i extend my hand
a green dragonfly takes hold
we have become one
Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, zines, and online publications. He has published 13 chapbooks. He runs Between Shadows Press.
He is trying to teach us—this Time
It is the capital H cast in the Sunbeams
That overflow my pane
In the Morning—scuff marks
On hardwood—specks in the Space
Between bricks in the sidewalk—
In the square where a brick had been—
Air that expands into each Corner
Of the room as soon as the cracked
Window whirls the Dust alive—grass
Billowing along the Charles—motionless
Ducks in the garden—my God, the bluejay
Blurting into Oblivion, to the oblivious—
Bees, ceasing, deceased—Red wine
In the fridge—the orchid wilting on
A sill in sunlight—obedient Dog
At the door—the shadow behind Him.
Kakie Pate recently graduated with an MFA in poetry from Emerson College where she worked as the head poetry editor for the literary journal Redivider. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in DIALOGIST Journal, Rock & Sling, West Trade Review, Yes Poetry, and Entropy, among others. A native Virginian, she currently resides in Boston, Massachusetts.
in the morning
I was sprawled across
a white table
my legs in stirrups
things are progressing
deep ulceration
I tried to read
with all the lights out
in the dark
I heard the migratory birds
driven off course
Richard McCann died this morning
my mother told me
not everything is hereditary
I bled all over the bedspread
something alive in my gut
I thought I heard you
calling my name
does dreaming about you mean
I have to thank you for visiting?
Jesse Arnholz is a queer, writer, comedian, and artist from Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in the Eunoia Review, the Washington Blade, the Chicago Sun Times, and the Windy City Times. Her work centers around chronic illness, the body, and making sense of trauma.
I have discovered Eden in the backyard of a Veterinary Clinic
in Upstate New York.
Over there all the good boys souls departed.
On site crematorium.
Sanctuary for grass.
Eden.
Agrarian heaven.
Must be.
I can think of no other reason they haven’t
flipped the whole thing over into gardens.
Adam cranks his Ford 8N tractor with a thumb on cracked rubber.
His sister has a cooler of beer outside in the sunshine.
There’s ten thousand things alive in the lawn
and a billion years dead in the bed below.
Be low.
And you too will know.
The voices of ten thousand things.
The Adam up the road sings Tom Petty while he mows.
And Eve is asleep in their bed. They share everything.
Except for parents. White violets in thin grass.
Purple ones in the woods. Fringed on the fringes.
White petals with purple veins and singes.
The trees we plant and those we can’t stand tens of feet
and hundreds of years apart. Roots tangled like long ghostly
strands of the same spider’s web.
I have discovered the true sun. And the true earth. Its daughter.
And the first life. And the grandparents of plants.
Grass that tells a different sort of story about God’s favored ruminant.
The four in one. Four stomachs. One hungry lamb. Poor grass. Outnumbered.
Ten thousand to one dandelions yawn up cotton at the wind.
I have discovered Eden.
In the prayer.
Dear Lord.
Save us from our saviors.
J.T. Homesley is an English teacher, writer, actor and farmer currently based in the Piedmont of North Carolina. A recent graduate of Lenoir-Rhyne University in Asheville, he holds a Master of Arts in Writing. Follow his journey at www.writeractorfarmer.com
Even her hands became gentle
like sunlight. And on the operating table
her heart stopped 11 times,
she begged (thump thump thump)
for a bloody mouth, fluid to
spill over the cracks between her molars.
She suckled her inner cheek between beats, all flesh,
the way she did when my mother was born.
Silence, a relief.
If chewing is a sign of life
then I’ll pray to bubblegum
when all is said and done, I’ll brush her teeth,
and she will fossilize like seashell.
