Poetry

Martha Collins

This Year

I’ve packed up all
the cards we bought

each other for all
those years but

there will be
no birthday card

tomorrow and
later this week

there will be no
anniversary cards

from now on
there will only be

one anniversary

Martha Collins’ tenth book of poetry, Because What Else Could I Do (Pittsburgh, 2019), won the 2020 William Carlos Williams Award. Her previous books include two volumes of linked sequences, Night Unto Night and Day Unto Day (Milkweed, 2018 & 2014), and three works that focus on race and racism: Admit One: An American Scrapbook (Pittsburgh, 2016), White Papers (Pittsburgh, 2012), and Blue Front (Graywolf, 2006). An active translator, Collins has also published four volumes of co-translations from the Vietnamese and co-edited, with Kevin Prufer, Into English: Poems, Translations, Commentaries (Graywolf, 2017).  She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Abigail Diaz

Self-Portrait as the Overlook Hotel

head full of jack, that dull

dull boy. he knows my secrets, likes to

hand me the axe, rotates my

faces as i commit

redrum.

i gibber and menace the world with

rings under my eyes. my dog

sniffs out my headaches, my

pockets of blood and

unclear intentions, and her eyes ask me if the

hotel-body i’m building is one i’ll want to stay in.

i force her eyes away from my eyes, steer my

car-thoughts away from the curb of her scared ears, but behind the

wasps’ nests and the

here’s-johnnys, i

wonder.

Abigail Diaz is an author of poetry and fiction. She has been published in the Esthetic Apostle, the Blue Marble Review, and the San Antonio Public Library 2019 Young Pegasus Anthology, among other publications. She is currently an English major at Texas State University, with hopes of publishing poetry and fiction full-time. She can be reached by email for any inquiries at abdiaz878@gmail.com.

Robbie Gamble

Toasts

Here’s to Denny, surviving
two weeks outside in his wheelchair
in sun and rain, piss and shit
overtopping his unchanged diaper
when they finally brought him in
to discover maggots squiggling
through the soup of his groin.

Denny had money, he drank
wine coolers, he raised a bright
bottle now and then to the memory
of his good buddy Dwight, who won
their slow race of imploding livers.
No joy in place or show, now he
just can’t give a fuck anymore.

And here’s to all of us, spent
by current events, stroking
upstream through effluents
of the arrogant city-state, gold-
plated bubble that doesn’t care
fuck-all for Denny or anyone
who might stink.

Robbie Gamble

Tectonic People

Disturbed plates of raw humanity

sliding across the globe,
quicksilver overlays
on the crusted earth’s faultline grindings.
There’s no known social seismographs
to gauge these eruptions.

We know, of course,
that somewhere
ethnic grievances throb
like subterranean pustules,
that droughts spread
mangily across the land,
while economies
are pumped up or plundered down, but then
Surprise!
A war breaks out,
or ethnic cleansing, or blockades, or random chaos,
havoc spills over
rumbles down hillsides,
choked bloodlines wind through river deltas,
more executions and rapings and fire from the sky.

And people begin to move, expelled by forces

as calculated as the Richter Scale,
they move because the horror of home is exponential,
because they know their children will starve
or be chewed up by machines,

they move en masse or in fearful clusters,

bits of families, strangers holding hands,
they come,
they come with unanticipated speed,
they come in waves and waves
on blistered feet, on leaky rafts, on boxcars,

on thin promises, on the last
few wrung-out drips of adrenaline.

O yes they come, and puny border walls
will not hold up against the white-hot lava of their pain.
And when killing field
shudderings finally subside, when weapons
of mass agony are decommissioned,
at least for a time,

then those who have made it to somewhere
where they can lie down

and breathe through the night,
these few will bind up wounds,
and build roofs, and hold stories of the journey,

crystallizing into exiles:

beautiful, shining, damaged communities,

studded down onto strange landscapes,
where they remain
always disbelieving
worn and metamorphic

until the next upheaval.

Robbie Gamble’s work appears in Coal Hill Review, RHINO, Whale Road Review, and Rust + Moth. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston.

Michael Lynch

Neil Died Doing What He Loved Most: Dying.

I remember your fearless handfuls of pills
washed back with whatever and double birds
out for all the midburbs, the drear and vinyl
siding malaise, thirty cal bullet belt
holding 501’s loose over your hips
as we ran through covers: raining blood,
seek and destroy, paranoid. We rattle-
canned inverted crosses onto Chad’s
kick drum heads and I suppose it’s possible
we desecrated some stuff, because fuck
this town, but we were the best metal band
in the cemetery that night, and listen:
I cut the mids and stomped the dirt pedal,
I’m all compression and still fighting feedback.
Wake up kid. Get your corpse paint on.

Michael Lynch

Uninvited

Listen: this is ritual synthesizer
hum decomposing to gruff belts of dust,
angular guitars arpeggiating
minor chords, dripping like stalactite
chandeliers. There are glass baubles braided
in the cascading willow and wind-wakes
hackle up prodigal chinklings, a stiff
boarbrush drawn across the base of your neck.

Look: mise en scène just means doll parts
or scattered fingers, a jar of taxidermy eyes.
We’ve got atmosphere for days here; breathe deep
and your skin might split like frost-heaved pavement
your lungs bristling with cities of crystal
coughing up clouds of black glitter and ice.

Michael Lynch’s poems have appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Sugar House Review, The Baffler, Switchback, and elsewhere. His chapbook Underlife and Portico (Aforementioned Productions, 2013) won the New England Poetry Club Jean Pedrick Award. He received an MFA from Lesley University and lives in Melrose, Massachusetts.

Anne Marie Wells

untitled

Am I still a child

playing in the chapel pews

missing the message?

Anne Marie Wells

I Now Know

as admirers stare at Hibiscus

wondering how the gods created a tongue

and mouth

delicate enough to steep and swallow,

she wills rough hands to pluck her from her stem,

to end

her ignored screams.

They don’t see how she trumpets

her macabre wishes

to the dancing insects.

They do not hear her over their own buzz.

They don’t want to

know her as anything other than pretty.

Anne Marie Wells (She/Her) of Hoback Junction, Wyoming is a queer poet, playwright, and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. In 2015, she published her children’s book, MAMÃ, PORQUE SOU UMA AVE?/MOMMY, WHY AM I A BIRD? (Universidade de Coimbra). She earned first place in the Riot Act Regional New Play Festival in 2017 for her play, LOVE AND RADIO (AND ZOMBIES… KIND OF), and earned second place in 2018 for her play, LAST. ONLY. BEST. In 2019, the Wrights of Wyoming judges blindly selected four of her theatrical works for the statewide play festival in Cheyenne. In 2020, her play LAST. ONLY. BEST. was selected for publication in The Dallas Review, and her 10-minute play, THE DOOR will appear in The Progenitor Art & Literary Journal. An avid storyteller, she performed in and won several Cabin Fever Story Slams and was selected by The Moth to perform in a ‘Main Stage’ event in Jackson Hole, Wyoming in 2019. Anne Marie’s poems have appeared or will appear in In Parentheses, Lucky Jefferson, Unlimited Literature, Soliloquies Anthology, Muddy River Poetry Review, Variant Literature, Poets’ Choice, Meniscus Journal, Changing Womxn Collective, and The Voices Project.

