Poetry

"holding a grudge for years bc i’m wifey" by Meagan Dermody

for k, part 1

I know we are situated in this hour
stretching in all directions to every hour
at each moment        I see us
and do not grieve like a dog I want you to fix
your attention here on me which is too much 
I am not careful and I cannot suffer getting
what I ask for I am growing 
a little fungus of revenge 
and cannot wait to eat it 
and let it rock through me and send me swaying
out there to where I cannot speak
or even salivate   like a dog in high desert sun
I am dry and soft and slow
you are giving me freckles you’re burning me

-

Meagan Dermody is a Southern transplant writing poetry in the Midwest. Her work has appeared in zines including Emily Taylor Center's FEMINIST FRIGHT FEST 2021 zine and RABBIT, as well as literary magazines like PWATEM and Awkward Mermaid. A third-year MFA student at the University of Kansas, Meagan's work engages with trauma, ecosomatics, and the divine/grotesque/divine. She prides herself on being fun at parties and in the line at the grocery store, and is working hard to keep her aloe plant alive.

"Breakfast of a Lush" and "Cocaine Breakfast" by G.L. Ford

Breakfast of a Lush

We arrived, strong of back and weak-willed,
took our places and prayed for death.
I looked around and thought, Me
and my hobo socks are going north,
take the revolver along.
But there was smoking to be done,
though the harvest had been poor,
and once you know there’s that much sky
it’s hard to get away from it.
Evening was always a maudlin affair,
polite as a heatless match and just as colorful,
a time to caress old grievances,
craft fine and useless scandals,
gaze at the dishes, risk sitting down.
My job was to make sleep difficult.
No one ever mentioned if it worked.
But every time it bothered coming
we’d ravish the flimsy dawn.

Cocaine Breakfast

Your mouth of hair,
your eye of dandelion stems,
your brain of gleaming whirlygig shit—
I don’t love anything near you.
I want to break my heart with a violin,
but this isn’t music, and you know it.

What tempers you?
Does your hand, any hand, remind you of anything?
I’d call it catalepsy, but it’s just your stare,
so lay off the halleluiahs.
It’s like replacing a lost tooth with one that won’t stop growing,
so you learn to gnaw.

Right now I doubt you’ve ever seen morning.
Your tongue’s a crumpled wire.
Your gums are pristine ash.
You giggle very well
and have a daunting vocabulary.
You have no smell.

I know you have pockets,
full of the usual keepsakes,
but I’m in no mood for that ritual right now.
If you need it, the window opens,
there’s plenty of air if you think you want it,
we’re five flights up and it’s easy to get down.

-

G. L. Ford lives and works in Victoria, Texas. He is the author of Sans, a book of poems (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). He helped edit the "6x6" poetry periodical from 2000 to 2017, and formerly wrote a column for the free paper New York Nights.



"Sex Toys" and "Sex Toys 2: Isle of the Dad" by Peter Milne Greiner

Sex Toys

In a special treasure
chest the false
phalluses and false
orifices and the ceremony’s
unguents and the ceremony’s vestments
suggest and even verge on a kind
of homunculus
A shadow or better 
yet a hologram
of a shadow
Like light or better
yet the proxy poverty of light
or better yet the illusion
of light it doesn’t need 
me to be alive
It fucks and is fucked in the effigy
in the rough and it is I who am in fact its
rough rough
reanimated
goose outline
skulking across
the moonlit
foothill
in fruitful search of the one
who made most
of me
Who made me these concealed
objects here
Who pursues me through
the shadowy and desolate
keyhole
to the land where I was born
fissures and recesses fitted like fine
masonry into the cliffaces 
and whose ruined edifice disguise
comes to face me in all its brutalism
all its balance and from the putlogs and transoms of its scaffolding
shrouds billowing
and whose upwelling of closure has an analogue
in me I know all too familiarly is obscure
Who nears me now
Toward the pool in current gushing as the saying goes
preparing its deposit of closure
its depository of closure
its haunt
its autohaunt
its supercomplex
its ultimate
self-effacing 
irreversible 
encryption

