"quick life" by Livio Farallo

shrink like a
raining cloud.
my heart between ribs of
sky and earth
squeezed hard
as the ocean’s
bottom by countless
tons of its pressing hands.
the world fallen
elsewhere is
unnamed, but battles
back, climbs trees,
coughs to the grave.
hands hold my
head. yours,
slapping the face
of wind like
midwestern straw,
and then from under a
chicken, soft as the
the young girl’s hand,
a story is taken away:
a child cooks into
adulthood, shrinking
down to nothingness.

i can’t read the passage in this light,
can’t taste the salted memory of meat.
an ice shaving glaciates
on my tongue.
these cliffs hurry by.
this
sorrow
is
incorrect.

-

Livio Farallo is co-editor of Slipstream Magazine and Professor of Biology at Niagara County Community College in Sanborn, New York. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Blue Collar Review, Scud, Helix, Biscuit Hill, Beatnik Cowboy, Rattle, Spillway, Spelunker Flophouse, and others.

"Three Animals" by Henry Goldkamp

1

I have an extra shoulder blade. Some call it a “wing.”
Exactly 50% of angels have this defect.

I like it when I catch God looking.
He looks away.

2

I have a missing stomach. Some call it a “miracle.”
About 95% of these particular surgeries are successful.

Eating solids and drinking liquids with a lover like you is easy.
We dine. We dash. All done.

3

I have an optional hair. Some call it “rat tail.”
What’s a buncha fly-eyed zeroes like them gonna do about it?

I mind my business.
Shit.

-

Henry Goldkamp rehearses his poetics out of a small garage in New Orleans. His poetry appears most recently in Narrative, Indiana Review, the minnesota review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, and Best New Poets 2021. His public art projects have been covered by NPR and Time, and he reads poems for Tilted House, The Adroit Journal, and Bayou. More and more at henrygoldkamp.com.

3 Poems by Dalton Day

TO SAY ANYTHING TO ANYONE

When faced with overwhelming
calamity or tenderness, the man said
oh, wow. I loved the man for this.
It wasn’t even morning & yet
I myself was faced with something,
an understanding perhaps,
of the way stacking works.
I should’ve told the man this,
but I didn’t. I was too overwhelmed
to say anything to anyone, except.

THE TREES ARE FULL OF CONSEQUENCE

See, me, standing beneath
what light makes it through,
wound without wound.
I am kidding.
I am impossible without
a wall that is cool
to the touch, a window
that looks out over various
griefs. See, you, sitting
in the kind of dark
that only wants you to know
how a decision gets made.

THE PLUM

Because of the sweetness of a plum I shall be taking the afternoon.
I will take the afternoon to the lake, & I will teach the afternoon how
to swim. The afternoon will be invigorated by this new possibility, &
will move through the water for hours & hours, which mean nothing
to the afternoon, the lake, or the plum. When the afternoon looks to
the shore for me, I will be there. Why would I abandon it? I am not a
person who is convinced of the ways of the world. I am like a
pebble, in that way.

-

Dalton Day is a preschool teacher and the author of Exit, Pursued and Spooky Action at a Distance. He can be found at tinyghosthands.com.

"The Dog That Resides Above Me Knows How to Cry When it’s Quiet" and "Space Off" by Benjamin Niespodziany

The Dog That Resides Above Me Knows How to Cry When it’s Quiet

In the morning, I’ll paint
the very top
of a lighthouse. It will take me
all day. I’ll arrive
home late. The lake
this time of year. It’s why
they call it a mirror.

Space Off

To pause the opera
he bow ties bow
ties. He tries
on wine thumbs.
The man’s helmet
looks like a spelling bee.
His daughter wants to be an explorer.
She knows the desert is not dead.

-

Benjamin Niespodziany's work has appeared in Fence, Fairy Tale Review, Hobart, and others. Along with being featured in the Wigleaf Top 50, his writing has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. His chapbook The Northerners (2021) was released through above/ground press and his chapbook Pickpocket the Big Top (2022) was released through Dark Hour Books.

3 Poems by Evan Nicholls

Knight in an Old-Fashioned Book

I am actually very apprehensive about
getting on the horse.

Eaten by a Tiger

I am actually really enjoying getting
acquainted on a personal level.

The Sharks Smell Blood

I am actually not the chum I am
the captain’s beautiful son.

-

Evan Nicholls is a poet and collage artist from Virginia. His chapbook of poems and collages, Holy Smokes, is available from Ghost City Press. Find more of his work at enicholls.com.

"City of Confusion" by Peter Leight

All day long the dark part of our city is lightening at the same time as the light part of our city is darkening—the walls are creamy and lumpy, like tapioca, and every door is a double door, as in a restaurant, swinging one way then swinging back like the kind of interpretation that depends on what you think:  we’re not even sure where we’ve been. There are chairs in the middle of the sidewalk where you don’t usually find furniture—when you sit down you don’t even know what you need to get up for, is it time?   All day long the lights are bright then go out altogether, and we look at each other the way you look at something in the lost and found, something that belongs to you if you can only find it.  It’s true, we often mix up the fight and flight signals, covering our teeth and uncovering our thighs, swerving or veering unnecessarily, turning to the side or turning around—everybody says you need to remember where you haven’t been.  Narrow homes appear on wide streets and wide homes on narrow streets, like a kind of mirroring—it’s dark where it is light, as if there’s a dark source inside a light source we don’t even know where we are when we’re right here!  People ask you where you’ve been when they don’t even know where they’ve been!  Of course, it is easier when everybody is close together, walking around together, checking on each other or holding onto each other, like a microphone that picks up everything, I’m not even sure what this is an example of. 

-

Peter Leight lives in Amherst, MA. He has previously published poems in Paris Review, AGNI, Antioch Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, New World, Tupelo Quarterly, and other magazines.

"Hot Couch" by Brett Belcastro

I was completely lost!
The weirdos following me with cameras—
they broke up,
and then I could only talk to phone scammers.

Something they learned is that I’m not a good cook—
I may not want much for myself
but I want a meal,
and I can no longer eat glitter!

I had spent everything on porch-bomb traps,
and all the drones would deliver were bombs
and 3d printers to print bombs
which exploded as soon as I’d print them, of course.
that was sort of embarrassing

But at least with their cameras
they would catch the moment that I,
waking up on a too-hot couch
in their unfinished basement
worked up the courage to cut through that haze
and rasp: “I’ve had enough. Come to my porch
and I promise, no more bombs. All I want
is for us to gather and show some love.”
That was in the golden age of YouTube,
don’t ask me when. Probably 2008.
It gave me chills.

-

Brett Belcastro lives with his partner and an enormous wolf-dog. His work has appeared in the Cobalt Review, Platform Review, and Tupelo Quarterly.

"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
yellow. I 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.