Poetry

Cassandra Whitaker

Two Queens in Summer

When woods drew up dry
like puckered lips, we went
down to the river to drink
and sunbathe and be queens
like queens of old and do nothing
with our lives but proclaim
and proclaim this beer is mine
and mine is yours and yours is mine,
laughing our heads back
like we were lemon wedges
about to be sucked or twisted
into a drink to sweeten up
the heat of a dry dry afternoon socket
of wood and river and river
and wood. The heat. All
what could be slaked
was slaked with beer,
with smoke, with tears, with jokes
as our sweat sweated, beads
multiplying upon beads, a shimmer
of relentless damp, a shimmer
of glamour among teens. Jenny
would pee standing up, proclaiming
I am a king and I am a queen. All
you see is mine! And who best
to answer back, but her own voice
in opposition. My laughter
did not even shatter the echo,
not even a little bit. Jenny showed
me how by tucking my hair behind
my ears and holding my face
in her hands. When she kissed me
courage welled up. In her hands,
I melted easy. Heat and drink,
going on and on, summer’s leg
extending into autumn, all
the way down to winter’s toes,
and when we came up
from our kiss, there was no leap
I could not make.

Cassandra Whitaker (they/them) is a trans writer from Virginia whose work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, RogueAgent, The Mississippi Review, Foglifter, Bennington Review, Conjunctions, Evergreen Review, and other places. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle and an educator.

Adriana Stimola

A ONE-WAY BRIDGE

In May, it’s not the sprays
of lily dripping valleys across sidewalks.
Not after-school play
on after-rain clay. Not birdsong.
Not no curfew or nose breath or backs of hands
in dugouts drifting under shirts and over
ribs caging what ifs. It’s not
the way the daylight bleeds,
sets eyes-closed daydreams on fire.
It’s the time, when we were ten,
you taught me how to spit, before I knew I was a girl,
or cared, and Spring was a one-way bridge.

Adriana Stimola (she/her) is a non-fiction literary agent and writer. Her poetry has been featured in numerous publications, including: the Santa Clara Review, the San Pedro River Review, Driftwood Press, Harbor Review and High Shelf Press. She was awarded an Honorable Mention in the New Millennium Writings 53rd poetry contest, and she lives on an island off the cape of Massachusetts. Find out more on her website: adrianastimola.com/poetry

Hilesh Patel

That letter about touching horses (briefly)

In March a boy held a gun & pulled me out the car & I accidently
touched his face &

 
he stopped, the organs in my body relaxing not exploding. That death
is for another letter.

 
I wonder if, some time before I made my way west with you in tow, I should
have taken the time 

 
to feel the muscles of animals on the same journey. I can’t remember the
sunsets in Dar es Salaam

 
anymore. We came here to bargain for your lives under a second sun & we
came to embody love the

 
way sailors see animals on dry land. I confess I have never started a fire 
& not cried.

 
We are told to look for god in sunsets but I confess I count on my 
memory (even as it's not true).

A stone’s throw

Never so much the distance of the sun as surprising warmth. Somewhere:
a plane with its wing broken, a ship swimming too far for it to return safely,
a jeep stalled on a crowded highway all to say to say take care, apna khyaal
rakhna, khuda hafiz, pues que descanses cariño. This is how it ends. Again. 
You pick up pieces of god everywhere. I thought I had saved your true name
from burial. Somewhere there is a grain of a mountain on a paper map. I too
was taught by my mother to put my hands into the soil and hear voices.

Hilesh Patel is a writer, consultant, educator, and member of the art group The Chicago ACT Collective. He was born in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and has called Chicago home for most of his life. You can find him most days teaching, writing, reading, grinding cardamom, and on Instagram and Twitter at @hilesh.

J A Hansen

you’ve been so quiet

We’re dividing your money, stripping the walls of art,
reading your journal entries, letters never sent,

we make coffee in your coffee pot, display your jewelry, 
China, wedding crystal on card tables, pick and choose like contestants 

in a game show, and in the evenings we sit on your couch and drink 
the last of your gin surrounded by all your things, out of place, exposed. 

Dead, death certificate, died at home— why so quiet? Please help us understand. 

Is that you in the air passing from room to room, arms crossed, 
watching the deliberate deconstruction of what you so deliberately stacked? 

Objects tagged on bookshelves: estate sale, charity, church     and still— you say nothing?

Is that you in the crash of crystal champagne glasses 
falling from the rack into the sink in the middle of the night

or the smell of zucchini bread you used to make wafting through the house,
the gentle chuckling in the living room when no one is there? 

But we need more than that— we need you— why now? 
of all times— have you decided to leave us alone— stuck down here 

in the basement with antique Christmas decorations and your father’s 
battered trunk from the first world war— none of the guidance you so loved to give.