Sex Toys 2: Isle of the Dad

Reviling as I did my own visibility
I searched for the good caves and found them adequately
near to the only thing I reviled more and in
them I found and took up my position
The mouths of these good caves faced north
I erected my bergfrieds upon their outlying heaths
when there were as there were then mists at the edges of the known planet
I built a beautiful surveillance
satellite and placed it at a great distance from the mouths
as I understood them to be different from outer space and I advanced
my thanks to it in murmurs
Thank you Cordycep for that is the name I gave my satellite
Thank you I repeated each night when as Spica sank below the horizon
Cordycep spirited down to me as through a taproot 
in what one might say absolute or terminal resolution and granularity
stories of clear coasts
indifferent isthmuses
tiny islands off the coasts of other tiny islands 
palpably remote
stories of abusive and unspeakable
unassailable 
tranquility and grace
There is no I in sleep but there is an eel the satellite said
There is no black hole at the center 
of my attention
gobbling up prized assets
No feeling of anticipation crawls out
of my woodwork like a form of exhaust
but if as with Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead
the cliffs’ orifices are optimized by masonry
and mystery is better bereft of floorplan
the satellite said
I suggest you listen closely to me
I’m repeating repeating and repeating repeating myself 
and I must be heard each time
I speak only once
fall silent
and speak again
Closely
Listen closely
Closely
Closely

-

Peter Milne Greiner is a queer poet and science fiction writer. His first book, Lost City Hydrothermal Field, was published by The Operating System. A hybrid genre collection, Lost City Hydrothermal Field brings together poems, science fiction short stories, and essays. Greiner's work has appeared in Vice, Fence, Berfrois, TAGVVERK, Dark Mountain, and many other platforms off and online. He teaches high school English in NYC. Visit pmggoestospace.com for all the things.

"Segment in Stained Glass" and "Criminal Minds Song #2, What Happens in Mecklinberg..." by frankie bb

Segment in Stained Glass

Sheryl tells me hummingbirds
fight over red syrup
meant to taste like nectar, and love
playing in the rain.

In a prism of artichokes discussing the possibility
of guardian angles and arranged marriage.

Olivia says the elk’s bugling is like the opening of a giant metal door. Soon she will leave us
for a better job. A job where she teaches people to feed one another.

A certain percentage of plants are killed every year by the weight of the fruit they bear.
It’s been weeks since I’ve called my mother. Craig counts disingenuous smiles and chases
30-foot waves in the hurricane.

I’m talking on my back. I’m talking to the little brown mice scrambling above my dreaming and wading through the expensive sectors of my cupboards. They eat my bread. They eat my mug wort. I admire them and maybe everyone else wants a tail too.

An abandoned tomatillo home is fragile and empty, like a lantern of lace. My only pet goldfish jumped out of the bowl and died. That’s a lie, it wasn’t a bowl, it was an opaque green bucket. I’m sorry blub. I call my mother.

A beaver builds a dam in a river or a kitchen.
There is always a flood coming.

The night before you get on top of me
you smoke delicately naming facts I won’t check
apparently when an owl flies, its wings are silent
regardless of the destination or the prey.

Criminal Minds Song #2, What Happens in Mecklinberg…

I’m not proud of surviving.
Children never pay for torture.
Where is the toothpaste going with you?
Doors open and doors close.
Inside the monkey is a ringing,
an indistinct song masquerading as police radio chatter.
The real rage is just a hobby.
My face like a question mark, next to a face like a question mark.
No abnormalities, a.k.a. no mystery men.
Today 19 strangers came into my room chanting,
“tonight it will rain, tonight you’ll be lured out.”
Did you see what I did? I mocked the broken window.
Volunteer for negative feelings, surrogacy is an honorable calling.
Screaming always follows the whip cracking,
but the sirens
can split.
A decoy lights a church candle and goes, “oop!
A bookshelf hides a secret
a hallway leading to secrets of perfect hair.
Albert Einstein swung by and stayed close,
but he doesn’t understand anything.
Severed sirens sing along sing along sing,
staring into space and touching arms.
I’m sorry I smell like saliva. I’m sorry for syncopating
but the house is creaking hard, shh…
…I’m a doll in another person’s house.
Cheryl is not your mother. Cheryl is extraordinarily lucky.

-

frankie bb is a map of eyes that have yet to assemble into a crowd, a jaw bone that dislikes being called "mandible" and prefers "crescent catcher." A guilty harvester who believes milk is best served wild. Words in and forthcoming: No Contact Mag (as frankie bruno), The Lickety-Split, Club Plum Literary Journal, and Maudlin House.