Chloe Cook is an undergraduate student attending Northern Kentucky University. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for the student-run creative magazine, Loch Norse Magazine. Her work is featured or forthcoming in Tule Review, Oakland Arts Review, Sledgehammer Lit, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, entitled Surge, is forthcoming form dancing girl press in fall 2021. She currently resides in the NKY region.
cw: rape
my cat bites whenever she doesn’t want
to be touched / which is most times / i
wish i could learn such feral refusal /
but i am soft / not like her fur, a smooth
enticement / but like a peach ripening /
in the summer sun // he sank his face /
into my pink flesh / i ruminated on the
bite-marks for a year / before i moved on //
but still i think of him whenever people /
speak of peaches and teeth / whenever
i hear his name / i run my fingers
through my cat’s marled fur, receive a
nip in return / juice lisps from the pink
ring of dots where her rebuke found me //
anyway, this just to say / i wish to never
be touched without my consent again /
the threat of a sharply-lined bite / my
new exuberance / my fanged stone fruit
Michaela Mayer is a 25-year-old elementary school teacher and poet from Virginia. Her works have been previously published in Perhappened, Feral Poetry, Survivor Lit, Claw & Blossom, Barren Magazine, and others. She has poems forthcoming with Olit, The Lickety~Split, and Monstering Mag and can be found on Twitter @mswannmayer5.
I get drunk
and watch a Pedro Costa movie,
the shape of grief, plaster falling in when they hope
to take a shower, wash off the spit
and comb their hair out before bed,
a stranger’s sheets, a lover who abandoned
them so simply for false promise in Lisbon,
it was more like a shaping of dough for frying, chopping
pumpkin for stewing, smearing peanut sauce on springrolls, what
the lordship calls facts, factum, fractal wisdom wailed in subway
sax over click track,
our roof is leaking, there are spore-spots in the
corners, mossy growths on the windows, curtains stained
and dripping with brownout bruise, a hole hangs in the ceiling
where I once hoped to replace the horrific chandelier monstrosity that
blinded us over dinner, that one time we had dinner at the table, shared
curry with guests who drove two hours to find us on the margins of the
city, we sat together and shared takeout samosas,
pretended
the masala was more than watery slop, afterwards played
early Joni on the turntable and swapped verses, maybe we sang
something, certainly
we were not worried then about our fascist neighbors, who now walk the neighborhood in late afternoons, guns holstered on their swagger, looking out for brown kids who frequent the 7-11 and visit the ducks swarmed in the culvert-lakes,
there were fewer flags on trucks then,
today I saw five lined up across the pickup arse, texas/eagle/prez,
flopping in hot wind like puppies
popped in their peabrains
with kiddie bbguns,
the prez twisted round its stiff prick poking out the back
so I have to be careful not to scrape my chassis,
lined up behind throbbing chevy
in the drivethru at TacoCabana, and I have to wait extra long
while the driver rails at the woman at the window
because the change is not coming out sweet
and steady and on time, only really it’s her accent
that makes him peel out after
and swing into the Petco parking lot to stuff two steak tacos and a
stale quesadilla down before heading back to the homestead, and I am
listening to a failed song about failed love,
without mercy there is no mercy,
without mercy there is no pico,
without mercy there is not enough queso,
without mercy we have only enough cat food to feed the animals through this weekend,
without catfood there is no promise of tongues gifted with prophetic speech,
without prophecy there is no pleasure in Portuguese longshots, near-silences laced with ambient
voicestreetgroan,
without silence there is no awareness of poverty within,
I head for the park to eat my tacos, pull into the space between two other
loners who sit with engines running, windows rolled up, chew on their
chicknuggets and balance their laptops, dip sorrow in gravy then sit with no
music, no radio, checking out the apt. complex nextdoor, lawncare specialist
trimming grasses round the keypad entrance, I roll down my window to hear the
blade spinning, read an article about the sighing collapse of 70s feminism in the
80s, don’t make it to the end, this is not the 80s I want to think about,
the revelation of Patmos, the perfect city as a perfect steel cube, horrorpromise
circling everslow in everspace and evertime, song unending that sounds more like
a slice of looped Angel of the Morning
bind bind bind bind bind bind bind
my hands my hands my hands my hands
bindbind my handshands
bindhands my handsbind
my band my hind
cut off the speaker midsentence
examine the shadow of friendship
cease weeping sentimental tears over oilgas tumors
gate swings back
squint in sudden flare
of sun
James Miller won the Connecticut Poetry Award in 2020, and is published in the Best Small Fictions 2020 anthology from Sonder Press. Recent pieces have appeared or are forthcoming in Rabid Oak, North Dakota Quarterly, Scoundrel Time, 8 Poems, Phoebe, Yemassee, Mantis, Cleaver, Rathalla Review, Worcester Review, Elsewhere, Passengers, West Trade Review and Counterclock. Follow on Twitter @AndrewM1621.