Near the end, it was the cat 
you wanted near you most and the cardinal 

his scarlet song, dense against the snow you could not see anymore. 

We watched you sleep through an electrical storm, lights 
of the television flickered, alive but unchanneled, its underbelly 

glowered. You were being pulled in the wake of something— you 
curled inside a place as private as a buttonhole on your nightgown. 

The day you died the neighbor was training his white pigeons— 
we watched maybe two dozen of them shoot up from their lofts 

wings flapping hard, circling— circling over rooftops, gray lawns
bare trees— their tiny bodies searching for     scooped under by 

an updraft, pitching them higher still— and here, they opened their wings—

Judith A Hansen is a poet and theatre artist living in San Diego, CA. Her chapbook You Must Remember This was published by Gooch! Books. Her poems have appeared in Writing for our Lives and the anthologies A Year In Ink and Songs on the Wind (Editor’s Choice Award). Judith received her MFA in Drama from the University of Southern California, and she has performed in numerous plays throughout the United States. Her play The Voice Lesson was a finalist for Ensemble Studio Theatre’s One Act Festival in New York City. She is a workshop facilitator and writing partner for PoeticJustice.org, an organization that offers poetry and creative writing to women who are incarcerated.

Sara Rosenberg 

MERCY

I release the Velcro from the dog’s cone
so she can roll unfettered in the cool grass.
She is eleven years my charge.
Each morning, I call her to my side
and slip my finger down her throat:
three pills, twice a day.
Each time, she softens and waits,
already forgiving me.

 
Once I took too much pity, letting her walk
around the house unencumbered,
and she licked the tumor back.
Now, I keep the cone on even when 
she bumps into the furniture or gets stuck
in the doorway, dumbstruck by her body's
strange new gravity. A tumor sprung 
from her own yearning, tender as bone.

 
Last month, I at last threw away all my own
pills, the boxes of syringes, the sharps containers,
the little vials of drugs, foggy from the last bits
of liquid rolling in the glass--remnants
of the medical interventions meant
to make me a mother. Cabinet cleared,
I wondered what use I will have for it now.

 
In the yard, we are twin shadows
on the grass. If I am anything,
I am attuned to the muscle
memory of want. When I scratch
the fur behind her ears,
her whole being responds, presses
into the palm of my hand.

Sara Rosenberg holds degrees from Hollins University and Emerson College. Her poetry has appeared in Pine Row Press and other publications. She also writes and edits nonprofit grant proposals to raise funds for educational equity. She lives in Austin, Texas.

Kit Ingram

RUNAWAY

My calendar pings our meeting
two days early and spikes the pressure.
My head is an engine whistling off,
a train past the empty playground
where you left me for a phone call
then the wading pool where you whispered
a person could drown in a teaspoon of—
now the field where the boy with the pretty face
is sacrificed to bees on a screen big enough to swallow me
in the back row of the outdoor cinema
the windows down for our smoke to escape
but I choke anyway, the officer’s arm reaching in
fist on collar to root me out.
Twenty years—whoosh, a history
of institutional cinder blocks
scratched with rhymes, bastardized pop lyrics
locker room jokes—
I’m barrelling towards you
lost in the blur of internal motion.
Geometries of metal and light slow on the glass
your face on the platform, lifting
searching for a reason the doors open
to no one.

Kit Ingram is a queer Canadian poet and fiction writer based in London, UK. His work is widely anthologized and has appeared in Ambit, Magma, and The North. His narrative poem Alice and Antius (Penrose Press, 2022) was a Booklife at Publishers Weekly selection described as a ‘moving, gorgeous novel in verse … and must-read elegy for the Anthropocene.' Aqueous Red, his debut poetry collection, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in October 2023. Website: https://kitingram.com

Craig Finlay

Before Anyone Sees

Rivers clean the world.  Rivers only help. It is 
November, 1888. A girl floats through Paris, and when 
fishermen pull her from the water she’ll be 
remembered. A pathologist will be so taken with her 
that he’ll make a plaster cast of her face.  They’ll call 
her L’Inconnue de la Seine, and copies of the mask will 
adorn the walls of every fashionable Parisian 
apartment for the rest of the century. Artists and poets 
will wait impatiently for guests to ask about her, eager 
to explain the beauty they can find in endings.  The girl 
didn’t intend this, but once art is out in the world it no 
longer belongs to the artist.  Still, Paris glides by her, 
and so too the gaslights and the singing from the cafes 
along the quay. The girl floats peacefully.  It has been 
hours since she slid into the chill, glassy waters of the 
Seine at Pont Neuf. A sharp intake of breath at the chill, 
and then the earth letting her go. Gravity looking in the 
other direction.  Hours, and she has traveled 
miles.  And the river is trying. Trying to get her out of 
town. Quietly, before anyone sees.

