Ben Kline

Reading is Fundamental

Lesson 1

What’re we gonna do tonight? / Lotus-legged circle in Grandma’s den / around a foot high pile of newspapers to roll / I say we drive down to Huntington / giving good face around the room / the category best friends for Jon and Henri / guest starring cousin Pat and Wesley as Henri’s boo /and go to the Driftwood for drag / boys, ya turn me / Damn I love this song, and then me / teetering off the bass rolling from Jon’s new stereo / from a cassette tape by / a beautiful brown woman in white tee and snug faded jeans / There’s a lot for a Friday paper / upside down round and round, instinctively / Honey, people like sales / Trickle down as a big move up to / any other side of town / respectively, as it were / I say we go to the lake / but I was from a farm, away / from the burn of / knowing, or not

Lesson 2

That reporter / dispatched from Tehran / needs to shave / where the claws of metal eagles failed to make fists / Right? Bad news should come from / saturated blues and greens on Grandma’s new RCA / good looking people / But the former actor in the first commercial / Can we watch something else? / promised a great America again / I mean, you know they’ll kill them all / not knowing the coming need for kindness / Pat, can you reach the dial? / More papers rolled, stacked pyramid / Who the hell’s buying shoes at K-Mart? / Almost time for their bike route / I dunno, honey. Your trailer cousins? / Henri lifted an invisible tea cup to his grin and winked / and Pat laughed, Nah/ my ma buys mine at Unger’s / and I wiggled my toes / squeezed into unbreathable plastic / brown Payless sneakers

Lesson 3

Guys, look. This was my uncle Reggie / Wesley unfolded a paper / Top left photo, a young black man halfway through / life at the bottom of the obits / sad bits, Grandpa always said / between sips after coming home from the mill / Jeez, lotta dead people today, whole page worth / Imagine dying without your name / no Jon, Henri, Wesley or Pat / just fledglings smashed flat from sudden impact, all flung / into the trash hole behind the horse barn / Was really sorry to hear about him, Wes / into flames angry enough to melt everything, even the boys / later left in trash bags by anxious orderlies passing the bill to hell / Thanks, Pat, but truth, we weren’t close / after heaven refused to help / They think he had cancer / Imagine knowing without / words for your knowledge /but I don’t think they’ll ever know for sure

Lesson 4

Ok, let’s wrap this up and get going / Pat finished his pile and mine, unknowingly rubbing / my arm aflame with a feeling he / Folks need to get their news / would articulate loudly a decade later / in a locked stall at the mall / I still say we go to the Driftwood / The papers stuffed into smudged eggshell canvas / bags slung over shoulders / Hey everybody, having fun again? / as they strutted toward the back-porch door / as Henri insisted the dress made / by someone named Mackie / was fabulous, like a gown / woven with moonbeams and starlight / and I wanted to / know how they have fun / go with them again / on the handlebars down 4th Street over / Grandma’s objections and Jon’s denials / when my mom found out / I mean it matched her lashes! / that Henri and Wesley were demonstrating French / kissing for Pat the last time Jon / babysat me on Friday afternoon

Lesson 5

I can’t believe she / halfway through a daydream about Spider-Man vs the Thing / called us faggots / Laughter opened the door / She didn’t call she yelled / like an old piano finishing / with some jazzy ad libs / notes ahead of the melody as / bags crumpled on the kitchen floor / That’s because she doesn’t know about Bobby / joining the invisibility of wishes and prayers / Or maybe she does / Crosstalk cut the tar cloud / of Grandma’s after-nap slims / like thwip thwips from web shooters trying / to stop Grimm from landing a kapow / ugh who cares! Everyone has a secret. Sooooo, / where it might actually hurt / where are we going tonight? / My mom would be back soon / taking me home with the groceries and pizza, four / loaves of bland wonder / for the deep freezer

Lesson 6

Can we please go back / upstairs in Jon’s room, thigh to thigh with Pat on the lower bunk / to that dress? / Jon closed the door as Henri / adjusted boombox dials, / Because it was everything and the leftovers / restarting the cassette / Is that Miss Ross? / my small crooked finger turning their heads to / the poster of the giant black lady on / the back of the door She seems / shiny like that Mackie / and their laughter smothered the beat and the bass as Jon / took me by the wrists and spun me to dizzy / That’s Grace lil man, Grace Jones, a whole / different kind of goddess / the boys a blur and I wanted to know / Is she fabulous too? / but my fab wobbled loose, flopping / off my lips, my maw not ready / for such girth / Honey, she is / fierce! and she resembled Storm right before she summons lightning to blow up Sentinels