Craig Finlay

What We Missed

When we all went inside forever, I was fine.
I never thought I’d miss the people,
sober I stayed home always. But if I did,
I thought it would be to see them bring me food
or hug me as a friend, or fuck me
how strange I found myself resting my head,
my head on the shoulder of the man urinating
next to me in the Wal Mart restroom.
Not angry that he got so close
(there were urinals aplenty to choose).
How we talked about the first thing we ate
when the restaurants reopened,
how strangers found themselves colliding
on purpose, in the grocery stores, wild grins
wild eyes, just to say those long-lost words
ope, ‘scuse me, just gonna squeeeeeze
right past ya.

Craig Finlay is a poet and librarian currently living in rural Oklahoma. His poems have appeared or will be appearing in numerous publications, most recently, The Ilanot Review, Little Patuxent Review, Levee Magazine and After Happy Hour Review. His first collection, The Very Small Mammoths of Wrangel Island, is forthcoming from Urban Farmhouse Press.

Daniel Edward Moore

Dominion

He told me to call him Dominion
how could I refuse
such sovereign breath
such ministering sound

the way his eyes
unchained my hands
before a slave’s broken wrist
became a bone cathedral.

He said accidents adore
caution’s blinking eye
adore the siren’s country chords
strumming the dead away

which is why you’ve been chosen
to guard mercy’s gate chosen
to govern tenderly
the taming & the telling.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. He has poems forthcoming in Weber Review, The Cape Rock, Kestrel, The Phoenix, Red Earth Review, RipRap, The Timberline Review, Capsule Stories, River Heron Review, Passages North, Eastern Iowa Review, and The Tipton Poetry Journal. He is the author of two chapbooks, “Confessions of a Pentecostal Buddhist” (CreateSpace) and “Boys “(Duck Lake Books). ‘Waxing the Dents,’ his full-length collection is from Brick Road Poetry Press. Visit him at danieledwardmoore.com.

Rex Arrasmith

Jesus Meets Eve on Ascension Day

(for Sarai)

I sometimes see sad Jesus in a dream.

Having died on Good Friday for our sins,

He releases Eve from hell, original sin

forgiven, and greets the mother of us all,

upon her ascension, at the golden gate,

filthy with the sin of men, but washed

clean by His sacrifice. Meeting her savior—

is it a blessing? Meeting her savior—

with gratitude? Eve’s . . . conflicted,

meeting her savior. Sad Jesus has left

the only home he’s known—His mother,

disciples, fresh bread, wine—but Eve,

saved, washes away His sorrow. Jesus

takes Eve’s hand in his, and they walk,

clouds at their feet, to where manna waits,

gold cutlery, music, translucent raiments.

The once-betrayed Jesus, full of love,

wonders, what could go wrong? Eve wants

an apple (it’s my dream), but they’re still

forbidden. I did this for you, gestures Sad Jesus.

Eve, but I never asked you to. Remembering

the garden, she lets go of her savior’s hand.

Rex Arrasmith

Steven, Who’s Not Dead as Far as I Know

Boombox mixtape, boxes everywhere, Chinese
take-out, empty Tsingtao bottles, bare feet.
I fucking love this Lou Reed song
we would’ve never heard in San Diego—

​ Little Joe never once gave it away
​ Everybody had to pay and pay
​ A hustle here and a hustle there

Swaying, I pull Steven up to dance.
He curtsies, takes my hands, Santa Ana
breeze through our second-floor windows.
Singing, we mack on each other
during the doo doo doo doo doo’s.

Slow turn, lights flash red—
squad car stops in front of our building.
Second floor, front, nosy view, we stare.
Startled, heavy fist on our door.

Weird. Coincidence?
Bare-chested, shoeless, we race to the door.
Loud laughs greet two tight-assed tin-stars.
A sudden silence has us scrambling
for our shirts. May we come in?

Steven, panicked, offers LA’s finest
an egg roll and a beer. Officer Dimples smiles
at Officer Mustache. I turn off Lou. They take
in the scene. There’s been a complaint.
Us? What kind?

Our new neighbors reported us “shooting a porn.”
We’ve only just moved here. Suggestions? Officer
Dimples says, Curtains. They grin and leave.

We dance for weeks, flaunting our bodies, then
get window shades, then stop. After the show,
our relationship crashes. Steven—
who’s not dead, far as I know, who wanted
to be a dancer; instead, is a realtor in Florida.

Rex Carey Arrasmith writes fiction and poetry in Sedona, AZ and Lāna’i, HI. Rex earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University. His most recent work can be seen in Spillwords. He can be found on Twitter and Instagram @Wrecks_Writes and can be reached at WrecksWrites@gmail.com.

Alex King

Advice for a Bright Dot

another bright & lonely dot,
brought forth beneath a tribute cigarette
and your father’s begging eyes,
I see you there, alone as I was
polishing the practice faces
furnished then for men I’d never meet --
sixteen, and what to do
to pry the evident from you?
I’d no answer but that not asking was better,
and that college posits powered chemistry:
that your dear cupboard of reasonable things
may become in moonlit novelty
down avenues greased by the
poison which here brought your father me,
a secondary source.
that your bright, alone, self will, one day,
stumble to a fitter galaxy, worth the wait
& the weight of the way things feel today
will be your wingspan, wide & right.

Alex King

Your Eyes’ Blue

as though the scattered specks
of something once a truer blue --
a child’s trust,
the moment’s ease,
their residues --
had, having fled, here found high ground,
taken refuge from the flood they then
became like little lanterns,
hanging embers
in your pupils’ cavern skies:

they've long since crystallized,
exhausted from the perilous trek,
migrant specks the paler boy-born blue

of a hope wrung of all expectation,
of awaiting a prophet without holding your breath.

Alex King is a software engineer from Washington, DC with a deep love for all things language: word games, foreign language, linguistics, and of course, poetry. He is fascinated & inspired by theoretical mathematics, epistemology, cognitive science, and recursion, and finds great joy where these things intersect. He can be reached at afk2h@virginia.edu.

George McDermott

Rangoon

My fireteam was sent that day
to search a tunnel under the jungle,
the place where the night raiders hid.
But most had already melted away—

there were only a few left behind:
grotesque, unmoving, soft and silent.
We didn’t know how they had died,
or what we should do. I held my breath.
I sat on my heels and tried to think.

