"Non Pearl Body" and "Quilting" by Nathan Wade Carter

Non Pearl Body

God’s eyes are yellow.

I peer into them
in my celestial bed.

The color of god.
Heaven is yellow.

The stars spell things
whether we want them to or not.

Whether they mean to or not.
Whether it matters or not.

Words mean things.
I didn’t think I’d need to say this.

This very long tunnel.
An electric light every so often.

This underground bend
through the mountain.

My eyes get used to this dim.

I have yet
to connect

enough dots
to make a picture.

I stay in bed for days
boring a hole in this spot.

I am surrounding
my foreign body in nacre,

making my own iridescent mother
and being her.

I have this hard object
within my soft tissue.

My mantle has made something
valuable.

My immune response
is beautiful.

-

Quilting

A tectonic inch
My oceans jostled
A cup of water
On a bumped table
An earthly hiccup
Waves pull away
To rush in
Cities reclaimed
I am a new landscape
After fishing the lake dry
After wearing holes
These knees
After spitting
This wind
I sit in a puddle
And pretend I am
A gold fish
All forget and yellow
I use the last pencil
Down to its ferrule
Which holds a finished eraser
One cannot erase what
One cannot record
I survive
A quilt
Warming
Assembled well
Even I say thank you
But there’s a gap
An ocean
I worry
I broke
Without noticing
I am built different
Too many years of feeling I need to be
Fucked or never loved
A sand castle erected so proud
So bound to fall down

I will not sleep with you
I will not live with you
I will not have sex
I don’t want to

-

Nathan Wade Carter is a queer, grey-a poet, musician, and artist living in Portland, Oregon. His poetry can and will be found in Heavy Feather Review, Horse Less Press, Souvenir, Powder Keg Magazine, The Fem, and others. He is editor and founder of SUSAN / The Journal. He writes and performs songs under the name Purrbot. He is recording a new album called DNR. Find him online at nathanwadecarter.com.

"Zodiac Killer" by Naomi Bartlett

Always            through glass you screamed into yourself

before            July knew you before Newports before morphine and blank-slate

catharsis         through county fair dry heat wet cotton candy vomit on asphalt and there

Daddy             sweats oils and carcinogens shrieks fury bellows candor he

echoes            holy illness he is chapped and necking with indigence he is

fifty                  years old and holding you by the wrist taking you to heathen

gods                who breathe peek-a-boo, you are doomed and you’re salty in susurrus sobbing

honey              gumming eyelids viscid and glistening glazed like windows like his eyes after –

I                         am sorry

jarred                childhood on the carousel and

killjoy                filler remember black dahlia remember lust remember bottleneck choke and tang

I’ll

let                      you be sawtoothed let you soak in stagnation let

my                     hotels grow stale leering through peepholes pillow mints melted face

neighbors         coughing phlegm lungs all rot and entropy so you

overdose          on lullaby and angel dust smoke disassociation

pathologically   drowning transience in a flash flood of ether

quickly              gorging yourself on lapse and navel-gazing you

ran                   laughing into the arms of

some               soft eggshell canopy where mother waits smelling of

turpentine       like when you were a child and played God

under              the nothing sky coyote song tearing holes pulping life becoming

vacant             and after rats there were Gilas and then jackrabbits and finally

women            preening then sloshing beautifully to the soft eggshell floor brittle limbs now

xenophobic    membranes ripped apart thorax and abdomen merging

you                  said death will know us all you dissolved into trees you dissected yourself

you                  sat down on the Ferris wheel rode it to its

zenith              and you rode round and round round and round all through the town.

-

Naomi Bartlett lives in Nashville, TN. She spends her days writing, painting, playing the drums, and plotting her escape from the food service industry. She is currently working on completing her BA at Belmont University.

"2 Portraits" by Kevin Gwozdz

Portrait

 ‘don’t forget the béchamel’
and enjoy the magnifying glass
a mention to some sort of searching

musk rat grapes

what relevance is there found in spring?

     motorcycle interruption

bleeding hearts. Hummingbird tree. Spring forgives
the abuses of nature

provisional but new opportunities
soil, air, foliage

Cuban food.
A thank you card exemplifies more flowers
slow to lower the anecdotes found
or the slight of brain

the boast of a routine that is absent
and its absence
becomes causative to subject
and object

The paint is drying
and then rewet

painterly from a photograph

An object to transcend written
painting
remember: ghost plant
magnet for ghosts
the insipid humming
return to disillusion

What will become of the words?
A painting became its painter

An exercise in self-restraint—                                             active words of inaction
‘paradox

a lapsing of time sufficed.

Portrait

in ultramarine
sexual tension
is taking shape

and color: peanut and walnut
could be senseless narcissism

narcissist: don’t force the words

they just come,














‘you can’t hold onto

                                    a wisp of smoke

                                                                                    not for very long’