Volume 4, Issue 3
Poetry
including work by Cyrus Cassells, Tiffany Troy, Hilary King, Adam Day, and more
Kay E BancroftPistachio House Aubade
Each window in our home is cracked open on an afternoon in February —
our bedroom looks out to the world like the pistachio clutched
between its shells; small and earthy, light green and beige emerge
where dawn dances across the hardwood floors. Breeze rolls in, thick
and damp, so heavy that dew drops rest on the laundry pile
beside our bed, on my wedding ring, on your naked back.
When I rise for the day, I look back
at you — legs knotted in the pilled quilt we bought last February
when our bones chilled. Each limb stacked in a chaotic pile,
your torso spoons the small of my back, clutching
the softness, the sweat, the heft of each thick
thigh crested together as pink clouds find courage to emerge
in sullen Midwestern winter. I visualize how our bodies merge
in this bed we’ve built; fingernail skid-marks on the back
of your neck, seductive bruise on my upper chest colored like thick
plums and cornflower. These are the only colors of February.
These self-inflicted wounds of ourselves where we clutch
one-another in our nest. This year, we’re safe from heavy snow piles,
salted one-lane highways, and shoddy plows. Gardens pile
high with newling buttercups, daffodil shutes emerge
amongst freshly laid mulch, and my palm clutches
my naked collarbone while I consume early spring. It brings back
the imprint of fresh lace on my forearms two months after February
where we swayed our bodies in a white backyard tent, the room thick
with gin, and strawberries, and laughter, and coats thick
enough to fend off small chills in an evening breeze. Remember the pile
of polaroids on the table? The relief that we didn’t marry in February?
The tenderness? I do. I remember it all. Each morning when I emerge
from soft slumber, I count the moles on your resting back
and recall how you kissed my hand in the crosswalk, clutched
each palm in yours as we wed in the courthouse. The judge clutching
a plastic pen as she signed documents declaring our love in thick
cursive. When I feel the warm breeze in early spring, it takes me back
to this, the greatest joy held in my body. I like to think I can stockpile
it in my torso, summon it when I need to emerge
from a new kind of sadness. Somehow this February
warmth, our chaotic limbs, this dew on the laundry pile,
reminds me of us. Each creature in our pistachio home emerges
from a cozy stupor, and I see it. How our love sustains us, even in February.
Kay E. Bancroft (they/them) is a queer non-binary poet, educator, editor, and reviewer from Cincinnati, OH. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Randolph College, and a BA from the University of Cincinnati. You can find their writing in ANMLY, GASHER, Voicemail Poems, Hooligan Magazine, The Rumpus, & more. Explore more at kayebancroftpoet.com
Ariel BanayanIn Persian we call another language another tongue
On Day 83 of the 2022 protests in Iran, protester and artist Mohsen Shekari was executed by the Iranian Regime for ‘waging a war against God,’ whatever that means.
In two tongues, I can only
lament. I cannot un-wrong
my English. I cannot unwind
the wind. Again and again,
with tongues against a wall,
I lament the death of Mohsen Shikari.
With two tongues bent like horns
against the skull, I hear a mother
yell. One tongue wandering alone.
How I remember his age
in our mother tongue that cannot unwind
the wind. Again and again, these deaths
in Iran are horns growing to no end.
I do not know if living is another horn,
troubled like a tongue refusing
the nib of a broken pen.
In two tongues, I can only
lament the death of Mohsen Shikari.
Ariel N. Banayan is a writer and reluctant driver born and raised in Los Angeles. He received his MFA in creative writing from Chapman University, where he taught composition classes on the rhetoric of memory and the Holocaust. You can find more of his writing on Poetry Daily, Guesthouse Lit, Crab Creek Review, and other places. You can also contact him under the handle @tiesto_eliot on Instagram and Twitter.
Kindall FredricksProgressive Boyfriend Receives Standing Ovation For Saying He Thinks You’re Hot, Too
despite all odds i forgot to bring bean dip to the
séance again is there anything more lonely than a
jellyfish pitchforking across the sea in search of
connection or a comet nosing space aside to touch
a sun who plucks her away quill by quill until she’s
just a dusty runt shivering in a trail of her own
yellowed fangs who is speaking my name
that dust bunny hunkered beneath the couch
a tuft of dead things drawn together to soothe
loneliness One day i will be a tongue-thrust in a
dress the color of woman, scorned i will be seen
dandilocked between chandelier and wine and he will
dig up all the pink-bellied radishes for us to bite are
you ready to take this spirIt i will have granite
countertops a full planner and smile a smile that says
yah they’re granite i do not ask the dead girl what
she thinks because she is at it again:
swallowing her tongue as quietly as a child bending a flower at the stem, pushing its feathered
cap back into dirt.
