Robert Bires

SOME LOGISTICS FOR WALKING IN FLORIDA

You only need one word and a dog
To navigate the people on paths,
Dodge the sprinting lizards,
Step beneath the shedding palms,

For this is Florida, and you must
Walk before heat joins the moisture
Weighting the air, before afternoon rains
Steam from the pristine streets.

So, choose your word. Use with others
You meet.  “Morning” is safe as tea.
“How-are-you” invites a response,
If you like, as does “Humid!”  

If you’re the chatty type, then a phrase,
Like “Good day for it,” but let them
Decide what “it” might be,
If the day fits the duty.

They won’t tell you, that I promise.
Walkers seek human contact, only
That, runners a nod as they blow past,
And cars leaving condos, just a wave.

If you let them speak first,
They will compliment your little dog.
“Cutie,” she’ll say, and not to you,
While her husband stays silent.

But what is the word for 
When a batch of flies launches 
From the flat squirrel by the curb 
Or (not wanting to enter 

Her head-down solitude)
To the nurse walking from her car
To her shift with the ones
At the Memory Care Center?  

She will narrate hours and gets sounds 
In return, as tones, stories, years, 
And selves evaporate around her,
Until she walks back to her car

At the end of the day. By then the rains 
Are gone, the late sun flares, whitewashed 
Egrets feed in the pond grass,
And the sky is empty of words.

Robert Bires studied with Charles Simic and McKeel McBride at the University of New Hampshire. He has published poems and stories in the Pennsylvania Review, ERA, and Chug: Unbound. He lives with his wife in Tennessee, where he plays in a rock band, The Introverts.

DS Maolalai 

People in new situations


storming – and it's weather
and coming from all sides,
like the last pieces shifting
in a rapid game of chess. my feathers
frozen in flight
I walk, hounded by rain 
which seeps through my jacket
until my armpits are hothousing
mushrooms. another apartment
gone before I got there – I walk, persevering
against a conspiracy of landlords
working together to catch me 
pneumonia, or some other type
of waterborne disease. and I’d stood in the queue
for hours, along with various
people, all of us searching 
for some new situation. afterward, we walk
toward town in a cluster,
people flaking off down sideroads, rain rotting
our unspeakable party 
like badly varnished wood 
and rusting gratings on the front of houses 
full of studios. a bus passes – hits a puddle
and soaks me. it might as well
not bother, like waves
on a broken boat.

DS Maolalai has been nominated seven times for Best of the Net and three times for the Pushcart Prize. His poetry has been released in two collections, Love is Breaking Plates in the Garden (Encircle Press, 2016) and Sad Havoc Among the Birds (Turas Press, 2019).

Jacob Griffin Hall

Signs of Symmetry

Yesterday we walked together in the snow.
It seems self-righteous to describe 

the weather
but you’re gentle, and I try to be, and when we bicker
insects dot the sky like surgical marks.

Let’s start with the text then cross to harder hearts.
Say accountability. Say stigmata. OK, 

he’s in the hospital again.
Liver not cirrhotic yet. The snapdragon 
supposedly

survives well in winter, and in the park M skims her phone 
for a diagram comparing addiction 
to social acuity.

You grip my hand and squeeze.

It means that sometimes 
symmetry is a crisis. Sometimes it lies in wait for you 
like a hospital bed

or a florescent bulb grown weak 
in the back room. 
What’s the point of pleasure, you ask, then pick the leather 

at the fold of your purse.
I beg justice from the worst of our words.

Say monopoly. Say coolio. 
Unsnap the straps on your backpack 
and light a lemon scented candle.

If there’s something simple, let it be simple.
If there’s an ache, then take it for what it’s worth.

Jacob Griffin Hall was raised outside of Atlanta, Ga and is currently a PhD candidate in English at the University of Missouri. In the past, he has worked as assistant poetry editor for the Mid-American Review and he now works as poetry editor for The Missouri Review. His work has appeared in New South, DIAGRAM, New Ohio Review Online, The Carolina Quarterly, and other journals.