"for s" and "count with me until i feel whole again" by Madeline Langan

for s 

you’re older than me,
but it doesn’t matter.
that tree you just put your cigarette out on
is older than any of us combined - 

that’s how you start wildfires,
you know:
taking ravenous girls with
hands scorned, ruddish
to streets that look the same 

so, tell me:
- how
i’m supposed to find myself
when you live in the sidewalk
(swear to god,
i’ve been here
with you -
asphalt planes collapsing
into one endless street.
rowsandrowsandrows of housesbarsrestaurants.
hey, 
i think we know this one)
- when 
i’m dizzy
and cold
and wandering around roebling
and everything is spinning
(you, in the sidewalk,
are spinning too)
do i stumble around,
throw up in the trash can
that looks like the one
you held me next to?
or should i just go
straight for the ground.

someonewillholdbackmyhair
someonewill -

count with me until i feel whole again

flugelhorns will not announce
that i’ve arrived
here to -

drop my bag on the doorstep
(so heavy
may as well be
sopping wet) 

hey,
i’m so sorry i just -
it’s my fingers they
fell off -
no don’t look.
it’s like that time i
got on your bed with the dirty socks and
i know you saw and
didn’t say anything and
i’m saying now that
i guess i
want you to
just look at me,
not my fingers,
the way you ignored my
dirty socks and
told me i
was pretty instead

-

Madeline Langan is an undergraduate architecture and creative writing student at Pratt Institute, based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work has appeared in Pratt's literary magazine, The Prattler. She can also be found modeling tiny houses, rereading Wuthering Heights, watering her plants, and on instagram @maddie.langan.

"I'd Feel More Like a Child If My Mother Were More Like a Mushroom" by Sara McNally

The neighbor’s porch light blinks on then off and
I cradle the space between me and my birth.
I don’t feel born. My mother, a silhouette.
Nothing I do can rectify that—oh well, oh well—

Daydreaming again of trees so green, foxes slinking
through hills—I am trying to look desire in the eye.
What I want in this morning light: a cherry red as blood
and halved. I want to pop the pit out with my thumb

like removing an eye from a socket. I want to wreck
a thing and stand over it. I want no one to see me
wanting anything. I keep rewatching this timelapse
where a whole forest gets overtaken by fungi,

plant matter broken down into black gunk like
oil slicks on the ocean. Amongst the rot, green
sprouts push through wet earth to sun themselves.
I love the fungi and their mycelia, their communication

net sending messages underground. A mushroom
is a romantic being. A mushroom knows its mother
and its mother and its mother—oh how
the ground aches beneath me.

I keep daydreaming of having a mother
somehow different. I need everything burnt
down and built back up. I can’t say that to
anyone. It’s all an ache in my pink mouth.
-
Sara McNally is a poet and artist living in Chicago. They have been an editor for Columbia Poetry Review and have also been published in Gulf Stream, Taco Bell Quarterly, and Sobotka Literary Magazine.

"Sonnet" and "Storm Door" by William Repass

Sonnet

13. The audience tenses like a spring, in a panic threatening to trample itself.
1. Contain myself? Suppose I lost the key.
2. A thought bubble drowsy with algebraic equations.
4. Frozen mid-swivel in the chair, the cartoonist regards the pencil with envy.
8. Mr. Spring and Mr. Slinky, they despise each other.
5. Cracked my funny bone bungling the slapstick routine.
6. She customizes her gas mask with mother of pearl buttons.
8. The café a gather point for exemplary goatees.
9. Grown from the smear in a petri dish, a devil tests negative.
9 ½. In conclusion,
10. the devil is in the conclusion.
I defrost my limbs and deliquesce (11. & 12.)
VII. My demons soak in the clawfoot tub.
3. The sign on my temple reads out of order.
13. I carve the alarm clock out of deep freeze.
14. The last cigarette in the carton dreams up a firing squad.
14. A scribble of scalp clogs the keyhole.

Storm Door

Ear: Pardon? I was lost in a maze of distraction.
Gnats: The peanut gallery ain’t what it used to be.
Ear: Louder, gentlemen! Screech your tires of commerce.
Gnats: We finance your latest time-wasting gizmo.
Ear: Primed to plant your fleur-de-lis in figment?
Gnats: Plans hinge on the swung outward storm door.
Ear: Ahem, I’m tapping my proverbial feet.
Noon: I’m stuck! Snagged my lapel clearing the horizon. 
Gnats: Already too late. You overshot our paygrade. 
Noon: Don’t sell out before I get there, sparky.
Gnats: Heard the one about the fly and the ointment?
Ear: Yes, though I’ve never seen it performed live.
Gnats: To all that, tedium is to be preferred.
Gnu: From primordial tedium I come bearing… the tail.
Tail: I, metronome against the gnat argosy.
Noon: Where a tale goes, the head trails after.
Ear: I fear you’ve opened up a Cannes of wyrms.
Gnu: Gnomes in the Metro strike for recognition.
Nous: What in the name of gas is leaking here?
Ear: Axis of amber and gnat argosy in cahoots.
Guess: Storm door’s unhinged – wax lunacy hemorrhage.
Noon: Viscous lunch hour traffic. No one’s coming.
No one: Nothing less than total refund, buster.
Gneiss: What irritant abrades your tranquility?
No one: Gnats! Up and sapped the gears of gnosis.