Brothers
after We the Animals
The tabby light the tabby light bellying
above the swamp, curled around
its reddening bird. The ticking. The ticking
of rain against the shed. The shed, twisting
away from mud-swell like a new fang. The underlip
of leaves, the quiver. The
drip. The boys. The woods,
unblinking. The way their bodies spoke
its dialect. Hungry they tremor and teethe, turning
mouthward It was the littlest
who had to kill the fish. Pussy
The word shivved, passed brother
to brother. Each examining how it
gleamed in their palms. He knew that word.
Find yourself good pussy Pops once said
smile snapping like a belt
as he tilted the magazine down,
showing him a stranger, dark hair hived
above her privates. The fish thrashed
in his brother’s grip gills fluttering
like Mom’s summer skirts.
Like Mom’s finched voice
as they all hid in the pantry.
Little boys, unblinking.
Little boys
clutching hammers
Little boys killing little boys playing
a game they named Family
where the smallest stuffs a pillow
in his shirt and pretends to be
Mom.
He closes his eyes, feels the phantom galloping in his belly.
Not having the words. to call
a baby in the womb
a craving
Kindall Fredricks (she, her) is a practicing registered nurse and an MFA candidate at Sam Houston State University, focusing on both poetry and the intersection of literature and the medical sciences. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Letters, Boulevard, North American Review, Grist, Passages North, The Academy of American Poets, and more.
Tiffany TroyCrocodile State
There always lived a crocodile in the swamp, coveting, hungry. That’s where I met her eye, as I
turned mine away from the bag of urine that had trickled out of my master. In my two-day
absence, he didn’t use the restroom. I felt my jaw itching to drag him down to show him the
animal I had become. That hunger was my love turned wrong.
How lovely a Wendy’s Asiago combo after two back-to-back tomato mozzarella paninis from
Starbucks. Hilton’s breakfast waffle soaked with syrup wasn’t all that much in the Crocodile
State. I kept remembering that all that money wasn’t mine but his, cash gratuitous like the tall
London Fog tea with no vanilla extract, as I savored the all-Americaness of me in its suavity and
intensity. I swallowed to not be swallowed.
Then I came back home to that bag of urine. Instead of pity, I felt anger. Anger at performing the
stereotype of an extraordinary girl who came back a crocodile that ate her master with his clear
bag of urine. It was the only way out of the swamp of never-ending work, the only way she could
rest her jaw, so sleepy from all that chewing.
Tiffany Troy is the author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and the chapbook When Ilium Burns (Bottlecap Press), as well as co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tiffany is a finalist of the Changing Light Award from Livingston Press at the University of West Alabama. Tiffany’s literary criticism, translation, and creative writing are published or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Cortland Review, EcoTheo Review, Hong Kong Review of Books, Latin American Literature Today, The Laurel Review, The Los Angeles Review, Matter, New World Writing, Rain Taxi, and Tupelo Quarterly, where Tiffany is Managing Editor.
Cyrus CassellsMAN EXITING A MIGHTY FORTRESS
Early in high school, the taunters realized
It wasn’t a rib-crafted Eve
Or a world-altering apple
You were after.
In your panic-ridden,
Jerry-rigged routes to school,
It was easier to downplay
Your appearance,
Man whose body resembles
A Muybridge film-motion study,
Hide the contradictory prowess
Of your hill-and-forest trekker’s legs
Under nondescript corduroy
Or everyday khakis.
Such an artful, persistent dreamer and evader—
Tell me, have you found your Adam?