Lesson 7

I think she looks like a superhero / Wesley gives me a second spin, higher / and faster, lacking the safety of being kin, thus / She kinda does / possessing a thrill unknown / so like the complete opposite of most people round here / People who might envy the freedom in this room / You’ll figure it out when you’re older / so small so safe / Or he won’t because he’s...not? / but I was / wanted to be / could not imagine / being any other way / Should we be teaching him how to read? / I could already read the newspaper. (Wesley Carter II, 43, died / at the King’s Daughter Hospital on….) / Faces too, but / I took most note of names, / Is it ever too early? / especially after that they were gone / Have you seen him arch his eyebrow? / and my nights grew too long, the crickets / harmonious mmhmms floating / atop an unheard syncopated chorus of triple snaps

---

Ben Kline hails from west Appalachian farm country and lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, writing poems and telling stories, drinking more coffee than might seem wise. His work is forthcoming or has recently appeared in DIAGRAM, Homology Lit, Pidgeonholes, Screen Door Review, Impossible Archetype, 8 Poems, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, petrichor, Riggwelter, Grist Online, and many more. You can read more at www.benkline.online.

---

Note: This poem was previously published in Grist Online.

Aly Pierce

DW093: Lewd Acts Black Eye Blues

a list of things that aren’t gutting me recently
would be easier--I left my car window open for the rain

everything gets wrecked no matter
how hard you try, why not make that the goal

only drawn to hands with the capability
to clench, && i can tell you don’t have it in you

my lewd acts are escalating-- i’m old enough
to start understanding the whispers in my brain

as a kid playing lions, the most intimate act
watching the other pretend to pee-- the first girl

who called me creative in bed when i pulled her
into my lap-- old enough now that these things don’t scare me

i can look someone in the eye who turns their twinkling
intent at me--old enough to shy away

or engage-- old enough to let my body beg
even when you don’t know what i’m asking

it’s all run away with me--it’s all i see
in the grocery aisle at target, the young stud

and his brood, their shopping cart, the plump front
of his pregnant partner & their string of small animals

the way we play as if we’re them--is there anything more fun
than lewd acts? but all of this is stuck up in my brain

&& i’m that leaky hose again with a thumb stuck up
my spout--leave me alone unless i don’t want you to

come listen to the depth of my shame, how brutal it drags me
under & how i had one glimpse of purpose for my downcast eyes,

a sliver of permission to keep them there

---

Aly Pierce lives in Beverly, MA where she drinks coffee & mails you records from Deathwish Inc. Her debut collection The Visible Planets is available now from Game Over Books.

Travis Lau

A Lover Dead in His Twenties

After Adrienne Rich

1.

Just before they signed away 
your right to 
                                     life, 

you thought to hide hints 
behind your 
gasps

because you knew 
I loved to lean 
          into you,

to listen actively 
as it was the closest 
we could ever be.


2.

The grain of your voice:
I did not know that
memorials bore
such textures.

(The ivy has already
strangled your
name.)


3.

The planes of       you 
were changing, 

but you chose never 
to make much of it

because that wasn’t how 
you were raised:

to outline yourself in 
enough green 
to be envied,
enough red 
to be a target.

A shot
in the back is
the present’s
plain language.

I learned from you 
that being a cipher
could be a powerful 

desire.


4.

Wojnarowicz said 
when it was all over,

he wanted us to 
just drop 
his body 
on the steps 
of the fucking FDA,

but I don’t know 
if I have the 
        heart 
to do that to you,
you, 
                  you
(who I failed to
love with any
grace) 

even as your body is something 
sharper now than it ever was in life

because you refuse the right to
amnesia,
the linchpin of 
home and country

reddened rusty 
by your and our brothers’
tainted blood, 

for our touching
needed to be untouching

until they were distant forms
that only became

hard fact
in the flows of longing.


5.

How am I supposed to
cast this flower upon your soil,
how do I tell the truth of you

when the very words I need

were the ones that once
bound you,
hurt you,
stole away your name?

eulogy:
true praise.


6.

By the time you could not move,
you no longer bothered with

the headlines, 
cheap pundits

because the story
still eludes

the dainty fingers
of press and camera:

you were already
too busy
cleaving hard
to that imperceptible
space             beyond
their line of sight.


7.

A warrior
burying
                  a warrior:

(no, that’s not right.)

you would want
me to write,

however inexact
or exacting,

about a life
beyond reproach

so that none of us
must apologize

for doing nothing
wrong.

