Poetry

Michael Montlack

Questions My Father Asked Watching This Old House

That afternoon beside him on my mother’s half of their bed.
Our English Setter licking my father’s gnarly un-socked feet.

Lemme ask you something, he said as Bob Vila mixed plaster.

Out just weeks, I’d been waiting for the inevitable Do you do drag?
Or … You one of those, um, leather guys?

My father, a mechanic in his 60’s, never knew anyone out before.

But no. He said, Why are gay people smarter than straight people?

I swallowed the impulse to mention some of the himbos I met at bars.
We aren’t, I said. Maybe it’s just easier to be out in educated circles?

Spatula in hand, Bob made circular patterns. The dog paused to lick his own foot.

Ok—but why you guys always so creative?

I was unprepared. Having only rehearsed vows to use condoms, settle down one day.

I dunno, I said. Guess being silenced, we use art to express ourselves?

The walls fully primed, Bob was pleased with himself.

My father rolled his head on the pillow to look my way. And you’re not angry?

And then I was back at his auto shop, all those summers pumping gas.
Nine, ten. Collecting tips for being Howie’s son. Ignoring his crew:
This fan belt’s a real cocksucker! When’s that faggot coming for his Pinto?

I couldn’t answer. Did this mean I wasn’t angry? I’d met guys
with chips on their shoulders. Guys who drank their chips away.
Where was my chip? Still in the closet? In my writing? My need to write?

Bob was in different clothes now. On a return visit. The walls fully dried.

No, I said. I’m not angry. But what could I be angry about?
There, comfortable in that bed. With my father and his dog.
Learning how to build a more beautiful home.

Michael Montlack is author of two poetry collections and editor of the Lambda Finalist essay anthology My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them (University of Wisconsin Press). His poems recently appeared in Prairie Schooner, North American Review, december, Poet Lore, Cincinnati Review, and phoebe. His prose has appeared in The Rumpus, Huffington Post and Advocate.com. In 2022 his poem won the Saints & Sinners Poetry Award (for LGBTQ writers). Find out more on his website: michaelmontlack.com

Malik Thompson

Rupture

The quiet rampage of a heart breaking.
His dark hands left red thunder

inside my rib-cage. I roam fields
of moon-kissed crystal. Pale light

& thunder becoming his dark hands.
A night sky pours blue rain

onto lanterns of pale crystal. Moon-kissed,
I fall asleep beneath the kindness of streetlamps.

Torrents of blue rain pouring, the night sky
is indifferent to my listlessness.

Streetlamps cease their kindness while I sleep
& I’m drenched in waves of memory.

Indifferent to my listlessness,
I ignore the black splinters throbbing in my chest.

Drenched in waves of memory,
rage in my throat like a shot of whiskey.

Throat shot through with whiskey, I rage—
mirrors smashed in spite of silent pleas.

Waves of memory drench
my quiet heart. Its rampage. The breaking.

Malik Thompson is a Black queer man from Washington, DC. His work is featured in MQR Mixtape, Voicemail Poems, Poet Lore, and other places. He has received support from Lambda Literary, Obsidian Foundation, Brooklyn Poets, Cave Canem, and other organizations. He can be found on Instagram via the handle @latesummerstar.

Suzannah Watchorn

Echolocation

After George Ella Lyon

 I       come            from            a      pod

      of                 melonheads             &     singers,                    from    buoys 

      &     nets                                  &                 reindeer

skeletons.    I       come           from            cold

sonorous                  water:          Arctic          Ocean,         American    Rivers,

the               whispering              estuaries      of

the   continental  shelf.           I       come 

  from            hunting.                   I       come           from    the

  hunted.                    I       come           from

baleen,         blowholes,               teeth,           skin-

         shedding,                 forages,                   twenty-knot speed,             echolocation

         ten                       fathoms                               under   ice.

Suzannah Watchorn is an English-Irish writer who grew up outside of London, UK. She now lives in the United States, where she works as a writing coach and freelance editor. Her poetry and essays are forthcoming in Eunoia Review, Nebulous, Sunspot Literary, Wild Roof Journal and Red Noise Collective.