*
You sallied into the world seeking love,
And for some, that central quest seems
Hallowed, offhand;
Not for you—with a bookworm father,
A heart-cloaked mother,
And a busy-as-hell actress for an older sister,
But here you are:
To your stolid colleagues’ shock,
You’ve left behind your stronghold
Of impersonal laptops and ledgers
To assist in a city hospice,
Brand new samaritan unaccustomed
To candor, confession,
And around-the-clock intimacy,
So you who were half-robbed of touch
In childhood,
And veered from it in college,
Must now claim its immeasurable power—
In your up-close-and-personal vigils
With the faltering,
The leave-taking—
The bullied, tender boy’s first hope
Turns out to equal
The soul’s valedictory request:
To be honored in full
On this rough-and-tumble,
Denigrating earth,
To be valued and held—
And now I wouldn’t exchange
Your expansive heart, your allaying
Hospice worker’s touch—
Not for a sultan’s jade,
Or a mantle of costly Tyrian purple,
Not for a janissary’s stolen topaz —
Cyrus Cassells, the 2021 Poet Laureate of Texas, is the author of nine books of poetry, including Soul Make a Path through Shouting, The Gospel according to Wild Indigo, and The World That The Shooter Left Us, (Four Way Books: 2022). He is the translator from Catalan of Still Life with Children: Selected Poems of Francesc Parcerisas, which garnered the Texas Institute of Letters’ 2019 Souerette Diehl Fraser Award for Best Translated Book of 2018 and 2019. His honors include a Lannan Literary Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the National Poetry Series, an NAACP Image Award nomination, and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award. He is a tenured Professor of English at Texas State University.
Eben BeinT(he)y
Eastern Hemlock (Tsuga canadensis) is tolerant of slope and shade; monoecious; pendant female seed cones (1-2 cm) and male pollen cones (0.5 cm) both borne on 2nd year branchlets.
Mom, if you would hike up Tumbledown
Mountain with me again, up
through the hemlocks
after our two-year tumble, up
through all the trees with their incomprehensible
chromosomes, up
to this X you drew on my map
just off the Ridge trail
to mark the blueberries, Vaccinium
angustifolium, if you would hike up in July,
when the anthers and bells have fallen off
the swollen ovaries, skin taut
around their embryos—I won’t forget
the Tupperware this time,
we can toss them in tuptuptup until the sound
is soft and full—I would do that, but
you can’t pretend you know anything about
how an X and a Y should walk
that dotted line. We are more than a pair
of legs. Between,
a root network holds
the mountain up. Mom,
it’s just a word. The trees say it clearly
and never forget.
Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) is out and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection From the top of the sky about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.
Ruby ShifrinOmelette
The way I remember it, the way I remember it,
the short-tufted olive green carpet was an eyelash away,
your muscular heft on my upper back,
the way I remember it, breath getting short, the way
I remember it, you pushing me pushing me
Oh she’s going blue O.K.…
I was making an omelette, cracking brown eggs,
the way I remember it, the pan was hot, sputtery.
I turned it down a tad, threw in the whisk
and whisked again eggs, tipping the pan to one side—
my neighbor insists the art of the omelette
is in how much air is incorporated.
On medium heat the protein coagulates,
a skin forms—that’s the one fact
I recall from school science,
proteins coagulate under heat—Miss B’s cleavage
was so distracting, as was Miss D’s embarrassment
at having to mention the s.e.x word,
she’d stand there with her spare body and tidy black hair
and there was nowhere for her embarrassment to hide,
and that red tide just spread ever faster, ever further
the time Susie said I don’t understand Miss, do the sperm crawl
across the bed, how do they reach the eggs, and you knew,
it being Susie, that there was no malice behind the question,
her thick brown plaits bouncing against her shoulders
as her puzzled face looked up.
So Miss had to answer.
By now I’ve swirled and chased the omelette
from one side of the pan to the other, about to throw
on a snatch of grated cheese and translucent slices
of tomato before folding it in half,
when the telephone rings, you start
straight in, not even a hello,
Ruby Shifrin writes poems and short stories. Currently she is inspired to examine structure and line of things by the artist Gego. She has had poems published in Harbor Review, The Westchester Review and Hole in The Head Review.
Maeghan Mary SuzikKnife Block
The blades whisper:
remember how it is to be heavy with hate?
Carbon steel is wicked deft at blackmail. Cobalt has a barbed smile. I crack from their goading. I may expire, keeled from
my own hand. In trepidation I repeat: queer is outside, diamond jaw line, is queen. But each identity has its own steel
door. A diver’s watch measuring my daily plunges into pink-yellow-blue. Back to the outskirts to the bridges to the quiet
articles. Stash my unlimited vision into back stairwells, empty movie theatres, linen closets.
