PULP / Molly Zhu
While you were shopping for blueberries
at your neighborhood green market,
and the delivery truck double parked for the
umpteenth time on the gum-freckled street,
they said Andromeda was only lightyears
away and plunging straight towards us.
The feeling is humanly-imminent:
to have a memory for holding the futures of
all the lint colonies on earth, and the shoe-flys, and ripped
dollar bills, the rivers that crease your face over time
and the frizzy hairs, the people you loved who could never
love you back, the number of days you tried making the
shampoo last, the packages meant for you that
would never pass your door, the apologies you crafted—
as a knife carves into soap—left for tomorrow, tomorrow
when an egg is cracked open without a gilded yolk, the
feeling of loneliness in a world that buzzes
like a never-ending hive…
our destiny is to marry into a jumble of stardust
twinkling with the celestial milk from a mother
we’ll never know—when the sun
swallows the earth and fate twists her neck,
I will (of course) be enjoying the blueberries with you,
sitting on a sun-stained park bench
somewhere simple,
as the sky splits apart
and melts like bronzed sugar
over our lips.
⁂
Molly is a new poet and she lives in Brooklyn, New York. For her day job, she is a corporate attorney and in her free time, she loves thinking about words and reading and eating. She has previously published in the Rising Phoenix Review, the Ghost City Press, and the Bombay Review among others. Her work is forthcoming in the Wilderness House Literary Review. You can find her on instagram at: @mlz316.
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A CRACK IN THE LEVEE / Eva Miller
The first time I lost everything
was in August of 2005.
Rushing waters carried our
antique oak door into the
sea, snatched the yellow buds of
the angel’s trumpet, stole the
old off-white siding and took the
happiness of my family with it.
We never dared to go back,
to touch the fingers of the
cold corpse of a house we once
called home, to walk through
the tattered door frame like we were
once again cradling a newborn child
with eyes that reflected the waters
brewing on the cracked kitchen tiles.
My memories have failed me. The
calendar in my mind was torn from
the wall of a room in that house.
Pictures and news headlines and half-torn
letters of sympathy from forgotten family members
are stuck together with damp pieces of tape.
The newborn is swaddled in kelp. He is breathing
salt water, and crying for his mother.
Sometimes, I think I can feel the ocean creeping
up the back of my neck. The violent tides clean
the marrow of my bones and fill my arteries with
pieces of memories that cannot be remembered.
I can hear the screeching trumpets and heavy footsteps
on uneven pavement. When I open my eyes, I see the lid
of my above ground tomb. I scratch and I claw and I try to escape,
but I never get free. Instead, my incessant knocking has put a crack in the levee.
⁂
Eva Miller is a Creative Writing student at the Alabama School of Fine Arts. They were born and partly raised in New Orleans before moving to Birmingham, Alabama after Katrina.
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Grocery shopping in a Baltimore bodega / Emily McDonald
When I first moved here I would dream of apples,
ones so big and so unmarred that you
could taste the pesticides. But in this city
all the fruit I can afford is rotting,
flecked with wormholes like spiders’ eyes. The produce
aisle’s dusted with flies. But, god, I
still try. I cut the soft, white, fuzzy bits
off strawberries, pretend that screw-cap wine
tastes something like champagne, and that I am
still able to seduce myself. As if.
We’re too familiar. The marriage has long gone dry.
I’m too repulsed, I’m too repulsed
by those peculiar, unsociable
mannerisms, the ones that come from years
of living on your own: I reuse day-
old coffee grids, choke down the earthy sludge
to stave off headaches. Leave bloodstained curls
of floss to fester on my sink. I pluck
stray hairs for fun. Just once, I’d like to surprise
myself in a good way—a no-occasion,
plastic-wrapped bouquet of gas station
roses. Or bingo. Snake eyes. Strike.
⁂
Emily McDonald is a writer and English teacher from Maryland. Her poetry has recently appeared in Eunoia Review.
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In my cup, / Patrick Redmond
a shape, a slurred embryo
draws its limbs forward to hear
& then lets go of my lips
once the succulents on the window
have names of children.
I hear your pulse
through your forehead. I hear
a swift axe & its speech
tussled by wind.
Your hair is the only evidence you ran
smoldering against the buildings we were
looking up at.
Usually these senses are reversed
beneath a skyline. The hands
are held as saltwater
spilled on severed gums. Our callous
scrapes across my leg—we can’t kiss yet.
Whatever had been scraped out from the mouth
holds down the bridge.