---

Travis Chi Wing Lau received his Ph.D. in English at the University of Pennsylvania and is a postdoctoral teaching fellow at the University of Texas at Austin. Alongside his academic writing and public scholarship, his poetry has appeared in Glass Poetry, The New Engagement, Nat. Brut, Matador Review. His chapbook, The Bone Setter, was recently published with Damaged Goods Press. [travisclau.com/@travisclau]

---

Note: This poem was previously published in Glass Poetry for the Writers Resist series.

Samuel J. Fox

There are Times I Dress Up so I Don't Feel Despair

Some nights I lie awake, dressed in a wedding tuxedo. I am on my best behavior. When I can’t sleep, I practice my vows to anything listening: the moth flirting with the banker’s lamp, the cobwebs I’ve yet to purge, shadows on the wall that are really an angel’s hands kneading the darkness.

I forge rings out of cigarette smoke and slip my finger through them.

In college, I fell in love and since then I’ve been falling one year through the next. 

If the God of love is present, speak in a way that I will pretend I heard: selective hearing. Regardless, this tie is too tight; I take my cufflinks off. Tomorrow night, I’ll exhume my left bottom rib to feed to the foxes and crows, scrape away all the excess clay from my eyes. I am too deep in love with this world to construct a lover where there is none.

These eyes have seen the coming of many – too many – Lords, and, unvoiced, watched them go.

---

Samuel J. Fox is a bisexual essayist and poet living in rural North Carolina. He is currently poetry editor for Bending Genres LLC. He is the recipient of the Gilbert-Chappell Award for Poetry (2013) and was a runner up for the Ron Rash Award in Poetry. He is located in Statesville, NC. He tweets @samueljfox. 

Gabrielle Hogan

poem where the poet lies through her teeth

my dream girl is a thousand bees in a
trenchcoat / my dream girl is a
trenchcoat laid flat on the bed / my
dream girl is a bed whose sheets
haven’t been washed in months / my
dream girl is a sheet of paper folded in
on itself, & then again, & then again /
my dream girl is the last folding chair
at the church picnic, beer stain on the
seat shimmering like an oil slick / my
dream girl is a church unmarred by
worship / no, wait / my dream girl is an
oil slick dripping through the estuary,
insects flung into the air in fear / my
dream girl is an insect stinging me, &
then  again, & then again, & then /
again

---

Gabrielle Hogan is a lesbian poet originally from St. Louis, Missouri. Her work has been published by or is forthcoming in such places as Arcturus, Sonora Review, Academy of American Poets, and more. In the fall, she will be attending the University of Texas at Austin for my MFA as part of the New Writers' Project. Gabrielle’s website can be found here: https://gabrielleghogan.wixsite.com/website.

Nicholas Spengler

Love Poem from #14

Since I moved in, you’ve taught me
how to shuffle across the boards
like old men or ghosts, 
pointing out that our floor
is someone else’s ceiling.
We keep the volume turned low
when watching films about war
or families falling apart
so everything sounds far away,
as if it were coming from down the hall
or upstairs, or next door;
as if our neighbors were all
in a state of passionate disarray. 
Meanwhile, when we make love 
in #14 on the fourth floor
one of us has to have a hand 
or a foot on the headboard
to keep it from knocking the wall.
You would almost think we’re squatters
hiding out in someone else’s life,
playing at being adults—
but quietly so we don’t get caught.
The trick is to subtract from one’s presence
until it seems you’re hardly there at all,
as if this box of brick and plaster
held only the intimation of existence:
the furnishings, without the rages or the laughter.
But in spite of your discretion
when you do laugh that high
bright sound threatens
to bring down the whole place.

---

Nicholas Spengler is a writer and teacher from Burlington, Vermont, currently based in London. He has written literary biographies of Herman Melville and Mohawk poet Maurice Kenny for Scribner’s American Writersseries, and his poems have appeared in The Salon: A Journal of Poetry & Fiction and The Café Review. His first book of poems, Your Voice in Half-Light, was published in 2013 by Honeybee Press. 

Nicholas Ruggieri

Lee

I say, “HERE, TAKE MY HANDS,”
and he reaches out,
but he is surprised
when they fall off,
into his own arms.
 
He says, “WHAT THE?”
and I tell him,
“MY HANDS ARE CURIOUS ABOUT YOU,”
because this is perhaps
the sexiest way
to give someone
your bloody hands
freshly chopped from your wrists.
 
He disagrees: “I THOUGHT YOU JUST WANTED ME TO HOLD YOUR HANDS.”
I think this is strange,
because I clearly do want him
to be holding my hands,
so I say, “I DO WANT YOU TO HOLD THEM AND I WANT YOU TO BE CAREFUL WITHTHEM.”
 