I thought if I turned quickly enough
I might catch a glimpse of my room at home.
I listened for echoes of grasshopper mornings,
for the thump of the rotors to fade away.

I tried to imagine myself escaping
to Rangoon, Bohemia, Zanzibar—
some poignant name on an outdated map.
Today I still listen, still try to imagine,
but there are days, more frequent days,

when death in the tunnel is all I remember:
the mud on my heels, the buzzing insects,
the hollowed eyes and gaping mouths,
the fading turquoise dream of Rangoon,

and the motionless blur of my life today.
The nursing assistants have done their job
and the terrace is filled with partial men,
parked in our wheelchairs, soft and silent,
wondering whose lives we’re living now.

George McDermott’s poetry has recently appeared or is forthcoming in such journals as Clarion, Painted Bride Quarterly, Toho Journal, and New Southerner, as well as in the Philadelphia Inquirer. His collection—”Pictures, Some of Them Moving”—won the 2017 Moonstone Arts Chapbook Contest. He is also co-author—with Roberta Israeloff, who was once a student in one of his high school English classes—of the 2017 book “What Went Right” (Rowman & Littlefield), a conversation about the successes and missteps of public education in America.

James Roderick Burns

Seasons and Winds

Stripped by sun
a three-legged chair
leans to shadow

*

Windstorm – tin signs
popping like rags, gutters
dripping up

*

Quayside salt-pile
rising and falling
with the tide

*

Winter morning –
chirpy hedgerow, knuckles
bursting like fruit

*

Mouse body
turned towards home
by the wind

James Roderick Burns’ fourth short-form collection, Height of Arrows, is due from Duck Lake Books in 2020. His work has appeared in The Guardian, The North and The Scotsman, as well as a short fiction chapbook, A Bunch of Fives. He lives in Edinburgh and serves as Deputy Registrar General for Scotland.

Susan Michele Coronel

On the April Anniversary of My Brother’s Death

I.
With pink fuzz on his anus and peach hair on his penis and forearms, my brother was sent
underground with a Sony Walkman still reeling a mix tape of Janet Jackson, Meatloaf and Paula
Abdul. The same mix tape I strapped to his ears during the last month he was in a coma. Also the
baseball he used in Little League before his knees wobbled and collapsed. And his ’86 Mets
jersey with Daryl Strawberry’s number on it:18. The last full year he was alive. The Hofstra
University newspaper clipping where he wrote his first sports article, and a scrap of paper with
scrawled names and numbers of girlfriends he would never have. Could we also add my father’s
rage and shame at his son’s condition, or my mother’s hand, severed and screaming with a
diamond still on its ring finger? His dead rag of lung hung in a bucket in the rain. I know why he
went mad before the surgery. He stared all day at the TV in his wheelchair while my parents
sobbed and chewed their knuckles. My parents wrangled him into the chairlift each night,
hoisting him from toilet to bed to wheelchair and back. The knob on his wheelchair was fat in his
palm like an alabaster spider. When it started crawling, he couldn’t find his way back.

II.
When he was 7, I pushed him down in the yellow grass and called him Ducky, wet stains on the
rump of his jeans. I was hanging upside down on narrow bar on our backyard swing set, tasting
my own cruelty like a new flavor of gum and it was bitter steel. Steel like the rod contoured to
his spine to correct the scoliotic deformity of the disease. My heart was the aluminum of the
motorized wheelchair frame, all metal and whispers.

III.
At 17, my parents sent me to the Midwest for college so I could be as far away as possible from
the pain but I carry the pain within me every day like a tracking device.
The leaves of spring pluck their brows and eat the breath of grieving stars.

IV.
What kind of sound will emerge from the dead when the music stops? The doctor of death aka
the premiere orthopedic surgeon at Yale University Hospital breathes more heavily than usual.
The surgery was absolutely necessary, he articulates in his padded office, paging through album
after shiny album of successful outcomes – polaroids of smiling kids and teens in wheelchairs
with only a few months left to live. I did the best I could. but his body couldn’t handle it. But
why doesn’t he look sorry? You took a chance but you didn’t win. How do you classify the
outcome when the operation is successful but the patient dies? Don’t despair. It’s spring. The
florid April day emerges as an afterthought or counterpoint to our losses.

V.
I wanted to bind his legs with blankets. I wanted to shave his head. I wanted to build a canoe to
carry him down the Hudson on his final journey. The metronomical pump of the ventilator
competes with the rhythm of water. And I can still taste the formaldehyde on his gassy smile,
sham and triumphant on a satin pillow.

VI.
I grieve for your bedroom door plastered with baseball pennants. Your mouth opens, but it has
no tongue. There will be no funeral. There will be no more gatherings of any kind. I grieve for
the sun you’re not able to feel on your face.

Susan Michele Coronel has studied poetry with Yusef Komunyakaa, Annie Finch, Tina Chang, and Jennifer Franklin, among others. She has a B.A. in English from Indiana University-Bloomington and an M.S. Ed. in Applied Linguistics/English as a Second Language from Queens College (CUNY). She has had poems published in Newtown Literary, The Ekphrastic Review, Beyond Words, and Street Cake. She is beyond thrilled to be one of this year’s recipients of a Parent-Writer Poet Fellowship at The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Susan Michele Coronel can be found on Instagram: @susanmichele7 and at susanofthewoods@gmail.com.

Jason Montgomery

Sestina for Court Days

My new shirt still has store folds
With pin holes in the sleeves, back and neck.
My off black slacks need to be back home,
Because my brother works at 3,
And with his violent ways it will be days
Before I could get the explanations to washout.

It took two hours with Windex and a rag to get my shoe stains out.
If the arresting officer doesn’t show the prosecution folds.
Of course it’s true–Joey’s dad used to say it back in the days.
Last time I was here there was a bottle-neck.
But if the docket is right I’m number 3,
Which means I’ll have the day to home.

It is a coarse course from here that leads back home.
The 9 blocks to bus stops that sags out.
Dug out the 2 transfers what don’t cover Blue Line 3,
But a practiced hand paper folds
And a compassionate driver bends a neck,
At it there in the tip of my fingers from too long sleeves poking out.

Maybe this whole mess’ll get thrown out?
I was literally five blocks from home.
That isthmus, channel, pass, that neck,
Which seperated house & world from childhood days
My home lays in the Artesian folds
A place that should always be safe even when your strikes are 3.

For luck I could invoke the trinity with movements 3
But the doors are opening out,
And if I don’t show than my PD folds.
There is no reason I shouldn’t be home.
So I will give up holy moments to save days
Then remind myself to tattoo that prayer on my neck.

