Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch and Salt Hill, among other journals, and she received Shenandoah’s 2020 Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. She holds an MFA from the University of Washington. Originally from Bedford County, Virginia, she lives in Lubbock, Texas and is a PhD candidate at Texas Tech University.

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Jill Mceldowney

Sleep on the Floor

             —the first night we sleep

together I forget how to sleep.
                                    I don’t understand your body yet, as if I ever will.
Our sky does not have to be the sky

that dissolves, fills with crows stirred to flight
                        by the smash of champagne even though
I would break

              the good dishes with you,      my good wrist for you.

The sky goes no where. We could have
                                                anything we wanted, we could reach out,
we could take it:
at daymoon, at bankruptcy, at jars of yellow pears,
                        at robbery, at red wine, at scarf covering my mouth—

what would it be like               if we taught each other to be gentle?

            I think I could be happy with that simple ending

of home, goodnight,                arms around you, every emptiness
             a colorless bright.

If all we know of love is
                                    sleep on the floor,

in the glass, glass for our teeth—
            borrow water, borrow wineglasses—

we build a house.

We live in it.

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Jill Mceldowney

Birds of

“I loved you. I love you. You were.
And you are.”
—Mary Jo Bang Elegy

I think about him when I’m not
even thinking.
                   I touch my face, the side of my throat     the places his hands have been
hold what I should forget      I remember

no canary in the coal mine— no proof but the water
acting weird again, smelling like blood, running at strange hours—
         no one else there

                   when he stayed awake all night to check my pulse,
no one else illuminated                   the cities at the center of me.

Did I dream up—

birds of                warning, birds of no              tomorrow, birds in my gut,
         in my hair, his hands in—     of his     
kiss on every finger, his fingers to           my pulse? It comes back—

like the dead never will

         a between worlds pain           drags me.
I was 20 years old. I was vodka-drunk, out of my mind,

so calm.

He is the wound           without exit
—no voicemail to call,
                            no clothes on my bedroom floor,

no name to speak          all I have left       is a name I won’t speak
because I don’t want to wake

                   the dead, don’t want the dead

                   to think I am moving on forgetting happy
—no photos of us—like we forgot
we were there.

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Jill Mceldowney is the author of the chapbook Airs Above Ground (Finishing Line Press), as well as Kisses Over Babylon (dancing girl press). She is an editor and cofounder of Madhouse Press. She is also a recent National Poetry Series Finalist. Her previously published work can be found in journals such as Muzzle, Fugue, Vinyl, the Sonora Review, Prairie Schooner and other notable publications.

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Samuel Adeyemi

Unfiltered

if the poem says my stomach is a rosebush
unweathered from Spring, darling, believe it
like a litany. some boys simply cannot fit anguish
into euphemism. want me to say i am anxious for
morning, when it is hunger that huddles me to sleep.
i reject this acoustic grief. this affliction stripped of
venom.
O, sweet mother. nobody wants a honeyless boy.
O, Sylvia. if the poem is too confessional,
what will become of my body?
i do not want a lover to hold my hands
& begin to feel a couplet.

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Samuel Adeyemi is an eighteen year old Nigerian writer and an ardent lover of literature. His poems have appeared in EBOquills, Ghost Heart Literary Journal and Perhappened Mag and are forthcoming in The Kalahari Review. When he is not writing, he enjoys watching anime and listening to a variety of music. You may reach him on Twitter and Instagram @samuelpoetry.

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Taylor Fedorchak

False Premonitions

Our sheets are never this clean. At the kitchen sink,
he pretends to tie a plastic bag over my head

and I laugh. His suit from some store without prices.
Everything selected in the right size, then put back.

I used to enjoy shopping by myself. One July, I bought
a strapless black top to celebrate something

I shouldn’t have. By the water, every song we requested
went unplayed. Years later, I’m the one not answering

my phone. It’s November and he pictures me on the side
of the highway, ejected from my friend’s cobalt blue car.

Muffled ringing in the glovebox. He can almost see
the cuts on my face and neck. It’s November and I see him

cry for the first time. He argues my eye color and talks
of leaving our walls—lead under fresh paint.

We don’t have masks
for when the air turns to dust and settles on the yuccas.

Once, everything was airborne. Still, I made a list of things
not to touch: door handles, strangers’ hands, your car keys,

these numbers in a row.

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Taylor Fedorchak

Chiromancy

This is how it will be when our lives are over:
our empty A-frame back on the market,

the homes we will never think about
having again. No friends     to pack up our wine

glasses in a rush. To break them in the boxes.

Maybe we’ll leave dimes
for our loved ones

(if we still have any). The pact to haunt

one another.      I’d like to come to

you from across a wooden table. He’s

not the other man, he’s another
man & who will cry more

at the ceremony? The second husband       
or the first.