Now he says, “I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR HANDS,”
and he is standing there,
looking at me,
looking at my hands in his hands,
my arms without hands,
his arms with an extra pair of hands,
hands that I sure don’t want,
that I thought he must have wanted,
even without me attached.

---

Nicholas Ruggieri is a damn bicon (bi icon, it’s a thing). When he isn’t writing, you’ll find him napping, napping, and, um, napping. After graduating from the University of Nevada, Reno he adopted two perfect puppers to crochet sweaters for. The three regularly spend their time barking for no reason.

Ulysses Armel

in how many words

i liken u to wheat        honey paprika 
            frigid water     rushing river   winona minnesota
                        pale rainbow   meadow rabbit
                                    folk singer       old gay poet
            ancient erotic god
 
yet u sum me up better
                        “love”
            with a kiss in local grocery store

---

Ulysses Armel is a just a white non-cis cub who likes taking hikes. His poems shows up online with the help of journals like Butter, Impossible Archetype, and Kingdoms in the Wild. Sometimes he’s on Twitter @bigbutchcub.

Jenna Velez

Ode to Girlfriend

my nose has memorized the smell of your hair
sweet honeysuckle and green apple
my lips are still coding your kisses
soft lipped, bite lip
smile all tongue and teeth
my hands are forgetful of your soft skin
so they are excused
to learn every dip and curve of milk bottle body
of renaissance woman muse
lounging and grape fed
 
please tell me we are lovers
because you hold my hand in a way that says
i am an unexpected ring around you, my saturn
your eyes hidden in plum and nectarine skin when closed
burgundy stained tears and shimmer like
the tingling bubble sweet on your tongue
wine licks and girlish burps
 
we are not putting on a show
this is for us
this has been building a coal and soot house
since i saw you, cigarette-stained in a zeppelin shirt
hair so rock n roll, flannel so boyfriend and i didn’t want it to be
this has been singing dreams by fleetwood mac
from a pink rooftop sky to some dead mallrats and stale virginia slims
 
hold me between your two fingers
taste me of american spirit and immigrant song
call me your lover
not just in hushed tones and hotel sheets
but in laughing spells and feel notes
 
you are everything i have never asked for
because i did not deserve
now i know there is a god
and she may have favored me now

---

Jenna Velez is an emerging queer poet of color from suburban Philly. She has two microchaps forthcoming THE WHORE MADONNA LEADS THE BLACK MASS (Maverick Duck Press, 2019) and BLOODY SPIRIT AND BATHROOM RITUAL (Bone & Ink Press, 2020). She tweets @northernbruja and can be found at jennavelez.weebly.com.

Anne Myles

Lake Poem

When I think of grief I think of the lake, that vastness
you saw from your home and I from mine.
Your house on the North Shore, my grad school
apartment in Hyde Park. Your fair-haired children
 
and my solitude. I think of Lake Shore Drive,
Art Deco apartment buildings like jewels on a string
looping an uncrossable distance, longing’s throat.
I remember the mulberry tree hanging over my fire escape--
 
that time I gathered its berries in my pink sundress,
wishing for you, though they weren’t meant for you,
and somebody took a picture, and the dress got stained.
But they tasted too sweet and somehow wrong,
 
the way the lake is almost an ocean but not quite;
water that’s without salt and lacking tides,
a body not the source of original life. It flows
into a river inverted by locks and canals.
 
An imaginary ocean, maybe, the way what I felt
for you was something I imagined, was really
something primal that I hungered for. That’s the story.
You had a daughter and she shares my name,
 
that’s another, isn’t it? I said the word, you didn’t
hear it as I meant you to. So I won’t put it in
this poem, which is only a Chicago poem, a lake poem,
in which I will make geography the central character.
 
I remember how I’d lie out on the rocks, then slip
into the lake in summer. How shock would take my breath
the water was so cold. The waves that pull you,
the current that could drown you simply doing what it does.

---

Anne Myles retired in 2019 as an English professor at the University of Northern Iowa, and is working on an MFA in poetry at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in journals including Lavender Review, Ghost City Review, Isacoustic, Whale Road Review, Green Briar Review, and North American Review.