People are Dying to Get In

Today I read an article called “The World is Studded 
With Unnatural Mountains.” Slag heaps, mostly. The 
tallest slag heap in the world is in Loos-en-Gohelle, 
France, and stands 479 feet tall. I’ve never understood
this use of the word unnatural as an insult. Spat with a 
sneer. As if we alone stand apart from the world. If 
anything that wouldn’t exist without its making is 
unnatural, then so are beaver dams and termite 
mounds. I’ve long made this point to sound as if I’ve 
thought it through. “But beavers and termites are 
natural,” She said, passing me a joint in the dark.
“Aren’t we?” I asked. “Are we?” she said, laughing.

Craig Finlay is a most-of-the-time librarian and some-of-the-time poet currently on his Omaha leg of a lifelong tour of the Midwest. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, was released in 2021 by Urban Farmhouse Press. He also published a poem in the very first issue of Passengers, when he was in Oklahoma for a while, when the pandemic had just started, when it still seemed like we might all band together to get through this.

Henry Israeli

THE KINGDOM INSIDE ME

The punishing memories that precede
my coming into being, memories trapped
in seeds and those seeds trapped in seeds
and so on down the throat of generations—
genocide, starvation, the terror of pogroms—
are locked in the smallest nesting doll
of my DNA, like the one I lost when
I untwisted the pregnant wooden women
and believed the world could be balanced
in a child’s hands, a child looking up
at his mother standing in the kitchen
stirring a pot of soup, humming
an old song she remembers singing
when she crouched under a table
between her parents’ legs, oblivious
to the soldiers climbing the stairs.

Henry Israeli’s most recent poetry collections are Our Age of Anxiety (White Pine Poetry Prize: 2019), and god’s breath hovering across the waters (Four Way Books: 2016), and as editor, Lords of Misrule: 20 Years of Saturnalia Books (Saturnalia: 2022). He is also the translator of three critically acclaimed books by Albanian poet Luljeta Lleshanaku. His poetry has appeared in numerous journals including American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Plume, and The Harvard Review, as well as several anthologies. Henry Israeli is also the founder and editor of Saturnalia Books, and teaches in the English & Philosophy Department of Drexel University where he runs the annual Drexel Writing Festival and the Jewish Studies program.

Megan Cartwright

Harvest

"Count down from 100."
The figure in the white coat looms.

 
Ninety-eight is a protracted exhalation.

 
A room lined with listless women
seeded like pomegranates.

 
The nurse has inked the harvest on my body.

 
Soft flesh bears a circled ‘23’, its curves formed in
fat toddler-shapes, but blatant as a bruise.

Megan Cartwright is an Australian college teacher and poet. Her work has appeared in Arteidolia, Authora Australis, Blue Bottle Journal, Meniscus Journal, October Hill Magazine, and oddball magazine. She has poems forthcoming in Book of Matches, Fatal Flaw, Mono – DREAM Anthology, Swim Meet Lit Mag, Tabula Rasa Review and Quadrant.

Sarah Jefferis

Eastern Seaboard

Beneath my sheetless twin bed a shoebox

inside not Mary Janes but a bus schedule and an Eastern seaboard map shabby

and wavering Chincoteague frayed even the palominos couldn’t recover

though they taught me to circumvent the rope and the teeth click

in the box rolls of twenties from the heads of nameless men I blew at 16

after riding the waterslide at the park on days I didn’t want to eat

how I learned to save

a granola bar, a change of clothes, a wide ruled notebook, a pencil,

knew I was deserting my mother forfeiting the daughter role

but wanted a home without bedbugs

without bedhands without windchimes beating the frame

a morse code without hush-hush without amens

without flying roaches snared in braces from night walking

night spitting

sometimes in the morning in this new house

I culled from God's palm with the sunlight

and the Queen bed and the deck

in the trees I remember

to stop running

to stop forsaking myself

Sarah Jefferis’s poetry books include What Enters the Mouth (2017, Standing Stone Books) and Forgetting the Salt (2008, Foothills Press). Sarah’s poems and essays have appeared in The Cimmaron Review, Yuzu Presse, The So FLO Poetry Journal, The NY Quarterly, The New Coin, The New American Review, Rhino, and other journals. Sarah holds an MFA in Poetry from Cornell and a PhD in Writing from SUNY Binghamton, and lives and writes in Ithaca, NY. My website is www.sarahjefferis.com.

Sharon Lee Snow

The Ways We Lose Our Children

Our friend who
drank and lost her kids, doled out
like emergency rations
from her husband’s tight fist.
And others lost in malls, on paths,
through windows to chance
monsters. Or yanked
out of sleep and childhood
by those they loved tending
dark appetites. And the ones
who lose themselves,  
in fentanyl and running away,
jail and car wrecks. There is loss
from screaming and hating
and turning towards
friends and the internet,
cults and lovers. These things
stay up with us
when the clock strikes three
and their car is gone,
and the expanse
of night is vast,
weighing heavily on us
like a smothering quilt.
On TV dead
Carl Sagan shows us a speck
of light in the endless unlit
universe, illuminating
just how tiny and untenable,
the brutal beauty,
this whole shaky life.

