Poetry

Steven Cramer

Time Out

Said to know things about the soul we didn’t,
the yogini told us to relax our anuses and sit;

and to let the shenanigans of our thinking
simmer down, which made me think of carting

toddler Charlotte and toddler Ethan, spraying clots
of teary snot, into their rooms for a Time Out,

all the while don’t hit don’t hit on replay.
Then she gave us this half-sentence to complete:

I feel in touch with others when. . . . Which is when a truck
chirped the beep trucks make backing up

on this first open-window day in a bitter April,
which history shows is a cruel month. Who knew?

Lincoln shot, Hitler born, Titanic, Bay of Pigs,
King shot, Waco, the start of the Armenian

and Rwandan Genocides, Columbine, Virginia
Tech—yup, all April. You’d face as many horrors

googling May: most memes amount to lies.
Truth is, I lie more than I know, but I know it

took me less than a second to finish her phrase
in my head: I feel in touch with others when afraid

my kids will die before me. Some shared. Not me.
The exercise done, we filed out, anuses at peace.

Later, at the gym, the crazed babe of my fear
awoke, its arms and feet thrashing in a tantrum

I tried to quell by stretching: the gorilla stretch,
the cat-cow stretch, then back to the gorilla. Still,

fear hugged my knees so hard it brought me
close to kneeling. But I didn’t, because I don’t.

Steven Cramer

Zuni Fetishes, Santa Fe

Raven eats maize; Badger, ground turquoise;
Eagle, the guts of slain prey, but what
could feed this being dry as fossilized

dung? You took me in hand; we looked
at mesas, cottonwoods, arroyos; the Rio
Chama wound its umber cure our way.

Such medicines I spat back, and studied
instead the raptor’s femur at Ghost Ranch,
my soul hollow as O’Keefe’s ram skull.

Under the crags of Echo Amphitheater,
I watched for the blood of the slaughtered
said to have entered the pores of the rock,

so our echoes echo their cries. And now
we’re back: the night sky’s sucked in its stars,
speed-limits shrink, we have to trace our snow-

prints to relieve the dog. What I love most
about you is your patience, the way you check
my climate while I shadow-box with silence.

But first, love, help me stop playing dead.

Steven Cramer’s sixth collection of poetry, Listen, will be published by MadHat Press in October 2020. His other books are The Eye that Desires to Look Upward (Galileo Press, 1987), The World Book (Copper Beech Press, 1992), Dialogue for the Left and Right Hand (Lumen Editions/Brookline Books, 1997), Goodbye to the Orchard (Sarabande Books, 2004)—winner the Sheila Motton Award from the New England Poetry Club and an Honor Book in Poetry from the Massachusetts Center for the Book—and Clangings (Sarabande Books, 2012). His poems and criticism have appeared in numerous journals, including AGNI, The Atlantic Monthly, Field, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, The New England Review, The Paris Review, and Poetry. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and two fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, he founded and teaches in the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Lesley University.

Thom Swiss

Black Out

How I got to where
I was I still can’t

Tell you or which
Street near what

Address in which
Part of town I fell.

Maybe I drove or
Did I rideshare,

Wearing whatever
It was I was wearing?

Hold on -- who was
I with if anyone?

What crashed my head?
Why were my shoes gone?

Thom Swiss

In the End

Kissing my way out of a party, hair-ruffling
And hand-squeezing till I stood in the hall,
I knew where I was headed next.

At the party I’d struggled with my anger.
I decided to conceal it, then decided
I shouldn’t, then decided I should again.

Heading up your stairs I heard you playing piano.
My left foot on the fourth step, right touching the fifth…
Soon I was begging at your door, let me in.

I was twenty years old, smug and overheated,
Yet a person other people forgave –
Without exception, they all forgave.