I think I will leave dimes
or summon cardinals.            Foxes
on the beach. Come across to you

at some coffee store séance. I think
I’d like that.

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Taylor Fedorchak

Miscalling

the sound will come like wedding bells             or me, faced with barbwire somewhere
before our atrophy.                                              apple blossoms decay & decay. remember

years of living in french maid outfits,                 that wax skeleton from childhood
when the bathtub was full                                   & those cardboard boxes acquiring
before we moved in & projected                        shock in the grocery store after midnight.

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?                it was never your favorite. her on top—
on candy pink walls—no. we ignited                 exactly the way you liked. call me
outside under the frayed telephone                  wire. her name or mine. i won’t correct it.

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Taylor Fedorchak is a third-year MFA candidate at New Mexico State University, where she is currently Managing Editor of Puerto del Sol. Her work has been published in Moon City Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, decomP, Gravel, Bluestem Magazine and elsewhere.

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Susan Moon

Day 28

Death has been passing by
with habitual haste. My dreams skelter
through scenes of the undead,
their inventive ways of perishing.
Last night it was a zombie slitting
a woman's eye with a splinter. I wake
with eyes wide open in wonderance
of how I am no longer me. It is not
that I am beyond recognition
but when this pelvic floor quakes
to pit & pith heed my warning.
No longer am I your trusty mutt.
I love you
but these teeth cut callous
and cannot be held accountable. Keep me,
my likeness, in your memory,
something to come back
to when I am far-gone
for several moons. Thinning
moons are all I've held onto
since packing up my childhood
home. I could not stop myself
half a decade later from approaching the house
languishing in a cul-de-sac—its strange lawn,
impenetrable curtains, previously pristine
teal siding peeled to mockery.
Here along the trellis is where
my father grew peonies. The deck is hacked
to splinters, a thousand tiny teal stakes
pointing up towards heaven's naked eye.
I used to somersault the backyard in a cratered groove
till the ground gave out.

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Susan Moon is a Korean American poet and MFA candidate at the Writer’s Foundry of St. Joseph’s College. Her coordinates for home fall between the US, China and Korea. She currently resides in Brooklyn.

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Owen McLeod

Corona Sutra

The End blew in horses with bat-like wings,
swarms of animated gifs, drifts of human limbs
charred as if roasted on a spit. We dug trenches
in the fields, traded all our ideas for things, stashed elders
in the bellies of B-17s. Nothing that survived
was exactly what it seemed. Trees were not trees, bees
not bees, and the Vs overhead were drones, not geese.

Thus we began to hammer out our slogan.
Finally we settled on Beef You Can Believe In. The irony
was lost on everyone but the gargoyles, who lived, as we did,
with scare quotes around their names. For eons we floundered
in a sort of –ish zone, no longer what we’d been, not yet
what we’d become. We needed something suited
to our talents, but not easily transferable to video.

Winter was the toughest time, what with refugees
huddled around their fires, confusing that feeble light
with the illumination we had to offer. On the bleakest days
we felt like nincompoops, trudging through the snow
past boarded-up shops, our sleds piled high with gilded tomes.

You didn’t mean to be such a tough crowd.
It’s hard to get a creature to shed its protective layer.
The trick was convincing you that an exoskeleton
does more harm than good. (Imagine how that went.)

Sometimes we’d break through. Your shell would crack
like lake ice, offering a glimpse of swirling darkness
underneath—but deeper, beyond that darkness,
we could always see a light. It was just too cold.
A week later and you’d be frozen over again.

Could it be that you are more like fields
than frozen lakes, sown and reaped according to seasons
of your own, best by your own hands? We piled our gifts
on makeshift tables, let you wander by as you wished.
Our powers atrophied. It felt OK to let them go.

Gradually, something like the world returned.
We learned to be content just to be here among you—
hearing you laugh or sing softly to yourself, watching you
hang clean sheets in the sun, or drifting off with the paper
in your lap, forgetful of what has been and what again will be,
drunk on the flutter of the ginkgo’s golden wings.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Owen McLeod

Entomology

Once upon a time you drew The True
on a napkin from the Iron Horse Music Hall.
You knew more than I about Being & Time,
plus a bunch of other stuff, like where
to salvage sinks they don’t make anymore.

Month by month, I memorized your lines.
You burned a blue voice, scorched a rainfall wing,
arced many midnights on a turnip-white moon.
On Sundays, you’d fit in my hands like a bowl.
Your dials were marvelous. You stole my how.

I miss you half the time, always while reading
the National Audubon Society Field Guide
to North American Insects & Spiders.
Your pale green body with bright red stripes
was covered with yellowish wax.

I was totally cool with that, plus
the weird way you nudged me
until I stopped singing, devoured my body
while I transferred funds. In the morning
in the garden your cheetah was wow.