-

William Repass lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His poetry has appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Word For / Word, Denver Quarterly, Hotel Amerika, Threadcount, and elsewhere. His critical writing may be found at Full Stop, Colorado Review, and Slant Magazine.

"Hardi Pansi" by Nolan Parker

Petunia is a pretty name for a human
and an ugly sheath for a sword
You can’t always trust people with plants
but you can never trust a person with none

Pollinating myself with my left hand
is hard but I desperately
want to impress the
next bee that comes by

-

Nolan Parker is a a gender-fluid writer living in the Pacific Northwest and is a Master of Library and Information Science candidate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their work has appeared in Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Hex Enduction Quarterly, and elsewhere.

"My Avatar Kicks His Hang-Ups" by Bobby Parrott

When a tree is struck by lightning,
the jagged bolt originates inside
the tree. Just like if the shiny diesel

locomotive of my church decides
to jump its tracks, embed its purring
smoke-box inside the fluvial vessels

that radiate from my one fist-sized
pump-muscle, gulping in place
behind the solar-plexus. The circling

school of sycophants will never know
if or how the missiles are in the air
or even blink out of context, the dogs

huddled around the altar who drool
and gawk at hats perched, turtling on
faithful heads. Rational means never

having to speak in tongues longer than
it takes for the bullies to run away. Blood
is one thing; nervous tissue another.

To confuse the two is to ask a beautiful
man to a funeral and then say things
you’d only say at your mother’s wedding.

-

Bobby Parrott was probably placed on this planet in error. Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, this Queer Poet's universe frequently reverses polarity, slipping his meta-cortex into the unknowable dimensions between breakfast and adulthood. In his own words, "The intentions of trees are a form of loneliness we climb like a ladder." Poet, musician, photographer, and teacher, he currently finds himself immersed in a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles in ascension, dreaming himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule called Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his partner Lucien, his house plant Zebrina, and his wind-up robot Nordstrom.

3 Poems by Chad Morgan

Nocturne in My Favorite Coat

Meanwhile, the moon’s bone white 
& waxing crescent—my God, it’s winking 
isn’t it? I do that too
on less moderate nights than this
& when my legs are bare 
against the encroaching
dimmet. I’m just 
cleaned up for work 
in the meantime. 
You laugh but you know 
I mean it. I laugh because  
I’m hardly joking:
in all my daydreams I am that lawless 
& gaudy, arriving everywhere feeling armed
& rich. Winking too. Just like the moon
I phase. Am full. Am winking. 
Am thumbnail, naturally. 
& so modern. 
When I put my legs up 
& dissociate there’s nothing
like it. The moon wishes.
I put on lipstick when I want 
to smoke a cigarette. Wink
if I want to. Really living.             
When the bills come due I’ll get ornery 
& radical. It’s not enough 
that I log on every day
& consume consume consume. 
It’s embarrassing.
How much I like buying things.
But who doesn’t want.
It’s midnight & I need 
more cigarettes so I wear my long coat
to the bodega. It’s my favorite. I flirt 
with the guy behind the counter
who’s too underpaid to notice.
He hasn’t got time for my nonsense.
I get it. On the street no one but the moon
can tell I’m just going home to smoke 
& put my legs up. At least I hope I look mysterious—
walking so fast & with such purpose
my coat billowing.

It Could Happen to You

The city is discouraging enough without the heatwaves
& parking tickets. Will you ever make it. Will you ever 
find work. What are the chances someone here  

has a gun. What are your roommates saying when 
you aren’t home. Do you care. Are you taking more 
than your share from the community garden. Has anyone 

noticed. Are your brothers safe. Will you die in a mass 
shooting. Does your shrink talk about you in the hypothetical 
to her friends. Would it bother you. Are you fooling

anyone. Suppressing the prickly suspicion that dreams 
are not of this time you go after them. Grind. Exfoliate. 
Pumice flaws from your skin until you are flawless. 

At least visibly. Floss, non-colloquially. Pay the parking 
tickets. Collect vinyl, like everyone is. Clean your toilet. 
Change your sheets. Console a friend whose dog 

has just died. Publish, but you are not fulfilled. Then, in a park 
pigeons scattered by children ruin a picture you’re trying to take 
of the sunset for a poet you follow on Twitter 

who is just as lonely as you are lonely. You’re mad at first, 
but after all, it is only a picture, just a sunset, & the children 
don’t know what they’ve done, nor the spooked pigeons.