My wine spills,
welters the puzzle piece, making
the dog’s head
impossible to fit
on the child’s body
mid-flight to the ocean.
The movement becomes the subject.
As a priest hanged in a bag.
A watch burned on a stove.
⁂
Patrick Redmond teaches composition and creative writing at CUNY. Recent writing is forthcoming or is featured in The Columbia Review, The Hunger Journal, Silver Pinions, Bomb Cyclone, Prelude, and elsewhere.
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I AM / Renea Di Bella
I am a firecracker//
a static shock//
the chime of an antique clock breaking through the quiet of a clear, pink dawn//
I am unexpected//
a jolt//
I defy labels//
definitions//
binaries//
I am fluid//
I live in the kind of grey area that makes most people uncomfortable//
that’s where I thrive//
I am hard for people to understand//
and therefore, sometimes hard to take//
but if you let me in I will blow your world wide open//
I will push you passed your comfort zone, into dimensions you never expected//
I’ll have you questioning things you never thought you would’ve questioned//
this who I am//
a little bit of a troublemaker//
like a spark that lights a fuse//
I am a call from the universe//
that nothing is absolute except that we are all connected//
and those connections are all that really matters//
I am not everyone’s cup of tea//
I am not for the weak at heart//
I am who I am//
I am//
I am//
I am.
⁂
Renea Di Bella (she/they) is a queer, gender fluid, poet, blogger, and suicide survivor. They have a BA in Secondary Education and an M.A. in Curriculum and instruction. They were born and raised in Michigan and have been writing poetry since they were old enough to hold a pen. Their poetry is a reflection of their lifelong journeys with mental health, sexuality, gender, and identity.
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TWO POEMS / Rachel Hinton
HOSPICE PLASTICS
What were we doing when the supplies came into our house,
enteral feeding protocol, ostomies, the spirometer
she breathed in each day for duty,
security pole and bathroom grab bar,
holder for cane, each with its suitable bearing,
a toilet with arms, a bath bench,
the real material? First I avoided it,
then I stared straight at it, I wrote
a message from the nurse, Debbie Dill. My sister
yelled DEBBIE DILL, DIAPERS. It was
good to take things too far. I tell you it’s
unnerving when the natural world
makes a mistake. A big bald cow came
around the corner for hay. A bird flew at my head
during dinner. None of this was supposed to happen. I have no
thank yous for the commode that could not
accommodate, the grab bar that could not be held. We kept
stepping on hazards. Please, it wasn’t clean, I mean
they could have been clearer about my dead.
ENMESHMENT
A small section of follicles swept to the
side like water I may have thought once
this was something my mother did not mean to do
but I think she meant to make whorls of my hair with her
fingerprint she was trying
to make small art out of small art
I knew myself most when she embezzled
from my own neck made of birds
twigs that snap to pull into their
place a small moonup-to-the-porch face
Nothing is sliding yet our house has not begun
its peachy slip in my cheek the peachlike function the
neck back to the moon where porch-high a relative river
fell in hoops This is the best way to do hair
These are the thick loops for crimping out into a lion
Can I just cancel and wipe hair down
Can I just be one thing for once
I want to think why I remember
my face the moon It’s making an earnest
circuit around the tree It’s laughing outside
The hair is too dry and forkfuls I am too shy for this
region of hair which makes
life around it The porch light and
through it a ribbon of hair, abeyance
⁂
Rachel Hinton's poems are forthcoming in The Hunger and Salamander, and her debut poetry collection, Hospice Plastics, will be published by Southeast Missouri State University Press in 2021. She is originally from Vermont and now lives in Chicago, where she works as an editor and teacher.
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CHONDRITE SÉANCE / James Yeary
Imagining someone unlike myself
awakening musical unities
The wine-dark sea holds the stars in its cup
These single-point constellations the last
sailors shed of individuation
transfigured in the fog of sea·map·sky
the drumming is incomprehensible
commanding while side-stepping the private
as nerves muscle their way into hammers
the word slinks from its brief biography.
We wear the hole in the light as our badge
sight returned one hundred twenty years
it climbs my face, looking for the name.
Kudos searing to the throat on its own
now I know what everyone else knows
The thighs are wise to what the thyroid is doing
Telemachus disappears into her command
a vent of cortisol burns my eyebrows
every void with their identity.
⁂
James Yeary is interested in the mitigation of personality for the sake of Martian influence. His most recent chapbook is Hawai’i (violaceous euphoRia, 2019). He has taught collaborative writing as an art practice in the classroom, at the museum, and on the street.
