Jarrett Moseley

After You Slept Over & The Power Went Out & You Explained to Me The Secondary Nature of Electricity Before Completely Disappearing Forever

I find it hard to believe there’s a yellowness beneath it all.

The black-esque room & one hand tucked into
            the lip of your elastic waistband.
 
I’ll still kick you
            out in the morning.
 
Someone says, a curse
            of lowering standards.
 
I say blessings.
 
Here’s the one picture of you balancing a metal pole beside Lake Merrit, trying to make
            the best of what you’ve been given.
 
Here’s the middle part of the essay.
 
I’ll just go ahead and leave the meaningful stuff
            to someone other than me.
 
& so but I do find I am constantly
            someone other than me.
 
& so but I do concur at least with almost full certainty that I am someone other than
            that me—
 
That me who was never drawn into
            the blue movement of your breath.
 
Who never stuck one finger into the wind which carries it, trying
            to find where it was going or taking me.
 
Those old aphorisms and the town I never left saying:
 
I’ve learned well enough to leave just enough to grow.
 
—ok. I’m being serious now.
 
Here’s the real middle part of the essay.
 
It’s erupting. 

---

Jarrett Moseley is a bisexual poet whose work has been published or is upcoming in Homology Lit, Sanskrit Literary-Arts Magazine, and Mineral Lit Mag. He is the Editor in Chief at Non.Plus Lit, and a member of the University of Miami's 2022 Creative Writing MFA cohort. In his spare times he enjoys walking dogs, reading weird poetry, and contemplating the breakdown of society.

Zara Williams

the manse

i think of distance.
            of summer nights, stretched and endless,
            and warm, green mornings soaked with dew.

and you, not here.

a wood pigeon coos,
            and i toss and turn in the sun-spill on
            the sheets, a shade of orange like 

the yolk of an egg.

i think of eggs.
            sunny side up, or poached, or scrambled,
            and how your father says there’s nothing like

getting them fresh.

and then, there:
            the two of us walking in the dusk, and there,
            the clucking of hens, air thick with wild garlic.

the smell is familiar,

but the ache is new;
            i wonder if i will ever see that place again.
            the firepit, the garden. the wall your cat

likes to sit on.

a dainty, bloody paw
            halfway to the scrape of her tongue,
            pale eyes watchful.

---

Zara Williams (they/she) is a twenty-something queer poet and storyteller based in Scotland. They were the winner of the non-fiction segment of L'Èphemère Review's Inaugural Writing Awards, and through them published their debut chapbook, We Begin In The Dark. They have also published work with Mineral Lit Mag, Corvid Queen, and The Rising Phoenix Review. A postgrad student of Medieval Literatures and Cultures at The University of Edinburgh, they have a fascination with stories, and all things magical and dusty. You can observe their stream of consciousness in real time on Twitter or Instagram @zdeawilliams.

Katie Hogan

Root Forage

Midwinter, Maryland woods are wet
and stuck to the earth— taproots.
 
His hair a buzz of rust and her calluses
hand-pocketed in the wears of overalls,
 
Her own thick friz syrupy, curled
around her scalp.
 
The ground a clump
 
Of oak trunks, knotted,
full of pebbles,
 
The smell of crabs
 
He cuts in-two with his knife,
angled from palm, shell-
 
Crack to reveal
flesh, sweet, salt.
 
The air misty, thick as smoke, above checkered
sheet they eat from, basket of fruit she brought,
 
Beer he sips. Dusk-fed, they groan
into each other. She is so young.
 
He breeds bees and opens her hand,
dry, places claw and crab belly,
 
Flush of saltwater,
plate of root vegetables.
 
They eat with hands first.
Mouths hang open.
 
*
 
In the meadows, we friends at first
used to eat the red berries,
The wrong ones— water roots—
golden apples and milk bottled
 
Up on fleece blankets our babysitters
laid for us. We’d run our hands through pockets
 
Of clovers, beards of dirt;
in her backyard we buried
 
Chicken bones and our baby teeth and overtop
grew her mother’s mint.
 
The spinach, cilantro:
 
Earth meat, foaming at the mouth
of the mud.
 
At the ocean
 
We looked for seaweed and held
our breath, ribbons of kelp,
 
Salmon, mushrooms barnacled
to the sides of shore piers, fog
 
We tried to grasp—
 
Sea daisies, mermaid tails, octopus plums
foraged from underwater orchards,
 
We swore
 
*
 
He licked the goosebumps, back
of my neck, they rose like
 
Blush, dozen buds,
light pink.
 
I had my first boyfriend at six
or seven, and we kept it from my parents
 
Like we had anything of our own to keep.
 
Our roots fibrous,
souls still hardened in our ankle-bones,
 
We danced on sand dunes and hung
in parallel crescent moons on mud
 
Beneath the trampoline. Butterfly kisses, secret
life of brushed limbs, arm fuzz uprooted to tremble
 
On freckles, warm jolt, hugs we thought
forbidden, his breath. I still remember
 
His smell: linen, skin, sweet-damp,
palm trunks, like mornings made
 
Of egg yolks and honeybread,
fresh rain on the oaks that curtained our tree-fort.
 
*
 
The poems are Wright, earthy, eros,
full of rural, plant sex, roots tuberous,
 
Appalachia, home that was not home. Shadows murk
in corners and later leak, soak open
 
Meadows, seep to prisons, stumble over
old abandoned houses, once belonging both
 
To coven and prayer belt.
Her husband.
 