I think you might be anything by now—
otter, billboard, a temple of cement.
You’re not what I thought you were, that’s for sure,
not even the doll’s head I found on the bus
on the long and lonely ride home.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Owen McLeod's poems have found homes in Alaska Quarterly Review, Copper Nickel, New England Review, Ploughshares, Sixth Finch, The Southern Review, Willow Springs and elsewhere. His debut collection, Dream Kitchen (UNT Press, 2019), won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Olúwádáre Pópóọla

The Names of Hunger

After Precious Arinze's "The past is not always a door you can walk through"

1.      If at all our names should torture us,
let’s end with how darkness adorns a void land
to the heaviness of body up-on the swoosh of wings,
tucked in pillowslips fastened to heads,
splattered with half-moons and sweet dreams like reality could be a wish.

2.      What are not dreams unclad a mirror / tell me you are bitter/
say you're well / say you're enough to be called departed.
With mirrors / what is not you is your making.

3.      Nothing is a wish until it cannot be traced back to the balm
your voice bestowed it / apologize / in a way shorter than I’m sorry/
You can say ‘m sorry / it was no longer I that drummed light.

4.      Fear is the line between wishes & commands
when our distended bellies fall into axe-shaped prayers,
your face splits into a drained field.

5.      We can't hold our breath and curse the wind
that swallows the inertia of shadows
swelling past a body towards pleading a father's name.

6.      Come / into me
Your name sits you in my hunger
like I love you / tomorrow / outside of my body, scion of death.

7.      I plead my own name softly.
I rained under a different sky,
which is to say I apologize after famine took me.

8.      No death should ever have names / there is no reason to not overlook them/
nobody is not enough to be called                 

9.      It is almost good that we are good,
I never knew such names can be discords
in a foreign language lain into my throat
where nerves tightened to one from a thousand nest of stars,
swept under feet descending from ladders,
puckering into floors familiar with shifted bones,
squeezed from blood-drained water.

10.  It is not a drown until it has a name, big enough.
Absence is not a way to say something left.

11.   Here in the world, I am never wrong,
I am just one language short of undraping hunger.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Olúwádáre Pópóọla is a Nigerian poet, a student of Microbiology and a Sports Writer for a media company. He writes from a city named by a rock and longs to see the world without discrimination of any form.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Isaac George Lauritsen

Us Gone-By Citizens of the Shore

We are bootless without boots or a capo.
We cannot adjust the guitar in the grass.
The key to the Cathedral has gone quiet
and plotting on the limestone, the ever-present
fox. It is time to miss a life as we do
the tin cups of the window in an oval
of going mist. Yet here we are, still
with faces. Here is Humbug, here is
Doughboy, here I am doing the last
folks’ work by doing nothing
about the pain the past pushes up
which we place on our laps
and pat its back like a mischievous
child who belongs to no one
but whose command is that of
the willow’s top above our heads
crushing us with its weeping.
After, things are not in dew.
The time that takes fills a basin
for the next best ocean. It is a wide
ocean. It is a wideness elevated by
a ship set forward in a fleet
of magenta. We are on the magenta.
We are statues with people between us
in a room. We spout water from
our decorative lips. Here, have an appetizer
we cannot say through stone or take a coin
into a pocket made of stone. And stone
goes the mind. It’s time to return to
a grass that is not ours and quietly
we condense to letters in the stones
of our silence. The graveyard as simple
as the shore without a pair of eyes on it.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Isaac George Lauritsen is a poet, playwright and graduate student in the Creative Writing Workshop at the University of New Orleans. His poems can be found in Habitat Magazine, Inklette, The Roadrunner Review and on a broadside from Octopus Books. Previews of his plays can be found at the New Play Exchange. He serves as Associate Poetry Editor for Bayou Magazine and teaches first-year composition at UNO.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Duncan Mwangi

A Forever Thursday Afternoon

we're in a forever thursday afternoon /
the day does not want
     to go to bed
like a fat onion
     on hot oil
the sun is browning
     and crisping
we're in a forever thursday afternoon /
pastor tony is cheating on the lord
     with five strong men on a motel on river road
karis is slaving on a building site
      hulling rock and mixing kokoto with all his might
jas is smoking her throat and lungs
      to sleep
we're in a forever thursday afternoon /
an alien mothership
     lassoed the earth in place
one half of it stays day
     and the other night
the moon is growing
     a tan
and a fat sweaty upper lip

________________________________________________________________________________________

Duncan Mwangi is a writer and poet based in Nairobi Kenya and a graduate of the Nairobi Fiction Writing Workshop.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adam Day

This Other Dying

Underground come up
twisted; narwhal

swim ice leads
to sheltered shallow bays–

tonal knowledge. White bean
sitting between ice plates–

molecular readymade.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adam Day

Getting Lost on the Way

Filled square. Street
sliding alive. Took what

from the state? Some
want? Useless as an office

building. The watched
cop’s mouth fills

with forgetting. Preta.
Wing stitcher. Stuttering

orbit. Still, the moon
is carried on water.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adam Day

Sight Eyes Still Traveling

Coptering
eyes: object

landscape. Periphery
America; bullets

sucking in their stalls.