I wonder about this hangman’s neck.
If given time he could turn it to see passed my number 3?
If he could owl it around to witness my days,
Or witness what has burned out,
Because even the fee will price me out of home
And this shirt can’t be returned without its folds.

My face cracks to my neck.
We are postponed until March 3.
There’s a lot of wrong that can fill those days

Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano/Indigenous Californian writer, painter, and playwright from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA. In 2019, JRM’s art was featured at CreativeArts Workshop in New Haven, CT, and his solo show Aqui Y Alla at the MapSpace Gallery in Easthampton. JRM completed graduate studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Department of Theatre and Dance with an emphasis in Playwriting and Chicano Studies in 2006. JRM’s work for the Coalescence show at Readywipe Gallery is an exploration of the cultural synthesis intrinsic to decolonization. Using found collage and construction materials, he merges Kumeyaay, Chumash, and Chicano designs and aesthetics to explore the history of US colonization, while synthesising a decolonized motif that honors the complicated heritage of the postcolonial subject. His work can be found at: www.attackbearpress.com, Facebook: @attackbearpress, Instagram: @attackbearpress.

Andreas Fleps

Tell Me a Story

Tell me a long and strenuous story—not one where
someone wins, but how someone survives a loss—
a string of losses even, which is another way of saying
life: a necklace of pearled emptiness. Tell me a story
about the woman who was swallowed by a dragon
and chose not to become more fire, or about the tree that
was disappointed in the leaf that fell first. Tell me a story
about how all you need is a streetlight and a puddle to make
a star bloom from the pavement, or what it feels like to be
wounded from head to toe in skin. Tell me a story of broken
windows and wind breathing through them, and cracks like
rivers of light, or the one about aching feet walking beyond
their bones. Tell me a story about dawnings and how they often
bring more night in their hands, or how coffins only know how to
hug what’s placed in their arms. Tell me a story about skeletons
and the heavens in their closets, or about a wolf in sheep’s
clothing, who disowns its fangs and chews on grass like guilt.
Tell me a story about the man failing his way up a mountain,
or about overdosing on teardrops. Tell me a story about light
bulbs who like the dark better, or how the rained on shimmer
in the littlest of light. Tell me a story about the violin with no
strings that believed symphonies were left inside it, or the
history of lips and everything they forgot to kiss. Tell me a story
about the bottom of a bottle and bottom of a burdened body and
bottomless air, or how bombs have thought they could sing as
softly as rain. Tell me a story of cliffs and how they are
perfect for sightseeing or jumping from, or the one about
worship and the warships it welds. Tell me a story about
knuckles and regret and how the best punches always land
on the one who threw them, or of the stars in the sky, ocean,
and at the ends of our wrists. Tell me a story about the boy
who carried his body to his mother and showed her how he
spilled his life, or about candy and choking on hardened sugar.
Tell me a story. Fill me with word after word, and I’ll tell you
where the period goes—but if I place it too early because I’m scared,
tell me a story about what it means to be erased, or how to rescue
an ending from its conclusions.

Andreas Fleps is a 28-year-old poet, based near Chicago. He studied Theology and Philosophy at Dominican University, and has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as High Shelf Press, Snapdragon, The Windhover, and Waxing & Waning, among others. Battling Major Depressive Disorder and Generalized Anxiety Disorder since the age of five, he translates teardrops.

Mike Hackney

Search, Deserted (A Winter’s Meditation)

How will you handle this willful, endless-blue nocturne
when it drops a veil over your delicate, maroon ski-coat…
the koans, which nature often writes, buried profoundly

beneath dangling, anorexic arms of wood,
patches of land covered in permafrost
diamonds?

Like a snow leopard hunting the timid mountain goat,
you will search for answers, as in every other season.

Yet even old crow knows
the certainties of the cold
and has flown.

Mike Hackney has published three books of poetry and one book of essays on poetics. His poems have appeared in Artifact Nouveau, Gasconade Review, Red Fez, White Wall Review, and elsewhere. He has a BFA in Creative Writing with a specialization in poetry from Bowling Green State University (Ohio). He currently lives and writes in Sylvania, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo.

Nestor Walters

On belonging:

a little boy being homeschooled
in a restaurant parking lot

reaching for a new t-shirt
in a trash bag of donations

Mipos theleis fyllo?
Did you mean paper or friend?

crystal dew on a dry brown branch

when a blade is on my wrist
you only hold my hand

Nestor Walters

Cracker

for Seth S.

it’s not that he died

it’s that at first you stayed on the wall didn’t believe the call for Corpsman Up couldn’t
believe the setting desert sun the firing machine guns the wild chickens pecking at the
dust the ration crackers pasting in your parched mouth until they haul him in a Marine
on each limb head hanging like a rag doll with a green plastic airway in his nose and lay
him on the ground face empty and pale but not a drop of blood so you run over and
freeze wait for training to kick in like they promised it would like they promised it would
like they promised they promised they promised until the medic slashing an airhole in
his neck says start an IV and it’s rip tape punch plug prime tubing don gloves fuck
gloves swab the site stretch the skin pop the needle angle in look for flash look for flash
look for no flash his veins are flat and the patch on the vest that stopped just short of the
fingernail-size hole in his chest is Old Crow that drain-cleaner whiskey that he ships
over secretly in bottles of listerine and he’s not even twenty-one yet and when the
airhole opened in his neck it gurgled like a broken-motor fountain and there was all the
blood there it was pooling in his lungs where the bullet bounced around so you squeeze
his cool and clammy palm watch a boy turn into a body then zip the bag with the
awkward straps that sag at his hips then carry it out to the waiting helo that mechanical
pegasus then it’s back to the wall to the setting sun to the firing machine guns to the
wild chickens pecking at your crackers

Nestor Walters was born in Bangladesh and raised in Greece. When he was 19, he moved to the United States and joined the Navy, where he served ten years as a combat medic and SEAL. He is now a junior at Stanford University, where he studies math (barely) and is a staff writer for The Stanford Daily. Find him on Instagram @nestor_walters or by email at nestor.walters.293@gmail.com.

Olivia Thomes

Lucy the Snuff Film Photographer

The challenge was not finding the bodies. It was trying to capture
their vulnerability. It was easier for girls to sacrifice —
butchered breasts pouring strawberry milk —
an act of self-destruction.

Quivering skin with drops of salty rain: a body begging
to be ravished like dolls left in their house-boxes,
admired only until dust forms
on the cardboard above their tiny heads.

This was bullshit, Lucy thought,
all bodies were meant to be played with.

Men’s pain was different — scrunched faces, no sound,
their limbs locked and loaded. Their toes a linear push
in the air as if they could warp gravity and lift up,
up, and away from the metal and disinfectant.

