Brandy St. John

Circuits


I could write you an electronic letter, 
filled with the wild current of time.
I could write your sonorous voice and say, 
Why do you do me in?
I could write the ghosts fluttering around me,
at home in their cool, tin ache.
Then bound by wire, slip into your night, 
slip into your home, a digital mistress.
 
I could speak to you and watch letters dive
like starlings from my mouth:
“Could you come to my graveyard? 
Could you see what I’ve seen?
Feel ten-thousand pinpoints of the big, sad nothing?” 
Every prick. Another prick.
 
I carve words in an apple and roll it toward you.
You stand in the alley and pulse and howl.
I touch my tongue to my upper lip,
think about your neck and the word Someday.
Then I make a bed and never dream of you–
I’m down by the river where I grew up feral,
pulling roots of dry weeds and thinking about the word Someday.
 
Everything comes around again,
a baby spine, a hungry moon. 
Everything is born electric,
your blue teeth, pinwheel eyes.
Pick up the rotary phone and remember:
we laughed and your smile imprinted on my wrist.
 
I could write you a digital letter and say,
“I’m here today because I loved you”
and then radiate into the light.

Before graduate school, Brandy St. John worked as a wardrobe stylist in Los Angeles for artists such as Jack White, Beck, Trent Reznor, and Karen O. In addition to writing fiction and poetry, Brandy records goth folk music under the name The Long Wives.

Nicholas Boyer

Aluminum Foil


Sometimes when it rains, I wonder if it’s static,
and my connection with the world just sucks.
Maybe my body is TV, and my mind is an antenna:
A bent-up coat hanger that once held a coat
now out of fashion, but once hip and trendy.
A cut inspired by military uniforms.
Somewhere, somewhen, bodies are piled
With epaulettes, berets, and bayonets.
The rain washes the commodity.
The coat hangers became bayonets.
Three stripes down one pant leg.
VHS tracking needs adjustment.
Acid washed brain. System Adjustment.
Enhance Resolution. Increase. Saturation.
Press the OK button.

Nicholas Boyer is a poet & short story author from Buffalo, NY. His writing aims at the emotions that many people experience in so many unique ways. He believes it impossible to capture an experience in words, but regardless continues to write for both others and himself as a therapeutic process of communicating that no one is ever alone. Other work by Nicholas can be found in Riggwelter Press.

Juliet Cook and j/j hastain

Otherworldly Force Field


At least I don't force myself upon others
and act as if my brain is in total control
of everyone and everything 
even though we have our own bodies and brains
and nobody knows everything about everyone else.

For example, you don't know how many fangs I have 
hiding behind my left eye. And I don't know
exactly what my own fangs might do if
we died tomorrow and in the afterlife
only ate peanut brittle made from
memories of broken bridges. 
  
What if the afterlife is a slightly rotating never ending 
shuffleboard display? What if the winners receive nothing
other than stale, old-fashioned candy?
Or monopoly boards with subcutaneous missiles.
Who is in charge of this game?
 
Who am I when I am in charge
of a rototiller. Will I use it as weaponry
against the flowers that don't like me?
What if I'm paranoid about every flower on earth? 
 
Should I buy a roto-rooter and go to town,
trying my best to repair every drain in order
to find the underworld?
Or should I use my imbalances as
explosions to force my way in to a new world?
A mental metropolis 
where somatic exercises help us learn and grow
into beasts if we want to stay alive.
 
Read a book.
Masturbate between pages
until stink bugs crawl out of your mouth,
hoping to grow new brains,
because we all need them with this vacuum.
 
A herd of deer across the street stare at me, as if
trying to determine if I'm friend or foe
but I don't know the answer. What if I'm rabid?
All I know is I want my hair to be the color of a fawn,
but it just keeps turning white.
 
We all scream for eye candy,
brain waves stuck inside volatizing spray paint tubes 
and as Halloween nears the weeds in our lawn will
cheer and gallivant and fly into red costumes.
 