Don’t knock, just
come in.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press, 2020), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha and of a PEN Award. He is the editor of the forthcoming anthology, Divine Orphans of the Poetic Project, from 1913 Press, and his work has appeared in the APR, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Volt, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review and elsewhere.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Natalie Young

Stuck in a Watery Still

She sees the monster
as an illustration

sketched in charcoal with wide strokes
defining body, lightly shaded parentheses

of movement, water in grayscale—not flesh and bone
and tail—like imagining a centaur

or being a pioneer. Standing at the edge
of any body of water, She returns to him,

lets the water swim over her toes, pretends
the sting of gnats are a swipe from the ends

of limbs lifting above the surface—pelts of water
ping the skin. Proud

of the welts, the miniature kisses
dotting her cheeks, She kneels and washes

faces in salt water. The monster is everything
She thinks She needs: a story

told, a reason to believe not to believe.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Natalie Young

Earth Ghosts

The light is morning: a slow spread with most of the landscape long and lean in shadow. The front yard is an orchard: fruit fallen and fruit on the branch give a crowded smell to the half-lit air. The alien startles from movement between leaves, cloaked by trees and said shadow: a white horse softly chews the fallen apples. So soft it’s hard to believe he exists. Half a mile up the hill: a flat open field without structure or crop whose purpose seems to be to wait for a purpose. Two weeks ago this waiting field bobbed with prairie dogs, their small heads popping in and out click, click, clicking, Danger! at the alien’s approach. Now the ground is silent, littered with soda bottles and doors to empty tunnels. The alien looked into these creatures: due to dwindling wide, open spaces, prairie dogs are protected, listed Endangered. Which means: the field was emptied by Forest Service rules and relocation cages. Or: someone else came with no rules, no cages and a label of Pest. Puffed like half a balloon, a white bag rolls at the edge of the lot, over one dirt mound and then another.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Natalie Young is a founding and managing editor for the poetry magazine Sugar House Review. By day, she works as an art director for an ad agency based out of Salt Lake City. These poems are part of a manuscript that mixes the factual scenery and history of Utah with speculative fiction, in order to explore peculiarities in human nature, culture, religion, and environment. Poems from this series have been published in Green Mountains Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Rattle, South Dakota Review, Drunken Boat, Pilgrimage, Terrain.org and others. Natalie is half Puerto Rican, half Brigham Young and a fan of popsicles and Dolly Parton. NatalieYoungArts.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dan Wiencek

Now It Can Be Told

What happened then is spent napkins on the floor, each day dying
on its own tiny hill. I was my cravings: better posture

steadier aim and the power to sense you entering the room until
starting over again meant tindering a fire from ashes.

Planes took off never to land again. We gossiped about neighbors
pulled off the street and thrown into vans with no windows.

You taught me to look first at a man’s shoes, then his shirt collar. You slipped
the last roadblock by disguising yourself as a mirror.

Bruises come and go without reason at our age. I forget why traffic lights
are those colors and whether you were comrade or lover, test case

or ill-disguised warning sent by spies
with smiles like stomped-out campfires.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Dan Wiencek is a poet, critic and humorist who lives in Portland, Oregon. When not making poems, he writes for a luxury travel company and has walked in the same shoes on the Pyramids, the Taj Mahal, the Serengeti Plains and the Abbey Road crosswalk. Someday he will write a poem about those shoes. His work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Hypertrophic Literary, New Ohio Review, Timberline Review and other publications. He is currently working on his first collection of poems.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Andy Keys

Sonnet for Spirits

They say a waste-green dumpster stands
in an alley in town, collecting refuse
and uncracked booze, somehow so bad
the line-cooks and dishwashers
don’t spirit them away. Bad spirits,
then, but we were twenty and thirsty
so we crammed behind the cockpit of Rachel’s
Cherokee, all sweat-through-moisture-
wicking fabric, wicking wetness
into pilling wool, piling in and out
of the icy night, all clandestine
and cramped; a lap, an arm against
a softer region, discovering
nothing, all night.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Andy Keys is a writer from Sandpoint, Idaho, the child of a weaver and a winemaker, and is an MFA candidate at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His poetry has appeared in Queen Mob's Teahouse and ST.ART Magazine.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Vincent Poturica

The Coldest Day in California

Just as you become sad
when suddenly I fall in love again

with the beautiful machinery
of your hands, I’m disappointed

when I watch the pink walls
of this office, and they refuse

to tremble. On the coldest day
in California, I found a termite in an apple,

and you screamed. Your Diet Coke
filled with snowflakes. The blood-colored

leaves huddled in the planters.
A kid ollied over a Costco cart.

