Poetry

Natalie E. Illum

Apex Predator

I too am a missile
a nightmare made
of saltwater and jaw
My bite is just 

a lost thought 
A mirage of fin
you won't even
feel as I tear

You are an easy
heart to torpedo
used scuba gear 
human seal with
gills starved closed

 
A shark cage is just that
Prehistoric womb
Water coffin 
Tourist trap

You are the one
who wanted to be 
the lookout
But a dive bell 

 
doesn’t actually ring 
for anyone 
The ocean

 
is a false lullaby
a charming lull for
the bone mountain
I am building

Natalie E. Illum is a poet, disability activist and singer living in Washington DC. She is a three-time grantee of DC Arts , a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, and a former Jenny McKean Moore Fellow. She was a founding board member of mothertongue, an LGBTQA open mic that lasted 15 years. She competed on the National Poetry Slam circuit and was the 2013 Beltway Grand Slam Champion. Natalie has an MFA from American University. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter as @poetryrox, and as one half of @allhermuses.

Sarah Elkins

Keeping Time

The plastic wand from the mini-blind
arcs through a concert of dust motes
in the slatted sunlight of late spring.

 
Put some english on it, he’d say 
teaching me to return a ping-pong volley
with a flick of my wrist 
to make the landing unpredictable.

 
Swung forehand from the fulcrum 
of his elbow, the rod sings the air and lands
as a full spectrum of light behind my eyes.    

 
My mother is a flailing conductor
of her own orchestra, retreating 
to another room to wail out
her dissent.   

 
The backs of my legs mirror the light
streaming through the blinds in streaks. 
They replay the rhythm of the bow,
report the consistency of his swing, 

 
weeping but not bleeding. I am silent,
a music-less work, little statistician 
keeping count, keeping time.

No One Gives a Flood a Name

The river churns chocolate around the Sycamores
as if they wandered into the water for fun. 
The Greenbrier is out of its banks again. 

 
No one is dead this time, but the children
old enough to remember get nervous 
and stand at windows repeating, It’s still raining.

 
A red Adirondack floats downstream 
from Caldwell past Stuart’s Smokehouse, 
twenty feet out from the edge—too far to reach

 
says one woman on Facebook, in response
to another who has reported the chair missing.
She guesses, at this rate, it’ll reach the bridge

 
in Alderson by 5:45. You know this town 
even if you can’t recall why. Billie Holliday,
Tokyo Rose, Squeaky Fromme, Martha Stewart—

 
they know. Everyone sends their rain here, 
downhill into the valley, sometimes incarcerated
in the bodies of women, sometimes as gravity. 

 
It’s still raining but by the time the water crests
the sun will be shining, and unless someone dies,
no one will remember this nameless excess.

Sarah Elkins lives in southern West Virginia. Her poetry has most recently appeared in Rust + Moth, Red Eft Review, and The Shore; critical analysis in Kestrel. She holds an MFA from Pacific University.

George Burns

Bruised, I Guess

When I asked her why, the morning after, 
she didn't know. "Grownups just do things sometimes—  
Neurotic—Broken inside—Maybe a psychiatrist can fix them."

 
The night before, when
she didn't want to sleep with my dad,
she had him sleep with me.

 
She found me downstairs on the couch.
"Why are you down here?
Did anything happen?"

 
And I guess he was just a little bit mean
and it was the middle of the night
and he didn't have all his self-control.

 
He was asleep, dreaming, as was I,
and he thought, maybe, I was 
one of the men on his ship in the merchant marine

 
and this was his chance to get back at my mom
and me, because I was her son, and she babied me.

 
The morning after, when she took me to school
and I asked why, why did she let—
bruised, I guess, I was—

 
bruised, not my body,
but bruised like that word 
neurosis

 
and I told myself
when I grow up, I—
when I grow up—

After founding a market research firm specializing in information on semiconductor factories (fabs), George Burns began attending yearly Robert Bly poetry workshops in Asilomar, California and began writing poetry. His poetry and short stories has been published in such literary magazines as The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Comstock Review, Caesura and The Massachusetts Review. In 2004, his poem, "Partly Heliotropic", was the winner of the Robinson Jeffers Tor House Foundation Poetry Contest. Find out more on his website www.thepoetryofgeorgeburns.com and buy his book If a Fish from cathexisnorthwestpress.com

Gilbert Arzola

Where Migrants Cross

They crossed water hoping for shallow places
where their feet could touch dirt.  