Finally freed of their status
quo response of cowering
to the lawn mower

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j hopes to make the god/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon.

Liva Felter McWhir

An ode to 2018; to being sixteen


I want to write you psalms about being sixteen
about how i'm learning how to save the world,
about red stained carpets,
about carpets 
where no-one is actually sure 
if its blood or not and 
everyone is afraid 
to check
I want to write you poems 
about being sixteen
sad but meaningful
where every other line rhymes 
and everything makes sense
in the end
I want to write you hymns about being sixteen
suited more to dark empty nooks 
in bars and clubs 
then any cathedral I have ever 
been to
About towns I don't know the names of,
towns I have never seen 
but from the inside of sticky floored pubs and clubs.
I want to write you soliloquies 
about being sixteen
about how all my clothes are vomit stained
about the bags under my eyes and 
about how loneliness 
is a word much to pretty
 
And about how nothing makes sense, not even in the end
 
I want to write you stories about being sixteen
about being so full 
of love 
that I don’t think I could ever bear to see it blister
About how everything hurts
all of the time and 
about people who tell me these are the best years of my life
About how my mum always sighs and shakes her head,
looks at me over the top of her glasses
about how she always asks, what happened to you? 
 
And she always pauses as if waiting on the answer, as if she thinks I have any that she actually wants to hear.

About how I love
like I'll never live again
About how sometimes
when the sun sets in your eyes
and all I can see are broken boxes, red stained carpets. 
I think that maybe, just maybe  
it would be ok to never love again.
About how I don't think I can love anything else anyway.
 
I want to write you plays about being sixteen. 
 
About how i'm learning how to save the world, and about how maybe one day I might learn that it is ok if I only ever save myself.

Liva Felter McWhir is a fulltime student, occasional poet and avid shower singer, originally from the east of England but currently studying in the wilderness of rural northern Denmark. Liva would really love to learn how to play the trombone, so she can play carless whisper at parties and annoy everyone into leaving her alone. Her main past times include sleeping, eating pasta and never knowing what is going on.

Abby Cothran

Going Home


vodka & limes / on a picnic table in Plaza Midwood / colder here than in Texas / most everywhere is / in my dark velvet dress / I’m asking to be touched / but just sip my drink / while the boys talk to my friends / who are prettier than me / smaller / & I don’t blame them / this body is not for everyone / but it is mine / more vodka / more limes / sing Hall & Oates in the bathroom line with a stranger / we leave / we’re always leaving / back to Lauren’s house / smoke blunts & take bumps / more vodka / no limes / the sun rises / we have a threesome on the hardwood floor/ in the light of a new day / our bodies collide / almost content / Carolina isn’t home / never was / always will be

Abby Cothran (she/her) is an Austin based writer from the Carolinas. Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in journals such as Pink Plastic House and goodbaad poetry. She is currently an MFA candidate at Texas State University. You can find her on twitter and instagram @abbzsz. 

Andrey Gritsman

BOAT


There is a wooden shed by the Moscow Presnya subway station,
a Georgian eatery where my friend is served
the best dumplings. He is in the back room next to the dusty ficus
by the kitchen door.
This used to be a local community club
where Brezhnev’s portrait hung on a dilapidated wall.
 
My friend downs a shot of vodka, topped by sparkling water,
wolfs down stuff on his plate,
but thoughtfully. He remembers the misty Hudson,
us together on the Circle Line, passing
through summer, by piers and parks,
by a restricted area,
listening to the Indian song of Canadian winds.
 
I am sitting at the river café, having 
penne arrabiatta, drinking Valpolichella,
looking at the same boat
that is heading toward our meeting point,
always there.
 
Dust floats from the Metro-North tracks. 
Here you can get real close to the river.
On the opposite side is the Park Police Headquarters.
 
It’s nobody’s business how we throw our words, and they fly away
on northerly winds.
That’s how poems are. This is our meter.
 