Ximena Keogh Serrano

Because I Cannot Stay

I spread my letters like limbs
they go everywhere

My pen—
a prosthesis factory,
a kind of miracle

Ximena Keogh Serrano is a poet and transdisciplinary scholar based in Portland, OR. Born in Quito, Ecuador, her writing embraces a movement between disciplines and languages. She is an assistant professor at Pacific University in Oregon, where she teaches Latin American and U.S. Latinx literary and cultural studies. Ximena is an alum of VONA/Voices. She is also the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston Scholarship and the Amiri Baraka Scholarship from Naropa University’s Summer Writing Programs at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Her poems have appeared in The Chiricú Journal, Hematopoiesis Press, the Journal for Latina Critical Feminism, and elsewhere.

Michael T. Young

Salt and Pepper

If salt preserves like memory, maybe pepper is forgetfulness. This might explain why riot police
pepper sprayed the crowd that listened to violinists playing for the memory of Elijah McClain, a
violinist who died at the hands of police. It was memory they tried to erase, of a life, of a
violence, of a tune and the way a tune is carried, and the way a tune can carry us. Which is why I
think back further: to Hartley and his quintet playing until the slow, Atlantic waters swallowed
the Titanic. They went down with the ship, performing to calm the passengers. It’s a bit of
history floating on the surface like flotsam, and I hold onto it, because I want to believe we’re
not on a sinking ship. But every morning seems more waterlogged, farther off course. Even
Plato’s metaphor runs aground, because he fooled no one putting a philosopher king on the
throne. We know he meant that only his kind is fit to rule. It’s a common ignorance, to believe
that in a night as dark as peppercorn, there isn’t another iceberg drifting like a towering salt
crystal, and preserving in its ice channels a trace of the one thing that will sink us.

Michael T. Young's third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award for his collection Living in the Counterpoint. He also received honorable mention for the 2022 New Jersey Poets Prize. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer's Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including Main Street Rag, Pinyon, Talking River Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Vox Populi.

Elise Triplett

Pickling

I want / aged grief /.

I’m tired of buying that / new bag of potatoes grief /
week after week.

I want my friends to ask how I can afford
this / vintage of grief /.

In the car, I was joking, but not joking, but not
not joking when I said:
“Wow. It will always be this way, / it / will always be this bad.”

And my sister said also not not joking:
“Yeah, I think / it / will always be this bad.”
I want to put my / grief / in vinegar and sugar
and shake it and shake it and shake it and shake it
until it bubbles and bleeds.
I want it to spoil and rot in that good way
that makes little bacteria happy.
I want it to rest behind the eggs and tofu
only considered on trash day
like “Should we throw / it / out?”
“No, leave it. It’s fermenting. It’s almost / right /.”

To Cope?

When I see the house listing and
what the house flippers have done to the bathroom tile
I believe

a lovely pair of sex dolls will purchase Theseus'
grandparents’ house, just above market price. I don’t hate them;
they're probably very caring, expensive, they slip twenties
to children in the supermarket when their parents’ struggle
at the till, press one ballooned finger to their lips, and leave
before they can be thanked. I hope

they sit in the breakfast nook holding hands, latex
melting together, closer than skin and skin
watching the same hummingbirds my grandmother did.

Their children will dye their hair on the new respectable cream
tile and when vinegar doesn’t work they’ll sigh and smile
spend a little extra to replace it with something a bit more
beautiful, a bit more them.

Elise Triplett is a writer from Dayton, Ohio who is trying their best. They have been published in places like Black Bough Poetry, The Taco Bell Quarterly, and Okay Donkey. They stopped writing for three years to try out being sad all the time but has decided to try something else like not being sad some of the time.

Catherine Weiss

Ekphrasis of "BOWLING ALLEY GANGBANG - Bukaki [sic] Ending"

The back room is depressing, its low ceiling just beams
and fiberglass insulation the color of brains.
Machinery. Harsh lighting.
Then, a barrage of average dicks—unrelenting swarms
like Hitchcock’s The Birds.
The woman seems to be having a nice time, thank god.
Some of the men wear masks.
I watch pornography twice a week
but I am more haunted by BOWLING ALLEY GANGBANG
than by that two-headed calf poem,
goosebumps beyond Good Bones.
You could make this bowling alley beautiful.
What does it mean to watch? I don’t want to
want to. I’m fascinated by what art could be
and isn’t. If we meet in a frenzy of desire,
take it seriously. Bowling is in decline.
There are still twelve thousand bowling alleys in the world.
I always wanted to be useful, too.