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PLANT ME IN THE RIVER / Taeyeon Han
My
eyes
fell in love
first, then my nose,
enchanted by old lemon roses,
fell second and harder.
My heart beat black mullets and crooked teeth (erythrocytes)
flowing freely and coagulating with maggots
at the same time.
Vessels broke in the soil of love.
I would let my antibodies fill glasses
of champagne
for you, but
you wouldn’t
water my leaves,
notice my green,
or see the bouquet of
thorns that prickled my scalp
and sent blood down the slope of my nose
each time I fell.
⁂
Taeyeon Han is a student in California. You can find his work on loose-leaf paper and on the Notes app.
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CORE PARTY / Sica
one of my cats always sits on the edge of the tub when I’m in the bathroom and it makes me feel safe and protected while I lay on the floor of the shower, with the water turned up a little too hot, and think about phasing through the bottom of the tub, like clipping through a wall in a video game, water and all just falling through every possible layer below until I reach the center of the earth and discover something really weird like it’s filled with other naked people floating through everything or maybe all of the run on sentences ever written in the history of written language or maybe nothing at all...
⁂
Sica is a poet and writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Sadly you can read more at sicahi.tumblr.com/ or follow them at twitter.com/seakuh
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TWO POEMS / Justin Rigamonti
STOICISM
So many false
starts, false sparks,
flames that just
wouldn’t take.
All around me, wet wood
leapt into orange
infatuation, but not
my little wick.
Flintless, curious,
alien. Cinders
from a distant sun.
Once, at eighteen,
I showed my mom
a yearbook glimpse of Shaun’s
frost-blonde eyebrows
like a sleepy cigarette
leaned out for a light.
Oh Justin, she said,
you can do
better than that.
But no, I never could
do better than love.
Solitude
is different, the placid
thump of one heart,
a single drum drum-
circle, and soon enough,
it almost feels like music,
almost warm enough
to hold you in its sound.
PENTECOST
Let there be light
and there was light—
one of those big
beeswax candles,
they smell so good.
And god said let’s
smoke this joint,
Galactic Animal,
and we did smoke it
and my body unfolded
below me like a trapeze
artist, like a generous
noodle of slack,
and the animal climbed
around me and held
my limbs the way
a doctor would, more
firmly than you’d think,
and I wondered who
taught him how to hold
a man as though his
touch could heal,
but those were my feet
being tenderized,
those were my lips
making almost foreign
sounds, saying,
Tongue of fire, holy
finger, heal the man
I love.
⁂
Justin Rigamonti teaches writing at Portland Community College and serves as the Managing Editor of Fonograf Editions. His poems have been published or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, and Zócalo Public Square.
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STITCH, BACKSTITCH, STITCH / Becca Yenser
I sew masks to cover the faces of people I don’t know. I sew masks using the CDC recommended pattern. I sew masks but I only have two prints I bought from JoAnn’s last year. I sew masks but my needle bends, so I replace it. I sew masks for nurses. For senior aide staff. For New Yorkers. For the Navajo Nation. I sew masks to the music of Wilco. Neko Case. King Princess. I sew masks as we break up. I sew masks when I hear my dad has cancer. I sew masks as our family dog dies. I sew masks through the downpour. Through the sunstroke weather. Through the haze of pollen. My dead dog visits me. I try to find the heartbeat stitch but this model is too cheap to have it. I sew masks for my immuno-compromised neighbors. For my aunts. My parents. My ex-boyfriend. Andrew Cuomo holds up a mask mailed to him by a farmer in Kansas. My hands sew the mask without me. Like running in a dream when you can’t feel your legs. The rhythm of the stitches are like drums in a Sting song. Upon the fields of barley. I sew masks then watch videos of people dying on ventilators. I don’t always sew masks. Sometimes I sit outside and watch the robins fight mid-air, my cat running hip-deep through the tall grass to reach them. Sometimes she brings me dead birds, but sometimes they fly away.
⁂
Becca Yenser was born in Iowa and raised in Oregon. They earned an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University, where they were a Fellow in Fiction. They are the author of the poetry chapbook, “Too High and Too Blue In New Mexico” (Dancing Girl Press, 2018). Their fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Madcap Review, Toasted Cheese Literary Journal, The Nervous Breakdown, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, Fanzine, and many others. They live in Wichita, Kansas with their cat, N.J.
