Dia Roth's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Verse of April, TAB: The Journal of Poetry and Poetics, Hawaii Pacific Review, and elsewhere. Dia wishes they could spend all their time submerged in bodies of water, rivers and oceans in particular. Unfortunately, they haven’t yet managed to grow gills. You can follow them on Twitter and Instagram @diaroth____.
She wears glamour
like skin, pulsing
silver and purple
like God’s personal rainbow
as if a lost girl
could promise
that kind of redemption
once the bars close
and the sun sets like fire
over the Hudson.
Even in the dead of Spring
as people fled, she stripped
down to her heartbeat,
rocked us to sleep
like only a lost girl can.
One night I caught her
light thrumming from hood to tip
as I shadowed her rhythm,
and promised to never leave,
our breath thin as ghosts.
Nancy Hightower has been published in Longleaf Review, Entropy, Sundog Lit, Barren Magazine, and Drunk Monkeys, among others. Her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015 by Port Yonder Press and was a finalist for the Elgin Award Book of the Year. Her story 'Medusa Gets a Girlfriend' was chosen for Wigleaf's Top 50 in 2017. In 2018, she was granted a micro-residency at the Strand Bookstore by The Poetry Society of New York as part of their joint Poet-A-Day Project. She currently teaches at Hunter College.
get on the plane
don’t get on the plane
stay home and print out a regret
fold the page in half and
hand it to a stranger on the street
who will take it home
to parse for honesty
forget password
enjoy the lockout
find solace in traces
pick a long-assumed boundary to expand
under enough stress, it will snap in two
this is a lesson, but hardly a revelation
breathe in an exhalation and
return the favor
expectorate accordingly
in warm clothes, sweat a fever’s worth of fear
stay afraid of getting sick
stop drifting so much
stop telling stories with
no words and only drift
murmur unfamiliar names in sleep
call or text anyone dreamt of
even if they are composite characters
let them down by the end of the conversation
cite any new thought for legitimacy
shit horribly in front of a crowd
just to demystify the experience
dissolve an entire timeline in acid
stop asserting reality
start with an apology
rank the last ten past lives
play dead
mourn openly, die in reverse
Daniel Schwartz is an editor at Inpatient Press, a small publisher of text and visual art based out of Brooklyn, New York. His writing has appeared in Really System, Thin Air Magazine, tNY.Press’s theEEEL, Blunderbuss Magazine, Dead Beats, Sein und Werden, Compass Rose, The Bellow Literary Journal, and elsewhere.
I'm a bedroom artist.
Surrounded by trash and mental illness.
Lamotrigine, Trazodone, Wellbutrin.
They get me through the day
Current cocktail to numb the neverending pain.
They make me more reliable, lovable,
Less emotional, more tranquilized.
Like that one elephant at the zoo
Who steps on the clowns.
No remorse.
They caged him in the first place.
Displaced him from his trees and rivers,
Making him wear a stupid hat and pretend to be some sort of happy delusion.
I fell in love with someone.
Or we just existed well together.
I used to love him.
He used to get drunk,
We’d fuck,
He’d profess his love for me,
Forget he said anything in the morning.
I will never forget the time I found three empty bottles of Jameson next to his closet.
I dumped him on his birthday because I wanted to see other people.
He had already been seeing other people but would lie when I asked him about it.
I’m sick of the city.
It makes me feel schizophrenic.
I’m good at living in the city.
Just bad at leaving my house sometimes.
The ghosts in the suburbs are less pushy and reactive.
The ghosts in the city cause me to crave parliaments and marlboro lights.
The city is full of acid hallucinations.
I went to hell and I liked the sex but I hated the people.
Because they hated me.
My clean body completely lacked the body art required to be cool and punk or whatever.
Fuck them and their cocaine riddled brains
ignoring everyone outside of that secluded bathroom
As if everyone else is a leper for not sticking molecules of white dust up their snotty noses.
Yes, I am bitter.
Because all I wanted to do was have a fucking conversation.
I have a soft spot for those without homes.
They are the kindest citizens of this world
Even if they claim to have met God.
I always give them a dollar or a conversation. Sometimes both.
Not for them, but for me.
For the Karma and the company
Both conversation and karma have no price tag.
I don't need that one dollar
And I don't care if they buy drugs.
Not to be mean, but because that is what I would do.
What I want to do.
He told me I was the most beautiful woman in world.
Which of course is a complete lie when models walk among us
Amazonian women with perfect small figures.
Designed by the devil
As God designed the broken and helpless.
Not beautiful.