Thom Swiss is the author of two collections of poems from university presses, and editor of many academic books, including one on Bob Dylan and another on digital poetics. He teaches at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Sarah Murphy

Poem with No Shame in It

I want to mention the body they carried out of the canyon
through the unnameable wildflowers so you'll know
that I am paying attention, so you'll know
I know not everything is about the perilous state of my soul,

but or and that story is not mine to tell, except for the moment
my friends rose over the ridge and saw a man in an orange helmet
carrying a boom box, and behind him
someone's actual body in a black bag carried by strangers

Today is a new day on the mountain, and the trees don't or cannot
know what did or will or can happen, that's not their call, that's
not why they stand like sentries or pencils, guards or stars
or trees, lodge pole or aspen or douglas a mix in my mind

though my father tried to teach me about the wilderness,
walking fast up the rock field with his straight spine,
my brother and I panting, whining, rehearsing our abandon
in our own ways, though I cannot say anything is shared

sealed as we are in our own bright bodies, sealed as I am was are
in my own bright pain, my brother an enigma of shared code
living in Oakland like the Sphinx, that still, that stone, that unknowable,
that full of riddles and silt. No, the silt is me, contingent, watching

the St. Bernard who does not want to sit down under the umbrella,
watching the mountains rise over the McDonalds while the tourists
huddle over their maps and snacks, each of them a soul wrapped
in a soft machine that can fail at any minute, one snap of an aspen,

one slip of heel, and oh yesterday I told my story in the plainest
tones I could muster, and it wasn’t so bad, it wasn't so bad,
forgiveness like a yoga pose or a dose, something I can master,
forgiveness like a dog that wants to break out of his mortal coil

and climb the mountain with a flask of whiskey and save everyone
from themselves, our or my or your or his hubris, I know it is not
mine to claim. They say when they told the young man to turn
back from Long's Peak in a blizzard, he refused, he refused.

Sarah Murphy splits her time between California, her home staff, and Florida, where she teaches English at Jacksonville University. This poem was written in rented house bordering Rocky Mountain National Park last summer.

Joyce Peseroff

After 40 Days

For 39, the novelty of spring
freshened my walks
as various naked trees
flowered, then leaves
unclenched to a forest
of small green hands
soft as rabbits’ paws.
Gold and purple finches,
solo bluebird, cardinal pair,
woodpecker at the feeder,
back of its head scarlet as
the victim of a coup de grace—

it hardly mattered that strangers
died, if you loved them
less than the sparrow gleaning
moss for fallen seed.
The baby leaves drooped
like a girl locked in darkness
for 13 years then displayed
to neurologists, linguists
and writers who studied her
mute “bunny walk”—
it hardly matters,
if you notice a blossoming pear tree

in terms of a profit in fruit,
that Genie, passed from lab
to foster home like a feral pet,
lives. The leaves broaden and stretch.
Rain sweeps petals into sewers
while a turkey roosts
in a neighbor’s pine
soiling his roof. Genie is
a pseudonym, despair a suitable
answer to parents
silently feeding and tying
her upright to a potty chair.

Joyce Peseroff

On the Near-Extinction of Fireflies

Religion was made by men
we name and men we can’t.

The rabbi eulogized
Uncle Abe as a man who left behind
shem tov—a good name.

Fireflies that rivaled the unnamed
stars in number spark
no longer.

Abe joined the Navy at 17.
After the war, he hated
the popular car with a German name.

The Navy was all
anti-Semites, my aunt confided.

Fewer and fewer
whip-poor-wills call their name
in fields prickling with juniper.

June ends without a flash, without the high
pitched whistling
farmers at night

stopped their ears against. Eventually Abe
bought my aunt a Mercedes.

The program named what the rabbi read
a service, not a funeral, since
the body was absent, awaiting

cremation. Still, we chanted
the unspeakable name of the Lord.

The farmer wrote his name
in a small red notebook, then
Summer is over and we are not saved.

Summer will find the wire-bound
pages, coils powdered
with rust, in a dark pocket.