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STATE BIRD / Carrie MacLeod
because we were small we felt old
in his hands a typewritten cell a graft
of narcotic he maybe had to be shed
he maybe has his legs & i am ruined by this
effect no soft bear to bear love wandering
suburbia mauling trash cans
housewives hissing their kitchen terrariums
my food is dead don’t touch it
bear be not there i frame dead ducks
a basic brown every dog
every day she buys three apples & peels them
to be sure they are not gold
then feeds them to her dog
a pine sword tail wrapped brown to fill her closet
was he militant a bear of bordering languish
no patio set photo bear bomb catastrophe in serial lives
& if there’s any truth to the lie that we’re all neighbors
maybe he’ll stun our brains into becoming so
⁂
Carrie MacLeod is a disabled poet/musician from Trenton, New Jersey. She lives in Portland, Maine with her teenage daughters.
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BLUE AND GREEN SHOULD NEVER BE SEEN / Alicia Byrne Keane
On Mondays and Tuesdays the world is a clasp
I frequent the same rooms I did when I was 19
But talk to no one; my steps have an underwater
Elasticity and I think about my mother’s story of
An itchy green dress trapping the angled points
Of elbows. A Tuesday is a kind of incandescent
Elbow where all of the group chats are quiet, so
There are less last minute gutterings of the old
Sparkle-feeling, the stilled tree trunks in a park
Floodlit near the Phibsborough crossroads when
You walk a friend home, the polaroid, the pear’s
Crescent-bite, the homemade zine gathering the
Lunglike dark of coffee stains at the bottom of
A bag. The possible, and the fizz, and the feeling
Your anger is justified when back then I didn’t
Know anything yet and should have just shut up,
Like a Tuesday, like a shining juncture. Verbena
Tea stills me, and valerian tincture, the sense of
A chlorophyll tang, expanding. Some mice sleep
Curled beneath my flesh, waiting for the lit box
Of catastrophe, for plump extraction, for iodine-
Bordered construction sites. I’m sick or sick of
Everything, and the distinction becomes some
Sort of a leaf, something with veins that radiate.
⁂
Alicia Byrne Keane is a PhD student from Dublin, Ireland, working on an Irish Research Council-funded PhD study that problematizes ‘vagueness’ and translation in the work of Samuel Beckett and Haruki Murakami, at Trinity College Dublin. Alicia’s poems have appeared in The Moth, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Abridged, The Honest Ulsterman, The Cardiff Review, and Entropy.
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TWO POEMS / Briauna Taylor
spring as a nameless DM from a past love
eager I plucked every single petal off you one single rose
blooming early on the bush
with my fingernail I made half moons in your flesh
and used them like chalk to draw a door
on the other side I have been
building fantasy around human form
and I cultivate closure for the memory of our los angeles apartment
a youthful deity
covered in plaster and dust
here we will stand forever
all our lesser loves tethered to the curb
like pewter swap meet angels
and I believe a notification
could contain the same
power as mouthless kisses
this modern apology
I really did love you once
a single eyelash
fluttering on the pavement
bipolar pronounced pandemic
when drinking does nothing for this
stinging head and foul mad mouth
I eat dried mango
and sing loudly
at my damask curtains
remorse is the only bed
I can't bury
It hangs around this house
winged and hungry
for the repair of unfamiliar illumination
⁂
Briauna Taylor is a poet, and seeker of magik living in Portland Oregon. Her background focuses on performing arts and spoken word through youth outreach non-profits, such as Youth Speaks and Get Lit-Words Ignite. She is the facilitator of the ‘Mind & Mouth’ youth poetry programming and open mic series at local non-profit Marrow. Her practice and personal mission aim to inspire emotional authenticity, navigation of trauma and grief and the exploration of the ethereal self. Her self published book of poems "Nightwell" came out in the summer of 2019 in conjunction with the Independent Publishing Resource Centers certificate program in poetry.
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NIGHT SHADES / Marie Landau
unblushingly I lie
settle hips
like signals
to a dream
perching
on an edge
of night
gimme sleep
or at least rest
half of you gone
before I close
my eyes
bolts of yellow
strike the lids
when I was a kid
I wondered
is this what nothing
looks like
a spectrum
of colors
against the dark
all neon and sundry
sun shining
against sleep
edging out a cloud
whose soul was battered
by wind
something needs fixing
what you do to me
when your mouth says yes
and your body dissolves
we passed a coyote in the dark
after you asked should we watch
for deer
yes the black dispatch
of night
the animals
wrenching their omens
yellow eyes like lit wicks
seeing night
the way I saw nothing
rings of light unchained
open, eyes, open
like pearls crowning
from an oyster
⁂
Marie Landau lives and writes in Albuquerque, New Mexico. A 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems have appeared in Spry, SOFTBLOW, District Lit, Powder Keg, Litbreak, and elsewhere.