He told me I gave him the best blowjob he had ever had
I only half believed him because my oral skills contain a lot of enthusiasm.
I’m not a loud lover.
Passive. Afraid to say “pussy” and “dick”
Because it reminds me of Rape.
A comedian is a magical thing.
I was never able to do it well
My subconscious didn't want to tell comedy.
Only tragedy.
But for a while it ruled my world.
Approximately three years.
But I developed a paranoid personality,
A sense of vengeance,
And a persistent need to drown out the voices with PBR and shots of tequila.
Since I quit drinking I don't think about it much.
I miss the community it provides.
I have the hots for every bartender I come in contact with.
They should receive a purple heart for putting up with their patrons bullshit.
He has to pretend to not know who I am because of logistics.
I have to pretend to not know who he is because it's the right thing to do for some reason.
I think he knows who I am,
And i think my existence pisses him off,
Which is fine but also it hurts me deeply.
I made myself throw up in the porta potty that one night I was tripping.
It smelled like shit and day old piss
And I christened it with the vomit I forced out with my pointer and middle finger,
Wiggled the uvula, touched my tonsils
Gagged a few times and the deed was done.
It was beautiful.
The fact that he looks so angry and I've never seen him smile
Was why I got the sense I needed to purge that one time.
I couldn't control it and I can't control how he feels about me.
Loves me?
Hates me?
He shouldn't love me as we’ve spoken ten words.
He shouldn't hate me as we’ve spoken ten words
I pursued him after he pursued me.
I pursued him not just because I think he is gorgeous
But because I was thinking of taking my own life that year.
I needed to feel some magnetic connection so strong,
That I could hold on a few more years.
He moved away and I think he loves someone else
Because why would he love me?
Some men refuse to be with women who are smarter than them.
Funnier than them
They go for looks.
Then they get surprised when they get bored and sick of her,
And her vocal fry and overuse of the word “literally.”
But men need some coaxing sometimes.
Not that they are dumb,
It’s just that they have seen too many pictures of naked women.
And we can't always make that face.
The one that we make to look like a sex goddess.
Parted pushed out lips, sleepy eyes, desperate facial tilt.
That one!
That’s the one!
The one that feels so familiar yet unnatural.
I can’t make that face often.
As I am a bedroom artist.
A lonely, shy, sad, broken, held up
bedroom artist.
Priscilla Spangler is a writer and artist based out of Denver, Colorado. For the past few years she has been performing stand up comedy in the bustling comedy world of Denver performing at crappy dive bars and black box theaters.
We talked the morning of my parent's
39th wedding anniversary in a fifteen minute
prepaid conversation from one of
the last payphones on the face
of the earth, in a prison where he
is serving life. He sounded like
he earned a peace of mind that
wasn't illegal. He tried to cheer me
up with the power of positive thinking.
I told him about my girlfriend''s death.
I asked him how he coped with
my mother's death. He said she was
such a beautiful lady, gratitude singing
in the sonic tone of his voice.
He warned me and told me to think
of the good times and nothing more.
He spun his voice as he told me
he got a promotion at his job
in prison as head seamstress--
he did not ask me to put money
on his books. H e sounded
like he had managed to grow
as a human being after a
lifetime of demons. He brushed
off those demons from his shoulders
and a bunch of them landed on me
and are still holding me hostage,
all of them silent and hidden in deep
into my many shadows, unafraid to kill me
until our hopeful call came to an abrupt end.
Kevin Ridgeway lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. He is the author of the poetry collection Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press). His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock, Spillway, Up the River, Suisun Valley Review, KYSO Flash, Home Planet News, Cultural Weekly, Big Hammer, Misfit Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry and So it Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library.
Night unzips
trains and buses from Belmont Avenue. Dawn again
like headlights trumpets past
and grief steps on.
In the bathroom, night sky tops Irving Berlin
tomorrow-tinted
while boys stumble, obviously unwounded, to the bar,
dripping cloth
pressed
between their hands. Every season passes through.
Irving Berlin will never visit Saigon,
never see dogs on the cathedral steps.
Telemachus will never stay in Syracuse
with its never-empty streets.
I’ll never meet anyone at Sidetrack,
never join Food Not Bombs.