    
If they crossed sand then
            they ached for water
                        where
                        there was

 
                        only dust, only dust. 

 
                    I never crossed but
                        my father did.
                        Still for the rest of my life
                        everything would be about water
                        or the lack of it.

 
They called me wetback in the fields once.
When I was twelve, wetback they said,
these five hillbilly boys twice my size.
One was named Hamilton and he stared when he said it.

 
                       I didn’t know what a wetback was.

 
                        But I understood
                     because
                        his voice grew louder
                        and the words exploded
                        out of his mouth 

 
            like he was spitting out poison,
                        that it must have been something bad.

 
          Words can kill you   Words can kill you
                                   I found out that day.  

 
I didn’t die but my father did.
            and I never asked 
            what they called him
            or if his life had been about water or dust.

 
I never asked what
he put in his pockets when he had to leave home,
what things mattered most to him and what things
            he thought he might need. 

                       
                            Before he died we went 
                                    back
                             to the town he left.

   
                                    It was changed, he said.
                                    we had changed too

Gilbert Arzola is the second son of a migrant worker living in Valparaiso Indiana. He was named Poet Of The Year by Passager Press in 2019. His first book of poetry Prayers of Little Consequence was published in 2020. His story “Losers Walk” was nominated for a Pushcart Award in 2018. His work has appeared in Whetstone, Palabra, Crosswinds, The Tipton Review, Passager, Slab and The Elysian Review among others. His chapbook The Death of a Migrant Worker will be published by Rattle in September.

Christine Elizabeth Hamm

[smoke of an old war]

It is this:
The sun clinging to smoke.
A woman’s shoe in the street.
A bloody footprint in a column of light.

Christine E. Hamm (she/her), queer & disabled English Professor, social worker and student of ecopoetics, has a PhD in English, and lives in New Jersey.  She recently won the Tenth Gate prize from Word Works for her manuscript, Gorilla.  She has had work featured in North American Review, Nat Brut, Painted Bride Quarterly and many others. She has published six chapbooks, and several books -- including Saints & Cannibals. Find out more on her website: gorillahamm.blogspot.com

Lydia Downey

the soft white underbelly of womanhood

calloused skin can shed 
snowflake mountains in midmorning

 
like snakes that emerge in camouflage 
grass though you do not see green 

 
moons inside the eyes of lovers; yet
father explains what being a 

 
man means & how a venomous 
bite is self-punishment if placing 

 
the target in front of its mouth; 
constriction does not equal crushing 

 
against limber bodies & hundreds 
of bones slither slowly, latching 

 
backward fangs into necks of 
feeble mice women, scurrying 

 
with hairless tails pulled welcoming
into deep-throated males where snake 

 
saliva buries deep in the soft, pink
belly of patriarchism & manhood 

 
& fatherhood, laying eggs only 
to eat them for breakfast under 

 
basilisk suns to possibly be reborn 
& change this time into a better man

Lydia Downey (she/her) is an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay majoring in Creative Writing and the Applied Arts. Downey's poetry can be found in other journals such as The Vital Sparks and Northern Lights. Lydia Downey was the nonfiction editor of the Sheepshead Review Journal in Spring 2021. When she is not writing, Lydia enjoys reading, practicing yoga, and journaling. Reach her on Instagram @lydiamarionn. 

Tia Cowger

Bone Ash Woman

The charcoal woman hangs a 
half-drawn head with faceless
shame. Bone ash, burnt sage, 
bare outline of form. Everyone
always sees two lovers, in 
negative space between her solitary
body. Imagined love outweighs
belief. The bone ash woman 
feels on her own, by being
unintentional.

 
I am ready to give these bones back,
she says, her mouth a single line
on gray paper. Borrowed
from my mother, belong to
my daughter. Her body forms
like birth. Harsh, thick lines.
They were lost in negative space
too. Headless body steps
out of paper, arm outstretched, 
reaching towards a bone-pile
at her dusty feet. Break one, burn 
one, all to ashes. She turns the 
paper and begins another woman, 
starting with her face. 