Linda Crate

that was a dream

i think i loved him
because he reminded me of you
he was canadian, too,
and he loved anime;
but he wasn't the girl that woke in me
the dreaming
when i thought it were dead—
yet even as we went up in flames
i loved him like he were you,
but he wasn't;
he wounded me without regret
and i pushed you aside with many—
perhaps that was the price
i had to pay
for hurting you,
and i'm sorry;
once i had a dream that we were reconciled
in a garden of white roses
at a white table
you wore a purple kimono and your hair
was dyed blonde,
i wore a red one and my hair was dyed red—
yet there was an unspoken agreement
that there was peace between us,
i woke up weeping;
because that was a dream and not a truth.

---

Linda M. Crate's poetry, short stories, articles, and reviews have been published in a myriad of magazines both online and in print. She has six published chapbooks A Mermaid Crashing Into Dawn (Fowlpox Press, 2013), Less Than A Man (The Camel Saloon, 2014), If Tomorrow Never Comes (Scars Publications, 2016), My Wings Were Made to Fly (Flutter Press, 2017), splintered with terror (Scars Publications, 2018), more than bone music (Clare Songbirds Publishing, 2019), and one micro-chapbook Heaven Instead (Origami Poems Project, 2018). She is also the author of the novel Phoenix Tears (Czykmate Books, 2018).

Jacob Butlett

Silly Gay Aubade

We wake up to a rapid tapping at the window, 
but I tell him it’s not the sun trying to pull us apart.
I say, “Maybe it’s my landlord Mr. Monroe, who always
demands rent from me. Maybe it’s my roommate Pete,
who loses his key more than the sun sets or rises.
Maybe it’s my neighbor Beatrice, who might want 
to borrow another cup of brown sugar, crushed red pepper, 
fish oil (assuming one asks for such ingredients at 6 AM).
Maybe it’s my sister Ruth, who always asks if I have
her Tupperware set, her old retainer case, her tabby cat.
Or maybe it’s your boss Mrs. What’s-Her-Face here to explain
that you don’t have to go into work anymore, because 
someone set the office on fire just to watch it burn.”
He laughs with disbelief and kisses me good morning,
but before he can rise, leaving me alone with the warm
shadow of his side of the bed, I beg him to stay.
I say, “You could be climbing the hairy mountain of my 
chest to reach the sleep in the snowy whites of my eyes,
your toes pouring down my sprawled legs like fresh rain.
You could lie on your stomach while I trail my fingers down
your sweaty back as though sliding my hands across barrels 
of sunflower seeds, uncooked lima beans, wet silt, slimy marbles.
Our tongues could explore every winding curve of our ears,
our cheeks, our chins, our teeth, as though we could find a place 
to rest together forever, without distraction. We could even 
nestle like larks in the endless nests of our arms.”
But he kisses me again, rises to the continuous tapping
at the window, which he opens, revealing a steady stream 
of morning dew, along with a cardinal perched on the sill.
When he steps into the bathroom to shower, I walk to the window,
shoo away the bird, which flutters toward the violet skies, 
the crimson sunlight riding on every feather
of the cardinal while the sun itself crawls out of the hillside 
like a lover longing for one more hour of night.   

---

Jacob Butlett (he/him) is an award-winning gay storyteller with an A.A. in General Studies and a B.A. in Creative Writing. In 2017 he won the Bauerly-Roseliep Scholarship for literary excellence, and in 2018 he received a Pushcart Prize nomination for his poetry. Some of his work has been published in The MacGuffin, Panoply, Rat's Ass Review, Cacti Fur, Gone Lawn, Rabid Oak, Ghost City Review, Lunch Ticket, Fterota Logia, Into the Void, and plain china. He was selected as a finalist in the 2019 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards residency competition. Learn more about Jacob at https://jacobbutlettacademicreflection.weebly.com/.

Blake Wallin

ALL NONDESCRIPT BARNS LOOK ALIKE

To the keen observer, we change
lanes like wild fauna, start wars
with adjacent cars and kiss them
in whatever imagined space suits.
 
We know this drive is final, but we
choose to ignore that plus barns and
noble reasons to give up on travel,
like, Hey we couldntve done THAT
 
Hugs last longer when one party
keeps the hug longer than the other,
stripping commonplace rights down
to a core only one person sees, center.
 