Joyce Peseroff’s sixth book of poems, Petition, will appear Fall 2020. Her fifth collection, Know Thyself, was designated a “must read” by the 2016 Massachusetts Book Award. She directed and taught in UMass Boston’s MFA Program in its first four years; currently she blogs for her website joycepeseroff.com and writes a poetry column for Arrowsmith Press.

Karl Walters

Cozy in the Belly of the Pitcher Plant

Who hasn’t felt,
as a man in a Stone Cold Steve Austin t-shirt
cleans corn kernels from the open space
in his fiancé’s teeth with flat strokes of his tongue,
that Walmart is a place out of space and time?

I’ve lost myself in labyrinthian corridors of chips and Pepsi
products only to find my way to the check-out kiosk
like a spawning salmon.
No, I don’t mock you, Earth Salt.
My ass, too, winks from the lip of my Dickie’s.
My teeth also wiggle in their sockets. Like you,
I don’t trust weathermen or doctors or dignity’s
myriad notions.

We are flies to honey buns,
bees to caved-in bottles of Fanta.
We are stuck – glazed in, capped up, and drowning
with the face of slow orgasm
in a love like corn syrup,
having forgot what moths forget under
fluorescent lights.

Karl Walters is a receptionist from Alabama. His work has been published in American Chordata, Bull Fiction, High Shelf Press, and The 3Elements Review.

Mickie Kennedy

The Queen’s Bonfire

Damn the will. The day's blotter
has given up the dead:
a girl’s name and alleged act of treason.
A wooden chair for her to sit,
should her location be revealed.
The plume, a plane, a vintner's glass,
the sprocket in a mechanic's bag of tricks.
I'd rather the search be
for something regal than the alternative,
a girl in a faded blue dress and a stitch
of remorse along the hem. Her simple act
of defiance was a raised glass and a toast
to simpler times, when a girl could grow into woman,
not fuel for a queen's amusement, a fire left
to smolder in an open field, the many places
a royal sword can linger over the body
until what passes for allegiance
becomes severed and alone.
A sedan with stolen plates circles
the castle as a guard smiles and turns away.
He knows these are uncertain times.
An Uber or an assassin, either way no reward
in the status quo. Better to keep quiet
as a family tree splinters and catches fire.
The queen is the town's fodder. Tonight, she
crackles and burns.

Mickie Kennedy is an American poet who resides in Baltimore County, Maryland with his family and two feuding cats. He enjoys British science fiction and the idea of long hikes in nature. His work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Artword Magazine, Conduit, Portland Review, Rockhurst Review, and Wisconsin Review. He earned an MFA from George Mason University.

Fred Marchant

The Lighter

It is amazing how much war can be etched on
the face of a flip-top Zippo.

In the upper right, a tiny photo of Saddam's head,
mustache and all. Opposite him

a jet embossed with American stars and dropping

a bomb. When you thumb the cap up,

the plane, the stars, and the bomb path all light up,
via some electric gizmo inside.

As I flip it open and closed, I keep watching the lights
go on and off in my hand and start

to see broken concrete, a building collapsed, the slabs
pressing down on whoever it was

saying help me help. I could hear myself saying back,
of course I will help, I'd dig like a dog,

like a frantic father or mother, I'd rip my fingers
open to help get that kid out. Did I

tell you before that it was a kid buried in the rubble?
I guess not, it doesn't have to be.

The voices, the words, the ruins, the bombs are all in
my mind, and this is only a lighter,

only a piece of war junk that has wormed its way back,
made to be put away in that drawer

you keep for things you don't much want to look at,
not even once in a while, if that.

for Rachel McNeill

Fred Marchant

The Buddha of the Garden Table

Especially now, in the worst of it,
I feel my mind pull away from the clank
and clatter, from worries about health,
money, and the jets overhead, from
the angry sound of a car taking off,
its driver burning rubber at the stop sign.
What rises to mind instead is a memory
of mists in the morning, seeping water,
good soil that feeds the bougainvillea,
sweet-fern, and fennel in your backyard
a continent away. That, and a memory
of the glass Buddha, its gray, translucent
face watching over us sitting at the round
and rickety wooden table, telling stories,
true ones we said, of suffering and hope,
how deeply every war gets etched within,
how the heart recoils but does not forget,
how we teach each other how to outlast it.