Tia Cowger is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University. A poet at heart, her work has been published in The Examined Life Journal, Gone Lawn, The Olive Press, Sheila-Na-Gig, and The Coffin Bell Journal.

Soo Yeon Chun

Forgiveness

My mother taught me how to turn a word over 
in my mouth until it tasted sour:  
Love ruffles its fur in the wind. Love carves out
the flesh of its pumpkin. Love unfurls its pungent curtain over my eyes. 

 
She taught me forgiveness was a ritual for two,
a kind of dance for rain. Backs arched in a mutual cry.
I laughed at the paradox of it all—
his mind a house
full of mannequins, his plastic hand 
inside your chest.

 
To be honest, you never deserved
the snowflake that melted on the tip of your tongue.
Never deserved the comforting weight
of abandonment.
Put that ring on, and tell me again:
am I special?

Soo Yeon Chun is a rising senior at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, and a lover of things strange and in-between. Previously, her works have been recognized by Scholastic Art and Writing Awards, Jack London Writing Contest, Poemeleon, For Women Who Roar, Inlandia, and other online publications. She will be participating in the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop this summer.

Tristan Ayran

Crushes and Other Fiction

They are reading Miguel de Cervantes to the wolves,
she said, her eyes a spectacle of 
celestial conditions
pointing to the northern lights
that stitched the June sky.

I did not know where the wolves were
that night, so I could not ask. And there was 
no way that I could have asked her,
mostly because we spoke different
languages, hers stemming from romanticism, 
and mine, from the Industrial Revolution and 
the Age of Failed Conquests.
Metallic like grinding gears. Clockwork,
and pragmatic, with roots in Selby Royal.
But also, because there
is a treatment for rabies, whereas rejection
courses through trenches in the consciousness
and never the blood. 

Or so I imagined. They call it,
taking your shot
and I have always found that unusual
because it reminded me of the 
fictional ease –  the effortlessness in esophagi, especially
dry ones that have swallowed names, forcibly, 
that don’t belong to them,
and urinal water – of downing tequila shots
but also of the firing range that had the Buendia’s
family name engraved on the barrels.
And I am all too aware,
of the fate that befell Macondo.

Tristan Ayran is a 23-year-old poet and writer from Regina, Saskatchewan. He spends an inordinate amount of time trying out different cafés, reading Latin American literature along the way, or writing poetry and prose with themes of romance, immigration, and solitude. His work has previously been published in the Inky Community and some can be found on his Instagram at tristankarl.poetry. He can be reached at ayrank26@gmail.com.

Tara Tulshyan

yuan yang

yuan yang is bitter, caramellic –
our wounds are the same. 

 
mother told us to fetch expired tea,
cattle flushed into thinned milk, kopi

 
poured from another man’s mouth.
she cannot speak of him without                                

 
her lips parted, simmered over 
condensed fat. she told me i followed

 
him, where his hands could 
till apart my dress, let me be moon-skinned,

 
gilded: a rotten harvest, the paddies
a tender mouth. his weight heaves

 
onto me unravelling a body for 
cultivation as he holds his ankles over my 

 
fever, paler than the first steep of jingxuan 
chastened into dry tea leaves, sealed 

 
in his clay pot, where his mother could offer 
me to the gods, and maybe she would

 
receive forgiveness for him instead.
the man fooled me with prayers, in part told

 
me that nothing could ever sweeten 
in me.  instead, he birthed a bowl of his own

 
cha— reddened for another woman. 
his mouth jaundiced by my mother

 
with teh so he could no longer pour into me. 
when i asked mother, to rinse him out of my

 
mouth, she decants half of my body, 
she said: i was a cup of tea gone old.

post-typhoon prayers

split a chicken intestine along the grain 
of where the hen was sliced skin to bone 
along the grain of hunger. do not add herbs, 
only vinegar and rinse, a brown which we seem 
to recognise. sold next to pig mesentery 
fried in after typhoon wetness, man
on the margin of a street 
that hasn’t been inverted by cars, budding fat 
crisped by thrice-cooked oil spongy and latticed, 
pesos always oily. beer bottles praying 
to the sun spilt on the peppered 
roadside where motorcycles cleave and cut 
through half of the mountain until they can taste
the paddies that flood our tables with rice, gleaming 
almost like damselflies after rain. upright, unfolding
to reach the summer night, the tin roof writhing, 
polished by the water cultivated from a thousand hands 
on shoulders during the rosary, the netted ear 
of a child who became the river himself, a boy 
who never learned how to swim. 
he did not die 
by drowning. 