Irving Berlin and the end of the world
will never hold hands
on the train ride back to Holiday Inn,
while the sea, never stirring
Séamus Fisler (he/they) is a queer poet and madperson from Chicago. His work previously has been published in a bathroom stall in Austin, Texas and in Night Music Journal.
names held in your mouth like watermelon candies,
like you couldn’t bear to swallow
the cheap, stale taste of someone else’s
unwanted daughter, left to wither in an empty bowl
at the pho place you always thought
you were too good for,
names on letterheads, names on cardstock,
silly names and pet names and legal names with the weight of three languages
xinhui when you’re angry and dudu when you’re sweet,
dookie if i’m lucky and braindead fucking bitch if i’m not,
names engraved underneath periwinkle watch faces
where it’ll press against the skin,
names like kisses on my wrist and water bottles slamming into skulls,
names you type and delete and type again,
announced in public and yelled across a room.
you don’t get to look down at me from the cafeteria balcony and mouth
my name anymore. you don’t get to trace its letters.
i take it back, i’m snatching the syllables from your brain and
scattering them on the floor. forget it. forget it,
doesn’t matter, not worth the time or energy.
if i asked you how to write my name you
would get the brushstrokes wrong.
i could write yours in my sleep,
against my leg, on the ghost of a keyboard,
could type it without looking,
forge it without practice.
you don’t deserve to hold my names in your mouth
when you don’t know how to say them.
i want them back.
you owe me,
you always do,
you’re always taking and i’m
too willing to give for my own good,
too ready to let someone else take my organs
before i’m done with them.
give me my names back.
i’ll carve them out of your skull if i have to,
take my fruit knife and start peeling,
i don’t care if it gets messy;
i’m not scared of your messiness anymore.
i’ll make it ugly, make it raw,
i don’t care what you see when you look at me
wolf or girl or too much or
not enough or just wrong.
today i’m making names like the ginger in my kitchen,
well-loved and familiar,
names like the blackbirds scattering across the telephone wires,
the snails in my brothers’ bedroom,
so secure in their existence,
in their lettuce feedings
once every day,
names like origami roses,
like stacks of unread library books,
silver rings on hardwood desks,
like slices of sunlight between the blinds,
names like pastel highlighters and peonies,
said between gasps of laughter and whispered across a pillow;
names worth waking up to,
names worth writing poems for.
June Lin is a young poet. She loves practical fruits, like clementines and bananas.
But don’t onion peels kind of look like Angel wings,
although you sweep their see-through blessings into the trash?
Doesn’t your blood look like a renaissance masterpiece on this tarmac?
Something believers would stand in line to sip?
Your waking seconds to your oblivion, a collage on the eyelids of some false god,
who lost the lottery and made you in the broom closet
with a waitress who has the same
dream each night of running down an
open road without her kneecaps.
No kneecaps nothing to give away your shaking.
No kneecaps nowhere for one blow to bring you down.
No kneecaps no way to fall to your knees.
This is the sun refusing to surrender,
which always inspires us before it blinds us
but who could protest such a golden, brave violence?
Doesn’t the tangerine, a mini sun itself, look like a good catch all peeled and
undone in your palm?
A lover porous and yielding, still juicing despite inevitable bitterness.
Sloppy kisses and vitamin C do keep
the body moving.
If this is all you need, that is good,
that is best.
If not, close your eyes and keep
reaching I guess.
Angelica Whitehorne is a Buffalo, New York artist who writes poems, pieces of fiction, and stanza-formatted rants about the world we’re living in. She’s not creative enough to write about some other world, so this one is all she’s got. She has published or forthcoming work in The Laurel Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mantis, Ruminate, Hooligan Magazine, Cypress Journal, Oyster River Pages, among others.
That last week I wrote
a dark story,
The Bad Luck.
You read my favorite
Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye.
To the very end.
I don't write horror now,
not the made up kind.
At 3 a.m., I'm up
You-tubing ghost stories
Haunted houses,
attics, cellars,
ravens, graves,
women in white, in black
faceless nameless men
empty coffins....
I fall asleep lights on,
No problem, they're LED.
They never die.
Just like spirits
I keep hoping.
Carla Sarett's recent work appears in Third Wednesday, Prole, The Virginia Normal, Hamilton Stone Review, Halfway Down the Stairs and elsewhere; her essays have been nominated for Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize. A Closet Feminist, her debut novel, will be published in 2022 (Unsolicited Press.) Carla has a Ph.D. from University of Pennsylvania and lives in San Francisco.
I’m already drunk with sorry sounds.
Treaded the weather. Like the birds
above the ocean. I can’t wrap my head
around that grey matter. Call me whatever
you read first. My childhood in search for trees.
Houses haunted by nobody’s home. I feel like
the last flu. When I saw you at the post office,
envelopes didn’t know what to say. Prayed for
the dark. I’m confused like a family tree.