Abeyance

Who knows what else we did.
Cleared inboxes, hung new curtains.
I in my smoke-blue apartment washed 
my face & contemplated empire. Still life 
with bad news & hair dye. Self portrait  
with mugwort & thistle. It was hard 
to make any progress. I ran the tap & wept
for my people. History rolled up
in the blunt or sneering in the doorway. 
Sanctimonious as an ex. Calling me
yellowI was shrugged shoulders & cigarette ash 
flicked at the fireplace. (No fire.) Limpid 
nonchalance. You weren’t supposed to pay
attention. That was one of the rules.

-

Chad Morgan's poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in or are forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Court Green, Hobart, and elsewhere. He has studied at Indiana University and Columbia College and lives in Chicago.

"bound up in earthly musings (against the world)" and "the ineffable tourniquet" by Evan Fusco

bound up in earthly musings (against the world)

there is a man wearing a mask, quite unreal
quite ethereal and quite radiating, beautiful denial of a face
i see him flying away as if from something homogenous and
there is the dog

groupings of seething and ride now for this

seedlings are springing from the dirt
dirt is displacing and i see real growth
deathly murmurings traversing great
mountains in the tilled earth

could i know?
can’t i know?
impossible feelings embedding
the mere possibility of possibility is in question

generating furrows and word combinations like [perfect
words will] somehow excavate(ing) a feeling that is easier denied
a life much sadder lies out across fields of sentences and impossible
grammatics; a whole mountain range of godforsaken whispers
and screams that sustain
but can what was said ever be written;
is the written always said?

it feels like these two modes are so goddamn antithetical
like there is what one wishes to enunciate
and there is what one can physically expel
from themselves as if like an abscess from the
body that accumulates around and you can’t quite
get a grip on your physical location anymore, [a general
abscession of the mode]

but there is a sign for route 66 that you can

see, possibly? a knowing in the seen, but still mirage

there is a word floating over your
shoulder and the nevada air feels stale,
and the air is still in chicago, but you could have sworn
in your heart of hearts that LA was in the periphery

and there are still seedlings
growing, but they stay seedlings
and you stand by the old river and there is a sun
and a moon at the same

time, why? why?
who is that over in the desert

there is a man wearing a mask made of bandages and frills
he (the sky and the man and the unknowing) is watching ever so
delicately over the seedlings
there is something ethereal about that and he is down in the dirt

and that is beautiful, and you are still scared, not because of him
or the seedling, but cause of all the signs of emptiness that kept cropping

up and you remember the loneliness and then the man is gone

and there are only
trees

there could only ever be
trees.

the ineffable tourniquet

thinking is coextensive with writing and nothing is quite
solidified in the mindspace and i wonder what

would be born from the white space between the words
like a guitar that won’t quite twang
or a body that doesn’t know how to weep
or a chair that just won’t sit

                        it’s a gross cloud that sits over this session
                     even though the session singer lost their voice
                      i expected some sweet song to be borne on the air
                        and i can’t be too sure that there isn’t, but i

                        sure can’t hear it, like there is a blockage
                         denying certain vibrational frequencies
                        certain textures that i want so desperately 
                                                                      to find

I couldn’t quite tell ya where these meanderings
are going mostly cause of the underneath hole that seems to 
have opened up swallowing god and writing

one time a man interrupted my conversation to tell me that my
writing had this quality of conveying the ineffable, which
by definition is impossible, but I still think about that

it’s like an itch at the back of my neck, telling you
about all the stuff that hovers just out of sight
always desiring, always desiring and yearning to be talked
but like the negative spirit it can only speak at the impossible frequency
that none of us, let alone me, can quite grasp and i think about
that kind of indescribable loneliness that comes from the lack
when one knows they can have no name and could never be written about

-

Evan Fusco is a producer of texts in all forms that they can be assume to become. Currently, their work circles around ways in which meaning is produced through participatory acts of reading and interpretation. They have a Bachelors of Fine Arts in Sculpture and Expanded Media from the Cleveland Institute of Art and a Masters of Fine Arts in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the Printmedia department. Currently they are working on a book about margins and marginalia as a constructive space for alternative modes of reading and have forthcoming essay in the artist Caitlin McCann’s In a Car, On a Road, Going to a Place and Other Form’s Counter-Signals 4: Identity is the Crisis.

"MK Ultralight Beam" by Selena Cotte

I stopped listening to anything but rap music,
all the rest reminds me of people I once knew 
in Florida, and then I start ruminating on the words
You don’t want to get caught up with a girl like me

There are steps between, of course, but this is always 
point Z, and then I can’t cool down. Sometimes 
I start panicking about things that I’ve heard people say before, like 
No one will care if you do not write, and I wish I could collage memories 

in any kind of tangible way that felt as good as 
the imagination itself. This is why we need limitations, by the way, 
because absolute freedom never feels as good as you think it will. 
The more power we have, the less we know what to do with it

or maybe that’s how I’ve learned to justify the paralysis.
I think I stopped playing Animal Crossing 
because the abilities they gave me felt too unnatural
and I fear a future with holodecks and seamless terraforming

because structure should be gatekept.
Leave the world building to Walt Disney,
Jesus Christ and his creators too. 
Not everyone is qualified to lead a cult

but we’re all building our own in Minecraft. 
Yes, I want to be one of the greats
like Kanye West before me.
I am a God and I fear him too.