So from a distance we are both looking at the boat,
into our plates, at the sky;
I look at my Caesar salad, my friend at his dumplings.
 
Manhattan floats to Canada as the Flying Dutchman
to our meeting point,
God knows where,
where our words freeze in flight,
 
lit by unreachable light
in the boundless, echoing,Arctic space.
We are not there yet,
since our words are
still flying.

Translated from Russian by the author.

Andrey Gritsman is a poet and a writer, born and raised in Moscow. Since 1981 he lives in the US, in Manhattan, and works as a physician. Andrey is the author of more than 100 publications and several times was nominated for Pushcart Prize. His work was anthologized and translated into several languages. He authored several collections of poetry, essays and short prose.

Emma Lee

The Same Deep Water as You


The Cure were a perfect soundtrack for that out-of-synch feeling,
the dripping tap that was too much effort to tighten, the ghosting 
effect of a kitchen strip light that heightened a bad hair day when 
the fruit bowl offered a bruised apple and there was no appetite 
for a dinner you couldn't be bothered to cook. It was the beginning 
of the weekend, the phone was silent so you pressed play and they 
weren't poppy enough to get you on your feet but not gloomy 
enough for you to sulk to so you tapped fingers and let the room 
fill with swirls of guitars and a plaintive voice where love was always 
a prelude to heartbreak and you imagined life was always elsewhere. 
No one else could have lonely Friday nights, solo Saturdays, the dismal 
Sunday sentences of teenage years where dark scribbles in the margins 
of homework were hints of poems, lines setting a course for a life yet to be lived.

Emma Lee’s publications include The Significance of a Dress (Arachne, 2020) and Ghosts in the Desert (IDP, 2015). She co-edited Over Land, Over Sea, (Five Leaves, UK, 2015), is Poetry Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib, reviews for magazines and blogs at http://emmalee1.wordpress.com.

Hibah Shabkhez

KINGSFOIL


What if 
Poems dueled to capture rainbow deeds
Thrust into the sunlight athelas weeds
Until their marvels became known?
 
What if 
If in the end all writing were a quest
For the intricate velvet ice cream taste
For the other name of the rose that best
Carries forth a smell as sweet, for a waste
Of space to come into its own?

Hibah Shabkhez is a writer of the half-yo literary tradition, an erratic language-learning enthusiast, a teacher of French as a foreign language and a happily eccentric blogger from Lahore, Pakistan. Her work has previously appeared in Petrichor, Remembered Arts, Rigorous, Lunate, With Painted Words, The Dawntreader and a number of other literary magazines. Studying life, languages and literature from a comparative perspective across linguistic and cultural boundaries holds a particular fascination for her.

Kevin Ridgeway

Prison Wives


They are all scattered 
about the seaside waiting area, 
applying last minute touches 
of makeup and straightening 
their pantyhose.  One by one, 
we enter the security checkpoint.
We stare at the guard in disbelief 
when he commands our mother 
to remove her brassiere after
its underwire sets off 
the metal detector.  They hold 
it up for all to see like a prize 
or a Ripley's Believe It or Not!
oddity before they grant us access 
to the next security checkpoint 
across a concrete bridge 
closer and closer to 
a bittersweet family reunion
beyond the chicken wire,
my father in tears 
while I bounce around in his lap 
and in the blink of an eye 
they take him back 
passed the iron doors 
after he makes out 
with my mother 
in a frenzy 
of desperate passion 
while the inmate 
next to us sticks his hand 
under his wife's dress
in front of their children,
and her eyes roll into
the back of her head.

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press). Recent work has appeared in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly, Gasconade Review,The American Journal of Poetry, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock and So it Goes:  The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, among others.  A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.

Tiffany Belieu

Pastoral


A claw so tender
that the ripping is a blessing.
 
I’ve talked so much about 
the hopes tied to our actions 
 
my mouth runs desert
help me make it 
 
to the oasis. We can both
get our fill. 
 