Can I see this lasting? I am prone to stall outs. Bed is a eulogy on loop without knowing it’s yours. Simple is never the
case. Out is subjective. Love is love is imminent violence on my love. So my options are shelter or capitulate. The alloy
whisperings are quick exits. I could swim with bitter zealots or in the river Styx. I wax and wane. Sweaty palms grip table
edges. Perpetually on tenterhooks over which quick fix will prevail.
The blades whisper
...we are your sine qua non. Let us sing to your torpor. Carve to flower then toil no more.
Originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, Maeghan Mary Suzik (she/her) is a New York City based actor and poet. Her poetry has appeared with Slipstream Press, Grim & Gilded Literary Journal, What Rough Best through Indolent Press, Oakland Arts Review, Catfish Creek, The Rational Creature Magazine, and October Hill Magazine. Her work has also been displayed at several festivals including The Hickory Playground’s virtual Quarantine Diaries, The NYU Diversity Arts Festival and The International Human Rights Arts Festival.
*
Maeghan was formerly a Passengers poetry reader and voice talent. We allow our former staff to submit to Passengers after 2 issues have passed since their departure.
Amanda DettmannNeighbors’ Heat Lightning
When their chimney
exploded in July
at dinnertime, Suzanne
and Cliff were away
on vacation.
Toasted bricks lay
strewn around
their yard like electric
eels after sex.
My mother stopped
stirring the spaghetti
pot and dipped her
hands in the tomato
sauce as if she
was a dinosaur
who’d just survived
the big bang. I couldn’t
hear for two days.
I found a deer peeking
out the back
porch of their just-blown
yard, her yolky
eyes like dandelions
ripping the wind.
I wished her water,
a puddle in the middle
of the heated empty
street. Sometimes I still
hear her swimming
in the fire, her legs
the tentacles of heat
lightning coming
home. Now every
time I smell
hooves striking they
soften me.
Amanda Dettmann is a queer poet, performer, and educator who is the author of Untranslatable Honeyed Bruises. She earned her MFA in Poetry from New York University where she taught undergraduates and has received support from the Kenyon Review Writers Workshops and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute. Dettmann was one of two finalists for the Action, Spectacle contest judged by Mary Jo Bang, as well as the winner of the 2023 Peseroff Prize in Poetry selected by Jake Skeets. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize by The Emerson Review and has appeared or is forthcoming in FENCE, Peauxdunque Review, The Adroit Journal, Stanford’s Poetry Journal Mantis, and The National Poetry Quarterly, among others.
K. Jasmin Dulai Great Barrington
Under a cold star
starvation—
brown skin stretched over vines, over
white, roped bones
This is the you
who is not you
Away from potted cityscapes,
in-love in a snowbound forest
exchanges of simple words
with future sophisticated men
taking a break from their ambition
Under open night skies, behind a llama's cry
frigid jeans covering hips, covering lips
against fevered kisses—
against another night’s anguished heat
lust wide open on white snow
Love lost in a jungle of it, of snow
San Jose Fools
Those first years in California
we learned to live with the absence of rain
We landed in a river city in the middle of a drought, not far from a crackling Guadalupe River
that once flowed heavy with salmon. For generations, the site of celebration
I sought comfort in driving the highways, past dry brush and Ebay, Apple, JDSU HQs
the right distraction from not feeling at home.
We had moved here like fools
thinking the valleys still had gold to give
only to discover all that glittered were ranges
mounds of hairy, yellow earth in the distance
K. Jasmin Dulai lives in the Bay Area of California where she works at CERI, a nonprofit that is dedicated to the empowerment of refugees and immigrants. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Citron Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Pretty Owl Poetry, So to Speak, The Eastern Iowa Review, Drunk Monkeys, trampset and other publications. She is a 2022 VONA/Voices (Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation) alum and participated in the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for poetry in 2021. She can be found on Twitter as @kjdulai
Rosa CastellanoA GIRL THE COLOR OF SUNSET GOES TO HOMECOMING
My dress, short and bubble hemmed
makes me feel like a flower. Blue
eyes shine when he sees me and I know
I look on the outside how I feel—
we get into his car, have to stop
by his house. He forgot ________.
I open the door, move
to get out of the car and he stops
me, eyes on the floor—I can’t
go in. His mom doesn’t know
I’m black.