Tara Tulshyan is a sophomore from the Philippines. Her works have appeared in DIALOGIST, The Ilanot Review, and The Louisville Review, among several others. She is currently an editor for the Woolgathering Review.

Jami'L Carter

Void: generational wounds

This house has a hidden leak in the roof 
That’s been dripping for years. 
No one can find it. Honestly, no one ever looks. 
When I slipped and fell, grandmother said sternly
“Get your ass up” and I better not fall again. 

 
We took a family photo, 
And the photographer said say “with love”.
Immediately, I was surrounded by 
Bronze statues. So, we said “you be tough,” 
And smiles flourished but not before a drop
Plopped on grandmother’s head. 

 
We sat at the dining room table 
After church. Uncle Tommy told me 
I’m saying grace so I stood from the broken chair.
Grandmother said “and you can’t mess it up.”
So, I pieced together something about the
Three wise men and how grandmother’s 
Words were the light that leads us to Jesus. 

Water dripped onto the potato salad. 
Grandmother gave me a look, so 
I ate it and went to bed. Mother came
Into my room and before she left
she said “because I love you
I’ll tell you why tomorrow” and placed 
A bucket beside my bed. 
And when I closed my eyes 

 
A drop of water fell onto my face.

Jami'L Carter is a poet, fiction writer, and filmmaker. She holds a Bachelor's degree in English from Southeastern Louisiana University and is pursuing an MFA in Film at the University of New Orleans. Since her youth, Jami’L has utilized writing to express her storytelling and truths. A young creative, she thrives to impact the world the best way she knows how, with her writing. Her poetry can be found on Instagram @jthapoet and she can be contacted at directorjca7@gmail.com.

Charles Fleming

That One Time When a Funeral Made Me (Super) Horny

Don’t worry – It wasn’t a necrophilia thing. 
One day at work she hit the ground     dead. 
(as dead   as any animal that has ever died) 
(I never asked what   killed    her so young) 
(I prefer to pretend that it matters     a little)

 
The day    my best friend    buried his wife,
I was anxious about    entering   the church. 
(It had been   too long   since I had prayed) 
(I don’t bow my head   in reverence or awe)
(I prefer to pretend I do  in some scenarios)

 
Atheists appear   in churches  for weddings 
and funerals    but they don’t pray   for real. 
(we sometimes speak     our thoughts aloud
if our mind is gone   or our house is empty)
(we prefer to pretend  that no one can hear)

 
He cleared   his throat   through the eulogy. 
(he looked rawboned)    (that haggard way 
people wear a brutal and  unexpected grief) 
(like a backhanded face whose bruise has 
faded    but whose   shock     has remained) 

 
Afterwards –   I vigorously fucked my wife. 
I feasted     at the buffet    of her body then
I gazed at the ceiling   gulping my breaths.
I was bloated   on the meal I had received
(people    pray   in    all    kinds   of   ways)

What Would I Give Up?

An answer to Professor Laux —

 
Not the son upon the pyre, but the ram, the binding 
Not the people, but the church, the steeple   
Not the holy, but the ghost, the war, the water 
Not the savior but the blessed, the Lord-and 
Not the sin, but the original 
Not the tree, but the fruit, the knowledge  
            the good, the evil, the withering, the root and stem 
Not the sword, but the living-and-perishing-by, 
           the every-living-thing-put-to 
Not the money, but the love-of, the alms
Not the seed, but the mustard, the falling, 
            the spilling-upon-the-ground 
Not the heart but the hardening, the living-in 
Not the den, but the lions, the thieves, the iniquity  
Not the sheep, but the scattering, the clothing,
            the ninety-nine 
Not the oil, but the anointing 
Not the stone, but the tablets, the corner
Not the fire, but the hell, the brimstone, 
            the pillar and the lake 
Not the father, but the heavenly 
Not the ark, but the covenant 
Not the scandal, but the sacrament 
            The blood in the cup, the cock and the ass