The therapy of consuming
seems to be working 
 
I let my sheep out.
The pristine pasture only kept them
 
caged. You, wolf-eyed, never
crying know exactly why you salivate.
 
Thoughts are all unburst 
bubbles - fantasies 
 
giggled from lusty mouths
in these sweet clover fields,
 
cover me in your body,
let the howls rip through me.

Tiffany Belieu is working hard on her dream of writing. Her work is published or forthcoming in Back Patio Press, Q/A Poetry, Muskeg Magazine, Rabid Oak and The Mantle among others. She loves tea and cats and can be found @tiffobot on Twitter.

Lisa Lerma Weber

Deflated


Sometimes while driving to work,
I forget where I'm going.
I forget there is traffic—
other cars filled with people
haunted by their discarded dreams.
 
I let the music on the radio
wrap itself around me,
let it sing a lullaby of forgetting.
 
And I float.
 
I float away from my practical car
which gets great mileage
but never a second look.
 
I float above office buildings 
filled with grey cubicles and fluorescent lights
that make everything look like cheap items for sale.
I float over piles of paper and overwhelming apathy.
 
I float above dirty streets 
filled with the detritus of hamster wheel lives—
wrappers coated in grease and regret,
straws sticky with commercialism and soda.
Newspapers which tell of skyrocketing student debt,
tax increases, and countless scandals 
involving power grabbing politicians
or greedy millionaires who will get off easy
because money is a skeleton key.
 
I float above traffic lights
which are always telling me to slow down!
stop! it's not your turn!
when all I want to do is go     go        go...
 
I float and I float and I float
until the balloon is popped
by the sound of the horn
from the impatient driver behind me.
We're all in hurry to go nowhere.

Lisa Lerma Weber lives in San Diego. Her work has appeared in Brave Voices, Green Light Lit, Headline Poetry, The Failure Baler, Vamp Cat and others. Follow her on Twitter @LisaLermaWeber

Jack Miller

Letter to a Wise Fool


On cliff of childhood, I could try LSD with him
eyes bursting with calamity
 
he was trying to study himself
but I could tell him, find nothing
 
at all, just the past haunting
in time, transforms him, unveils a key to secrets.
 
He was trying to jam it to open the bathroom doorway
where I locked myself in, high as hell. I’d said too
 
much, I hardly believed it.
Two miles away, little poison hail darts
 
plopped into the saltwater of the ocean, oscillating
the crashing on the very same sand the bonfire's smoke slept
 
embedded in our clothes, until years later I guess it was some nameless
last night at the beach, waiting on the train platform,
 
I think we were drunk inside the city's soul between bus rides.
When I visited, we said our goodbyes, I opened up
 
the only book of poetry you own and stashed in a song of myself,
The Fool card, and a letter to you
 
who melted the stagnating ice-slush;
the lake we spent our last day together beside.
 
I am destructive and driven, and for this
transcendent selfishness, I am sorry,
 
but not regretful; there are so few places
I can open that book and not burn in cold.
 
Hidden in the freezing air there are so many places 
to lock secrets away, to celebrate in silence,
 
still I disappear completely as sure as the sun will rise,
snow fills me and leaves while you sleep.
 
Today was frozen. The snow melted when I left—it was tranquilizing:
a letter and a tarot card slept in the bed with us.
 
Tired, I got up in the dark,
and said my goodbyes to your sleep.
 
I slid the letters written on a coffee shop napkin,
then gazed deep until I shone.
 
I walked into the snowmelt and the sun rising,
not looking back, marching with a newfound intensity,
 
putting on the blue and white snow hat
you sometimes wear.

Jack Miller is a poet from San Francisco, living in Tennessee, and his debut collection The Glory Tree is forthcoming publication by Bone & Ink Press in February 2020. His writing has appeared in Raven Chronicles and Open Minds Quarterly, among others.