Rosa Castellano is a poet and teacher living in Richmond, VA. In 2021, she was a finalist for Cave Canem’s Starshine and Clay Fellowship and this year was a semi-finalist for Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work has been supported by Tin House, The Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Bread Loaf and can be found or is forth coming from RHINO Poetry, The Southampton Review and South Florida Poetry Journal among others.
Grant ChemidlinHe Came to Me Again Last Night
Is my mind, this dream,
the only place he allows himself
to un-hide? To be free? We snuck out
from the cabin where our families
were sleeping to lie
in the snow. The trees all dressed
like brides. We snuck out like we did
when we were teens, risked ungloved hands
to feel skin. This time, I didn’t feel
ashamed. I even went to kiss, but heard,
from close by, the low growl of muscled night,
the bear that followed him in.
He wanted us to run, so we did.
We barely made it. Inside,
in the cabin light, the snowflakes
dusting his eyes melted into tears.
I reached my hand to brush back
his hair. He flinched. I said,
I am so sorry. You can’t come back.
Grant Chemidlin is a queer poet living in Los Angeles. He is the author of the chapbook New in Town (Bottlecap Press, 2022), the illustrated collection He Felt Unwell (So He Wrote This), and the full-length collection What We Lost in the Swamp (Central Avenue Publishing, 2023). He's been a finalist for the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award, the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Atlanta Review's International Poetry Contest. Recent work has been featured in Quarterly West, Iron Horse Literary Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Saranac Review, among others.
Betsy TigheAn Adobe Chimenea Made from a Man and His Wife
following Amichi’s “A Pity We were Such a Good Invention”
From me they took the belly,
and from you, the fury to stoke the fire.
In the morning it’s lit
by hair from our brushes
and yellowed bits of nail.
In the evening we are cooled
by our moon and her breeze,
the waves that never reach the high desert.
From your thighs came the dirt,
from my running nose the water
to mud the plaster over.
From your eyes, the vacancy
of the center. From my grip, the narrow
end of chimney which lets little in and less leave.
Together we could burn anything:
tortillas, beans, the round cheeked babes.
Your women kneel to place
the sacrifice in us.
My sister scoops the ashes,
hauling them to fields in the
wheelbarrow made
from my mother and father,
she the wheels, he the rusty bed
nailed to her.
Betsy Fogelman Tighe has published widely in literary magazines, including TriQuarterly, for which she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and twice in Rattle, for whom she traveled to LA to read. She has won a third place and a first place prize from the Oregon Poetry Association. Her full-length manuscript has been semi-finalist for the Snake Nation Press Violet Reed Haas Poetry Prize and the Hidden Rivers Willow Run Book Award. Ilya Kaminsky chose a poem as a semi-finalist for the 2020 Loraine Williams Poetry Prize. Tighe’s essay about her mentorship with James Wright appears in the Spring, 2018 issue of The Georgia Review. She retired in 2022 from her good work as a teacher-librarian in Portland, Oregon where she also pays some notice to her garden, and values the presence of two young adult children.
Hilary KingMy Christmas List
I skip scarf, jewelry, chocolate.
I want a vending machine, I tell my family.
A food truck, a car wash, and also
a strip mall. I want an empire
and I want my daughter to want one too.
Be selfish sooner, I try to teach her.
Hunger for more than approval,
that heavy pink bathrobe of a present.
Don’t wait until no one is in front of you
to put yourself first. Legacies can be deadly.
Every December my mother would answer,
I just want love, and perhaps some bubble bath.
The bottles piled up. The tub waited for her
like a white porcelain grave.
Hilary King is a poet originally from Virginia and now living in the San Francisco Bay Area of California. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Ploughshares, Salamander, TAB,Door Is a Jar, and other publications. She is the author of the book of poems, The Maid’s Car. Website: www.hilarykingwriting.com
Katherine PageStirrups
The smallest bone called stapes,
millimeters vibrating sounds
through oval windows to an ear deep
pea-sized coiled shell. Stapes
pronounced like a child asking
stay please, tiny tuning fork that could barely
frame the cheek of a man
on a pocket coin grabbed
before dressing this hospital gown.
In an effort to create the quietest place on earth
scientists built an anechoic chamber
of foam wedged walls miscarrying waves
but even in a padded place there’s a roar of rivers
in cerebral veins a pulse in thumbs the audible
knocking on an atrium beneath ribs.
Listen absence is a thing itself
a clear glass ornament, cold and round
held in a hand or shoved down a throat.