A Pushcart nominee, Sharon Lee Snow earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of South Florida in Tampa. Her award-winning short stories, creative nonfiction, and poetry have been published in New Plains Review, Hole in the Head Review, Gyroscope Review, Griffel, Glassworks, The Concrete Desert Review, South 85, Typehouse, Gulf Stream, Bridge Eight, and other journals. She works as a Visiting Professor teaching writing classes and currently is working on a short story collection, a collection of poems, and a novel set in Tampa. Connect with her on Twitter and Instagram @sharonleesnow and her website www.sharonleesnow.com

Mirthe van Popering

UNFINISHED SYMPHONY D. 759

Dad’s Suzuki, Fridays; fake leather burnt
my thighs as I belted
my first want, laid hot breath with the sliding landscape
cloud-shaped against the window.

 
It between your knees upon arrival. You
(wide-legged, bow-armed, primordial)
erecting
every hair on my unshapely body,
fingering
my spine with resin.

 
Opening bars: strings, wind, knocked upon timpani.
Bows rubbed crudely against wire, youth blowing tubes
and you, always in the heart.
(your cellist’s hands dipping low)
(my shaky sixteenths)

 
Every Friday, the baton imbued our body of parts,
its tip whipping up curls of dusk like cream
or slaying very sticky throats
or punching tear-sized holes until the evening ripped,
again,

 
Unrequited.

Raised by the Dutch North Sea, emerging poet Mirthe van Popering (@mirthpop) ebbed and flowed between real and felt islands before settling in Berlin. There, she spends her days oscillating between languages. Mirthe studied violin, art history, philosophy and cultural analysis in Utrecht and Amsterdam, creative writing at The Writers Studio New York and poetry at the Berlin Writers’ Workshop. Her work grapples with the fallout of patriarchy and power, the porosity of language, Zeitgeist, desire and the unfiltered truths found in dreams. Alongside freelance writing and translating, she curates art and words as co-founding editor of Phyll Magazine. Websites: www.mirthevanpopering.com and www.phyll.space

Julieanne Larick

Warm Creature

After “Reverse Suicide” by Matt Rasmussen

 
I take I-71 home from college, unpack
all the stuff I collected over the year.
Return my favorite sweater to Nebraska
and bring the bird necklace
to the last man who loved me.
I leave parties at 7 and spit out drinks, return cigarettes.
I unwrite lots of essays about Donne and Wordsworth,
uncheck books from the growing reading list.
My dad takes back his apologies.
I absorb salt in my eyes, rub dirt on my skin, lose
old friends before loving them again. Unlearn them.
I turn 18, then 17, then 16, then 15
then ruin a birthday party for my sister and
go back to the hospital
where they relinquish my body of fluids
and I watch my heart beat faster and fast and slow and
spit the water and pills back to where they came from.
I erase the note saying why I wanted to die.
I sense November turning its back on me,
leaves cough up orange and rise in bloom,
back to their loving mothers.
June returns,
whispering like the warm creature I wanted to be.

Elegy to Lying

If a tree falls in the forest, it didn’t really happen if
our bodies weren’t crushed by the force.
If the deer dies silently into the lake,
if no one lingers behind while I tie my shoe,
if no one finds our bodies together, sewn up
by the earth’s moss, gentle dirt fingers drawing us further
away from the people who knew us,
did we ever live or die, did we ever love?
If I scorch my fingertips and no one notices the burn,
it didn’t really happen since the world keeps spinning
outside the skin of my hands. Keeps spinning around and around
and around until all the people I know wrinkle from a million little pleasures.
I told a stranger I loved her outfit in a Tesco while I was
buying six cans of gin. She wore
a pink button down and said it was her boyfriend’s and she smiled,
the first time a stranger smiled at me since I turned 19.
If we both loved each other but never said a word,
did it really happen?

Julieanne Larick is a poet from Ohio. Her work has been recognized by The Academy of American Poets, Hollins University, and The Young Writers’ Initiative. She has writing in GASHER Journal, perhappened mag, Eunoia Review, Kissing Dynamite, and more. Julieanne reads for GASHER Journal and edits fiction for jmww Journal. She tweets @crookyshanks. Find her work at http://www.julielarickwriting.com.

Leanne Shirtliffe

How to Bartend When You’re Six

Take out the special glasses—not the Tupperware—
the tall gold ones with orange and yellow flowers.
Twist the ice-cube tray: this-way-that-way, this-way-that-way.
Massage your wrists. Plunk one cube into the glass. 
Watch the second one dangle from your finger pad 
then freefall to smash the first cube, shards a-flying.
Kick the third cube, the one that escaped, under the stove:
hear Foster Hewitt fill your head: “She shoots, she scores!”
Open the Bacardi. Use both hands to fill the jigger,
then baptize the crackling ice. Take the bottle of luke-
warm Pepsi—not a goddamn Coke—and carefully
fill the glass. Stir with a spoon, but if no one’s watching, 
use your fingers.