Spine too wide to index
            against thumb, smelling like
 
Charlottesville, my father’s Arkansas.
They remind me of a lesbian.
 
As for myself? C.D. herself is the color green,
riper than Forrest.
 
Mirrors here are full of questions,
and peaches, and dust to shelter under,
 
Wink practice, half-poems lost to the breath
in-between. I don’t know where to look other than
 
An image circled. Margin.

---

Katie Hogan is a twenty year old emerging poet from Richmond, Virginia, writing and living in Denver, Colorado. Her work appears in Isacoustic, Mineral Lit Mag, and Certain Circuits, and is forthcoming in The Chiron Review, Dreich Magazine and Déraciné Magazine. She is currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in creative writing from the University of Denver.

Seán Griffin

Systemic

Dandy dandelion, you flower in the fissures
            on the median of the Bronx River Pkwy
            with black top gravel and what once
            was a squirrel, now a velvet strip
dandy dandelion, you’re seen to be a weed
            your presence on lawns a sign
            there goes the neighborhood, but here
            on the grass patched shoulder, oh
dandy dandelion, you proliferate with next
            to nil, cut down, yet still growing, and
            it seems, botanically, this world is out
            to get you, even though you try, sweet
dandy dandelion, to brighten up the bleak
            landscape you’re allowed until you aren’t
            I want to bring just one powder puff to
            acres upon acres of field, wish, and blow

---

Seán Griffin received an MFA in Creative Writing from Manhattanville College. Seán's writing has appeared in The Southampton Review, Selcouth Station Press, Impossible Archetype, Dust Poetry Magazine, Sonic Boom, and Cathexis Northwest Press, with poetry in The Mud Season Review, Mineral Lit Magazine, and The Hellebore forthcoming. Seán teaches writing at Concordia College of New York, is an editor for Inkwell Literary Journal, and lives in New York with three dogs.

Cymelle Edwards

imitations

after David Berman

cellophane, crackers, chartreuse

in the garage streams of multicolored christmas lights hang from rafters
the golden retriever whines until we pause dinner to go back inside
 
the mailboxes have keys hanging from them and so on
because no one stayed to wait for the all-clear, they just left,
 
their cars peeled off the shoulder like masking tape ripped from cardboard
adhesive tearing to carpet where fibers collect clusters of filth
 
waiting to be licked
 
lou reed’s walk on the wild side;
 
we come together on the sofa to exchange, you say yours is not a sad story
it’s just a story that’s sad
 
emergency-service alarms roll throughout the neighborhood,
an apoplectic crow survives the near-miss with an ambulance
 
inside the kitchen utensils furnish the countertop waiting to be touched,
to stir and dip into the thick of mennonite soup

---

Cymelle Leah Edwards (she/her) is an MFA Creative Writing candidate at Northern Arizona University. She is the poetry editor for Thin Air Magazine. Her work has been published in Essay Daily, Brittle Paper, Contra Viento, Elm Leaves Journal, and elsewhere.

Mary Helen Callier

Pondhawk

I.
At night there’s a dream. In the morning the dream swims
across a murky pond. The surface is a tell-all source: although we try we can’t conceal
what’s going on beneath it.
The surface ripples out in rings around us.
A green-walled room is a pond.
A green-walled room is a dream.
We are strung like boats along its bank.
Our bellies sink. Our bellies resemble the sunken
earth of an unmarked grave. 
When we leave, we leave the ground
that much more compacted.
 

II.
The heart is a cave poised in the cave of the heart.
Light defines its pools.
The heart turns white when you squeeze it.
I drive all night in the rain.
A finger with the blood rushed out.
The three flaps of the aorta open and close like a leaf-let.
 

III.
In the dream I see into the cave. I see into it sideways.
It is striated, like a canyon. Sedimentary.
Certain parts of it will fall away.
It looks equally like a burning log and like the inside of a glacier: kind of blue
and cavernous. In the sped-up evolution I see the cave reduced
to strings: stalactites and stalagmites. The copula connects the top to bottom.
 

IV.
So every beginning pulls in to its chest the idea of itself as an ending.
Isn’t it great we don’t have to talk about that?
The beauty of caves is knowing they were created in some kind of heat.
A hand on a thigh is a period.
A period is a hole.
The question remains.
Is this the hole in the web of holes that fills the cave, fills the basin, floods the town?
I don’t care about the ruins of towns.
To love what’s lost, decayed, abandoned.
When the water recedes it reveals not the thing, but the shape.
We call what’s been submerged a ruin. Resurfaced:
what’s been abandoned, deserted, becomes the idea.
A habitat for bats and birds.
Your hand is a chisel. I wanna crawl through
the abandoned cities of your heart.
 

V.
We wake up. A lattice-work of passion
laces up our necks. The skin’s a tight encasement.
The skin’s an elaborate web of veins.
In the alley, trumpet vines tangle around one another.
Years exist but I don’t know that. 
I lose my edges underwater.
The vines continue, twisted and tedious, long after the host
has died away. The surface shivers, a horse
agitating a fly. You’re the pond
I lie beside. I land on you in the stone-still morning.
I gaze across the pond, adjacent to it.  

---

Mary Helen Callier is a current MFA candidate at Washington University in St. Louis and the author of the chapbook Spring and Stuff (dancing girl press, 2018).