Blood squirts instead of pours over inflexible skin
like the cutting away of stringy bits when carving a chicken.
The stains easily wash out of the sheets.

Lucy wondered if a flesher could do a better job, though
they worked with meat that was already dead.

Olivia Thomes

Someone Lucy Loved

“If ya love ‘em, it’s better to leave ‘em in the ground.”

Among the scattered herbs and foggy vases in the shop,
the owner didn’t look like the voodoo queens from the movies
who dressed in melted gold and small bones. The woman’s
cheeks were full and rosy, a knitted shawl covered shoulders
that were round, plump with age.

Lucy peered at the black ink on her own caramel skin —  
covering puckered corruption from her youth:
the pinch from a needle every Thursday afternoon
in the barracks made of Government concrete;
her rind a cauldron hot with potion —  
it never made her better.

“Their bones are scratched. Ain’t no coming back from that.”

There was a girl, once, who kicked and screamed at the walls.
The girl wasn’t a soldier, nothing to look at, neither.
Dirt skin and dirt in the whites of her eyes.
She would cackle and boast, brick tumbling down around her,
until one day it was silent.
Lucy figured it was the needles — they made her crazy too.

“You’re not tryna raise no dead, are ya?”

The closest thing we have to bringing someone back to life
isn’t this Queens overpriced liquids, it’s simpler than grinding
black salt into nothingness — Lucy knows all she has to do
is remember the laughter, the crumbling brick.

Olivia Thomes is a poet from Boston, MA. She currently works in the fields of Farm & Equine Animal Welfare and Farm Education. Olivia has taught writing at the college and grade school level, is an avid equestrian, and has experience leading service trips exploring the literary community of New Orleans where she also volunteered with the St. Bernard Project rebuilding homes affected by Hurricane Katrina. Her publications include The American Journal of Poetry and Solstice Literary Magazine. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Lesley University and a BA in Literature with minors in Writing, Communication, and Music History from Wheelock College. Contact: olivia.thomes@gmail.com

Paul David Adkins

Peter Romans’ Sworn Statement When He was Accused of Burning His Family to Death in a House Fire on April 6th, 2008, But Rushed to Save His Truck As They Screamed Inside the Collapsing Structure

You know that I’m not guilty.

It may seem odd
I moved my truck as everybody burned, but I had to
save what I loved.

It wasn’t going to
start itself.

Billi, Billi,
you were my wife. Such
a praying woman. So much prayer
you heaped on us like kindling.

It was Jesus.
It was Christ.

You know
He could have saved you and Ami and Caleb,
but no one was there.

Paul David Atkins

Iraq Tour, 2004: You Know I Know You

You know I don’t
want to talk
about the time I witnessed
all the strange gods
clamber on the skids
of the Blackhawk
before it scorched the LZ chaff.

Want to talk
about something besides
the time I witnessed,
well, nothing?
Mortar rounds also whistle
in the movies.

About the time I witnessed
enough, it was time
to go home. Then
they sent me back.
I must have missed something.

All the strange gods
draped in their armor.
Mark us, strange gods,
with the imprint of your signets.

Balance on the skids.
Stumble on the tripwires.
We lift, either way, from the world.

Of the Blackhawk
there is no sign.

Before, it scorched the LZ chaff.

There is no sign
we were ever there.

We lift, either way, from the world
like paper in the whisk
of a dust devil.

With the imprint of a signet
subtlely pressed onto the crowns
of our shaved scalps,
concealing hair regrew.

I must have missed something:
a word, a scene, a look
from a strange god on which
the movie hinged, slammed heavy
as a turret hatch.

Want to talk?
Want to sleep?
Want to walk
the woods with me without
a weapon and the weight
of a K-pot?

Before I lifted from the LZ,
I gathered my secrets and stuffed them
in my boot, both boots.
They padded my steps.
Ink stained the soles of my feet.
Onto my toenail ran
Karbala’s indelible map.

Paul David Atkins

Assassinated Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba Considers, What Does 1961 Hold?

1961, and the calendar will rock me like a sick brother.

I don’t know,
but the days are stacked rifles,
their bayonets jabbing the sky.

I dreamed like Pharoah’s baker
of tinkerbirds landing on top of my head,
hornbills picking the gaps in my grin.

There’s no such thing as a year,
no such thing as a day,

just a series of ululating cries
in the night,
if there is such a thing.

Or the day
and the night

kneaded to fufu,
then rolled to a ball in the palm
and examined
before being dipped in the peanut soup,
and consumed.

Paul David Adkins served in the US Army from 1991-2013. He holds a MA in Writing and Oral Tradition from The Graduate Institute, Bethany, CT. He counsels soldiers and teaches students in a correctional facility. Publications include River Styx, Pleiades, Diode, Connecticut River Review, Baltimore Review, and Whiskey Island. He can be reached at koenigsburg14@aol.com.

Kimberly Casey

What Lives Between Our Bodies

My dog, curled gently against my hip,
snoring softly. A candle nub still on fire.
The Tennessee river. Someone else’s hands.
His liver, blackening. My lungs, blackening.
Mold on the back deck. Water
from the leaking chimney, dripping
into buckets that are never placed
to catch it all. Winter is melting
into our home. Damp coats hang
heavy on our bodies and my joints ache.
My body, a ventriloquist – put yourself inside me
and my mouth mumbles what you want to hear.
My body, a basin full of flammable liquid,
his anger, a match. My body,
a greeting card given to the grieving,
an offering that is never enough to help heal
but opened and read anyway. I kept trying
to break us, just to prove myself right. My body
an unchipped vase, flowers in this hollow.

Kimberly Casey is a Massachusetts native who received her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College in Boston, MA. She has since moved to Huntsville, Alabama where she founded Out Loud HSV – a spoken word poetry and literary arts nonprofit dedicated to inspiring community outreach and activism through spoken word. Her work has appeared in The Southern Women’s Review, Tilde Literary Journal, and The Corvus Review, among others. Kimberly is currently pursuing an MFA at Pacific University.  

William Thompson

i. Bristol

For you it’s not the distant thud of ordnance,
front doors left open in abandoned villages
or a heavy cattle truck lurching over farmland.
Instead, it’s the line and column of an Excel spreadsheet,
your teams of nurses waiting in hotels
for bus rides like stand-to on a firing step.
No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
You tell me that on Zoom. You keep in mind
the bell curve like an upturned crater, that in
two weeks you might be trying to triage ICU,
keep your head low as you move between
the shell-burst of the beds, your gas mask
just a square of cloth over your mouth, your rifle
two gloves beside a cardboard kidney-dish.

William Thompson is a Ph.D. candidate in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Bristol. His poems have been published in Lighthouse, Ink Sweat & Tears, The Cannon’s Mouth, Stonecoast Review, and Anima. He has work forthcoming in The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2020 (Eyewear).