I held it, looked at the ground spurned,
decided to measure it emotionally. We
danced the dance of death-as-parting
to the tune of our respective car radios,
 
and every turn when I drove back
looked like you in macro-miniature,
highway-exit jawline for rides home—
then the poems and your anger, then 
 
the first 2.2 stanzas are a lie. I had
threatened to kill myself, and he didn’t
want to see me off so quickly, so he
drove me crying and wringing hands,
 
First time for every thing you
come across on days I don’t
see myself as an offshoot of you 
anymore/ the second nicest thing 
 
you ever said to me was that it’s
easiest to cry in the shower if you’re 
unable/ it’s hardest to forget when 
the intensity of the memories
 

follows me around like I’m their 
sacred keeper/ and I know now 
that I needed what you had to say 
more than vice versa’d forms of 
 
whatever new meaning we/ fished 
out the water of the Atlantic 
as the Great Lakes called us back
but we’d lost the way littered with 
 
car keys and rust/ why I give priority 
to that weekend’s intensity is beyond me—
I liked the backs, the forths, the frothy 
conversations/ manipulation places too high a
 
price on the head of the manipulated
and I only knew the power I had then later
when you told me you were in
a different place, and the place 
 
sounded nicer, like a ducked-out 
greener pasture I don’t need your 
forgiveness; I’m trying to forgive myself
I’m trying to make the word lose meaning
 
as you drive me to a point you knew but
didn’t reveal yet, and my poems didn’t show,
and my life didn’t recognize yet, and me,
pre-hug: Thank you for holding.

---

Blake Wallin is the author of the poetry collections Otherwise Jesus (Ghost City Press), No Sign on the Island (Bottlecap Press), and Occipital Love (Ghost City Press); the novels Papal Glow and More Perfect; and two full-length plays. He attended the 2018 Virginia Quarterly Review Summer Workshop for poetry as well as the 2018 Kennedy Center Playwriting Intensive. He is an MFA candidate in poetry at George Mason University.

Zach Blackwood

aroma decline common program

after angelica liddell / after gala mukomolova

recall the flavor of our conversations,
damp air words army-crawling over tongue,
 
flip it in your mouth so it lands again and sizzles
new. you can’t know anything fully until it’s over.
 
when i say, i have already begun to mourn
 our time together, i mean what i said, i mean
 
i have stared through us in a long mirror, seen
you alone through windows and thought that
 
person looks like they’re chained to themselves
“i’ll wait for you” sounds beautiful in any accent.
 
recall seeing an idol in the canteen: fandom is kind
of love, but distant and performing itself. reconciling
 
her curling lipstick with the version of her she played
last night: beating her chest, real-wailing, “some of us
 
exist without ever deserving it,” and isn’t
that it? translated us fighting and not-fighting
 
against this wili? this shapeless nameless?
this placeless? sheer veil, opaque veil,
 
what matters is the weight intimating the shape.
the new work peeled imagery from Victorian Hidden
 
Mother Photography: the idea that beneath
the blanket, there is mother holding you
 
and keeping you still. in a crazy way my life
flashes before my eyes in every banal half-thing:
 
sneaker falling to catch a stair that was never there
and my heart do stop. and there it is: me rollerblading
 
or really just being dragged by a dog, affections snagging
in the carabiner earring of a boy who speaks italian
 
and german and french and spanish and just
smiles when i talk, and a hundred museums audio tours.
 
and somewhere, pinning all of it to floral sheets—
there is you, unable to grasp anything after 2009,
 
humming top 40 and shrugging when i ask you
the title. there’s a gala poem about your dead body
 
climbing up next to you, but if i look it up,
it’ll shrink me to swallow size again. washed down
 
by a beloved. perhaps even performance:
time-based. you’ve got to be there or miss it.
 
i love watching people fight in french: singing shallow
and spitting vodka in each other’s faces: it’s a threat
 
to throw each other onto the train tracks. i’ve been
saying that lately instead of fall on the sword,
 
dying gut hugging steel inside rings too familiar.
speaking of through windows— there’s a photo
 
by martine franck. another inside-baseball portrait
of a white master and he looks so different, skin matted
 
out by the oozing glass. i saw a play about chat.
that’s a reductive description: it’s a threat
 
for so long,—the difference becomes a virtuality.
it’s not a thing, it’s just closing the windows
 
so the day can’t wedge figures in, parking
us in my blind spot with the hazards on,
 
just trying to find a place we can sit still
for free. i’m wrapping my skin green
 
in cheap chain jewelry and chlorine halos.
i want to pray forever until the air goes
 
heaving pink and the particles love-flush.
so, whole plane goes wave field synthesis
 
until we can whisper to each other through
thick hotel sheets and distance weaves itself
 
flat between two warm metal plates.
my molt-white iris trained on desire
 
while its density undulates. a beating
heart you can move through now. instead
 
of the earth turning on the vamp-in-the-box,
imagine the light turning black each night:
 
whole days burning like white toast:  aroma
as indicator of                                  decline.
 
two doors in the vestibule, and i can count
every unperishable thing in that stride, that span.
 