Born and raised in rural Canada, Leanne Shirtliffe is a writer and educator now based in Calgary, Alberta. She is working on a poetry collection at the intersection of farming, feminism, and family. Some of Leanne’s most recent work appears in CV2, Stanchion, One Art, Stoneboat, and The FOLD program. You can find her at LeanneShirtliffe.com and read her overheard haiku on Instagram: @leanne_shirtliffe.

Amanda Boyanowski-Morin

Supplication

I was on all fours at Target
curled up to a 24-pack of toilet paper
to hide the gagging
when a forgettable-looking man
turned his cart down the aisle

 
Can I help you, Ma’am?
         Can I call someone?
         Rescue?

 
I was feral with rockfish eyes,
begging wordlessly to be left alone.
I wretched past him, leaving my basket drifting on the
streams of fluorescent light bouncing off the floor

 
Later that week I was prone
looking up at another stranger,
the ground holding me with the sponginess
of star moss
seeping into denim
and struggling to speak, comfort and
charm him with a quartzite smile

  
I’m ok. I’m ok. No, no, no, I’m ok…

 
On Friday I needed to surface -
an undercurrent
of the various conditions that leave me
suddenly unwell.

 
He asked me to stay home, knew I
was in no condition to be alone, but
I cope the only way I know how

 
I find the orb weaver in the field,
the cocked grin of a praying mantis
the taste of white pine
the shriek of a sprinting fox
the smell of warming reeds
the haunting loons who know how to communicate
ever on my knees in supplication
debilitation

Amanda Boyanowski-Morin is a poet, parent, and partner living in Rhode Island. Amanda's writing primarily focuses on her changing body and relationship to the rapidly changing world. Amanda can be found outside with her service dog, Rowan, pacing paths and knitting while trying to get lost in familiar spaces. Find Amanda on Instagram: @AmandaFuriosa 

Jessica Mehta

If food is love, what does it mean

for those who starve ourselves? Eat this,
says Maa, gajar halwa she shred
all morning ‘til her fingers burned orange.
I’m full, I say, pushing
her love off my plate, feeding
her sacrifice to the bin, to the birds,
to the raccoons that forage
at dusk. 

Taste this, you tell me,
fingers pinching palak paneer
gone limp. I’m fasting, I tell you,
scooting the bowl of our vows
back into your space. Over and over,
year following year, the love
is ladled and forked, plated
and whisked again and again
towards my clamped-shut mouth.
Maybe tomorrow, I keep saying,
the words by now stale

Jessica Mehta, PhD is an Aniyunwiya inter/anti/multi-disciplinary poet and artist. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, but born in the occupied [read: stolen] land of what is today often called Oregon, space, place, and ancestry are driving factors in her work. Jessica’s doctoral work focused on eating disorders in female poetry and her Fulbright Senior Scholar post (Bengaluru, India) culminated in the curation of an anthology of contemporary Indian poetry written in the colonizer’s tongue. Find her at www.thischerokeerose, on Instagram @thischerokeerose, and on Twitter @cherokeeroseup.

Jennifer Garfield

what a mother

begin at mitochondrial eve. poke
her packet of cells with a cattle

 
prod. let her mutate and glow. call her
lucky mother. lick each inch of skin

 
with scientific wonder. listen.
the nuclear clock ticks back

 
and forth. seas rise. europeans
arrive. sometimes i think the ancestors

 
would be pleased by my laziness,
their weather-lined foreheads finally

 
slack. click the ad for ancestry.com.
go back to desert. to first crusade.

 
to white russia and diaspora and the new
world’s fragile shores. my daughter

 
brings home a worksheet that lists
“The 5 Natural Causes of Extinction.”

 
not czar. not oven. not def con 3 tweet.
“habitat fragmentation” sounds almost

 
holy. listen. it’s a fossil song. begin
with a block of marble. we are there,

 
inside it still, haunting our habitat.
humans most likely sang before

 
they could speak, though perhaps
our blunt throats could not control

 
tune or pitch. listen. i will be the best
mother i can, but it will not be enough

 
to save them. in a new geological era,
someone might sing the song of our genesis’

 
in a register we have not even imagined.
someone might trace the shape

 
of bone structure on a screen. ask
what a mother was for.

Jennifer Garfield’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including The Threepenny Review, Sugar House Review, West Trestle Review, and Mass Poetry’s Hard Work of Hope Series. She is the recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Literary Grant and Martha’s Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing Fellowship, as well as a finalist in contests from Frontier Poetry and Harbor Review. She lives and teaches in Massachusetts.