Zachery Noah Rahn

Consider Ichnology

I learned in class today that Ichnology

[ noun. - ik-nol′o-ji - ]

is the study of life
is the study of traces of life.
In Bolivia, there is a limestone cliff
hosting bones put on display by a wall
of vertical footprints. It’s called the Cal
Orcko.         I could count 5,000 dinosaur
footprints, which is to say that I could go
back in time and study the new ichnology,
the new present, which I could say is the same
as the Jurassic,                              but I’d be wrong
because the Jurassic isn’t the same as the Late
Cretaceous. Cretaceous reminds me of my dad,
not because he’s old,                               which he is,
but because of the phonetics in Christopher. I met
a grandma in France once,                    she told me
how to make children cry in Syria, which is to say
that all you’d need to do is point a camera at them.
My favorite dinosaur as a child was the Deinonychus,
the ones they based the velociraptor in Jurassic Park
on because they wanted to scare the children, and who
could be afraid of a chicken-sized dinosaur? I used to run
from two-month-old            puppies when I was four, scared
they’d eat me alive in one single chomp like the Deinonychus,
or the T Rex, or the Carcharodontosaurus. Did you know
that some children cry at the sight of a dachshund?
Learned that when I was four. When I was five,
I lived in New York for a year. My mother
was scared I’d get sick    from the cold,
from the people,            from the mice,
from the rats.                Scared I’d die
in my hospital bed with nurses dotting
me, dusting my bones with tubes and devices
to study my trace of life. The study of Ichnology
is the study of New York,                     the city, I mean,
where my lover is, prodding specimens at the American
Museum of Natural History, which is to say that I’m gay,
because in his eyes I saw canyons, I mean, I saw Cal Orcko.
O the dinosaurs.
He took a photo of me and I screamed.
What’s in it?           There was him and me,
him throwing a grapevine into the ceiling
fan and then there were fireworks, bones
clustering together under a slide of tectonic
plates, a meteor and a flash of light, lifted
into the air on display for paleontologists
and / Godly / people to argue our ichnology.

Zachery Noah Rahn is a Writing & Linguistics senior at Georgia Southern University. He is a queer poet that enjoys reading about insects, watching horror movies, and spending time with his dog. When Zach isn’t writing poems about ants, he can be found in the candy aisle at the nearest grocery store.

Josette Akresh-Gonzales

Letter to my aunts, uncles, and cousins who want to know the date of my son’s bar mitzvah


This weekend I saw two grown men cry:
a man drunk and sick at knowing 
his parents had screwed up so badly 
they’d fucked up his life 
before he was even born
and a man who had lost his old dog—
belly full of cancer 
at his kid’s third birthday party 
while we were opening presents.
 
My husband helped dig the grave.
 
Balls hot outside.
 
The six-year-old girl who loved the dog watched
and asked questions. Why
are you digging this hole? Why
are her eyes still open?
 
Anyway, my father said that you’d been asking if 
my son, who’s twelve now, was having a bar mitzvah.
 
No, he’s not.
 
At least not a traditional bar mitzvah—
we will not collect checks in a basket by the door,
the rabbi will not cover the boy’s head in her tallis and bless him...
 
Like a marsh full of birds taking off, feathers splashing,
we too wonder what happened, how a kid 
who spoke in full sentences at one and a half 
could drop out of Hebrew school at ten, afraid 
of the twisted letters and guttural stops.
 
Prayer felt like a burden or an option to him.
 
It wasn’t something I wanted to force,
muscles flexed and twitching, and of course
we hope you’ll come visit sometime—
we sing Shabbos blessings and drink wine 
every Friday night—you’d be welcome anytime.

Josette Akresh-Gonzales is working on her first book and was a finalist in the 2017 Split Lip Turnbuckle Chapbook Contest. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart and has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. You can find her on Twitter @Vivakresh.