i imagine myself sitting upright in my casket,
marshalling myself through slime membrane
 
and my childhood dog is there, barking approximations,
and smelling like a used-up citronella coil.
 
an object can radiate pleasure on the palm, and still
be repulsive. species like specialization like mutated:
 
i could be a whole pack of wild dogs under this soft
organ. you could be 1000 honeymoons perforating
 
a bolt of blue suede, and i wouldn’t know,
you could be here right next to me: inside
 
suit of swords: a matador’s inflamed red cape
riding the heat like a slouching motorcycle.
 
generously turned on memory spit,
golden and aromatic after raw potentiality
 
not a gift, but a transaction. i turn us to this,
and we move aside: burn the braid closed for fantasy.

---

Zach Blackwood is a poet and contemporary performance curator in Philadelphia, PA. He is the author of SEXY UNIQUE HOLLOW POINT out now from Glo Worm Press. He has poems published in Peach Mag, Occulum, Bedfellows Magazine, Maudlin House, and elsewhere. He is available on the world wide web @blackwhom.

Dani Putney

Berm

Your pink palms stroke my face,
cheeks flush sanguine as you finger
bristles along my jawline.
Your tundra gaze, my throbbing
veins, punctuated by the aroma
of dewy grass—toxic to my lungs
like Marlboros that grace
your nether lip every twilight.
I bite, lap blood off
your chapped skin, plunge
my tongue into salivary nirvana.
Do you like how you taste? I think
but will not say, every breath
subtracts from our waltz.
I dare not close my eyes
as your hands traverse
my sweaty back, claw
stiff vertebrae. Exploding
pupils remind me
you crave this, too.
I foist my body
onto yours, roll with me,
bello, linen stains prove
we know our embrace.

---

Dani Putney is a queer, non-binary, Asian American poet exploring the West. Their poetry most recently appears or is forthcoming in The Blue Mountain Review, Juke Joint Magazine, and trampset, among other publications. Presently, they’re infiltrating a small conservative town in the middle of the Nevada desert.

Prince Bush

A New Romantic

There’s nothing more natural than brown arms,
nestling next to loved flesh, stilly and stuck,
and the notes of that Northern Cardinal,
acute, intense, subverting slow gentle
sounds with repeated chirrups. I can’t see
all but silhouettes and the bird’s sunny
souvenirs of sweet nature. I think this
red thing has wedded us—we owe more to 
shrill, happy singing. Rare love, to
me, lives in a shrub, beating where I once
hurt myself; is not as red as blood, but
pomegranate; is perhaps not even
human; may be heard in enduring birds.

---

Prince Bush is a poet in Nashville, TN. He has poetry in *82 Review, Cotton Xenomorph, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change, Protean Magazine and SOFTBLOW, and has prose about poetry in The Tennesseean. He is expecting a BA in English by 2020 from Fisk University, and an MFA in Poetry soon after.

Skyler Jaye Rutkowski

My Soft Girl

Our love was exchanged in lavender on the west side of Central
Park / your honey breath / your velvet hair / your pupils filled
with dragonflies - missing me while I'm standing beside you. //

We promised a romance that would travel history & mountain
tops so we molded it into postage stamps / I kissed you hard into
envelopes. Your lips my first loved secret / turned revolution/
Your heartbeat my loudest battle cry. //

We stuffed our ears with love letters / our cheeks burning into
cherry blossoms / a strange man yelling about our holdings
hands / I could barely hear it over your laughter / The kind made
of rose tea with a pinch of sugar / You taught me a lexicon of
love language / You once told me, "I love you something
irrational." / Sunflower arms growing in the summer heat / we
wrapped each other into cocoons / a bite of whiskey / a dash of
ginger / a burn, something beautiful. //

I pinned your pride flag onto the wall directly in the center of
your new living room / you hugged me so tightly our bodies
turned to fireworks and set the ceiling on fire / You told me I am
your pride in real form / We could hear the neighbors screaming
but we made love beneath the flames and called it romantic /
You were the first person to make the term "making love" not
feel like crow’s feet around my eyes. //

In a different life: we never held our breath crossing the path of
the basilica / our spines never taught in fear / we smiled so big
our canines were the punctuation of the little dipper and we
never introduced each other as friends 'cause the world is a big,
round place with thousands of nouns and you / put doves in my
stomach // 

We felt small in such a big city in the best way possible / when I
leapt into your arms and you spun me around so quickly / my
body became a helicopter / we saw the skyline at eye level / the
whole world would have wanted to be us if only they could see
past the buildings //  

whoever claimed man as a protector / never loved a woman in
the daylight with her guard down / never held a woman’s hand /
never had to train their eyes to see behind them //