Jennifer McKeen Rodrigues

LATCHKEY

Latchkey kids have kids who are latchkey
& now the world is on fire.

 
Take me foraging through your
fluorescent food wasteland.

 
Feed me your fried spam.

 
Show me the pacifier necklace you wore in
seventh grade. We were still kids,
God,
but thought we were full grown.

 
Look at the scar on my wrist
I’ll tell you it was from a slap bracelet
  It’s a Lie.
See my left forearm
I put it through a window.

 
You don’t see scars
from pills & vodka.

    
Bags of black clothes show up in her bedroom.
Doing homework to Nine Inch Nails.
Double down on Pop Rocks & soda
see if that will abort the fetus.

 
Codeine-fueled recess singing 
in a bathroom stall.
Daily trips to the front office to go home
because we’d swallowed enough
cotton balls called Life.

 
Stare into everyone’s eyes to find
a warm, beating heart.

                                                       
Throw up, throw up, throw up                                                                        
  tomorrow & all at once

 
Going to bed at 5:30 on a Friday night
waking up on Sunday.

Jennifer currently lives on the sacred Powhatan land of Fairfax, VA. She is trained as a certified yoga therapist & trauma informed yoga teacher, is a military spouse, & mom. She has been published in The Muleskinner Journal, tiny frights, Amethyst Review, The Martello Journal, & Bluepepper as either poet or photographer. She would like to thank Celeste Oster & Not the Rodeo Poets for their undying support and love.

Rebecca Evans

At the end of my shrinking

In the end was the endless buffet and the buffet was crowded 
in the end I was crowded in the end I was empty &
small holding my child-stories when I wore Garanimals & later
I turned to fashion crowded my closet crowded my drawers
crowded my mind & my time & my planner & my dinner plate
I went back for thirds & fifths more than the other
larger diners I stayed small grew smaller &
breastless & amenorrheic purging every morsel up & out

I grew up and I knew that I was too small too silent
with the boys because I was taught so well by the Father who crowded
my bed at night, crowded each crevice with his man-ness, crowded
my heart in cloud and storm

I knew the difficulty of loving mostly myself  & so I
shrank and shrank and shrank like those Shrinky Dinks you bake
in the oven until they turn hard and half their size I tornadoed
through that oven door wore the latest trousers packed
the popular tote used fashion to hide my thinness
used fashion to hide

until I saw the crone her hair frayed her eyes sinking &
bulging at once she wore her   thinness with frailness
she wore the same outfit as mine it took a minute or two or five before
I realized

she was me
my reflection echoing as I clung a scarf in Harrods’ third aisle
as I clung until I let go

and that was the end the end of crowds & buffets & 
perfectly matched Garanimal outfits selected by some adult who thought 
color-coding clothes a good idea but it prevented the child from 
choice & selection from her own style & voice

and that was the end I am not my dinner plate
or the size beneath draped dungarees or form-fitting gowns or spandex
now at the end
at the end of my shrinking

I am a buffet     & the latest fashion     &          my child-story     &       
I am 
thinness&thickness&crowded&frailness&sinking&bulging&frayed&storming

I am                 heart                 
and                 cloud        
and             difficult
and loving
I am letting go

I am endless tornado

Evans is a memoirist, poet, and essayist. She teaches creative writing and journaling, mentors high school girls in the juvenile system, and co-hosts a radio program, Writer to Writer. She’s hosted and co-produced Our Voice and Idaho Living television shows. She served eight years in the United States Air Force and is a decorated Gulf War veteran. She’s also disabled, a Veteran, a Jew, a gardener, a mother, a worrier, and more. She has a passion for sharing difficult stories about vulnerability woven with mysticism and hopes to inform, in a new way, what it means to navigate this world through a broken body and spirit. Her poems and essays have appeared in Narratively, The Rumpus, War, Literature & the Arts, The Limberlost Review, and more. She’s co-edited an anthology of poems, WHEN THERE ARE NINE, a tribute to the life and achievements of Ruth Bader Ginsburg (Moon Tide Press). Her full-length poetry collection, a memoir-in-verse, TANGLED BY BLOOD will be available in 2023 (Moon Tide Press). Evans earned two MFAs, one in creative nonfiction, the other in poetry, University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe. She lives in Idaho with her sons, her Newfoundlands, and her Calico.

Daniel Brennan

The Abstract Portrait of a Boy on Fire Island

1.

 
The room is method acting;
it becomes the warm mouth of dawn,
the last bastion of summer heat 
as the world pulls on its
mourning shawl, tightly wrapped
around its neck, knowing what comes next.

 
And still, the room is his escape; in any one of these rooms,
he is something more than the night call of a reckless body.  

2.

 
Here he is again. 