Inheritance

every poet has at least one poem called inheritance
and mine is about the rogue porno i found lurking
among my dead grandmother’s dvd collection.
i kept it. obviously. i put it in my pile and quietly took it
home to examine further. now, i check the release date
on the back. 2006. the DVD itself has been gently scuffed.
all evidence suggesting it's Been Watched Before.
i'm performing forensics on Playboy’s Nude Dorm Party.
on the front of the cardboard sleeve is a lady
covering her nipples with her hands. inside is a lady
with her tits all the way out. hark: a scene index.
bonus features include photo gallery and trailer.
the lady with her tits out is also somehow wearing
a crochet sweater. i have recently taken up crochet.
it's been making me feel closer to my grandmother,
a crafty woman. a woman whose husband had,
before his death, a subscription to Playboy Magazine.
i mean, it all makes sense. the existence of this porno
in my grandma’s belongings is perfectly explicable.
i still barked a despairing whoop when first i saw it
cuddled up between Ratatouille and the Minions movie.
i wanted it to be hers. wanted porn to be something
we had in common. a softcore tragedy. tits casserole
at thanksgiving dinner. i'm sad. what if i framed it.
what if i set it on the mantelpiece in a place of honor,
told you stories about how giving my grandmother was,
how i don’t ever once remember her complaining about shit
my grandpa did and didn’t do. i want to remember her
with joy. i want to remember her with pleasure. i say
it's grandma's porno now. i hope she wouldn't be ashamed.
i'm laughing with sorrow souping up my lungs.
i wonder what she wanted. if i could ask, i wouldn't.

Catherine Weiss is a poet and artist living in Deer Isle, Maine. Their poetry has been published in Tinderbox, Up the Staircase, Fugue, Birdcoat, Bodega, Counterclock, HAD, Taco Bell Quarterly, and elsewhere. They are the author of chapbook-length poem FERVOR (Ginger Bug Press, 2021), full-length poetry collections WOLF GIRLS VS. HORSE GIRLS (Game Over Books, 2021), and GRIEFCAKE (Game Over Books, 2023). Their third full-length collection, BIG MONEY PORNO MOMMY, is forthcoming from Game Over Books in 2025. More at catherineweiss.com.

Tara A. Elliott

the turning,

I look for you here—in the robin’s freckled egg, in the water
as it pools clear from a spring, in the globe
of the hydrangea altered blue in needled soil. Your eyes,
your eyes, early summer sky mirrored
in the still pond—morning glories unwinding
deep into her pale throat. This is a poem without resolution;
this is a story without end. This is a book written long ago—flecks of print
against a white page: pigment, solvent, carbon black. This ink,
still wet, is unmarred, sand strewn across endless sheets.
These are the hands of a clock
that does not stop, dark numbers on a bloodless face,

Tara A. Elliott’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Cimarron Review, Wildness, and Ninth Letter, among others. Community outreach includes her role as Executive Director of the Eastern Shore Writers Association (ESWA), and Chair of the Bay to Ocean Writers Conference. A former student of Lucille Clifton, she is a recent winner of Maryland State Arts Council’s Independent Artist Award for Literature.

Emily Rose Miller

Front Stoop

There is a picture I remember but can’t find
anymore of me, my brother, and the neighbor
kids sitting on our red-brick front porch stoop.
We have rainbow smears of ice cream
from the singing, Pavlovian truck on our faces
and our teeth are all stained blue,
making toothy cerulean grins the focal point
of the image. My blonde hair is wild and my bangs
cover my eyes, in need of a haircut. Our arms
are interlocked at the elbows in front of the xanadu
lining the walk and my gangly legs are longer
than the younger kids’. It’s funny, if it weren’t for the picture
I wouldn’t remember this moment but I’m glad I do.
So much of what we love isn’t even memory.