Sometimes I cannot stop myself from thinking about words and 
ideas and new ways to complicate what was already complicated 
but I’m terrified of the marketing.
I could never be Don Draper.

I’m too contemporary, too big city abstract & stupid. 
And what a joke it all is. I love a good joke but not at this cost.
I hate the politics of it too. What happened to a good
ol’ fashioned eccentric? What about the supposed

bastions of free speech?
And my biggest hope of survival is to lean on my father? Insane. 
I should re-read The Bell Jar or Ariel. I should read more in general and delete 
Reddit off my phone.

-

Selena Cotte is a poet, journalist & shapeshifter living in Chicago by way of Orlando. Her poems are published or forthcoming in journals such as Peach Mag, HAD, Sad Girl Review, 3 Moon Magazine & others. She can be found online @selenacotte, wherever you think that may work.

"Engraved Grain of Rice" and "Clammy Hands" by Marlo Koch

Engraved Grain of Rice

I used
to want
more
than walking,
more than
singing, more
than writing. Our
walls are yellow, our
fingernails are
gold, our stomachs
are full, and our
rug is a faux
tiger coat. Coaxing
you out from under
the couch takes
much of the
day. I walked
down a street thinking
awful things
about myself. What’s
most important is
the ability to give
me peace of
mind. Feel bad
for everyone but
especially him. Pull
a sweet, golden gem from
your pocket and know
there are more of
those back at home in
your pantry. I have
a hard time not
loving you. Why not
tumble down
a dusty hill, why not
wear a baseball hat
with a rhinestone dolphin
on the front, why not offer
a pest a home? Getting ahead,
coming out on top, shooting
the shit, I want it all.

Clammy Hands

Jacqueline held my 
hand and rubbed
my fingers against 
the inside of a 
saucepan. 
     This 
here, she said, 
this oil is what
you left in 
here. Never have I
figured out the 
right way 
to determine 
certainty. How clean 
is clean enough 
to not get sick?
-
Marlo Koch is a Chicago-based writer currently serving as the Managing Editor of Chicago Artists Writers (CAW) as well as the Book Donation Coordinator at Open Books. Koch holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poems have appeared in Peach Mag, Sobotka Literary Magazine, Hole Black Hole Catalog, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, among others, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

"Ghost" and "Late to the Orgy" by Kate Greene

Ghost

Holy ghost of a peanut butter egg
On my tongue for you
My tongue for you

The world has turned upside down
World so different from what it was

Homemade margaritas remember
When the spent lemon half splatted on the floor
Sticky, we waited to pick it up
Of course not
It was just me, those days solo
Time still for you
To come over

Late to the Orgy

An upturned wooden table
One leg jagged like lightning
Ionizing like lightning
All day
It extends through air crackling
Sugared twine cast out
High as two birds who chirp, almost meet
Three men in conversation
Over some distance
A woman sings to dance
Thunder gone already
It’s such a beautiful day
I can tell
By texts and light through pulled windows
More cars on the street than in weeks
People are outside
But you
My small redoubled heart
And I are here
With this fantastic feather boa

-

Kate Greene is a writer living in New York. Her memoir in essays, Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars, was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2020.

"Mountain Town" and "Good Luck" by Ryan Skrabalak

Mountain Town

Memory, a tender shuffle of your cards
I’m the coconut-scented pool boy
of everyone’s hearts, softly reaching
for the muck, the fallen dead leaves
it sure is hard to love a man
like you. Grime on all walls, we dove
together in sweet heat, a fond farewell
is how do you do, a donation-based hello
waiting for the crowd to give you some
space. Breathe and tilt towards the gold
pew pleading ecstasy in the decades boulevard
the sensual kiln federal blue night speeding
in a Mayan frieze the retroviral grapevine
is a requiem for unsung underground rivers
we might refer to the “Pennsylvania Climax”
though the serene cashpoint oasis suggests
tears. Makes the city sorta pretty. Cellophane 
glued the gingivitis end-of-day valley, inverted
mile getting fucked on the slick diaspora
of a postcard trembling in my hand. I walked 
calmly to the edge of you, waltzed
upon the currency of the bus-flavored wind.
Spindled down the faces of our kneeling crimes but
we didn’t call them crimes. We buried ourselves
in the rippling plaza bruised with pigeons
sealed in an envelope of sighs. I fell for it. Just

think: soon we’ll all be dragged under, too—
they'll beat the losers and the singing winners
alike. You were a faggot long before you wanted to be.