 
He is not what he seems, which is to say, men never are. 
The wood-paneled walls hang low and dark, a gallery of ghosts –
No one is awake but him. Chest expands, contracts. He must breathe.

 
That sound, he wonders? The Atlantic, writhing madly against the shore. 
A frantic fucking and friction of foam & salt. Replication, observance. He must breathe.

 
Now he is no longer alone. 
He is splitting apart, atom by atom, in the confines of an old twin bed 
where this new man, this smell of sour sweat and oil,
this compilation of curling black hairs and swirling
blue ink, pushes his legs back until his feet can catch starlight
in the hollow pools of their arch. 
Uncertainty, freedom. He must breathe.

 
Here he is again.

3.

 
The boardwalk has groaned every night since he arrived,
faint white jet streams on the edges to keep him from falling into thorny oblivion.
His watch says         it’s time to go home.
Time to sink into the over-starched blue bedsheets. Time
to wait out the euphoria in his blood until the stirring & bird call shatter his glass dreams
at sunrise. 

 
Instead, instead he finds himself at the bony joint of a crossroad,
the grass rising high around Ocean and Sunburst. 

 
His mouth fills with the bitter salt of the sea and a stranger’s
promise. He can hardly see his face, but the crack and knuckle
of a man’s hand runs through his hair, holds his head in place,
guides even the most lost of schooners to shore. He swallows:
                             desire, misery, his own kind of prayer in the moonlight.

 
This man made of 
midnight silhouettes fucks his throat and screams through his
own closed mouth that nothing can be more
beautiful than this; to know that lighting can’t strike the
same place twice. 

4.

 
His body becomes an oblation to the old ways
                             old days 
                                            The strays who scuttled 

 
through sand and root and dune and wood where we all become the delicacy of shadow

 
Following the siren call of bodies slamming against one another
Against all odds       Against death itself

 
This is his chance to bury his hands wrist-deep into the soil and 
say I’m just like you I know how you hungered I am this same blood and bone and hope and desperation

 
                                            Out in the dark, halfway between
two worlds    Two havens          

 
He is used           He is spent He is led into white-hot caves of
flesh and dream     
He will never learn a face 

 
but he is giving name to his own limbs as his ancestors did before him

                               
in wine-dark corridors of bramble branch tooth & claw

5. 

 
One night becomes the slow breath of many nights.
The fading trails of smoke curl
around his head in the sunken pit of a couch
where, in a voyeured circle, other faces tilt back and star-search
along the ceiling. 

 
A hand finds its way into his lap, finds its way beneath the tight elastic of
his cherry-red speedo, still wet from the promised night swim,
hugging his hip in protest and anticipation.

 
The boy has hazel eyes that go gray each time
he ignites a blunt. 
The boy has hands warm as pooling 
sunlight on the wood deck.

 
The boy pulls his speedo off him easily,
straddles his crotch. 

 
The boy says a name that’s no longer a name but a blessing.

 
The boy uses those quick hands
to guide their bodies along the buckling baseline

 
of music that emits from the kitchen, the hallways,
every open-doored bedroom. Others look on as 

 
the boy grabs at his chest, nails digging deep into muscle,
learning to forget everything but this. 

6. 

 
How many more days, how much more counting? 
  The house bellies a groan. The surfaces slick with
       perspiration and forgetfulness. Ants pick at a half-eaten Pantry sandwich,
            or drown in cups still holding warm vodka. Remnant
                 sleep. Remnant desire. Remnant salvation if he could name such a thing.
                      He can’t say when the week began, or worse yet, how it can end. Can this end?
                 His body holds tight to the vibrating
            high they chase all along the beach, the boardwalk,
       each other. He rubs his eyes but sees no more clearly. 
  He pushes out into daylight once again, the only God
left, hoping for the him too to fall. 

7. 

 
How can he be so lonely when there is nowhere
to go but inside another body within this crowded fortress
on the ocean? Lured by the swiping prism of light such a 
house can create, he is sampled over and over again. 
Everything is red and black. Doorways left open,
the sound of the singing little deaths alive in
every room he can find. He recognizes each face that
passes him by, that samples and assesses him, and
still cannot speak a name into existence. Cannot make
these shapes real, pull them from myth into truth.
All of him aches; he is something for everyone but
no one to anyone.
He wants to cry out; unsure if for 
pleasure, or if to the saints he is sure have stopped
watching. Legs spread apart. Mattress fresh with the
perfume of silicone and amyl nitrate and the dull
lingering of another human body. A hand over his
mouth. He screams and this time it is for pleasure.
This time it could be for pleasure. This time it must
be for pleasure.  Without it, what has he become? 

8.

 
No more ghosts. 

 
No more sandcastles swaying in a west-bound wind. 

  
No more fingers slick with sweat between his lips.

 
No more bedrooms collapsing in on themselves within the ribcage of 
beach-side mansions, the hungry sentinels. 