What I’m trying to say is that we’re
spinning around this stubborn wheel.

But when I press the levers
of your fingers, the wheel stops

and becomes your hair, which
I kiss with a mouthful of snow.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Vincent Poturica lives with his wife and kids in rural Northern California, where he teaches at Mendocino College. His writing appears in New England Review, Salamander, New Ohio Review, and Foundry.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Fallon

Early Adopter

On a few occasions, I caught Dad
in the yard with a sledgehammer

or a drill, a saw or a hatchet—
tools he never employed otherwise,

tools I didn’t even know he owned—
going after a keyboard that no longer

cared what he wanted, or a bottlefly
green motherboard that had become

a minute silenced city. He had plenty
of material. Each thing he brought home

would inevitably fail or be replaced
by progress. I saw him sweating,

at war. I dodged shrapnel, watched it
glitter in an arc across the sun.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Fallon

Revelry

I watched from my window while tall,
thin men danced through the trash fire

in our backyard, hollering as they climbed
up and down the flaming backsteps

they’d just replaced. What filth I heard,
their vowels all syrup, their feet glowing

with flame. Beers in hand, they scuffed
against the grass to put themselves out.

I searched and found my father in shadow,
present but hardly a man if this is what

makes them. Next day, I woke to the quiet
hiss of the garden hose. He was soaking

the charred earth, afraid the smolder
had burned all night without him.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Fallon is the author of The Toothmaker's Daughters (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Her poems have appeared in AGNI, Colorado Review, Juked, Meridian, Foundry and Best New Poets 2019, among others. She has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. She shares domestic space with two cats and her favorite human, who helps her zip her dresses.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Lilius

Her Hair Is Full of Crickets

Her body, a flat stone,
she waits for other people
to rub the cool surface of her skin.

Her eyes are on video like a fluid lover,
she believes in social media, her best friend,
concrete, masked harpy keeps her up at night.

She can’t wash her eyeballs, rolling up,
the rocks of overstimulation, grass over her skin
when she picnics with no one and everyone.

Insects, small mammals slay a nest
into her excessive hair, curls of forgotten
color, coarse tangent, unnecessary—

it grows not sturdy but like waves,
something others can’t even hold
like dirt, like the answers of the earth.

She can’t find the stream, to lie down,
drown the intruders, they make nothing
like noise, silence sews into her ears.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Sarah Lilius is the author of five chapbooks including GIRL (dancing girl press, 2017) and Traffic Girl (Ghost City Press, 2020). Some of her publication credits include Fourteen Hills, Boulevard and forthcoming in the Massachusetts Review. She lives in Arlington, VA with her husband and two sons. Her website is sarahlilius.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Troy Varvel

Spring in Stop Motion

Rain soaked branches drop
in the wind. Rustles break

the silence of buttonbush shrubs.
Ice cracks back into the creek, unblanketing

hard mud and knots of gray weeds.
One to the next, seasons diphthong.

I didn’t speak all winter.

This morning my voice soaks in
birdsongs, the pine-dewed slants of sun,

the slow drip thaw of my vocal cords
and the quiet uncoiling of soft roots.

But still no words,
only shallow light breaking in soft fog.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Troy Varvel is the author of the forthcoming chapbook Licking the Splinter (Kelsay Books). He is runner-up of The Missouri Review's 2020 Miller Audio Prize, and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Creek Review, Dialogist, Iron Horse Literary Review, River Styx and Yemassee. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Eulensen

Jogging Poem

The sun came up         all egg-like
on the water.   I was                            ready for it.
I kept to
the paved path – cracked black top spat
weeds, glass bits                       sun-refracted.

The wind pulled                       at my shirt        all
handsy.

            In the bathroom the fluorescents
didn’t work.                 The other woman–
            she had been here–

headphones in ears     and the stall that creaked,
            the hinge
                                   and the unhinging of it,

palms pressed
            to her back, a firmness             not unlike yours

when I have asked for it.     
                                                          Each day
I spray sunscreen in a thin film
            across my legs.             Listen: there are places

where I know my voice            will reverberate
            on rocks and places
                        where it will get lost

in water, the salt filling                         my lungs, the hands
            on my ankles, how it is
to be drug                    to be touched
                                                                        not like that
to think on       the failed ankle
           that spilled from the shoe
                                    rounding the corner,
the bruise blooming, the fingers          that drum my ribs
                        the warmth      of proximity
the collarbone presenting itself at the right angle
for breaking.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Eulensen