Satya Dash

Daily Suicide


The breathing certainty of ink, 
how the pen strokes paper
etched in the rapids of a moment’s vanity―
                            
                             this is my warm blooded yoga.
                              With this ink I bend the course of
                              the everyday
                              into breath, excrement,
                              blood cleaving erections.

 
What once troubled me
is now 
                              yellow juices susurrating in ponds
                              in my tidal belly.
 
I try to nibble at the day’s offerings,
my earnestness     born out of rhapsodies in caffeine.
 
                             Once I jumped         into a lake of boys 
                              but didn’t know how to swim―   
                              a joyful suicide, a murder of my inhibitions.
 
I guess I was just looking
to outlive my history. 
 
Now the lizard in my washroom       glides away from me
like a dark feather on wheels.            I watch it go by as if            
                                                   it were time in visual motion.

                              Under the shower I keep looking
                              for a little bit of flame 
                              between my outlandish legs. 
Forests whistle 
                              birdsong in muscled bark, 
                                                       shameless foreskin. 
 
Did you know 
there is jutting grace
 
                             even in the worst of ugliness?

Satya Dash's poems have been published or are forthcoming in Passages North, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Florida Review, Pidgeonholes, Glass Poetry, Prelude amongst others. Apart from having a degree in electronics from BITS Pilani-Goa, he has been a cricket commentator too. His work has been twice nominated for the Orison Anthology. He spent his early years in Odisha, India and now lives in Bangalore. He tweets at : @satya043 

Chris Costello

Black Coffee


The next time we met
I tried to turn it into an accident
but even then I couldn’t fool you.
You gave me that small smirk
I’d grow to hate. Your signature 
stare, stolen from a movie.
 
Then that almost-whisper
that tells me you’ll soon
become a monument. 
I tried not to look up 
from the menu.
 
You waited tables, I watched 
the clock. When the time came you took me 
out behind the Dumpster. The smell of grease 
thickened the air. We found one another
like trees in a storm, violent and awesome.
 
The footsteps came, not like the ripples 
on the surface of a pond, but the stones 
that sink to the bottom. You pulled away
as violently as you’d come.
 
I asked you “what’s wrong?” 
You whispered, “No one knows.” 
I put my hand on your shoulder: 
like punching through gauze. 
“It’s okay. I’ll wait.” 
That time, at least, I meant it.
 
Soon, the footsteps retreated
and you came back into me. 
Embrace felt emptier, somehow, 
drained of color. But you were so new, 
and your eyes hid so much from me still. 
I let go and hung on tight. I whispered: 
 
“I’ll let you write your name 
on my tongue in cursive if you promise 
to tell me a secret like you love me, 
but only in the dark. Kiss me, 
and we might make it out alive.”

Chris Costello is a writer, editor, and educator from Central New York. His work has appeared in Stone Canoe, Ink and Voices, and Protean Magazine, among others.

Alice Carlill

soap


I stood & cried at the kitchen sink today. 
I stood & blinked away my salt-brine drops,
sunshine saccharine marigolds fleshing 
confetti soapsuds into a slippery existence.
 
I sat on the kitchen floor & wept for the exhaustion of 
my hope.
for the women wearing squeaking smiles that stick 
pearlescent oil slick to their soap scum mouths,
suffocating beneath the weight of
their sadness.
 
I descend into the corporeal & I 
howl from the ground as I
scrape the knife across my scarlet soft and 
spew forth
clots of bile.
 
Do I defile?
 
No. 
You asked for this.
 
do not tell me that emotion does not belong 
in my body & its language
when it is you who would demand the 
performance of my pain
over & again
just to validate its existence.
 
so take my body in all its blood 
& smear a smile across my skin.
my substance is paper thin 
& if all you want is the surface without subjectivity, then I will 
paint myself into
mosaic being.
 
 
the suds have dried
leaving barely anything behind.