Preeti Shah

The Haunting

maa is my broken dawn       I am her prayer

she is my grandmother’s prayer     my grandmother is the mantra  we whisper

passing old photographs between our hands or passing a funeral procession

maa was carved by the tears of my father during his coma

like a torso of red canyon with a waterfall trickling so sparsely

you would cry believing you were watching the death  of something beautiful

maa moves about our home  like a cloud of ancestors

her words are her father’s brother’s her laughter otherworldly

she advocates it should have been me that she deserves death

like my father deserved another morning

I read my heart like a sutra the one where mahaveer forgives a snake for biting him

drawing milk instead of blood she perceives a dismissal

of death row as a life sentence

she haunts the house again

her screams like the crowing

from an entire bloodline of ghosts

Preeti Shah is a Queens-based Indian American poet who was a finalist for the Brooklyn Poets 2019 Fall Fellowship and 2020 Hamptons Retreat Fellowship. She has poetry upcoming in Soundings East and Newtown Literary, and art upcoming in Penn Review Online. She served as Assistant Director of Communications for YJPerspectives Magazine. You can find her on her IG handle: @babyprema.

Michael Elias

Child

When they talk about her, I ask who is she?
as if I can keep her that way—
a joke. As much as I try I cannot forget her:
the pronoun sits heavy
on a tongue that learned to get by with a language
so strict it never had space
for the uncertainty of a body
stretching sideways, churned
fighting in vain the gravity of a black hole. Unspeakably solemn
sliding through cracks in the guts of a version of a child
who never learned how to stop crying. I recline in my seat
back to the years of sharing
my grand personality; I do not remember
when it shrank so, hiding
behind a ribcage as if a heart is not so easily penetrated.
But let her stay there, let her feel
veiled safety and the warmth of blood rushing by.
Maybe I, now, can learn instead of her.
She can’t be more than a voice
I hear what I don’t want to see; she sees what I don’t want
to hear. We have been fighting this battle
further back than my memory goes
muddled with her, desperately clinging
to being me. How can we settle the discrepancy of growing up?
She is an echo in the flesh
reverberating through skin, rattling bones
she hurts me. They say these are growing pains
they happen when you try to salvage
a childhood in your twenties.
I try to dig her out like a coin from under a vending machine
so I can get rid of her.
loose change, I try to tell her—
a joke. but my voice is hers and she speaks in tongues;
weaving a language that takes time
inside a rickety skull.
Through cracks she helps me translate
lessons in disguise, repeats infinitely until I catch her meaning:
you forgave your mother
—she does not blame me—
forgive me too.

Michael Elias is a student at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem majoring in comparative literature. They write essays, prose, poetry, and plays to communicate a human experience to themselves and maybe to others. Their writing has so far appeared in Gold Flake Paint, Homologylit, Pass The Mic, Jewish News Detroit, and is upcoming elsewhere. They can be found on Twitter @itwastrash.

Mee-ok

dark web

just give me diapers and pizza and a war
criminal with a gun and a camouflage thong
staring out behind
a screen that feels oil
slick like a beating heart
in the slap of my palm
dwarves cougars faggots nazis step-sisters
real sisters vegetables robots amputees everything
everything but all of it stops
when a man with a
white swatch for a throat
like the one who opened my wings
covered me like a cross
that weighed one-eighty
and smelled of heaven and musk and
don’t stop
stands over my mother
my mommy
sharing my screen
with catholic school girls
pantless saltimbanques and midnight
cowboys who lift up
skirts buckle belts and juggle eggs that don’t
break why does my mother just lie
there while a dark prince
with an adam’s apple
prays over holy water mixed
with 70% (or higher) rubbing
alcohol why can’t i
stop watching
mask slipping
more more please more
handcuffs and coffins and covids don’t
stop until my cheeks are
wet until i am a camera
my face a screen my eyes
a plague my mom six feet
under don’t stop until
oh god
oh god
watch me mommy
watch me
choke your sweet death pretty

Mee-ok is the winner of the 2019 Construction Literary Magazine Contest for Nonfiction and was selected as a finalist for the 2019 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction. She has also been featured in the LA Times, Boston Globe Magazine, American Journal of Poetry, Passengers Journal, Korean Quarterly, and Michael Pollan’s anthology for Medium, where her piece was named Editor’s Pick. She is the recipient of the 2021 Voices of Color Fellowship at the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and has been a visiting lecturer and Writer in Residence at the Frank Lloyd Wright estate, Taliesin. More at mee-ok.com.

Josh Lowder

Remembrance (A Revision)

At a half-forgotten, shaded park

where ravens and vultures gargoyle

the fence line along its gravel drive

to wait out the afternoon’s pecked-clean,

perched upon planks and posts

like retirees stuck

up on stools in a diner,

I walked beside the Oconee

River, near where it flows under

state Route 10 in Athens,

and scuffed my shoe on a dried dog turd

before realizing what I’d done.

You were,

soon enough,

too far away to laugh—

I missed that until now.

As I watched, you fed our Jack a stick,

then took it from her to throw.

She chased it down, gnawed and shook it,

but did not bring it back.

I would play with our four-legged love-child

when she ran to me, until, loyal,

she tailed you into the woods.

I sat monk-like atop a picnic table—engaged

with the firm press of my hands into

its tombstone top—and did not follow.

_________

Soon, even I trod the trail, to the shoals

that reach out into

the wide shallows— and found you.

I was tired, and let go a loud sigh,

but, still, you ebbed

around the stones,

eddied atop

dry outcropped rock

long enough to step to the next—

the side-stream of others’ old tears

gnawed at my beachhead,

loosened the ribboning belt between.

The sky succumbed to the inkwell,

and a weather vane slipped

its rust with a crow—

the winter wind

pointed you back towards the car

with woman’s best friend

winnowing behind.

That open meadow of dead, trampled grass,

swallowed you whole as you walked

away from me.

Josh Lowder received his Poetry MFA from the College of Charleston, SC in 2018, where he also won the First Crazyhorse MFA Poetry Prize; he’s also been featured on Antarctica Journal’s ‘Soul Fountain Poetry’ series, contributed at Sewanee Writers Conference, road-managed bands like Fu-Manchu, and appeared in Adult Swim’s ‘Too Many Cooks’.

A.K. Freeland

My First Spell

The only time I kneel to pray I ask God for my parents’ divorce my hands making circles in the air in my white flannel night gown hands folded together not a gentle our father no begging as only a child can please please please my voice cracks to a summons then a witch’s incantation send a tornado that will split their hearts rend this home its books chairs the dinner on the table crosses swirling high into the wind fracture the walls turn their hearts to ash.