Praise for the Other Bodies in the Apartment Building

True I’ve hated some of you [occasionally]       for your loud tufts
of bossy song coming down the air ducts,
the figure eight the vacuum makes as you roll it
over my ceiling. I forgive you. I know that I
am a difficult person
to live above. Last night, when the white noise machine clicked
it’s sad little button and began to whir,
the reverb that comes down the walls every night
at ten, a low grumble made
for the kind of people [not me] tolerant, expectant
of noise, I sat still for a moment
to praise it.           Hello thing
I said in my head, give us another burst
of your melody, let's hear the drum of feet upstairs,
in the hallway, at the door, the way you can hear
them coming in the stairwell, the door rasping open
in the moments just before  the fist suspended
                —wine bottle, napkins, bowl of bread—
in the shape of wanting
to come inside.
               I've been missing you           all these weeks.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Katherine Eulensen's poems have appeared in Cutbank, The Seattle Review, Little Patuxent Review and others. She lives and writes in the Pacific Northwest.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mayowa Oyewale

to call a ghost a ghost

& we are walking into this mouth of night, holding lanterns before a black sea.
& we do not ask why this moon moons here, or why god forgot a star inside our eyes.
& we don’t know what’ll happen now that the birds have stopped singing, how many people
are dying of it [how many people are dead already]. &/or any other question about bodies
becoming a washbowl.

& the night snores on the sea now.
& we are still here holding each other’s hands, &
yet seeking ways to forge these stars into a key that might open
the moon door. &/but we forget the stars in our own eyes, flat lined light.

& see, we’re just bodies in every town’s cemetery  unable to talk about the silence in our
mouths. & see, we may be this or that, boy or girl, man or woman…
&/but we have no names for
ourselves.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Mayowa Oyewale is Yoruban. He writes from Ile-Ife, Nigeria, where he is an undergraduate student of Literature-in-English at Obafemi Awolowo University. Mayowa has one of his poems in Memento: An Anthology of Contemporary Nigerian Poetry (Animal Heart Press, 2020) and another forthcoming at California Quarterly. A lover of photography, you may find the need to follow him on Twitter @https://twitter.com/mayowa__oyewale?s=.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Grinwis

Omar And Vinnie Emerge from Woods to Place Something Vast in Check

They passed. No, they passioned
one another. Or something other
than glance. The corners dulled.
What he hoped to achieve
was ungainly as the next shrub
which just caught his eye,
the next stunted knee-jerk belief.
Headaches. He gives her ‘a huge
headache’ she says. My head, a chewed fuse,
maybe I am me in no shape or form.
My issues, they move like scraps.
Am I scrappy, or one ‘unscrapped,’
often in fear. Omar Tarik
emerges from woods with Vinnie
as my ancestors banter in the trees.
Nothing all day. A grunt maybe.
Sway like Hawaiian surf. Some see
the world as list. I searched
for my name and turned up
a hammer, a swimsuit
and her picture of an igloo.
The door is small and I am outside.
I don’t grasp my head even in dreams.
I have control, no
control, and explosions
all the time. Trust
the great thing and how
to trust it. There are mysteries
that need no questions.

________________________________________________________________________________________

James Grinwis is the author of The City From Nome (National Poetry Review Press) and Exhibit of Forking Paths (Coffee House/National Poetry Series). He co-founded Bateau Press in 2006 before ceding it to his friend Daniel Mahoney at the College of the Atlantic in 2014. His recent work has appeared in Alexandria Quarterly, Bennington Review, Crazyhorse, Rogue Agent, Willow Springs and very recently on a Painted Bride Quarterly slush pile podcast. He lives in Greenfield, MA.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Daniels

Saxophones, Drum

             All objects will become either
a saxophone or a drum.                   
—Cole Swensen

People have taken the jobs
of the dead, their husbands

and houses, their robes and
soft slippers. The moon

is a saxophone moaning softly.
It shines in daylight over a roofline

ghosted by clouds. Deer trespass
through fields of weeds, alert does

and bucks, those saxophones,
their antlers no longer velveted.

They’re grunting, snorting.
Township trucks nozzle up

leaf debris, stirring fragments
that know how the dance is made

because they are saxophones: wind
plus their shining. The dead swim

steadily under the waves, the beating
above them the sound of a drum.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Barbara Daniels’s Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press in 2020. Her poetry has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Mid-American Review and elsewhere. Barbara Daniels received a 2020 fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Spicer

Mulberries and Spiders

If I exhumed memories of you,
I’d recall your soliloquy about the Pope
munching mulberries on our chocolate
sofa, how he flopped down, coughed,
and watched the crocodile lick the griffin.
You admitted that cocoon of a tale
was a lie, but we laughed about it
for years. Then the time you dressed
in nothing but cobalt scarves that covered
your delicious body parts, your sandy hair
unraveled on the ferry near a town called
Venice. I loved the hieroglyphic wind
and loons that decorated your loins as you
opened to me: our jacklights barely shined
in the lagoon and a moth landed between us
as we both slipped into rhythmic silence.
What happened next? I think we entered
dawn’s colors with echoes of each other
moaning in the morning. Now, I sit on that
same sofa, survive day to day, little snags
in my thoughts winking at each other.
Beyond the canal two miles away,
a gull waves to another gull just as I
can’t recall the last words you spoke,
your fever frying the spider that
crawled on your forehead, and you
sleeping for the rest of my life.