Sean Joyce-Farley

another fucking daffodil poem

The fever breaks like dawn,
if it were night & if fever
were the warm haze
of your body on my body. No body
wholly inhabits itself. 
See sweat on the forehead
of a sick child, piss in the sheets,
& her brother’s nosebleed staining the sink. 
Your body extends itself. See the shake
in my grandmother’s hand become 
the teacup’s rattling voice. 
See how she loves, & then, for good measure,
love daffodils. By the bed, on the kitchen table, daffodils
even crowning the bathroom sink as I wash my hands, falling
into the leering yellow dark of their phallic 
mouths. Even mountains rise & sink. Even dawn,
dusk, even snowmelt. If your chest 
is hanging heavy as oranges 
let them swell & ripen
& fall. Let our cock be a daffodil.
Maybe then we sit at the table
sipping tea, both our faces tilted
to the winter sun & with my grandmother’s
scissors, my one hand over yours, we cut
the stem. Marvel how we sit—
so pretty—
in the vase.

Sean Joyce-Farley is a poet and copy editor with a B.A. in English from Smith College. Their poetry has been published in tenderness lit. You can them blogging erratically at crocussed.wordpress.com.

Helen Wang

October Volta

I’m forgetting to un-remember
the world turning in your gaze,
like the wheels of a carbon fiber bike

how all of life’s extremities end where you begin:
an open beach road into your stoop,
the sun into an egg yolk over toast

sometimes I think I see you clearer
when you’re not here, like a kite,
the type of wonder that elevates with distance

you, holly against evergreen,
like Christmas morning in July
& somewhere 
firecrackers were burning, 
pulling smoke over the hills

how is California so fast
to consume itself in flames again?
razing fields to the ground,
as if it’d rather paint itself 
red than wait for fall

I’m trying to reconcile the difference 
between how nature is,
and how I want it to be, 
how seasonal depression
is just forgetting to remember
summer will return 
if I let it go

Helen Wang is a graduate from Swarthmore College with Honors in Economics and English Literature. Outside of her full-time job at a cancer data health tech start-up in New York City, she attends poetry workshops at the 92Y and serves on the Haitian Global Health Alliance BoardPlus. Her poetry focuses on themes of femininity and love, coming of age, and the Asian American experience.

Sara Youngblood Gregory

Medusa / Dark Blue

1

My girlfriend and my girlfriend kiss second hand
from her lips to my lips to her lips to mine 
then the other to mine then back  then restart.
If you can’t imagine what I do
with my girlfriend and my girlfriend
 that’s the point.


2

My lovers gather in the temple. 
The temple underwater where Medusa is raped.
Medusa’s pussy turns explosion. The smell of fish
frying.


3

I break up with my girlfriend and
I stay with my girlfriend. Perverts in the water,
pyros in the sea. There are more women
than my girlfriend and my former girlfriend. 
The way we manage to share one mouth.


4

I show up late to the underwater temple. 
My lovers there are ugly. I am there ugly. 
The knife slips through the bucket.
The knife guts the fish. Guts explode the world. 
What is ugly defiles. 


5

I don’t compare myself to Medusa
when Medusa has a cock. Who’s clothes 
make up my bed? Who’s teeth my mouth? 
On the end of the line, dark blue.
There is heavy breathing. Am I still
angry?


6

The cock is the mangrove snake. The mouth
is the mouth. My body
is never the temple.


7

My girlfriend and my former girlfriend
me and my lovers the uglies. We are climbing
the trees. From up in the trees the uglies are looking down.
Years ago saying, don’t touch the ground. We show up
early and kill what doesn’t suit. 


8

On the shoreline there is a snake for every mouth. 
There is a bucket for every hole. The second hand
the knife the explosion Medusa still angry and the smell
of what this time doesn’t get away. 

Sara Youngblood Gregory (she/they) is a disabled lesbian poet and culture writer. She serves on the board of directors for the lesbian literary and arts journal Sinister Wisdom. Her work has been published in The Rumpus, Tahoma Literary Review, Queen Mobs, and The Adroit Journal, among others.