for Maxine and Earll Kingston

Fred Marchant is the author of five books of poetry, the most recent of which is Said Not Said (Graywolf Press, 2017). Earlier books include Full Moon Boat, House on Water, House in Air, and The Looking House. His first book, Tipping Point, won the 1993 Washington Prize, from The Word Works, and was reissued in a 20th anniversary second edition. Marchant has co-translated works by several Vietnamese poets, and has also edited Another World Instead: The Early Poems of William Stafford. An emeritus professor of English, he is founding director of the Suffolk University Poetry Center in Boston.

Jaewon Chang

The Geography of Walking

A man sits by the windowsill, hoping
rain would cultivate the crops.

Across him, a path of apparition is formed
between Taal Lake and the lighthouse,

a path he sees himself
walking across blindfolded, escorted

by two men in light blue uniforms,
a sergeant’s badge grazing atop their chest.

His son’s snoring fills the air, and
any other sound is a voice underwater.

He wants to go for a walk, knowing
a wrong turn can end with a short barrel.

He stands up, as the first marigold collapses.
Around it, lagundi flowers create an oxbow rind.

Jaewon Chang is a high school junior living in the Philippines. His works of poetry have been accepted by magazines such as District Lit, Cleaver Magazine, Blue Marble Review, and more. He is currently the founder and editor-in-chief of Celestal Review, an online social-justice themed literary magazine. During his free time, Jaewon enjoys traveling the city on foot.

Jeffrey Skinner

The Escape

Dog plants nose next to wasp
on stair, affecting nonchalance.
Half chewed wasp stumbles
drunk-like away from nose.
Dog paws it back. Wasp
waits, antennae twitching,
then rises an eighth of an inch
on six feet & tries another
route, slower this time,
stumbling worse. Dog thinks,
is this real or am I dreaming
wasp, stair, miniature hunt?
Wait, no — dog does not
think any part of this. I write
lines for wasp and dog,
I take wasp in mouth, one
last time, shake vigorously.

Jeffrey Skinner

Loving Eve

You were there, in a small room
with other artists, composers, and writers,
drinking. Then you, and nothing else.

*

The rowboat adrift, your finger
drawing a miniature wake across the pond.

*

You were serious when you left the apple
on the counter, quartered.
I saw it as four sections of light.

*

Every day we woke up
slightly transformed. The angel we shared
whispered down the hall, warm breath in my ear.

*

The famous writer
showed up unannounced, wearing a tiny suit, a toy tie.
We said Hi, love the work,
and climbed back into each other.

*

Sex, the renewable
resource: hotel, shower,
dress shop dressing room: yes.

*

Why is the membrane between past centuries and us
so thin? Nothing retreats.

*

You were there, in a small room
with drinks. I was drinking.
The room is still there
and us in it, our first scene rehearsing itself
again and again — same apple
you held out to me, same
dot of juice glinting on your lip.

Some of Jeffrey Skinner’s recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Three Penny Review, Ploughshares, and Paris Review.  He is a 2014 Guggenheim Fellow in poetry. His latest collection, Chance Divine, won the Field Prize. He lives in Louisville, Kentucky, where Sarabande Books, the press he co-founded with his wife, is also based.