After spending a decade in corporate retail, Charles returned to academia in search of a more fulfilling career. Since then, he graduated Magna Cum Laude with Honors and holds a Bachelor of Arts in English Education from North Carolina State University. He is continuing his studies at NC State as of fall of 2021 as an MFA candidate in poetry. He won Honorable Mention in the 2020 NC State Poetry Contest and has been published in a couple of anthologies that no one bought. In his spare time, Charles agonizes over line breaks and collects rejections in his Submittable account. He also enjoys watching trashy horror movies with his wife and screaming at his TV while playing video games. He can be reached at audio.passengers@gmail.com and followed @CharFlem37.

Corinne Hughes

10 Books Influencing My Novel Right Now

the one where the woman gets killed

 
the one where the woman gets raped
the one where the woman gets fixed

 
the one where the woman gets coerced
the one where the woman gets acquainted
the one where the woman gets drugged

 
the one where the woman gets touched
the one where the woman gets accused

 
the one where the woman gets tasted
the one where the woman gets worse

Corinne Hughes is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer residing in Portland, Oregon. She is a 2021 participant in One Story magazine’s Writing Circle and received a summer writing fellowship from the National Book Foundation in 2004. She is currently at work on a novel and was inspired to write this poem after reading Ocean Vuong’s “10 Books I Needed to Write My Novel.” Though she has been writing poetry since the age of ten, this is Corinne’s first appearance of poetry in a literary journal. She can be reached at oleacae@gmail.com.

Ellen June Wright

Where Guns Melt in the Sun

(for Dante Wright)

 
O’ to live in a world where bullets 
            are decorations and guns like butter melt 
                       in your hands on a sunny day and each man

 
is prince of all he surveys 
            and his children come home every night 
                        to dinner and baths and bedtime stories 

 
and their mother never cries because 
            she can't find one of them 
                        and there's never a knock at the door 

 
opened to grim gray faces. And a mother never 
            has to listen to her son on the phone and hear 
                        the first moments of his death come through 

 
as she's screaming his name and the world changes forever 
            never   never   never to be the same again. 
                        O’ to live in a world where bullets 

 
are chewable like vitamins and good for you 
            and guns are buried six feet under ground eaten 
                        by carrion beetles like the bodies they now undo.

Ellen June Wright’s poetry has most recently been published in River Mouth Review, Santa Fe Writers Project, New York Quarterly, The Elevation Review, The Caribbean Writer and, is forthcoming in, Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora. Her work was selected as The Missouri Review’s Poem of the Week and was featured in the article, Exceptional Prose Poetry From Around the Web: June 2021 by Jose Hernandez Diaz. She was a finalist in the Gulf Stream 2020 summer poetry contest and is a founding member of Poets of Color virtual poetry workshop in New Jersey. She studies writing at the Hudson Valley Writers Center in Sleepy Hollow, New York. Ellen can be found on Twitter@EllenJuneWrites.

Kryston Lopez

American Housewife

I am learning how to split my atoms
between present wife and future Fury—

 
be both the brick wall and the bellflower,
the bait and then the bullet.

 
How do you divide the infinitely empty matter 
of the ghost who lives inside your body

 
with no name
and no reason to leave?

 
Every day I break myself apart with savagery 
and push the remnant pieces back together, a little differently each time—

 
One      milky eye here,
           russet knees 
meet
knucklebone               there,

 
wet smack of aorta on the marble counter top,
the dog tooth 
clattering into an 
            empty bowl.

 
Maybe I’m looking for the splinter in the bone,
the sand in my oyster mouth,

 
to forge a bridge across my meaning,
to whitewash my dissatisfaction in nacre.

Kryston currently resides in Indiana, by way of New Jersey and Texas. She writes poems when she should be working from home. Her poetry has previously appeared in High Shelf Press. You can follow her on Twitter @kalamityKryston, or reach her at kryston.lopez@gmail.com.