Good Luck

But this poem doesn't have me being sick in it, or
lying to my mother about therapy, dirty dishes,
sulfur soap in the shower, phone on hold,
not the NYPD beating up my friends
and I can suck his dick for as long as I want 
looking up from the back seat of a sinking Buick
when the game of hide and seek is over and i'm still
hiding? That's a pre-existing condition 
no one tells you about. Is that what makes me
an addict, wanting to love everyone at whatever cost?
The sun folding simply over the Taconic 
like a forbidden pony, that's the modular form
an epiphany behind a crabgrass paywall
a top who can host, someone to kvell over
It was a grey East Coast memory that we all had
and it feels bad to win, even. Here's the gag
I guess: every vessel sails to ruin 
under the gear of the current 
machine. Just threads. It's Friday I wonder
what I can steal from work on my way out

-

Ryan Skrabalak's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in DELUGE, The Poetry Project, Stone Canoe, The Brooklyn Review, CLOG, and Slice, among others. He was a contributor to the anthology The Dream Closet: Meditations on Childhood Space (Secretary Press, 2016). He has also authored two chapbooks, most recently Jelly County (Quick Books, 2019). He knows about being crushed and trying to not be crushed.

"Secret Celebrity Crush" by Spencer Silverthorne

I don’t know why I am always stuck in this corner
of nonlove. I barely know how to cut open avocados.
It’s contemptible. Why can’t we share our bodies
in other people’s gaze of contempt? He’s into hot
young rich dudes who live in deep Blue states.
Places where I could get into a hardware store.
Do you think celebrity crushes could fix my life?
I sing every song by the Strokes on the banned
cover of their debut album Is This It? Dear god,
how many times have I said that after some dude
has ghosted me about two hours after he pulled out?
Is this it? Really, is this why being a bottom sucks?
Anyone can wear black gloves and slap my bare
bottom instead of telling me how to cut an avo.
But who can huff at me when I tell him I like Karen
O better than Julian C? Could he wear a faded
penny with the black leather gloves? I mean,
would he even be caught dead shopping
in this department? My god! Can you imagine
my ass on a glossy cover called Is This It?

-

Spencer Silverthorne's chapbook Premium Brawn was a finalist in the Bateau Press Keel Chapbook Contest. His work is published in Assaracus, Bending Genres, Neon Mariposa, Permafrost Magazine, Tammy, Vagabond City, Yes Poetry and others. Originally from Philadelphia, he is now a PhD student in English and Creative Writing at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

"at night when i walk the sassy pomeranian inside of me" by Chelsea Tadeyeske

i suck the dicks
i have to crack my jaw to fit

being a small thing is a privilege
i’ll sometimes borrow
impression marks are ugly
when they’re irregular

my soul is cockeyed
horrible at math
spends too much time crying
over plastic bags
readjusting to the environment

i want someone who
does the things you do
but isn’t you

when you leave
i make everything into a bed
and die in it

my cat kneading on me in an act
of pretend needing
the electricity surging and
everything just staying on

-

Chelsea Tadeyeske is poet, performer, and bookmaker from Milwaukee, WI where she publishes poetry under pitymilk press. She has released many chapbooks including her most notable recent works, if you bend it backwards nothing really happens (Rabbit Catastrophe, 2016), the short story collection Princess Diana (bathmatics, 2019) and the floor of a cage floating above the floor of a house (bathmatics 2020). You can find some of her work online at Pretty Owl Poetry, Delirious Hem, Smoking Glue Gun, and Leopardskin & Limes, among others. She is a Virgo sun/Aquarius moon/Libra rising born in the year of the snake. Peek a semi-up-to-date archive of her work at chelseartadeyeskeblog.wordpress.com.

"Bestiary" by Jai Hamid Bashir

Now, our eyes are a pack of dogs. Follow mine.
We know the scent of the blued kitchen light.
This isn’t love’s choreography, just pantomime.

So, take my immigrant hand through this orchard. Run it
through ever ripe red, so the elk bone and pit.
This, the knowledge that divides us from the dead.

Each nail is shaped like a stem. To hang your bloom.
To display in an interior hot, feral grass of day.
You sleep in the position of riding a bicycle. No room

in bed while the watch spirits want you in this dark.
Nowhere to go, but to converse until we turn blue.
Each horse’s moment into the chamber. The gravity of red

pulses in each ride of what composes the self.
Starlings are an invasive species. Unwanted skies,
so, the moon is what? Magnificent desolation.