Robert Crowl

Abandoning a Bird

for Katy

Weeks before a friend's suicide
and closed casket burial, I swerved into a
Starbucks’ parking lot for student essays had
piled and mounted, taking up residence in wire
baskets behind my eyes and in the muscles

between my shoulders. A gray pigeon lay crushed
but alive in the empty space beside me. Its eyes
bugged out as it swiveled its neck in desperate,
hypnotic circles above the crippled heap. Now crumpled
bones and fraying feathers twitched in the breeze—masquerading
as flight. I cringed, clutching my work, slunk out

of the car, and stepped lightly as if tiptoeing
through a graveyard. I paused beside it, watched
it open and close its muted beak. Lungs likely
collapsed, too weak to vibrate a dirge up
its throat. I yearned to help but was lost:
its body mangled into itself. My only thought:
crush it underfoot; a cringe returned. I pictured
its head flat against the sole of my shoe, felt
its bulb burst under my weight—a shiver chased

through me. It continued rolling its head around
its own remains, slowing with each pass like a clock
needing to be wound. I condemned my paralysis, my
impasse: abandon her through greased hinges to quiet
work or follow ache to nurse a bird in my hands and flood
emptying lungs with breath? And still the thought:
hasten death with heel? One last ache: sit and watch the stars
with her. I chose the glass doors, the bird growing

in the reflection yet shrinking behind me. Hours later,
when my cup emptied but for trace streaks of iridescent
foam rounding the edge, and my mind had become a wear
tailspin, I shouldered my lightened bag, loosened temples,
and empty inboxes. I pushed open the quiet door

to the night, darker than I’d left it. My eyes found her,
head no longer orbiting ruined wings, and I cursed
myself: lighter and undisturbed. A few weeks later,

my friend emailed us: she was leaving the school.
She had poured herself out for years. I paused
at her tidy, vulnerable type and gave the appropriate
twinge at her resignation before filing it away underneath
the next six messages cluttering my inbox. A few days later,

the entire staff gathered in the old cafeteria and learned
she’d killed herself, leaving no note. Some wept on circular,
backless chairs while others sat with silent solemn faces. I buried
my face in the pit of my arm. A stranger rubbed my hunched back
while I hid and wept. Afterward, the news lived beside me: how

had her unladen smile deceived us? All of us had leaned into her,
skeleton fracturing beneath that radiant skin. She had choreographed
teacher talent shows and streamed herself all over campus, bright pixels
dazzling us, an illness lying dormant. Something crushed her. All of us

excavating hallway pleasantries, unearthing conversations for signs
of the discreet unraveling. But she had choreographed herself too well,
thrown us from the scent with scripted text messages, feigning wellness.

For me, the last two emails, “I’m stepping away” and soon after,
“I’m resigning,” should have sparked me. Why didn’t I gather her
up and feel around the perimeter of her posturing? Why didn’t I flood
her ears with my pleading breaths instead of preening myself to appear
less small in her looming shadow? None of it may have mattered, to think
one pair of hands can nurse a broken bird back to health. In the end, I wish
she’d have heard me clamoring outside instead of all that goddamned silence.

Robert Crowl teaches English and Creative Writing at Concordia University of Texas and Austin Community College. He earned an MFA in creative writing from the University of Texas at El Paso and a BA in English at the University of Alabama where he was a member of the inaugural Poetry Slam team, performing at CUPSI. He’s also a consultant & presenter with the Heart of Texas Writing Project at the University of Texas in Austin which is a group of educators in the area committed to intellectualizing and growing the difficult work of developing readers and writers at all levels through writer’s & reader’s workshop. Currently, he’s writing a memoir that explores the intergenerational effects of substance abuse, toxic masculinity, and infidelity and the ways childhood trauma impacts parent-child relationships. He grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Houston, Texas, but he currently lives in Leander, Texas with his wife and their 5-year-old twins.

Clarissa Adkins

American Concubine

My vertebrae make renovations by sexing upon the shards
of Europe’s antique goods. Both thief and self-proclaimed concubine,
I build marble suburbs out of these bones of bones.

I build the countertops in my undressed spine, make pasting
out of the piles of bones, spines of thieves, bound and thieving.
Neither trustworthy, nor trusting. No more trust.

I am like leftover Haviland patterns painted onto scorched
bones of bones, casket-teering in my spine,
my marrow sitting erect in distracted conference.