                                                   *

There is a picture that exists only in my head
of a moment that isn’t mine but I’ll never lose
of a woman on the front stoop of her forever
home, laid flat and bloody. She crawls
across the red bricks and then concrete,
through xanadu and into fresh, fragrant mulch.
It smells like earth. She screams and a neighbor
comes running, calls for help. Inside, she hears a crash
and a wail from her husband. The sound of a porcelain
lamp, breaking. She’d never been so close to all of her
blood. When the ambulance’s shrilling filled her ears
the mulch was stained red and it was all she could see.
A neighbor frantically shouts but she can’t make it out.
So much of what we remember isn’t even memory.

Emily Rose Miller (she/they) graduated magna cum laude from Saint Leo University where she received her BA in English and is currently earning her MFA in creative writing at the University of Central Florida. Her work has been published in Capsule Stories and Cagibi Lit, among other places. Find her online at emilyrosemiller.com, on Instagram @emily.rose.miller, or in real life in Orlando cuddling with her cat.

Tia Cowger

Wolf-Rayet 140

This is how we cope. Papers proclaim
the good news—we have found the edge
of our universe—they say, like it’s actually
anything good. A spiral on the rim of our
glass bowl—God’s fingerprint left before
He left us behind. The news stations all
celebrate our abandonment in shekels.
Where do we go from here? Five thousand
three hundred light years of distance in my
mouth. I could cry, but the dust has already
settled once. Jacob got hip checked—this is
how I grapple; this is how I cope. My eyes
open like a wound to a glass sky, and I weave
my prayer through macramé fingers—don’t
let this be the end—but dust can’t tell before
from after. Supernova catches and shatters
glass like sugar cubes against our silver earth.
This is how I cope. Make up the words, dance
in the dust, leave fingerprints behind.

Tia Cowger is a graduate of Eastern Illinois University with minors in Creative Writing, Studio Art, and Entrepreneurship. At twenty-eight years old, she's still trying to decide what she wants to be when she grows up. Currently she enjoys working with her hands in areas such as gardening, painting, quilting, pottery, and poetry.

Pamela Wax

At Pinto Lake

for Aryeh

I heard but did not see

the bittern, his distinctive gulp
almost like a bullfrog’s. Pineapple

undertones wafted as I crushed
wild chamomile underfoot

with live oaks above me,
their arms extended as wide

as they are tall, covered in dangling
Spanish moss like bluish phantom

hair. My guide pointed to a tarp-
covered ofrenda across the lake,

built by a woman who saw Jesus
there on the bark of a tree.

The Parks Department allows
it to stand. Inside: lit candles

a bowl of water, paper banners
that float on the breeze

like the spirits they are meant
to greet. The candles will guide

the dead to this place, the water
will slake them. The pilgrimage

is long, harrowing. My friend,
alive just a few miles away,

will soon journey among them.
I brought him a book of Japanese

death poems and one of Hasidic
teachings on hope and joy.

He meditates his way to acceptance,
one Zen truth at a time: I am

of the nature to grow ill...
I send him a wind chime to guide

his way—may it arrive
before sound, his last sense, leaves.

Pamela Wax is the author of Walking the Labyrinth (Main Street Rag, 2022) and Starter Mothers (Finishing Line Press, 2023). Her poems have received a Best of the Net nomination and awards/commendations from Crosswinds, Paterson Literary Review, Poets’ Billow, Oberon, MacGuffin, Nimrod, Solstice, and the Robinson Jeffers Tor House. She has been published in literary journals including Barrow Street, Tupelo Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, Chautauqua, Rust & Moth, Mudfish, Connecticut River Review, Pedestal, Split Rock Review, Slippery Elm, Sixfold, and Passengers Journal. An ordained rabbi, Pam offers spirituality and poetry workshops online and around the country. She lives in the Northern Berkshires of Massachusetts and walks labyrinths wherever she finds them.

Brian Duncan

HeLa

—For Henrietta Lacks

Henrietta, is this really still you?
Your immortal cells double every twenty-four hours,
ever since the rest of you died, way back in 1951.
You’re all over the world now, being reborn
at your steady pace, doing your part for science.
You’ve lived outside your body
longer than you lived inside it. Your cells
would add up to 50 million tons today, a hundred
Empire State Buildings (that you never got to see),
and end to end, would circle the globe three times.