Alice Carlill is a London-based dramaturg, script supervisor, poet and performer. As a script writer, reader and supervisor, she has worked with Theatre503, Finborough Theatre, Katzpace, The Delta Collective and Big Broad Productions, and has performed her spoken word/poetry at venues including Watford Palace Theatre and Finborough Arms. She is collaborating with The Actor’s Box on performance-poetry workshops, devising a performance on queerness and liminality, and studying for her MA at Goldsmiths. She can otherwise be found walking her six dogs somewhere.

Courtney Bush

RILKE VOICE


I remember having no control 
More difficult than any angel wherever she may be caught
In whatever breast in whatever 
Blue pink yellow light
In gladiator light
 
*
 
The prodigy I held so close
I said close to her heart her country reminds me of Y2K
Even then it shouldn’t be Glenn Gould all the time
Mary Robison, the second elegy at Duino or the computer 
Plus whatever I had to say to you a year ago
 
*
 
Singing Turandot at night in the snow
Singing Turandot outside like a bot 
To all the rich people dressed as punks on the train at rush hour
The angel’s stuck in a hole in a leaf
 
Snagged on some edge
Like when I try to remember everything I love
And love is back
 
*
 
That Connecticut lady won’t shut up
Less than a year has passed
And it will happen again
I would tell you about it
Pushing you to Antarctica
In the free museum wheelchair
Being so mean to you
 
*
 
We can’t deny back there we felt closer
To where we are going than now
When we saw the painting with the angels in the rafters
You said that one is just a spear of light
The others were babies
Parts of babies with wings
A head 
And you said we are happier than they are
Than everyone
And it felt like standing on a cliff
 
*
 
Half the time Coco doesn’t understand the words themselves
Half the time only meaning eludes her
I feel inside I will transform
And you can justify anything by connecting it to Ashbery
There is no one to talk me out of it
As one of us has to eat, clean, receive and give away money
 
*
 
If a photograph exists
It can’t really be rare
At Duino I could call on something Italian too
My mom’s friend Carmine
From the middle of the Earth
The sin cake eater
I’m fighting over who should buy the cigarettes
 
*
 
What’s the youngest you’ve ever been
And the youngest you could bear being again
 
At Duino I could isolate looking for you from abstract looking
And on top of the hand is the underhand
 
*
 
I miss other people more 
They are hosing things down 
So smart 
So today when they hose down the chicken warehouses 
I’d like to be a complete idiot or a complete anything
In the first clips of sunlight
 
*
 
In the sun is a metal circle
Turning into a dance that goes around
There is a premonition in language of the never ending pain 
Eclipsing itself
Out on the moors
It fractures and that is totally fine
On the moors
The female schooner captain died today
The gay cool female schooner captain
 
*
 
Katelyn said not that road
There will be a morning
And a road that makes you feel better about yourself
 
*
 
Dancing with the romaine lettuce devil
Sitting on the seawall with the man who killed the mayor
Emily Dickinson’s Poems as She Preserved Them
I told Andy he had these and other unspeakably dark forces to thank
For all the LA modern architecture he’s obsessed with
That’s how drunk I was
Mitya Pyotr 1 Pyotr 2 Dmitri Petroshka Your Name
I do this to myself
 
*

Listening to music and watching TV at the same time is impossible
A teenager told his girlfriend on the train this morning
Trying to fill holes
Frantic and ecstatic must come from the same place
When you take out the Christian myths
The angels are still in the rafters
Hanging over the empty barn
Stray clumps of hay
Dust
A dog
 
*
 
If one person can sing three songs at once
There could be more songs than ears
If you want to be hysterically funny 
Write out the logic of anything
 
*
 
When I sing I’m just saying
The question does the begging
People are not special
Being alive is special
 
Leonard Cohen yelling
In the end we give up customs we barely had time to learn
That is what hysterical light made me think of
 
*
 
Goodnight my love
I am trying to read six books at once
Some people change and some don’t
That is not a literary device
Some people learn something 
1-800-HURT
In this way it is like a garden
Or an aquarium where some flowers live by accident
There is nothing spectacular about a show of hands
Fuck a Whitmanic list
I always say
We are supposed to somehow give things to each other
Without taking anything away
 