Berlin once collected the greatest porcelain patterns, some said,
ruled the air with the meat of Easter and spiral fist. On willing tracks
I deliver our own rocks by my throttling. My people crack the rest.

Clarissa Adkins

Selfishness

This is kind of about the three-foot
black snake she tried to behead
with a shovel because her mother asked her to
and a little about the cat she ran over
and left behind because she was pregnant.

She did not kill the snake;
she only maimed it
and let it crawl away into pebbles
under a sky burning from pink-purple into black.
She doesn’t know what to tell you
about the cat.

The worst is this:
knowing someone is going to die
and not loving them always
with every scale or cell of your body,
this, the most selfish act ever.

Clarissa Adkins was a finalist for the 17th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize. She’s published in Poems2Go, The Pinch, Whurk Magazine, River City Poets’ anthology: Lingering in the Margins, and has a full-length book being published by Lily Poetry Review Books in April 2021. Clarissa earned a Best of the Net nomination for her work in Parentheses International Literary Arts Journal. She enjoys reading for Sugar House Review and received her MFA in poetry from Lesley University in 2018. When she’s not writing, you can usually find her teaching yoga and high school English. You can reach her via her website.

Nailah Mathews

Untitled

after Tomaž Šalamun

At 3:46 in the morning on 6
april 2019 in the peak of Aries
season there was an itch on my
calf below my stolen duvet
so i stuck my arm under
my stolen duvet to scratch
at the mound of flesh and i
scratched it like a cat scratches
anything it isn’t supposed to i
scratched it like a baby’s nail
can shave you closer than a
prison shiv i scratched it
straight through until
i clawed myself open and
i kept scratching up until i
gored my thighs and my
buttocks and my stomach
and my womb and i gutted
my womb and my heart after that
and when i took my heart
my white beating heart
i realized that i was bleeding
new light i was bleeding
light and my body was a
cavern fit for angels, feral
as genesis and I was the light
that said let there be light

Nailah Mathews is a nonbinary Black poet to whom books and black lives matter, who aspires to be as kind to every stranger as they would be to a lost child. Their piece ‘hanlon’s razor’ will appear in Tilde~A Literary Journal’s Issue V. They can be reached at nailah.mathews@case.edu for inquiries.

Emily R. Antrilli

When I’m asked

about how to nourish my body about the way I grow cells and blood clots not too thick

to give it the billow it needs to take steps and pulse I think of the amount of

minutes I can go without swallowing I Google how many days

a mammal can go without eating before its breath asks it for a hand

7 days and I imagine a slighter me on Day 5 moving my bones

like the panels of a reclining chair sprung-back I would split crack

into unbolted pieces splintered wood exposed in parts Then I’m eleven

again I hear Mother call for dinner and Stepfather is instructing me

to eat each sour bite of hamburger helper off the styrofoam plate

so I helplessly chew grind flesh with my teeth pick loose bone out of pieces

When I finish he takes note of how my hips have started to fill out and

soft rolls spill out over belt loops I strip naked in my room observe

the folds of skin water falling into the pointed down shape of my vagina

and I use the tooth brush scrubbed with bleach from cleaning corners

of my sill push into my throat to spill cooked skin of mammals onto

my carpet blame the dog and admire the way the rounded earth

of my stomach is concave in my sleep I’m twenty-six and I still keep

a tooth brush in an old tampon box center shelf under my roommate’s

shaving kit I mostly just watch the tip poke out of the box when I’m

letting the hot shower mend the the scrapes let it fall down my throat to

heal bile scabs I imagine being screwed together with flathead bolts

teaching my brain to write a manual for days I wish to loosen my sockets

nest under sheets of vomit like a mammal searching for heat or protection

from the thing that’s looking to kill

Emily R. Antrilli is a confessional poet currently living in South Philadelphia. She is a recent graduate from Arcadia University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. She served as an art and poetry editor for Arcadia’s MFA Literary Journal, Marathon. Her work can be seen in The Esthetic Apostle. She has recently released her first chapbook, Counting Teeth. For inquiries, please contact her at emily.antrilli@gmail.com.