A.K. Freeland

On Reading In the News, “Nicolas Cage Angrily Sings Purple Rain at Karaoke Bar After Filing Annulment”

Oh, Nic. Four days of a wrong marriage would bring it out in anyone. That and tequila. I am here to help with your karaoke indiscretion. Nic, this is hard to say: Do not sing Prince. He is not meant for you. No, don’t wallow in shame. We all have lapses in discernment. My friend Harry, hoping for Gene Simmons, was disappointed to hear that Tom Petty was his match. He said, “He’s too nasal!” I just stared to his left. See, the problem is, you start choosing willy nilly any song that air quote says what you want to say, geez, the divorcees screeching Not Ready To Make Nice, the balding accountant barking Pour Some Sugar On Me, without regard to sound choice, you start shouting the song, with— may I be frank— more feeling than strangers have left in their awkwardness-allowance for you. Sure, they may get behind you for your celebrity, but you’ll always wonder if they were rooting for you or the viral video opportunity. As you found, tequila helps. Two shots and suddenly the cardiac nurse wearing pearls is singing Bonnie Tyler, Total Eclipse of the Heart. Her natural rasp made it an ideal pairing. Oh, and the sunglasses. Slip those on, and your intensity becomes theatrical rather than gawky. Nic, is any of this helping? Try a duet before or after your solo. There is nothing more communal than singing together. Islands in the Stream. Wait no, Needles and Pins. Yes. This will work for you. Do not take it personally when Alice, the powdery lady in a white cowboy hat with a magenta feather, declines. Feel Like a Woman was a bold lyrical open, but she chose it for the sound. That is the magic right there— a tiny woman with a shelf bosom filling the bar with her siren lungs. She knows her wheelhouse and has her list of songs on the back of a grocery receipt. When she reaches the end, she’ll go home, put on her eyelet nightdress, and watch Wheel of Fortune. She doesn’t need a duet or me. Nic, when you overstep in tequila, here is your safety net. Suggest We Are The World and walk from bar patron to bar patron each singing their part. Obviously, you get to start it off with Lionel Richie, and he is fine for you for only one line. Better than Prince. Give the countriest guy in the bar the Kenny Rogers part, this will soften any fray you generated. And listen Nic, everyone wants the Bruce Springsteen part, don’t hog it. Ok, for your showstopper. You have a match. Mick Jagger. See, there is good news! The smooth tone, half tenor works for you. Even his sighs work well with your heavy breathing pattern. Use them for affect but only with sunglasses. Fool To Cry will bring the house down. Oooh, Daddy, you’re a fool to cry, a fool to cry it and makes me wonder why? Stay smooth Nic, keep singing. Then at the end, if you want to speak: I’m a fool baby I’m a certified fool now. That’s ok too.

A.K. Freeland is a poet and teaches English at the South Carolina Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, SC. She also teaches creative writing workshops at Perry Correctional Institution. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University in Portland, Oregon. In her spare time, she reads, writes, counsels struggling karaoke clients, and runs on the earth looking for adventure.

Jones Irwin

Ghost Town

‘All de klubs are bein’ closed down’

I

Last time was this quiet
North side after they
Took the bodies from the
Stardust right round the corner
From Beaumont

Two weeks earlier the Beat
And the Specials played a ska tour
Date and Jayo’s mates caused a
Riot Terry Hall nearly died when
A giant speaker just missed his head

That’s history for yus
This week they buried
A Coolock hitman but
I ain’t talkin’
Top of the Pops, mate
Or anyways related to lockdown

They carried his psycho body from Belfast
While the whole country went shush
In fear and respect

II

If you think you’re
Invincible then wait til you too
Hear the hard knock on the door today you bring

See the man’s children scurry to the
Back just like yours will soon

Lookin’ at yourself in that
Draught Guinness scrubby mirror
Whaddyyethink my brother as
If you’ll moody on forever whaddyyethink
When the bullets go in thick thud turn and run

Quick.

III

What a bunch we were me, Smelly, Ricky
Listening to the good old Captain round
Smelly’s Ma’s front room with the

Funny bird ornaments hoisted on the dodgy
Wallpaper. Elvis too ‘Fever’ asking for
A lend of a fiver to go down

The Lido chipper. Ricky boii
Had the Captain’s guitar sound no
Mean feat Smelly’s drum beat second

To none. Ah go on Missus
We will do the dishes promise
Cut down the noises

Shure now we be famous
Then we be just infamous
There’s a trans down the chip shop

Swears s/he is Jesus
Without a knob

Jones Irwin lectures in philosophy and education in Dublin, the Republic of Ireland. He has a strong commitment to pluralism in public life and was Project Officer for the first state curriculum in comparative religions and values in Irish schools. He has written several books which engage with the relation between philosophy and the aesthetic, with a particular emphasis on French avant-garde literature. In more recent years, he has been extending his themes into fiction and poetry and his work has been published in several journals including Poetry London, Kairos and The Decadent Review.

Esteban Rodríguez

Atonement

Because biology is not your subject,
you fear the wart on your palm,
believe that because you’ve never
touched a frog, this is likely, as boys
have already claimed, an STD, or AIDS
perhaps, or some other acronym you got
from the night you spent at your friend’s
house, and in his bed, after one thing
led to the next, you touched his crotch,
rubbed and rubbed till it became wet.
And because neither God nor the body
ever forget, you now have a wart
you pick at, scratch, try to remove
with scissors, paper clips, with half-
hearted prayers in between each class,
so no one sees and thinks you’re different,
so that when you hand papers back,
they don’t flinch, or don’t pretend
they didn’t see what they just saw,
didn’t glimpse at the lump you sometimes
pierce with a pen, as though this time around
it will cure the past, erase even
your most well-kept sin.

Esteban Rodríguez

Displacement

From the frontage road,
you spot the cardboard, tents,
the overstuffed suitcases
layered with years of dust
and neglect. And as you drive
past this scene beneath the bridge,
you wonder to what extent
your parents once lived like this,
if when they decided to join
the exodus, they filled every inch
of their backpacks with clothes,
aware that as they trekked across
half of Mexico, what they had
was all they had, and they’d have
no choice but to reuse the sweaty
shirts, pants, the underwear
you’re sure your father turned
inside out, the bras your mother,
at night in the back of some truck,
tried to forget about, as if forgetting
would erase the stench, or would ease
the terrain her body felt. And there
were the socks that quickly tore,
the shoes that ripped, lost their grip,
and there must have been, as you imagine
your parents trudging a dry and rugged
land, rags they wiped their foreheads
with, expecting, this time around,
that when they cleaned the sweat,
the river rising in front of them
wasn’t a mirage.

Esteban Rodríguez is the author of the collections Dusk & Dust, Crash Course, In Bloom, (Dis)placement, and The Valley. He lives with his family in Austin, Texas.