I’ve only known one type of silence
in this office with legs spread wide
my gravel hearbones wrapped in felt
feet upon the metal rests
like open mouths screaming.
Katherine Page is an elementary school teacher and writer living in Chicago. She is working on a manuscript about teaching and learning. She has poems published in Beyond Queer Words, Awakened Voices, Evocations Review, Green Linden Press, Open Minds Quarterly, Wingless Dreamer Press, and Rough Cut Press. She is a graduate of the 2022–23 Lighthouse Writers Workshop Poetry Collective in Denver, CO.
J River HelmsThe End of a World
Every morning the air reeks like doomsday. The ground
aches with anticipation. It knows destruction is
certain because all death is certain. What’s a better
harbinger than departed birds accumulating on our
porch? Life here is chaos. I hope our apocalypse is neat,
organized: tidy as it ruins in a fell swoop. If all
energy becomes something else in the end, I want
mine to become a crop of stars caught in an orbit.
Illusions may not be real but they hold more weight
subjectively. The thing about objectivity is it’s
absolute, or it suggests an absolute at least. We have
no time for a world without nuance — we’re not easily
abbreviated. If we swallow enough bark do we become
pine? Timber to floor some future we’ll never see? Let’s
orchestrate an afterlife & I promise you I’ll try not to
catastrophize that too. Undo our nightmares. Say no to
atrophy. Make whatever fucking reality we want without
limit, provided we do no harm. Is that so hard? Does
yearning always beget obliteration? In the field there’s
poppies, something to sedate us while it burns. What’s a
shore without a sea? you ask, your hand in mine.
Echoes are wingless. The caves are quiet tonight.
J River Helms (they/them) has published poetry and prose in Copper Nickel, DIAGRAM, Fairy Tale Review, New England Review, Phoebe, Redivider, and Sonora Review, among others. Machines Like Us, their first collection of poetry, was published by Dzanc Books in 2016. J has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alabama and lives in Houston, TX with their partner and two pets.
Iris Newelltouchpoints
touchpoints. touch me—my body unfolded
in a textbook, and captured in a two-page spread.
the scientists agree. on the basis of sex, our bodies
all become immutable. I have here assembled a list
of primary and secondary sex characteristics, in hopes
that I can meet some of them: enough, at least,
to please you. though my sex in stone is set.
the pages turn, and tease your fingers;
touchpoints. your fingers brush warm
and accidental against mine. worlds crash
and cascade down all around us. last night,
as our bodies intertwined in dreaming, I had
a sex change. all the doctors are in consensus. my
chromosomes are the same, but they now mean
different things. they say it happened when I shifted
from one side of the bed to the other. scientifically.
darling, this was simple biological algebra; I have solved
for x and y. now, I will solve all the
touchpoints. draw the curtains, and
douse the lights. outside, the night
is pounding on our window—let it.
turn on the music. notes will come
and drift and waver; the song that rings
is neither yours nor mine. one day our love
will be studied within textbooks. tonight,
that does not matter. I bear my body
for the science of your sight. the night is short, and hot,
and full of longing: tonight, touch not my shoulders
and take me by the hips.
Iris Newell is a trans writer and educator living on the lands of the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Wendat, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Anishinabek. She writes to challenge ideas of gender and sexuality, to express the struggles of dysphoria, and to continuously unravel her own femininity.
Adam DayBricolage II
After and for Molly Brodak
People are wild and small and don’t live very long.
The first to die are the ones who don’t tell stories:
mouse masks and leaky chamber pots and pine
straw and red embroidery and the ugly song
a crow teaches her son so he can sleep.
They tilt their dark half dome eyes up for hawks:
the sky is open all the way; workers upright
on the line like spokes. Impossible dreams –
like building a birdhouse underwater. Dark pasts
are only good at coming back. Each day ahead
is lake black. The holy lies between things.
You hope you are remembering something
when you see it. Come back from there. If there is
no one else here. I’m not either. Half of me feels
strangled, a hard curve in a dirt road. I can’t see
ahead. The last time I saw myself alive, I drew
the curtain back from the bed, stood by my sleeping
body. You will save yourself. You cannot help it.
Adam Day is the author of Left-Handed Wolf (LSU Press), and of Model of a City in Civil War (Sarabande Books), and the recipient of a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship for Badger, Apocrypha, and of a PEN Award. He is the publisher of Action, Spectacle.