________________________________________________________________________________________

David Spicer has published poems in The American Poetry Review, CircleStreet, Gargoyle, Moria, Oyster River Pages, Ploughshares, Remington Review, Santa Clara Review, The Sheepshead Review, Steam Ticket, Synaeresis, Third Wednesday and elsewhere. Nominated for a Best of the Net three times and a Pushcart twice, he is author of six chapbooks, the latest being Tribe of Two (Seven CirclePress). His third and fourth full-length collections, American Maniac (Hekate Publishing) and Confessional (Cyberwit.net), are now available. He lives in Memphis. His website is http://www.davidspicer76.com.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christen Noel Kauffman

Captiva

Let’s remember how we pulled sheepshead
from the Gulf of Mexico, scraped the scales

from their gills in a kitchenette overlooking the beach.
This place where we released the masquerade

of being something more than an extra pair of hands
or a warm body in the night, a harpoon wedged

in the bow of a boat, our marriage an imposition
of ceiling fans, a truck we painted black by hand.

I opened the cavity of my chest to show you my rows
of teeth, my father’s Thunderbird, a labia-pink heart.

See how I’m sewn into versions of a girl, each one
a practice in the erasure of spine, my failed attempts

at invention. When I told you my insides are made
of whale bone, that my body boiled down

could catch a house on fire, burn all hours
of the night, I terrified you into something small.

Today, I read that fish serenade the dawn
like songbirds bellowing some hope as the sun

begins to rise. I think of how their bodies looked
open and flayed, the knife we sank into one clear eye.

I asked you to show me the convergence of your ribs,
the fires you lit in your father’s garage – but sometimes

we kill the things we most want to love, leave them
tossed for the ibis. Let them pick the bones clean.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Christen Noel Kauffman lives and teaches in Richmond, Indiana with her husband and two wild daughters. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Tupelo Quarterly, The McNeese Review, The Cincinnati Review, Booth, Willow Springs and DIAGRAM, among others.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey Hermann

I Keep Almost Getting It but Then I Keep Missing It

Our bodies are elegant; let’s forget them
The bend of your legs on a bicycle, a pair of hands
knitting, how men sit differently in chairs than women
When I told a neighbor about the dead bird
on her front porch she was unmoved
Two kids argued over who had to move it
The big high window reflects the sky and
I guess they can’t tell the difference, the birds
Sometimes I feel like we’re just hanging on
out here at the edge of the Milky Way
Everything spinning away and not
making a sound. Astronauts say
we’re responsible for our own monstrosity
Mothers home with their babies say
poets should take up painting
and show us what they really mean already
Aren’t you tired of the past, the way
there’s more of it every day? I used to love
those old photos of people leaning out windows
in the summer in Brooklyn or Queens
A mother and daughter in aprons maybe.
Two little boys in shorts on the curb below, one
holding a cat by the scruff, the other’s face a blur.
Now it makes me love a modern kitchen.
Big burners and a backsplash behind the sink.
I just want to sit down on the cold blue tile
and have a drink with you before we head laughing
to the roof, remove our shirts, and throw them
off the side, twisting and dipping to the street.
The city blocks out most of the stars. We’ve never
seen each other like this before and eight million
people from eight million windows might be
watching us embrace, your skin touching
my skin for the very first time.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jeffrey Hermann's work has appeared in Hobart, Pank Magazine, Juked, Pidgeonholes Magazine, Palette Poetry and other publications. He received a Pushcart nomination in 2018 from Juked Magazine.

________________________________________________________________________________________

Jude Marr

As We Art

as the world burns we raise our brushes, heavy
with flaming shades, to paint
ourselves bright
                                                     but we are
of the night: our canvases
curl: paint fades: breathless, we wait
for new rites—

as the world burns we raise our chisels, ready
to create flesh from stone: but bone
blades become char
                                                     and we are

pigment pushed into cracks: not carmine
and azurite, but viridian
and verdigris—

as the world burns, green earth
graffiti curl across bedrock, tendrils
as breath: each leaf print
                                                    a testament

as the world burns we drag
fingers through ash and watch stick figures
dance as one last, willful act.

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Jude Marr (they, them, their) is the author of Breakfast for the Birds (FLP, 2017) and We Know Each Other by Our Wounds, forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in November 2020. Jude’s day job is Director of the Reading-Writing Center and Digital Studio at Florida State University. Follow them @JudeMarr1 and find more of their work at www.judemarr.com.