We squeezed each other’s hands as reassurance / when our
chests were filled with thunder / when our flesh raised goose-
bumps as surrender / when a woman screamed "dirty sinners" so
loudly our fists turned to bibles / just to melt on the sidewalk // 

Your heart the size of our state capital / you gifted me lilies / our
love is a daring thing, we always said / so we dressed up and
slow-danced on the streets in the middle of Greenwich village /
where all the other daring queers kissed each other in public /
my soft, girl / my exhale / my triple-dog-dare kinda lover / our
moving feet a riot / history-bone rhythm / peonies growing at
our feet //

---

Skyler Jaye Rutkowski is a poet and the author of A Mountain of Past Lives & Things I've Learned (BlazeVOX, 2019). You will often find themes of being very pro-women and proudly queer throughout her work. She represented Buffalo, NY in the 2017 National Poetry Slam, and works with youth writers at the Just Buffalo Literary Center. Currently based in Nairobi, she is pursuing a Master’s in International Relations and Diplomacy, hoping to use her activism to influence policy first-hand. Her work has been published online and in print including: Emrys Journal, Rhythm & Bones YANYR anthology, Peach Mag, and more. Find her tweeting @SkylerJaye23

William Ward Butler

Reading Cavafy by Candlelight

The storm we’ve been fearing hit tonight.
It brought down redwoods and power lines
and half a mile away, a transformer exploded,
sending up blue sparks bright as fallen stars.
 
I’m glad to live with you here, in these mountains,
even though awful things have happened—
when that car flipped and littered the road with glass,
when the sky was filled with smoke all November,
when you were so sick the state of California called
and I drove you to urgent care for intravenous fluids.
 
Now, this storm threatens to flood
our small apartment, and there’s nothing to do
but wait on the couch with you in the dark.
 
This must be what straight couples
think of when they’re told for better or worse.
 
We haven’t talked about marriage 
but next month marks five years together,
a length of time that once seemed impossible.
 
Who am I without you in my life?
The answer, like a burning wick.
I love you with all my insufficient words.

---

William Ward Butler is a writer and educator from Northern California. His poems have appeared in Assaracus, Bodega Magazine, Hobart, and other journals. He works for the Young Writers Program in Santa Cruz and teaches Word Lab, a free after-school creative writing program for middle school and high school students. He is a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal and has received support from the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference, the Catamaran Writing Conference, and the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods.

Matt Mitchell

a portrait of a hot dog restaurant the day after tyler, the creator dropped his newest album

including lyrics from Tyler, the Creator’s “Earfquake”

We all have the same grease fryer smell stored in our cheek pockets, our bodies turning inside out when Tyler screams don’t leave in two different pitches. A mangled potato membrane wraps around my crooked teeth, stained yellow from grief, crackling like bees dancing off sidewalks. The first day of summer doesn’t come until Jessi, Alex, & I hit up this hot dog joint the next town over. A month before the solstice burns like cigarette; the evening after IGOR dropped. There’s a sun-soaked eighty-degree dusk burning beneath mint-colored heaven. & we feel like gods, ‘cause we’re getting high on that red pop they don’t sell anywhere else. My father, two scraped knees once bent over the edges of these booth seats, in a decade where they played smear the queer in the empty lot next door, can sense that the mechanical hot dog rotating on the roof is getting slower every year. & the parking lot still gets emptier & emptier, pot holes turning into sinkholes turning into caskets. No one here cares where my mouth’s been, how I’m Coke bottle curved, but they still don’t love me like I’ve always prayed they would. So, I sit here & slowly vanish like stale fireworks, after making a mess on the tiny hairs above my lips, still feeling like the cursive Playboy Carti raps in a minute-forty into the track, because I’ve got dysmorphia masked as a circus of welts on my stomach from T injections, emaciation posing as a tuxedo cummerbund tight around my ribs. Sometimes I wonder if Tyler sampled me grieving at the funeral of my old body, golden child hiding under gossamered anthills, stinking of darkness & turtleneck covering pale, trespassed hickies, when he sings when it all comes crashing down, I need you.

---

Matt Mitchell is an intersex poet from Ohio trying to make his work as beautiful as “Hold Me Now” by the Thompson Twins, the quintessential pop banger. He’s a former Best Hair winner in high school, and the self-elected Poet Laureate of Vanilla Coke drinkers. His chapbook, you & me & the pink moon & these portraits, was released by Ghost City Press in August 2019.