Gideon Huan-LangStarting from Oppenheimer & Ending in My Arms
after Kim Addonizio
Mellow Prometheus, you were born to a painter and studied
French literature at boarding school, learning how to burn villages
through paragraphs of a chemistry textbook and learning how to ravage
a body through Van Gogh and the chainsmoking of your youth buried
by oversized tweed, yet you declare yourself as death—weak
monotone and avoiding my gaze, I ask why you are so insistent
on your strength, you tell me that you know you’re not strong
enough for greatness, that you’re only aware of your danger
as a destroyer pouring blood over chalkboard equations, daydreaming
of mushroom clouds at Los Alamos—it is not this body where I feel
brutality, your flesh is warm like all flesh, you are not listening
to the radio and about static suffering because you were in awe
of the physics encoded in your nightfall (and you will return to poetry
after the war, reading T. S. Eliot and learning Sanskrit), the uranium is green
and a distant glow, and I am forgetting that all bodies are tender
in the split second before their destruction, I am looking at shadows
left at the doorstep of a steeple forever in the state of going, the unfinished
utterance of a prayer—I have nothing but a prayer of a body and its desire
to find fleeting warmth against an apartment with a faulty radiator, a war
between my slow decay and the half-life of a brutal Northern winter muted
by the entering and exiting of an IKEA comforter by strangers searching
for an ending to an MFA memoir, the door handle is becoming more polished,
people are always leaving, the weekly physics homework remains empty on my desk,
I’m losing muscle due to microwaveable dinners but I still cause so much wreckage,
all I have are bodies who leave me, gray, this door only the scene of departure,
and the heating is forever broken, and my arms are wrapped around myself now,
aware of the dangers of a body.
Gideon Huan-Lang (郎健) is a poet from the Pacific Northwest. He is nineteen and studies the digital humanities.
Daniel Edward MooreRope
interests me now,
the way moonlit strands of Midwest hair
fondled by corn as the body runs
naked through Nebraska,
binds you tight
in a lover’s dream where you pray
a cold, steel blade leaves
your wrists untouched.
You, my farmhouse
tire swing, finds me, dawn’s bloody denim
flying over headless chickens,
a tribute to knots taking years to say
the word undone.
Made stronger with every push and pull,
until gravity finds a place for us
to stand and hear the hands confess,
consider the lilies
of the field at night,
blooming fingers seduced by the dark,
thinking no one’s watching.
Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work is forthcoming in Tar River Poetry Journal, Triggerfish, Critical Review and Watershed Review. He is the author of two chapbooks, Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist and Boys. His book Waxing the Dents is from Brick Road Poetry Press.
Johnathan RileyWelcome to Funtown
You are sat along the railing
counter of a new Thai
restaurant and below
the din of the entirely white
waitstaff and the Hawaiian
shirt the bartender
has on you can smell
the burn of the overworked
vibrators living upstairs
and your drinks shake a little
like something bigger is coming like
an orgasm is just down the street
driving home in a dump truck
but above the smell a friend waves to you
from the bar and you have not seen him
since he lost his phone and he
says your name and you call him
by his brother’s name and he
ignores it and you embrace
and he is drinking something called Funtown
and offers you and your girlfriend
a sip (it tastes like pineapple and
rollercoasters) so you go
back to your seat and you look
out of the window to see yourself
falling towards the townhall
across the street
that has been illuminated
in holiday light for everyone
to remember it is there
when it is closed and your girlfriend
says that light has never looked
more like sound and you both finish
your dinner in the well-lit silence of good
food and you go back over to your friend
to say goodbye but he is full
of Funtown and does not exist
anymore but you believe
in personalities so you leave full
and warm with your girlfriend
both smelling like chicken
and the outside air
is a dog
cold and hungry
that follows you home
Johnathan Riley is a writer from coastal Maine. Riley taught poetry and composition at the University of New Hampshire for a few years where he received his MFA. He's the two-time recipient of the Dick Shea Award for Poetry (22'-23'), and in 2018 was awarded the Poetry Literati Award by Florida State University. An ordained minister, bartender, and local newspaper reporter, Riley keeps his schedule full. However, in those moments to himself, he can be found in coffee shops pretending to be busier than he actually is. His Instagram is @j.j.riley
Melissa HolmFragment in Response to the Interview Question for an Administrative Position at an All-Female College “How Will You Manage to Work Full-Time as a Mother?” (circa 2016)
All my modes of escape have become my prison.