George Witte

Search

The wistful prophets of apocalypse
rue better times, when drought and summer snow
defied our experts’ weather almanacs.              
Believers flocked on hills to pray, eclipsed
beneath the livid, funerary sky
that silenced every animal and bird.
Nowadays the eye requires another
eye; passive witness doesn’t satisfy.
We click through messages to buy, arrive
on pages sensing we’re remote observed,
ills diagnosed and passions data-mined
more deeply than we excavate ourselves.
Like travelers departing from a train
we stumble forth on unfamiliar ground,
beset by furtive men who offer anything 
you want, whatever, oxy, DOA,
you looking for a girl, okay, a boy,
it’s dangerous without a guide because
you shouldn’t be alone tonight, my friend.

George Witte has published three collections of poems: Does She Have a Name? (NYQ Books), Deniability (Orchises Press), and The Apparitioners (Three Rail Press). Recent poems from a new manuscript seeking a publisher have appeared in Antioch Review, Five Points, Hopkins Review, Poetry Northwest, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Ridgewood, New Jersey and can be contacted at wittegeorge@gmail.com

Amanda Hiland

Northern Lights

Flo, wound in a pale blue coat,
gets up every ten minutes and cannot
remember where she’s going. 
I find her cursing at the door
to the laundry room. I coax 
her back through hallways lined
with plastic flowers that never grow
or die. The night stains 
the windowpanes with charcoal. 

 
She dreamed
of hitching a ride as north 
as roads would go, following 
the passage of lights in the sky.
I guess there was something for her
out there at the end of the world.
Her daughter always tells me this story
about her mother’s youth in Alaska
shelling mussels and pacing oil claims,
in love with that great mountainous alone. 

 
I don’t ask why she never went. I know 
how life piles on like a basket of laundry.
She always put us first. Kept a house and family
for forty years. Kept a husband while he stayed.
I never once saw her as angry
as she’s been every day since she forgot 
herself.

 
In a rare glimmer of lucidity, Flo tells me, “You know, 
auroras make a noise. It’s an enormous hum,
like a continent groaning
under its own weight. Such a heavy sound
from something made of light. You never forget it.”

 
In the morning I glimpse her standing
by the highway, blue coat
rippling toward the edge of dawn. Her thumb is
sticking up like a mountain that stops 
passing cars in their tracks. 

Amanda Hiland grew up hiking through old-growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. She teaches Special Education by day and is a major astronomy enthusiast at night. Her poems have appeared in journals such as Epiphany, New Plains Review, Topology Magazine, and Timberline Review. She can often be found sipping chai at the intersection of art and science. For inquiries, please contact her at ahilandM45@gmail.com

Shawn R. Jones

Spying on Uncle Hector

I often wondered if Uncle 
bopped down our walk 
like an ordinary man
before he came to our house.

I wondered if he had 
a spiky tail that retracted
into his spine 
like some creature wanting
to conceal its identity. 
But I detected nothing

from where I hid behind 
curtains in the front window.
I watched him 
cover his head
in the rain and drag
mud across the walk
that led to our door. 

He hopped off his bike, 
kicked down his kickstand, 
and looked over his right
shoulder before he knocked. 
Wiped his feet 
on the braided mat. 
Shook off his camouflage

coat. Hung it on the rack 
in the corner 
by the lamp and table. 
Gripped the banister 
with his knotted hand 
on his way to your room. 

Tied little brother
to an armchair in the hall.  

Kissed you with his head 
shrouded under your plaid skirt. 

Gave you five pennies 
to keep quiet.

Shawn R. Jones is the co-owner and operator of Tailored Tutoring LLC and Kumbaya Academy, Inc. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, Womb Rain (Finishing Line Press 2008) and A Hole to Breathe (Finishing Line Press 2015). Her work has appeared in New Ohio Review, Essence, River Heron Review, Guesthouse, Typehouse, and elsewhere. In 2020, her short story debut, “The Life that You Saved” was published by Obelus Journal. She holds an MFA from Rutgers-Camden and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

Esther Sadoff

Cheap Birds

In moonlit parking lots, 
amid firefly flicker
and electric hum,
the cheap birds stir.  
My father looks back 
to commence the chorus.
I bend my arms into wings, 
pressed skin curved 
into smiles as I flap. 
Six baby birds, counting
my sister's mouth and hands. 
The cheap birds chirp
while opening a box 
of discounted donuts,
dusty sweetness chalking
our fingers white 
as we reach for the lush 
heart of raspberry filling.
Everything we save tastes sweet. 
Desire can wait, need constructed 
from what we have. 
My father initiates us 
to the cult of savings. 
Even the raccoon,
small beggar,
looks like it's praying.