Joan Houlihan

The Enemy

We don’t look at them, they look at us—
lowered pig-heads, a grunt in our snouts,
a last burst of flame in our thighs,
our cries for mother as the knife loves us
then one by one, piece by pound,
they gather us, squealing, to their ground.

Joan Houlihan

Harbinger

I like paralysis best—
someone I can carry uphill, in a blizzard,
staggering across a parking lot, or
lifting them, hot, from bed to chair.
I am broad-backed and without PTSD.
My damage protects me
from you. I am a human fire, burning
with know-how you will never know.
I can give care because I don’t care.
Made of padding and string hair,
a plaster chest-plate pierced with spikes
I can remove, I’m not in need.
Several homes ago I stopped being seen
and can now see through you.
I cross your threshold—cross yourself.
Everyone is leaving. I am the only one left.

Joan Houlihan is the author of six books of poetry, including Shadow-feast (Four Way Books, 2018) and the forthcoming It Isn’t a Ghost if it Lives in Your Chest (Four Way Books, 2021). She is part-time Professor of Practice at Clark University in Worcester, MA and serves on the faculty of Lesley University’s Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program in Cambridge, MA. Houlihan founded and directs the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference.

Jessica Mehta

To(o) Intimate

To intimate is to suggest I shouldn’t (perhaps)
tell you Give me prayer hands (higher)
so the ropes don’t lash your face. (Bottoms, you see,
don’t want rope burns on those cheeks
unless they asked for it
in advance). It’s too intimate, they said,
using measuring tape
instead of hemp hank. I suppose
it’s fine when doctors family loved
ones friends that one
celebrity the blogger on IG
tells you you’re the wrong kind
of thicc but inch by inch in real life
is too triggering for some. I’d like
to intimate, yet again, that this
is not mature/adult/triple-x content,
this
is the human body canvas form
un-sheathed and Does this look
sexual to you? Nudity is to intercourse
and averted eyes as books are to madness
and mutiny. It’s too intimate to intimate
that we are beautiful stripped and hog-
tied in public. Let me paint my experiences
in cinema red across crowning iliac
crests and count the seconds dripping fast
before they shut us down in shameful protest.

Jessica Mehta is the multi-award-winning author of over one dozen books, including the forthcoming “Selected Poems” that won the Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books in 2020. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space and place inform much of Jessica’s work. Learn more at www.jessicamehta.com.

James Redfern

Worship

klan patches and PD badges
bought at ancestry shops, swap meets,
and truck stops out along the interstate,
hung up between the sunglasses carousel
and the bible-verse bumper stickers

we got all the gas we’re ever gonna need
but we’re shit plumb outta matches

busted-up and battered, deep-fried hatred on a stick
sells for twenty-seven-fifty a pop at the county fair,
it comes liberally dusted with confectioner’s sugar
on a paper plate with a generous side of ketchup
and a lemon wedge or two for squeezing

every year the pillow-sack races
converge on the courthouse for the hanging,
got everything, finish line, checkered flag, the whole bit

after the picnic and the pig-fucking contest,
a languid baptismal procession sets out
silent along the mourning river’s edge,
wading hip-deep in duck-shit salvation
praying for the safety of another newly reborn vessel

the circus is back in town,
just raised up a new center-ring tabernacle
out in the field by the old sycamore

the spot formally reserved for your second cousin’s
stepmother’s great-grandson’s
epileptic depression
played out in the purple-hued moonlit shadows
of the drunken pews cast on the floors and walls
of the transplanted house
of one god or another
earmarked only by hatred and fear
and always lustful,
always lustful for the cleavage,
for the cock, or for the carrion
always lustful for whatever form of salvation du jour
brings in the most green

James Redfern was born and raised in Long Beach, California. Redfern is a graduate of Grinnell College. His work has been published by The American Journal of Poetry, Transcend, Verity La: The Clozapine Clinic, Dime Show Review, Swimming with Elephants, Montana Mouthful, Anti-Heroin Chic, Great Lakes Poetry Press, Fear and Loathing in Long Beach, and elsewhere.