I always wanted to make stationery or notepads out of
restaurant checks
you know, those numbered sheets they use to take your order
at diners
but when I looked online the only places I could buy them were
restaurant supply stores
so you had to buy them in bulk like you were, ya know,
a restaurant
and I wasn’t going to order, like, a thousand notepads for my
tiny apartment
but! one website did offer to send a sample, which again, was a sample
in bulk
and this is a silly analogy but you’ll see the point
about proportions
like, if an elephant went to a restaurant and ordered
a sample of wine
they’d pour the elephant, like a full gallon of wine
so anyway
all this to say that I got mailed an entire box of restaurant checks and I use
them to make lists
and they’ve lasted me years, even though I was the type of
compulsive list-maker
who would do a thing, write it on a list, then cross it out just to prove
that I did a thing
until one year I got so depressed that I stopped making lists
because
the only
two things I could do were the only two things I had to do
which were get out of bed
and brush my teeth (and sometimes I didn’t even brush my teeth)
and I was afraid
I’d do something bad to myself so I’d text you and you’d come over
and we’d
make grilled cheese or just sit on the kitchen floor and breathe
and I guess
that’s what it means to need someone and I can’t seem to find
those notepads anywhere.
Ben Kassoy is all the birds in Minnesota, who come down from the trees and lace up their tiny skates and glide across the frozen lakes every winter night. More at www.benkassoy.com.
Buddied up at the bar with a lethal ballerina
who has just told me they are not afraid to remove all my lightbulbs,
I tell them I wish I could speak another language,
especially with someone who’s hot.
Later I will see the dancer everywhere I go,
because they traveled the world passing out masks of their face.
I, too, have gone undercover in other poets’ poems.
Some poets’ poems are softer than my decomposing corpse.
Regardless, the weather blinks the mind-games out its eye sockets.
I stand drooling on a diving board as two dancers swim laps in the pool.
There are things I never thought about, and probably never will.
I’m the first to go bankrupt. Don’t blame me for playing along.
Nate Hoil is the greatest living poet, published in X-R-A-Y, Witch Craft, and soon poets.org for an Academy of American Poets Award.
I was born a man's failed dream.
As a prayer, my father asks
Con thương ba không? Sao không ở Mỹ?
I dream the birth of a language
where the passive voice of thương
doesn't mean to be wounded.
Every love prays for my death,
seeking the ghost of someone else.
I lie still, a featherless thing.
When hope fails, a dream looks like
a daughter without wings.
Ba thương con không? I ask
as a prayer. The tongue
of silence buries me alive.
———
Love is the closest translation of the Vietnamese verb thương, though not the exact spirit. Thương conveys a type of compassion with much understanding and acceptance, and can be used for any close relationship. Perhaps ironically, one of its passive voice forms is bị thương, which doesn’t mean “to be loved”, but “to be wounded”.
Con thương ba không? Sao không ở Mỹ? can be roughly translated into “Child, do you love me? Why don’t you stay in the US?”, and Ba thương con không? means “Father, do you love me?”
This poem follows a form I created myself. I draw inspirations from 2 classic poetic forms, the American sonnet and the Vietnamese lục bát. Here are the rules:
14 lines; 1 couplet and 4 tercets.
Each line contains 6-8 syllables.
Each line in the couplet is repeated (loosely) alternatively in the middle line of the following tercets. (to capture the inescapable loss in meaning in every translation.)