Esther Sadoff is a teacher and writer from Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in Free State Review, Parhelion Literary Magazine, Passengers Journal, SWWIM, Marathon Literary Review, West Trade Review, River Mouth Review, Penultimate Peanut, as well as other publications.

Mitch Rayes

KILOMETER 2376 YEAR 33.230

I don’t know how far I can walk                 or how to close my 
eyes and my ears      I do not know how to forget             or to 
pretend not to know what I wish not to know       this is where 
my experience comes in:          I am practiced at stepping over 
the dead         I am intimate with the open end of a loaded gun               
I can walk through a suicide         I know how to stay between 
the lines                  or cross head-on into oncoming traffic

Mitch Rayes wouldn’t be here if his Irish mother didn’t leave the convent to marry a Lebanese chemist. He was born breech in Detroit, attended Wayne State University as a merit scholar, and Naropa Institute before the school was accredited. Poet, translator, musician, arts organizer, contractor, and father of two, Mitch produced four Albuquerque Poetry Festivals, and created the award winning warehouse performance space THE PROJECTS. Find out more on his website:  mitchrayes.com

Bita Shakoori

Love, Baba

His German's getting worse. 
It falls apart in his emails. 
They make the screen smell like rice fields and haven't changed since he took the Jadeh 
Chaloos back home. 
He tells me about his vegetable garden and his health and the Islamic Republic.
Say hi to your brother for me carries each message on its back. 
Among the wilting sentences, they're the few words he's never misspelled. 
He's my pen pal, 77 and used to tear my earlobes off if I wasn't quiet when he went to lie 
down in the afternoons. 
When he sent me pistachios, my friends and I called it child support between fits of laughter.  
Momon holds back tears and is so proud when I visit him. 
It makes me feel disgusting, but someone has to, and my brother stopped responding to him 
years ago. 
Afterwards, her face is different. She says she doesn't want to hear about it.
Maybe no one will congratulate you for being a good child when you're 24.
I try not to cry in the car. 
Who am I going to tell that he always speaks Farsi when he first sees me? 

The First Apartment

I was dreaming of a house when I came to this country.
You gave me as many rooms to live in as I gave you children.

You'd come home from the office I'd never seen and make them look like old fruit,  
leave each one in a corner and snore in your sleep. 

When you were working night shifts, 
I'd sit and eat chicken out of a baking dish with my fingers. The TV made the oil glisten. 

In the mornings, your curtains mocked me. They looked like wedding gowns. 
When I lost my mind, you took me to Greece, the sand white and cunning. 

Momon came to visit once and cried on all your brown furniture. 
She said Child, don't say you're unhappy. Your Father couldn't take it. 

I turned east for prayer. Azaan after Azaan. 
But you had no faith and made God wither quietly, buried in the fruit bowl.

I was considering the distance from our first apartment to the cobble stoned street below
and didn't hear a single thing.  

Bita Shakoori is a 24-year-old Iranian-German. They have recently graduated from university with a B.A. in Digital Media. They enjoy daydreaming to music, sharing meals with friends, and going to museums.

Anthony Aguero

No Good For Me

A sepia tinted digital photo of a half-naked 
man who is wearing sunglasses 
with a backdrop of a sliding door leading
to a side patio through Rick’s bedroom.
He explains why he’s no good for me
in a calm voice, practically in a whisper,
while there was a light wind outside 
that kept interrupting how life 
was happening, and it happens 
while the man is undressing or is speaking 
to provide a list: the night sweats, 
the drugs, the last man he slept with,
the syphilis last week, his sore ass cheek
from the penicillin. The wind picks up 
and he’s touching my neck all over, lightly.
Things happening, unmade for he or I.

Anthony Aguero is a queer writer in Los Angeles, CA. His work has appeared, or will appear, in the Carve Magazine, Rhino Poetry, 14 Poems, Redivider Journal, Maudlin House, and others. He has received two Pushcart Prize nominations and has his first forthcoming collection of poetry, Burnt Spoon Burnt Honey, with Flower Song Press. Find him on Instagram & Twitter: @shesnotinsorry