Ashley Renselaer

California Dreaming

You were always quick to spot a dragonfly desperately
searching for a delight around the evergreen olive trees

grown for time loops along Highway 5 Bakersfield untouched
Visalia ahead and it was your uncle Rodriguez in the fields

waving to us smiling as though he knew of our faces driving
glued to the glass shield of our thrilling hopes we never saw

come to fruition the orange trees were deserted you wondered
why no one picked the fruit so many laying around on the dirt

covering your uncles’ hardened skin beneath the panting sun
and we knew we had to part in Sacramento at my Grandmother’s

Persian kitchens where past and present met in rice and raisins
with no dearth of secrets and no lack of sensible ordinance

of being a dutiful girl you were always quick to spot a knot
tied in the interloping of our shame and our birthright we saw

your uncle shedding tears in the fields there was no coming
together the drive back home was always a dread

Ashley Renselaer is a student at Windward School in Mar Vista, CA. Writing poems is an integral part of who she is, as it is a venue for her to express her views and experiences. Poetry allows her to hope to connect with readers and bring about positive change. Some of her writing is either forthcoming or has been published in Inlandia: A Literary Journal, The Lily Poetry Review, The Loud Journal, and Lunch Ticket, and she has recently received a Gold Key from the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. Additionally, she enjoys writing prose and plays. She hopes to publish an anthology of all her poems sometime in the near future.

Abigail Swoboda

How Cool Kids Lace Their Shoes

The vibrations of my sister’s voice in the palm of my hand
tell me that his body will probably not start to work—
that his skin is the color of ocher,
that Dad rode his brother’s motorcycle to the hospital under the winter New Orleans sun so that
he could give him his leather jacket before he said goodbye.

I think I can see him from way up here,
among the baseball diamonds and the inground pools and the cul-de-sacs like flat silver spoons,
tracing the legacy of a lifted Arizona license plate from a past life.

Two days after we burn all the candles down,
my dad’s hand searches in the white satin
next to the rosary-clotted knuckles and the cold, coin-back face in the casket,
nose waving in the stagnant air like a flashlight in the dark.

My sister tells me that he knew how cool kids lace their shoes,
so that so much is not seen.

Abigail Swoboda is a nonbinary writer based in Philadelphia, PA, where they are currently pursuing their M.A. in English at Temple University. There, they also teach French, craft their own spice blends, and embroider until their fingers are raw.

Alex Pulliam

summer on a balcony

i
a blown transformer
stilled the fan once more
in the living room upstairs
we sang with no sound
breathing no more hot air
into the night
we sat outside
with a bowl of popcorn
talking about saturn
and her moons
and one more
gin and rosemary
before bed

ii
during the solar eclipse
the moon shadow traced us
unzipped every freckle
on our body
the humid air made
shallow breaths different
the careful air
spoke to us

iii
we thought loudly
up here
in the closing acts of july
of people we’ve kissed
and shared slices of ham with
what astrology apps
told us to do:
“you will”
so we cleaned
the kitchen floors at 11:30 pm
and after
we both cried in our bedrooms

iv
pain opened our window
and let flies settle on the plants

Alex Pulliam is a poet from Orlando, Florida. She has received an MFA in Poetry under Jena Osman, Brian Teare, and Erica Hunt at Temple University in Philadelphia; she also holds a BS in Political Science with minors in English and Art History. Alex is currently pursuing her second Master’s Degree in Organizational Leadership at Jacksonville University while being a Graduate Assistant for the university’s rowing team. Her work primarily focuses on familial relationships, language, and somatic experiences. She is an ardent appreciator of cooking, sci-fi films, and being near water. Contact: alexandriap96@gmail.com

Elvin Ramos-Muñoz

the bat, rats, and cruise

In my backyard there is an apple heavy with memories in that bite there is a plague like the streets of San Juan please do not speak of this. I have seen the bat flying above the cruise. They are coming with cameras to snapshot the days when you and I were healthy (and I’ve never been to Italy anyway). A box. Reggaeton sandbox. An island box. So many rooms to hide in and type the secret message of my heart: Abuela, what are you doing outside? I will play dominoes with you inside. Inside is the word the world fears in their rooms. We have not been inside ourselves for so long the curfew holds terror. Terror in a house in taps the taps of a million fingers online pretending this isn’t terror. Shopping to show we have power going to the beach to prove we are young. The apple in my desk knows this story. I hold the apple like a skull. I listen. And it speaks. Look outside the window it says. I see the rats nibbling leaves. They are starving…

Elvin Ramos-Muñoz was born and raised in Puerto Rico. He holds a BA in Education with a Major in English from the University of Puerto Rico-Aguadilla and has finished all the requirements for an MA in English Education at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez (to be conferred when global normalcy allows). He has been an Instructor of Record at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez for almost three years now. His research interests and literary practices overlap, and include sea studies, U.S. multiethnic writing, and animals in myth, folklore, and literature.

Laura Wisniewski

Vanished Twin

And who hasn’t floated with her,
dreaming one dream in tandem
curled within one heartbeat, safe in it?
And who hasn’t felt the sac go still,
the hand of new fingers go limp?
Who hasn’t watched her slide by?

Don’t we all enter the world thinking it is the afterlife,
forgetting the pulse of the vanished
in this room that is empty with light?
And doesn’t the milk taste bitter
because we are without her
and because she is unnamed?

Laura Budofsky Wisniewski is the author of the chapbook, How to Prepare Bear (2019 Redbird Chapbooks). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Image, Hunger Mountain Review, American Journal of Poetry, Saranac Review, Confrontation and other journals. She is winner of the 2019 Poetry International Prize, a Tiferet 2019 Writing Contest finalist, a 2018 Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2014 Passager Poetry Prize. Laura lives and writes in a small town in Vermont.

Adeline Gerrard

The Lamb

I have a reoccurring dream
when I am just shy of twelve years—
Abraham, my father; Isaac, me.
I lay bound—a sacrificial lamb—
On a stone altar, on Mount Moriah.
Screams are ripped from my lungs
floating off on a breeze I cannot feel.
My voice is far away, lost—
somewhere between here and real.

and and and it ends like this:
a cold knife below my sternum
the flesh of my wrists dug out
by ropes what’s left of them
limp at my side gently lifting
in the thin mountain air.

It is always the sound of my father downstairs,
the sound of his heavy boots hitting hardwood
that finally wakes me in the early morning.
And I am left gasping—images of the knife’s glint,
of the ropes choking hold, of the cold stone altar
are a motion picture behind my eyes that plays on loop.
Until I brave the creaky stairs in the semi-darkness,
my father sitting with a cup of black coffee, reading.

Adeline Gerrard is a recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s creative writing program. She can be reached at addygerrard1998@gmail.com for inquiries.