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TWO POEMS / Carolyn Supinka
FIELD GUIDE FOR F
FORM is what you do and feel inside. The form of an organ, its soft machine.
FURTHER is also located inside. Equal to the distance between now and later.
FAINT is the way the world works in reverse at dawn. The stars grow faint and then finally disappear in the light. The waves, once faint snakes of white, grow in clarity. And the birds burst into song from a place that is the opposite of faint, a place where there was no song at all.
We say “grow” faint like absence is something large and getting larger, which it is.
FACT is that which is undeniably felt. A fact is also the hand that pushes you against the wall. Less fact are the words said which you cannot remember. Even less fact are the words you wanted to say but didn’t, which you do remember.
Fact: how you love the term in fact, which acts as a sieve of experience.
Example: You had thought things were fine, but in fact, they were not.
FINE: can be something in the way of flour, powder.
Fine is a relative term.
Fine is dependent on how fine things were before.
The movement of wheat to flour means that flour is fine,as compared to wheat.
You might not call a pile of rocks fine, but what if the rocks once composed solid cliffs, worn down by explosions and the ocean? What if waves wore and tumbled the cliffs into the pile of rocks at your feet?
It might then be fair to call the rocks fine.
FIELD is located in the sense of an expanse. A field of study is the space in which the subject of study exists.
A subject might spend its days wandering around its field.
Fields might exist inside the field where the subject tends its beautiful crops.
The fields in the field could yield good harvest, or none.
The subject might one day, upon walking in its field, discover the boundaries of its field. There might be another field out there the subject might realize, other than the one in which I’ve lived. The subject of the field might leave the field, hop over the fence, and wander away. This has never happened, but it could.
**
MYTHS ABOUT THE BODY
The body is a walnut. Not the shell, not the meat. Both.
The hinges of the body creak when they fly open in the night.
Grass creeps over the body’s train tracks.
The body is never poisoned by the water.
The body is a perpetual sunset.
The body is civil twilight.
The body is high noon.
The body makes mistakes. Makes many. Nobody ever catches the body, or makes the body sorry.
The body protects the world from evil by holding all the evil behind the body’s lips, where it swarms like bees.
The body is a bee. The body’s lips drip with gobs of molten honey and fire.
The body’s memory is a lost city.
“Let’s never find that city”, says the body.
The body has seven snakes to do the body’s bidding.
Nothing runs in the body’s family.
The body lives next to a river. It’s the same river that ran next to the body’s mother’s house and the body’s mother’s mother’s house.
In some myths, the dancing in the body never stops.
In other myths, time is a field for the body to lie down in.
There are three main obstacles that the body must overcome. In some myths, the three obstacles are the same obstacle that must happen three times.
In most myths, the body loses everything.
In some myths, the body has a garden. In some myths, the body has none.
⁂
Carolyn Supinka is the author of the chapbook Stray Gods (2016, Finishing Line Press) and is a writer and visual artist living in Portland, Oregon. She has an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. Her work has been most recently published in The Sonora Review, Peach Mag, and The Recluse, and is forthcoming in DIAGRAM, Heavy Feather Review, and The Shore.
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FEED THE BITE / Brian Stephen Ellis
The 1st thing they teach you,
about what to do
when a human being bites
you, is to not follow your instinct.
When another person sinks their teeth
into, say, your arm
your instinct will be to pull away.
To jerk the arm back
and in doing so,
lose a lot of flesh.
It seems strange that our instincts would be wrong
on this, that human evolution has delinquent
standard operating procedure when it comes
to bite attack. You would think natural selection
would have accounted for this,
but even that ancient and advanced technology
fight or flight sometimes contains errors.
The best possible scenario
if you ever find yourself
being gnawed upon by another,
is to take your free hand,
if you have one, and place it gently but securely
upon the back of the head.
In the same place you would cradle a newborn,
and then, commit a maneuver that is often
referred to as feeding the bite.
This requires moving towards the damage
when everything is telling you to pull away.
You will move towards the injury.
Turn your body into a harness,
contort around the violence,
push forward
until you find the back wall of pain,
wait until the jawbone
releases
and then,
let go.
⁂
Brian Stephen Ellis is a writer and a special education therapist. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is called Often Go Awry. He lives in Portland, Ore.
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