Emi Bergquist

Ring of Shadow

We are predators all day long, like foxes
with their darkening eyes, closing in
on that Magnetic North, lunging

at the precise moment shadow meets sound;
like lodestones, we cannot be stopped —
minerals in love with iron and the pigments

of color that come from the earth; we paint
our walls with it, roll our naked bodies in it,
write sonnets and sing songs for it — seduced

by the execution of a clean strike, we like to wait
in the hallway where the element of surprise
will seem genuine, but smooth and on target,

feeding our confessions to the fishes and flightless
flowers that roam among us acquiescent yet uneasy.
At night we sleep and dream of nothing.

Emi Bergquist is a Brooklyn based poet originally from Idaho. Emi is an active associate of the Poetry Society of New York, a regular cast member of The Poetry Brothel, an editor of Milk Press Books, and is a current collaborator with the Pandemic Poems Project. Emi’s poetry has recently been published by Oxford Public Philosophy, What Rough Beast, and Oroboro. Emi regularly writes commissioned poetry and is currently donating all proceeds to charity and social justice organizations. For more information on collaborations and commissions, you can email her at emilykbergquist@gmail.com.

Samantha Hsiung

addiction

a thursday afternoon
we sit in your black mercedes
and you pull out your fairy wands
a pack of four that you’d gotten from
that chinese corner store
on fourth street

watch this, mei mei
it’s fairy dust
glitter-like ballerinas flutter in the air
pirouetting four times
then straying to neverland

my hands inch toward the wands
no, not for you
this is my medication
but once i get healthier
i’ll stop taking it
his fingers palpitate
as he feeds himself more

four years of healing
but for some reason
the wings on his back have cleaved
and the fairies aren’t here to save him.

Samantha Hsiung is a Chinese-American high schooler from California. Her work has been published in H.O.P.E. and Tabula Rasa (her school’s literary magazine). She also writes for her school’s newspaper. Aside from writing, Samantha loves reading, fencing, and teaching young children how to read.

e.e. greer

The Mother of Exiles

it’s no wonder we speak of crossroads devotion
drink atmosphere heavy petals
we tremble we’re fascinated
sultry, arrow-struck. outside, we’re growing hurricanes.

to touch the pooling flicker
some gossamer nightmare some underground royalty
i make pain and take the pills for it.
can’t forget the machines we live with
iron & task a branded rapture.
the solace crept up so did the sickness
what else can we breathe besides air —

we’re circling the sores getting warmer.
we’re waiting for the strings to come in.

a lair of fought and process
we’re out here piercing fathom stalking relief
nowhere to be seen the shrines and contours
all my amends are in heat.
hold risk as scepter rule the margins, sweet
we send our tempers the many nothings.

the sacred glacier the rest where we left it.
the rhizomes the chain-link our lanterns are full
and still been spilling
the message this mess age.

can’t count the coward fractions.

i canonize the blank wall and kiss the sixes there

a fever put you on the path.
the structure must be up by tonight
i mean taken down, hurry.

crowd oxidized like we want them
there is murder out in the melon field
there is cardboard in the streets

we’ve been centuries ignoring portals
the tyrants stroll so blatant
and now he’s spun us torment.

this fall they’ll make us pick
which rapist.

no choice but to press
the axiom tenderly
past ripe. reforming

this place will leave you frightened

stay livid darling
furious heartbroke swarming.

e. e. greer is poet, filmmaker, and hybrid-genre artist. When not writing, she can be found reading, eating, dancing with her eyes closed, or smelling flowers until she sneezes.