So twice each week I take a petri dish of you,
check under the microscope that you still look fine,
add the EDTA and a few drops of trypsin, scrape
you off the dish, spin you down to a pellet
in the centrifuge, resuspend you in fresh medium,
and put you on 10 new dishes. In a couple of days
I’ll hand you off to the scientists to do their work.
Lest we forget, I’ve placed a photo of you, looking sassy
in your finery, on the door of the incubator where you live,
cozy and eternal, in your stainless steel crypt.

Brian Duncan lives in Kendall Park, New Jersey with his wife, Margie, and two cats. He worked in a virology laboratory at Princeton University for many years and is now happily retired. He enjoys devoting his time to poetry, gardening, and hiking. He has poems out this year in ONE ART and Thimble, and in a forthcoming issue of Whale Road Review.

Coral Inéz

fruit salad

I can still hear the rackety old fan gasping for air, the laundry
swooshing, the vacuum going off upstairs, the cacophony
of my mother's homemaking.

It's all so irritating, the noise, the heat, my clothes sticking
to the parts of my body I didn't like being aware of. Still,
I'm hungry.

I look around for inspiration, only recently I've been allowed
to use the paring knife. First, I neatly slice a little mandarin,
then I scalp a couple of kiwis,

carve out the heart of a Red Delicious apple, methodically chop up
the rest into equal bite-size pieces. Then I flay an unripe mango,
pull its skin without remorse

until it's nothing but raw pulp. I try my game with a pineapple,
it fights back and my hand slips, sliced my finger open. That day
I learned that what I had inside me

was dark and thick and eager to ooze out. I lick the knife and wonder
if this is what wine tastes like. I clean up the evidence and sit down
on the cool tile floor.

I am jealous of the wind, how easily it surrenders to that sinful
lethargy of summer. This time next year I will no longer be afraid
of blood.

Coral Inéz is a Mexican poet whose work has recently appeared in The Orchards Poetry Journal, La Piccioletta Barca, The Tide Rises, and elsewhere. wildflower (2024) is her first poetry collection. She lives in Southern California.

Aiyana White

Eat

I like trees who fall down, Nina Simone,
warm vomit, that donut place.
Pretty dresses, how long must I bother.

No discipline for religion,
Can’t let things heal for longer than a day.
I believe in nothing. I am doomed.

What about attractive men on bicycles.
Their little legs, spinning, folding into
Precious shapes, a crane, a snowflake...

Don’t we want to eat those legs.
To eat California and the falling palms.
Nina and her teeth.

Above all else I am a consumer.
Strange pains in me.
Can’t stand to be moved emotionally.

At this time I’ll be smothered
And numb like Thanksgiving turkey.
Hungry, always I am.

Like inside me there’s nowhere to go.
Just hallways.
Just empty space and accent rugs.

Aiyana is a screen- and poetry writer based in Brooklyn. She received a BA in creative writing from Columbia University and spends most of her time wearing glitter socks and white-knuckling her way through the NYT crossword. Find her on Instagram @aiyanawhite.

Teresa Pham-Carsillo

Vivisections

1.

On TV, the blue-blooded horseshoe crab
reveals its underbelly, a tessellation
of horror and vulnerability.
We fix our eyes to the screen
after another all-night argument, fingertips
kissing like pinned butterflies
brought together by some mad scientist.

2.

I tell the phlebotomist I have trypophobia
as she bores a hole into the crook of my arm.
She asks me what that is and I say
it’s an irrational fear of small holes
and we both laugh at my silliness
as my blood pours into a glass tube.

Later, I wake sweating to nightmares
of venomous creatures and the pockmarked
expansion of ravenous contagion.
 

3.

I imagine my body in many forms:

a fungus, mindless and waterlogged
a bird, soaring with pneumatized bones
a cat, matching shadows step for step
an ancient tortoise, content to observe
 

or better yet, a smooth worry stone:
         all edges of my anxiety rubbed away.

4.

If we were hermit crabs
I’d leave my lonesome shell
and you’d leave yours.

We’d rub the soft spirals of our bellies together,
trading secrets in a rusted soup can big enough for two

Teresa Pham-Carsillo (she/her) is a Vietnamese American writer who lives in Napa, CA. Her poetry, short fiction, and essays have been featured in numerous publications, including The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, The Southern Review, and Black Warrior Review. Teresa can be found online at www.teresaphamcarsillo.com.