 
No more believing that want and need and desire are the same God. 

 
No more shore to walk.

 
No more night to wear. 

 
No more summer to recall. 

 
He is leaving as we all leave. Returning to the dream of a man within a dream.

 
He is softening to the violence and thrash of fantasy. 

 
No more portraits flickering in the half-light of the dock at dusk.

 
He is someone, he is certain. Abstract, the angles caught through
eyes still searching the sky for absolution. Permission. Release. 

 
No more ocean to ignore his cries. 

 
No more cries belonging to an ocean, long, long gone already.

Daniel Brennan (he/him) is a queer writer and resident of New York City, but spent much of his youth in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Pennsylvania (an early ecological inspiration for his work). As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, Brennan hopes to capture and juxtapose the vastness we experience within our rapidly changing natural word with the often daunting intimacies the queer body presents. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Garfield Lake Review, ONE ART, Feral: a Journal of Poetry & Art, Eunoia Review, among others.

Debbra Palmer

To the Pheasant & Other Wounded Girls

Still, I think of that ring-necked pheasant,
the one we tried to save that Thanksgiving Day.
The meal done and pie served, we girls sneaked out
to hide from dirty dishes and handsy uncles
into the familiar woods not far from the house.
We felt safe there, stomping down nettles,
searching for deer tracks and horsetail reeds,
choosing the sturdiest walking sticks from the forest floor.
This was how we found the pheasant, asleep,
we thought, feathers glistening in the underbrush.
Careful of the neck, I lifted it and carried it home.
We wrapped it in a flannel pillowcase,
and squeezed droplets of milk from a rag
onto its beak. The others looked on
while I checked the body, found a hole,
but it was only an ear. Together, we willed
the swaddled bird to wake up, to open
its bluish eyelids and be thankful for this day.
Our fading coos and whispers bittered: Look at me,
ungrateful thing! You’re making your mother cry.
It grew dark outside. And, worried about lice
and disease, and punishment for bringing
a dead thing home, we found a rope,
and knotted it around the pheasant’s neck.
If we were in mourning, we could not say.
We took turns swinging the bird in the air
above our heads, around and around, singing
Christmas carols until the night closed like a throat.

Debbra Palmer is a poet and visual artist living in Idaho’s Treasure Valley. Her poems have appeared in journals including Calyx, Portland Review, Pretty Owl Poetry, Ellipses, Literature & Art and Kitchen Table Quarterly. Her comics appear in Northwest Review where she is an assistant poetry editor. Her graphic memoir in comics about growing up gay and Mormon in the 80s, Holy Frigidaire, was published through a grant from the Alexa Rose Foundation in 2021. She has an MFA in Poetry from Pacific University. Find her online at: debbrapalmer.com

tommy wyatt

Transmasculinity

imagine a man with the trauma of a teenage girl
subtitle: i exclaim! to myself! wow, tommy's body?

isn't it romantic if he whines
how he'd eat me: like
licking molasses
reaching for canned cranberries
that jiggle supple and soft, its skin pockmarked too, and look
how quickly russet shifts to sunset, sloshing in the body,
how he fantasizes about my fat titties,
breathysighing at the end of the song? or is it the birthday
pasties i'm upset about? maybe he actually remembered
me saying something this time, saying how i think nipples
are useless on men. i think he said a guy with a pussy is the ultimate slut,
but in a way that makes me feel desperate, lucky for it,
when i'm really just relieved i only turn 27 once.

it's okay that you still think dead things are beautiful[?]

after N. W. Downs (Where Men Come From)

Jennifer's Body is for the transmascs.
no, really. you're so pretty dead, so pretty
when you sharpen
your weapons carefully
with tongue, wagging
like an animatronic
sheen of metal
when you lick
and flick it. an image of an image
of an image where you possess
so much beauty, the sky fucking
ripping you out by its rain, confessing
love because it turns you this way:
puncturing yourself with the wrong
end of the stick after a too-long sleepover
where you gave up all your secrets.

imagine a man with the trauma of a teenage girl
subtitle: you exclaim! to yourself! wow, tommy's body?

isn't it romantic how you planned to die at 27 and
how you don't question if
it's because you're a boy who hides in your
body? the way you look right
in the night sky, colorized by molasses and the retina of your eye
does it offend
you?
how heaven is a muck of black bile, how it is so pleasant to pluck
you out if your other eye lacrimates on this date and
you admit anything. see how easy it is to cast
this into existence, how if you mouth it once, it
will certainly snuff you out.

tommy wyatt (he/they) is the author of NOW THAT'S WHAT I CALL HORROR! (Gutslut Press, 2023), So, Who's Courage? (Bullshit Lit, 2023), and several chapbooks. he thanks his cats—Mimi, Cosmo, Peanut, and Skitty—for late night interventions.