My child toddles into my cave of duvet
wiggles down my back to be the big
(littlest) spoon. And after he’s warmed
against my spine, he slithers out to push
up the window shade proving to me there is light.
And I resolve to do today even after yesterday
I said I didn’t want to do tomorrow.
Melissa Holm Shoemake lives in Atlanta, GA with her husband and two sons where she works in college administration. Her poems have appeared in various journals including The Southern Humanities Review and Iron Horse Literary Review. Her chapbook Ab.Sin.The. is available from Dancing Girl Press.
Jessica HsuAerophobia, or the fear of flying
I.
The first time I tried to love a plane
I strung my confessions into a chain
& tore wide the emergency exit. I noticed
my mother perched next to me, her voice
like an eagle cloistered. I wrapped the chain
thrice around her, then my waist, & there I
leapt. My mother captured the image, me
blurred, almost like an apparition traced, but
I swear, I flew.
II.
Rainbow blessed footprints line
craters, carved in calcium. Placards
staked in grass pierce our throats
cloying with every sight, sulfur gifted,
pungent. We offer prayers for creatures,
the dancing of bison calves, brown
bear dew-touched, snake undone, cowbird
thinly crying, a spider mid-catch, frozen
framed in sky.
III.
You say, I am sorry, strap
on wings of lead, don
cloaks spotted with misuse,
& beckons me to follow
you. I say, I am sorry, split
open the glazed tombstones
& ask the buried to draw tattoos
across my thighs, shape of ink
leaping, facsimile of an angel’s ascent.
IV.
In English class, flight is associated with
upwards, or soaring. My teacher points
to Icarus, explain similes of heavy
wings unfurled, make opposites
of flight & falling. In physics class, I learn
of Newton’s Third Law. I track thrust & lift,
matched by gravity & drag. In turbulence,
I calculate forces, count minutes, confess
my love for a plane.
V.
Among the memories of Taipei there was no
flight, not before the last light in the city
dissolved, cradled in oyster pancakes
& the lingering scent of red bean cakes
& calls of rice rolls from a stall. There was no flight.
Not until the cats finished yowling in every alley
& street, not until the lovers bid farewell, not until the dogs
slinked home, not until we lay in our beds, did we hear
the planes roar anew.
Jessica Hsu is an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, where her poems have won Hopwood awards. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in VIBE, Star 82 Review, HAD, and others.
Kai-Lilly KarpmanPunchline
Springtime might be a perv,
but he’s no killer the girls say.
It’s April, no one is dying.
Blossoms have a joke about the branch,
they giggle as they tear through it.
A long time ago he held my hand as springtime
painted our room in daybreak’s pastels, joked
I’m making a hole
in this wall or in your fucking face.
I said sorry but could you wait until I have coffee,
You know I’m not a morning person, babe.
I am funny, too.
My cat has a joke about mice.
She says I wouldn't get it, but brings me their bodies
as a little prank.
By November, the world really starts to crack up.
The blossoms are huge and are all just roaring.
If you forget your coat the wind will whip into you
revealing the punchline:
I will kill you, I will kill you, I will kill you.
Kai-Lilly Karpman is a writer and educator from Los Angeles, California. She has been previously published in Plume, Image Magazine, Dewdrop, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Columbia University 2022 teaching fellowship, the Columbia University Word for Word travel and research grant, the two-time winner of the John Curtis Memorial Prize in Poetry, and the winner of the Connecticut Poetry Circuit. Kai-Lilly values the marriage between literature's intuitive, unnameable power and the formal techniques that support its emergence. Her subject matter is almost always the effects of patriarchy.
Marisa Victoria GedgaudasFault
I live on a fault line
There
below the water
below my window
lies a wound
tenuously sutured
by silt and shell
This morning
in the mirror
I discover a lone silver hair
And I suppose
that everything
is a product of pressure
building
Each calm surface disguising
a yawning threat
Here
catastrophe
happens
slowly
and then all at once
as you watch
the landscape
change
Marisa is a writer originally from Colorado who now lives on the windswept bluffs of Northern California. She is incredibly inspired by the wild beauty around her and is often found exploring the mountains of her childhood, the unspoiled Pacific coast, and the desert landscapes in between. Her work has most recently been published by Spell Jar Press and Cream Scene Carnival magazine.