Must have at least one non-English word
Tran Tran (she/her/hers) writes in the muddle between English and Vietnamese. Her poems are forthcoming in Salamander Magazine and The Seventh Wave. Currently based in Vietnam, she started Wordlust, a first-of-its-kind community project that runs open mics and writing workshops to foster self-expression and connection through poetry. Tran also co-hosts a local podcast named “Lắng Ngẫu Hứng", where she invites listeners to explore impromptu poetry writing. Outside poetry, she loves a good laugh and plenty of nature.
hell sours the blood and forgets before I remember the word Angst but not the feeling is one am run nerve surge becoming fluent you reach a point where you can hurt yourself pressure a fist compacting limbs when Moe was learning Portuguese she put sticky notes on objects in her parents’ house I should have specialized in the concrete to write Einsamkeit is to review vocabulary sometimes I get stuck on a flashcard frozen in its field spellcheck suggests easement I count breaths in German to prove there are other worlds outside disaster either my deck has only one card or each card is the same Moe suggests a cold shower the next time I need a language I cannot panic the trick is to outrun your flashcards fall asleep unclasp these embers I am falling asleep now let them fall
Lucas Wildner lives in Seattle, where he is repairing his relationships to English and German. Forthcoming and recent work can be found at Pidgeonholes Magazine, Homology Lit, Nice Cage, and elsewhere. On Twitter, sadly: @wucas_lildner.
memory called,
a garbled mess in the receiver:
when the time comes
the innocents will need saving
and that savior will be me—
an addict, a coward, a fraud!
a worm in memory's apple,
deeply burrowed,
gnashing at my ego
year after year after year.
time sends a telegram,
it arrives late:
an unheeded warning
to stay away from unboring words.
to scaffold a feasible truth
to an errant mishap,
i chose magic.
dazzled in a fated well,
blackness boomeranged into me.
no drag on the fletching of time’s arrow
to go back
to understand
what i had yet to learn.
it is this:
eons are enemies.
a cruel crucible of time, mutation, selection
meiosis, mitosis.
a G where a C should have settled,
an A where a T should have been.
Elyse Hart is a poet and musician from Los Angeles. Her poetry has appeared in The Nervous Breakdown, The Los Angeles Press, Okay Donkey Mag, and others. In 2020, her composition "Five Poems of Mirabai for Flute and Soprano" won top prize at a competition through the University of North Carolina Greensboro (UNCG). The piece enjoyed two live performances in 2021. You may find more of her work on Instagram @elysehartpoetry or elysehart.com.
I keep myself on a tight leash. Sometimes I start to wander
again but mostly I try to stay close.
I never buy the same candle twice. I don’t want to be drawn
into the ether of remember. The fog sogged forest surrounding
my heart. No one comes in or out. The perimeter
is surrounded. See, I got lost. I try to stay close.
At times I can’t for the life
(and it is life or death) of me
figure out why I’m holding this spatula. Why I’m putting on
these shoes. What I was saying to you.
Some days, I lose time. Some minutes I lose hours.
The why, like Siken said. I know how to write this
poem. What I’m asking is why I should. Should I?
I probably shouldn’t. Ask that. You ask if I forget
you. You ask if I forget why I love you.
No, darling, never that. But sometimes
how.
I know your why the most. But I don’t want to be your ghost.
When I slipstream I wish it was pretty. That
there were glitter. Faeries, fog, fantasy, fucksakes
I want there to be something glamorous about
the way I lose my life. Manicured
nails & a beat face while I look at yours
without registering it, or like I want to
claw it off. Sometimes I can’t measure
my distance from the ground. Sometimes I pretend
this makes me tall. That disassociation is
a superpower. Hi hello how are you no
I don’t have a name, because if you have a name that means
something at some time has to have happened to you, & nothing
has ever happened to me. Nice to meet
you. Welcome to the forest.
Camille Ferguson is a queer poet from Ohio. Their work is published or forthcoming in Flypaper Lit, Zone 3, Passages North, and Door Is A Jar, among others. You can follow Camille on Twitter @camferg1.