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Emily Lake Hansen

How to explain coronavirus to your children

From the yard, I try to name
every flower I know: gardenia,
camelia, wisteria, knockout rose.
On the second try: yarrow imported
from the desert, dandelions,
the pink pear buds that come
before the fruit, a single daffodil,
gold, unrusted among gray
weeds.
This is all I can
do: describe what I see.
Outside the fence and inside
my body too, there's lava molting
like feathers from the steeples,
card towers folding under a gentle
breeze. I am useless mostly,
unable to control anything
or make any plans, my calendars
all beer cans now in the trash.
I can't make it better, so
I'll explain it instead: our life’s new
boundaries, the ceremonies
we'll make of housework. When
things get worse —
and they will
get worse — I will name sounds
instead: the robin's warbling,
the dog's incessant panting, a huff
huff huff in your ear, the deep,
long amen at the end of a prayer.

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Emily Lake Hansen (she/her) is the author of Home and other Duty Stations (Kelsay Books, 2020) and the chapbook The Way the Body Had to Travel (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poetry has appeared in Atticus Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Rust + Moth, Midway Journal and Up the Staircase Quarterly among others. She is a PhD student at Georgia State University and currently serves as the poetry editor for Minerva Rising Press.

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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi

self-portrait in youth

in Technicolor:

We laid under linen sheets, tracing stories
on each other’s thighs. Washington Square Park
at dusk, a lonely brass saxophone whistling
by the fountain; I met a man there once, smiled
at him through the crowd, set his apology letter
ablaze with the end of my cigarette. I saw a god
that night, as I laid on a dying patch of grass, among
the constellations. Ambrosia lips, a scratchy
Chet Baker record praying to the moon,
the hiss of a tea kettle. There’s no room for the
Muses on this bed. Darling, you can bury me alive
right here--gone, I’m already gone.

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Ashley Hajimirsadeghi’s work has appeared in Into the Void Magazine, Corvid Queen and cahoodaloodaling, among others. She is a poetry reader at Mud Season Review and Ex/Post, attended the International Writing Program’s Summer Institute and was a Brooklyn Poets Fellow. She can be found at http://ashleyhajimirsadeghi.squarespace.com.

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Gary Fox

Building

Maybe I have a thing for bricks.
not cinder blocks holding up
houses from the high water table
but red bricks. Blood of
a city that raised me. I guess
this is why I am comfortable riding
through Church Street. worn
down. corner store boarded
up with dim sign flashing.
brick buildings with no window panes
on oddly cornered streets.

or maybe I am a paycheck away. one drink.
one pill. one tapped vein. I appreciate
life’s sticky posts, a stumbling rope
of a human directing traffic at a stop sign
even though logic says keep
moving. I stare though my rearview.
am I addicted to a patch of small
town that smells K&Aish?
do I want to be Sir Gawain
in Adidas and Kango
handing out little black books
inviting everyone to smokey halls
in the basements of churches or
am I looking for vacancies,
a dry space to hide when the
fog settles while I wait for the sun to
burn it all away

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Gary Fox has published in the journals The Bucks County Writer and Toho Journal as well as anthology Mass Incarceration in America: Advocacy, Art and The Academy. He has earned a B.A. in English and a certificate in creative writing from The Pennsylvania State University.

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Jack B. Bedell

Cardinal

My wife has faith
red birds are the spirits
of our kin come back

to visit our days. They fill
the backyard all summer
after the grass has been cut,

poke around carefully
like they’re inspecting
every inch of what we

have left back there.
She sips her coffee
and watches them

through the back door glass,
doing her best to soak in
all that color.

Once, she called me
from the parking lot
at work, crying

through the phone,
when a red bird landed
right on her passenger

windowsill. She stopped
mid-sentence to send me
a picture of it. By the time

that photo popped up
on my phone, we’d both
forgotten why she’d called.

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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. Jack’s work has appeared in Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain, Kissing Dynamite and other journals. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm (Mercer University Press, 2018). He served as Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017-2019.

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Joe Lugara

Art

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Joe Lugara took up painting and photography as a boy after his father discarded them as hobbies. His works often depict odd organic forms and inexplicable phenomena, taking as their basis horror and science fiction films produced from the 1930s through the late 1960s. He began creating digital paintings in the 2010s; they debuted in a 2018 solo exhibition at the Noyes Museum of Art in his home state of New Jersey. Mr. Lugara’s works have appeared in more than 40 exhibitions throughout the New York Metropolitan Area. His paintings have been exhibited at the New Jersey State Museum and with a number of commercial galleries in and around New York City, including 80 Washington Square East Galleries at New York University. He has recently completed work on his first illustrated book.