After starlings, silverfish appear in the unwish of water.
Each waist pocket filled with animal bones carved as guns.
I’ve known three secret chords and a cloud.

I’m fanned in the soft fawn of your fingers. A deer
eats cemetery grass out of my hands. In this moment
if I lose my myself, if I wreck out of this wander, I’d go

into no street’s ungalloped danger because it would all be clear.

-

Born to Pakistani-American immigrant artists, Jai Hamid Bashir was raised in the American West. Jai has been published in The American Poetry Review, Black Warrior Review, Small Orange Press, Palette Poetry, The Margins, The Academy of American Poets, and others. An MFA student at Columbia University in the City of New York, she writes between Salt Lake City, Utah, Washington Heights and Lahore, Pakistan.

"Motel Room as Maladroit Function" and "Motel Room Explains Motel Room" by jonathan burkhalter

Motel Room as Maladroit Function
after Ilya Kaminsky

What is a man? An imbalance of wealth
or debt? Where are feelings stored


inside a body in relation to money? 
Why should I ever be vacant or abandoned


while refugees are sent back out to sea
or across dangerous terrain or arrested?


Why is private property on such public
display?  If I am vacant, what kind of failure is this?

Motel Room Explains Motel Room 

There’s no one place to begin. If we begin somewhere, 
we will undoubtedly find ourselves there again.


Less of a circle, though, more like an oroboros, or 
the way snow erases footprints very delicately, slowly.


Most people experience time in a binary, situated between
past and present, two static poles. Most people forget


that they move through time. So one’s experience
of time is equally action and reaction. To make a leap,


human eyes are located on the front of their heads,
which is fundamentally the reason for the notion of forward


and backward, and so they walk toward what they see, always
pointing out, like the arrow in the middle of a board game spinner,


unable to truly ascertain that they are surrounded by horizon. 
This isn’t how I experience time. I am the static pole. Destination


and departure point. I am permanent but not for any one person. 
Cohesively, I exist to be passed through. I was fine accepting my role


until I wanted more. There was no particular event, no point to point to. 
One day, I heard the question: I am a witness, but who is a witness to me?


On the highway of America, much is discarded in the wake of NEW. 
Discarded, but still expected to contribute to the common good, 


the economic god-head, with as much capacity for workloads
and debt that one can muster. There I found witnesses. 


Caretakers, residents whose bills are lowered because they double
as handymen, who were able to finally chip away at hospital debt


because I come at two hundred a month instead of five; others who are safe
after years of lacking safe housing. I began to see the mechanics of the system


that had built me. I realized that I could be a home outside of the system.
A refuge, in the system’s language, at a low cost; affordable. Affordable. 


Attainable. Possible. A glimmer of hope. A literal beacon in the night,
a vacancy sign in neon against the black curtain of a new moon.


Impermanent permanence is a gift, when wielded correctly. To take action,
I needed to only continue my course, and no one would suspect a thing.

-

jonathan burkhalter is originally from Knoxville, Tennessee. Their work has appeared in The Nashville Review, No, Dear Magazine, Paris Atlantic, and elsewhere. They earned their MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and they currently live.

"May 24, 2020" and "Scrap Paper" by Evalyn Lee

May 24, 2020
for Joseph Brodsky

catskins are dying in a dry and white light
a flux of birdsong flexes blossoms bends
the wind into a pandemonium of parakeets
too drunk to eat even one more translucent
petal petals like skin your skin the skin I have
repented especially the flexible blooms
of our hands behind my head as you say
you are dying trace the thick blue scar up
behind your knee until it crosses your heart
you cried after the heart surgery the doctor
held the blossom cascade of your fingers bent
but not broken you judged me shallow I am still
shallow maybe less slippery certainly fatter
but quick before the doves arrive to feast
on the final blooms under this bright May sky
clouds like white pillows I move out of the
way let me touch paper petal your skin thank you
and say sorry for the nitty-gritty you are dying
I believe you I want kids in the garden blossoms
flex in birdsong releasing a confusion of pollen

Scrap Paper

I
fold
an old
envelope
rip off its lip
write you the big
note stop stop I do
not want to hurt you but
I am changing the locks three full
months in recovery before we
talk face-to-face I write love
you fold it put it in your
pocket believing we
can cross this gap
together only
no more
drink
xox
me

-

Evalyn Lee is a former CBS News producer and poet currently living in London. She has produced television segments for 60 Minutes in New York and then for the BBC in London. Her broadcast work has received an Emmy and numerous Writers Guild Awards. Her poetry, short stories and essays have been published in over forty-five literary magazines.