This has happened to me
several times now: I’m reading
a book from the library, and when
I turn the page, something falls
into my lap. Once, a take-out receipt
for Chinese, $14.85 for dumplings,
spare ribs, and Lo mein; once a flower,
purple, a pansy pressed so thin I could
nearly see the world in violet; twice,
prayer cards: a photo of crutches
and prosthetic ex-votos for St. Roche
of New Orleans, and today, out of the guts
of a volume of American Poetry, a card
for Eileen, white with the image of a candle:
May this candle be a light
for you, Lord, to enlighten me
in my difficulties and decisions.
I place in your care those I come
to pray for, especially [Eileen].
I picture the high windowed,
shadowy church where the flickering
candles watched in their terraced rows,
how the reader stood and wrote
and lit and prayed, and how they left
and went home then to the book.
What page had they marked?
Was it Dickinson’s quatrains?
Roethke’s villanelle? I’d let the book
fall closed without thinking
and should have thought
of the hand that tucked the card
between the pages – the gesture
of someone who’d made a plan
to come back, knowing the places
to which one must return and those
who one must remember.
Daniel Johnson is a writer from New Jersey living in Burlington, Vermont. He’s a graduate of the MA in Creative Writing at University College Cork. His work has appeared in journals such as Southword, Reed Magazine, and the Honest Ulsterman. He’s on social media @djohnsonwrites.
It started with all of us
on a long Grey Line bus
trudging through the spangled night.
The guide said we passed
a “poetry farm” – do they grow Words
over here? Oh, he meant chickens,
obviously.
Then we arrived and the sky
was a Coldplay song
staring down at me, as if daring me
to say, “Life is small and stupid
and I have seen
all there is to see.”
This is how the sky had looked at me.
Like it had a silent lesson,
like a paint-by-numbers picture,
begging me to take a brush.
And then –
Among all this cosmic complexity
somebody down here –
needed a doctor.
A little boy, much smaller than the stars,
but much easier to observe
had fallen on his young face
while exiting the bus.
And so – “Is there a doctor? ..Doctor? …Doctor?”
turned everyone’s attention
temporarily from the Celestial.
Two nurses and a doctor
felt up their way blindly, following the echo,
and then yet again:
Just silent dark silhouettes,
straining to look up
in solemnity.
Until, at last, it got very cold for me.
They say in Iceland – “Keep your ears,
your fingers and your toes warm and the rest
will follow.”
My toes were frost-bitten though
and the rest of me had begun
to follow.
But in this open-air cathedral
it seemed futile
to complain. The two things
our guide impressed:
“You won’t see it
from the bus”
and the other –
“You must be patient.”
Seventy and gray-haired, thick
with Icelandic accent, he annunciated
these things slowly:
I trusted him.
So on I went, instead of back.
Gravel crunched, sounding like
solitude; only a black field looming ahead.
And it dawned on me that
this might be where
the Icelanders grow
their poetry.
Spaced out around me, but a few heads
bobbing on in the darkness.
Suddenly, an orifice:
The wavy emerald curtain!
It draped and draped
itself around the Northern magnet,
a velvet blanket,
while all around me –
little yelps of excitement
peppered the darkness.
On everyone’s mind – a war cry:
“We’ve made it!!
Our shivering collective
isn’t going home
defeated in effort
tonight.”
And the wise old guide smiled, thinking:
“No disgruntled tourists will there be
on this night, muttering that I have
sold them fog, no smug mugs
asking for refunds.”
But on my mind, only this:
“None of this
is ours.”
I love and loathe the fact that
I cannot put these in my pocket.
To pull them out on nights
when I’m convinced
that life just might be
small and stupid.
Iva Ticic is an international artist and teacher originally from Croatia. She has lived on 3 continents and is currently back in New York City, where she hopes to finally settle down. Her preference in poetry is the intimate, the sensual, the musical and the brave. Her upcoming book is titled "The Skywriter" and should be coming out this year with New Meridian Arts. Find her on twitter @IvaHasWords
for J
& this is for the last time we met. two boys at the funeral pile.
one watching the other squeeze to ashes in gnashing blue flames.
in this poem. the burning boy is a blur graph plotted in different axes.