*
 
I saw a kid dabbing and flossing
At the Hilma af Klint show
I told my pre-verbal children how night time is pointless
I read the Duino Elegies at the top of my lungs
And yes they cried out for someone else
 
*
 
Lost beyond the resources of talk
I took the path of things so mysterious we shouldn’t bother with explaining
To play a heavy metal song of love
Fires
When I asked is there not something like Greek tragedy
But now
 
*
 
I pursued my obsession with shame and confusion
He is a nice person and he’s not addicted to drugs anymore
So that’s even better
So you feel what I want maybe it could be transitive
Oh no
This is what I meant about not taking anything away
Silver at the gills with facts about the Cold War
Silver in the bouncy balls at Wal-Mart
 
*
 
To the bridge that fell
You were the worst bridge
 
*
 
Something to suck water out of the ground
Intimate like the only self
They are out there, along the highway
In summer
My mom called me an evil weed smoking thug
And you’re distracted talking to a friend in the backseat
About nothing in particular
A child who knows poems is just a child who knows poems
Already too many of those
 
Something was lying to you
 
*
 
The youngest thing you could imagine
Give me a gold coin
 
When I sing I’m just trying to make a dog cry

Courtney Bush is a poet, filmmaker, and preschool teacher from Mississippi. Her chapbook Isn’t this nice? is available from blush_lit.

Rachel Tanner

Kmart, 1998


Mama says first things first grab a cart
so my brothers Brian and Aaron get a shopping cart.
It has rickety wheels but that's okay;
mama says we all get rickety sometimes and
it doesn't make us any less useful.
 
A wonderland of
all the bullshit you could dream of
where the bathroom
is in the back corner of the store,
seemingly abandoned, down an aisle
of ceiling fans going full speed.
Brian whispers hope the fans don't 
spin off the ceiling and kill you when
I ask if I can go to the bathroom.
 
I run down the fan aisle and
in a few minutes, run
right back out. I'll live another day.
I survived the whirring blades.
 
We beg and beg and beg for 
an Icee from the snack counter up front.
Mama says y’all can split one
between the three of you. That’s 
plenty.
 
We argue about which
flavor to get. Coke, I say.
No, cherry, says Aaron.
BLUE! BLUE! Brian shouts
louder than me and Aaron.
He wins. We get blue.
 
We pass the cup around and 
suck it down so quickly that we 
all end up with brain freezes,
but we don’t care.
 
Eventually mama’s cart is full
so we go to check out. We load
the groceries into the car and
watch the store disappear
behind us.

Rachel Tanner is an Alabamian writer whose work has recently appeared in Impossible Task,The Weekly Degree, Tiny Molecules, and elsewhere. She tweets @rickit and more of her work can be found at https://neutralspaces.co/racheltanner.

Hannah Storm

I am mother before me


The m hovers over the laundry of my past,
The time when I was other not yours, when I was ours.
Before we added the m, I was my, me, mine.
Now, I hold her head, her hand. I wipe tears,
and arses and sick from the spaces between us.
In your place, my absence, face unfamiliar,
washing piles of clothes and dishes, wishing away the days.
I wonder where the years have gone. 
None of this is how I imagined it to be, when we kissed, absentmindedly,
when we drank wine and fucked. And fucked,
no cares but yours and mine. When we were a couple.
You and me, before we were three, then two.
Before you subtracted one from three and took me from me.

Hannah Storm discovered flash, CNF and poetry just recently, after 20 years as a journalist travelling the world, witnessing war, wonder and worry. Her writing pays tribute to the people she has met and places she has been and helps her to process her own experiences of trauma. Now based in the UK, she has been published in Barren Magazine, Atticus Review, Bending Genres, Spelk, Reflex Fiction, Ellipsis Zine, Elephants Never, and other publications.