– lines cut across fear & despair & grief. remember where we met &
formed a conflux in our mother’s veins – the Nile of death in her womb.
the doctor said we'd not happen. or one person has to happen.
but we flowed together into this world gurgling with blood. giggling at
the defeat of death. the last thing I’ll do in this poem is set on fire
& seek the silhouette of your face against the wall. I have carried
this ritual & again something chars that is not my urge to come &
be with you even for a night. I knew mother had birthed something
more flexible than a bow – the arrow that carries dreams in its spines.
I still know how many sparrows you are yet to catch – a good life,
a good job, a happy family, a wife & two kids…
this morning I woke up to the smell of coffee, & remains of sleep
shower down my eyes. on the wall, I see your shadow standing still.
I see the guts you winged & hollow into the sky in search of dreams. but that
is not the point. we were two long lines nestled on our mother’s palm &
on certain hunt, she fists her hand so tightly to hinder our flight.
what I mean is this:
an arrow at hand is worth two in the sky chasing an illusion
in the name of dreams. you are trying to crack a wrong metaphor
when all is clear that my brother will never come back just like
a bird learns to fly away from home & never return to their nests.
Chinedu Gospel is a young Nigerian Poet. He writes from Anambra. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rising Phoenix, LUNARIS review, Rough cut press, Eremite poetry, Feral poetry, Poetry column NND, Fahmidan journal, Sledgehammer lit mag, among others. He tweets @gospel79070806 & on IG @gospelsofpoetry
Purple night of Kroger’s parking lot
8 o’clock
pale yellow flood light
two days post-Christmas
in my rusted Chevy Silverado
I listen to music on my iPhone
eleven scattered vehicles
SUVs gas-saving sedans
pickup trucks mud splattered
scattered around
moored to the asphalt
anchors of late work shifts.
Beams of Halogen headlights
slice across empty aisles
faintly painted parking stalls.
Through my front window I glimpse
a flash of face in an empty car
glint of glasses in a back seat
fifty feet from me.
My wife shops last-minute groceries
a half hour
women drift
motes jostled in the atmosphere
store to cars
pushing carts
heavy with bags thoughts
another flashbulb exposure
yellow curly hair
an image now of an older child
a nineteenth-century tintype
an infant in her lap
sprinkle of gold in the sand
sloshed in a miner’s pan.
An obese woman walks from the store
to the car’s back door
talks to the children laughs
then in a truck sits 100 feet distant
before returning to the market
a young woman in skinny jeans
unusual in our rural world
sits in her SUV
invisible in the cab’s dark
for ten minutes then leaves
to talk to the children
before she drives away.
They are watching me.
Ron Tobey grew up in north New Hampshire, USA, and attended the University of New Hampshire, Durham. He has lived in Ithaca NY, Pittsburgh PA, Riverside CA, Berkeley CA, and London UK. He and his wife now live in West Virginia, where they raise cattle and keep goats and horses. He is an imagist poet, writing haiku, storytelling poems, spokenpoetry, and producing videopoetry. His work has appeared in several dozen literary magazines, including Truly U Review, Prometheus Dreaming, Broadkill Review, Cabinet of Heed, Punk Noir, Atticus Review - Mixed Media, and The Light Ekphrastic. His Twitter handle is @Turin54024117.
begin your lisping from where
the fleeing steam from a nearby kettle
on a stove is a zephyr for mysteries
seeking solace in the arms of the atmosphere-
geography says, they evaporates, condensate & precipitates
these steams, like babies in my village
return in the names of their departed
names here, are visas of reenactments---rebirth.
grannies too were once here & then steamed
their fallen bodies encumber in ridges behind many compounds
they precipitates again & our neighborhood tropes with kids.
Ojo Olumide Emmanuel is a Nigerian Poet and Book Editor. He is the Author of the Poetry Chapbook Supplication For Years in Sands (Polarsphere Books, 2021). His works have appeared and forthcoming at Feral, Quills, Poemify, Melbourne-Culture, TNR and elsewhere. He currently curates the monthly Wakasoprize for Poetry and Abubakar Gimba Prize for Short Fiction. He is a fellow of SprinNG Writers Fellowship. Say hi to him on Twitter @OjoOlumideEmma2