Each of my characters to travel a bit further. But I'd
rather not feel my hands again. Without hands
call me a protagonist in your story. I started
reading in braille. I can feel whispers
even after I fall asleep. We are starting to look
like the accident, chalk lines on the floor. Chalk
lined this morning. Turned and dragged to sea,
I feel otherwise. At the beach kept an eye on the weather
wave at me. This is the last thing on the transaction.
It's a classic: I don’t want to live anymore—
but it’s too late. You're part of now. We all come to
where the world hates me. According to legend,
if you cannot sleep, simply run away. On the train
against humanity I think of drinking early. Call me
your metaphor for half. The waves a dance choreography
involving things I forgot. I may let you remember
me by the scar on your foot on glass. What if I stayed
in this poem and squashed a gnat on the word
god? I never wanted to be your shoe by the roadside.
Monika Zobel is the author of An Instrument for Leaving, selected by Dorothea Lasky for the 2013 Slope Editions Book Prize and Das Innenfutter der Wörter (edition keiper, Graz, Austria, 2015). Her writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Entropy, Nimrod, DIAGRAM, Beloit Poetry Journal, Guernica, The Cincinnati Review and elsewhere. A Fulbright and Djerassi Resident Artists Program alumna, she lives in Bremen, Germany.
I am lungs of house a glass spanned wall hung chandelier of larynx and trachea each breath bringing on minutia of volcano particles soil slanted light call it dust at noon.
I am mouth of house tilted bookshelves blocking trees decorated with bird song poet’s ink screaming to open bound tombs assuring me of want as dry as my mouth is.
I am bowels of house singing pretty with apparitions who have haunted these hallways all along water heater creak louder than boot-kick can fix begs of stomach and flesh pipes.
Linked between eyelids and teeth made of tendons, broad planks of wood a tub to wash words in clawed.
I am hollow of house needlewoman, double crossed on floor with spilled eyes fabric scraps each sweet stitch pushing blood into seams of curtains drawn across crowds of mannequins and fruit eaters so that I can finally sleep, here knowing that I wished this into existence.
Only tea cloth pressed to inner thigh to receive blood chimney and embroidery my kettle rattles against closed door of home.
Kelly Gray (she/her) resides on Coast Miwok land amongst the tallest and quietest trees in the world where she writes on the inherent queerness of nature, flips predator and prey constructs, and embraces the cringe. Kelly's writing has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Pretty Owl Poetry, River Teeth, Lunch Ticket, Bracken Magazine, CULTURAL WEEKLY and many other swoon worthy publications. She's been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize by Atticus Review and Best of the Net by the Account Magazine, and her debut book of poetry, Instructions for an Animal Body, is forthcoming from Moon Tide Press in the summer of 2021. She is a poetry reader at Bracken Magazine but you can read more of her work at writekgray.com and follow her at @_west_of_west.
after Zahra’s tweet
In the dismal ache between
Winter and Spring
I am so forgetful
The wind has always been wet anger
The streets ever slushed
The trees never not spindly fingers
Bare stretched toward slate sky
How easy sunlight slips through our sight into a too long parade of early evenings
How quickly the memory of blossoms drifts into soft hibernation
Favoring instead the cold’s white knuckled fist—
It’s always been like this
Somewhere else:
On the top of a squatty hill
A cottage beneath cotton candy sky
Peppered with gulls somehow
Always migrating and home
Above an ocean in constant lazy
High tide, lapping at fields full
Of wildflowers bursting
In infinite, chromatic yawn
Stems bent back beneath
The stumbling hooves of
A calf named Maybe who eats
Nothing but pink flowers and drinks
Nothing but pink lemonade and thinks
Nothing but little thoughts
Of simple life and simple rest
I am shoveling snow from my parent’s driveway and it sucks
But I am also watching Maybe wander
Toward cow adulthood
Nothing too particular to remember
Or to remember to forget
Knobbly knees knocking together
In a world well-suited to his stumble:
Seasonless and lovely
Timmy Sutton is a person who writes, loves his friends and family, and also sometimes eats oatmeal with peanut butter for dinner in Springfield, IL. You can find some of his stuff in Taco Bell Quarterly, The Georgetown Voice, and Bossier. You can find him on twitter @timothy_matthan.
I left my mom behind. She’s still in Queens paying rent on the same apartment I grew up in. There are mouse traps in the corner and under broken radiators. The winters are too cold and the summers are too hot. The windows won’t stay open. You look out and it’s brick walls and the neighbor’s kitchen. I sit in my garden in a hard chair with the sun on my back, eyes closed, trying to meditate, to focus on nothing, but really I’m fantasizing about fingering the girl from the bar while getting blown, my fingers wet, the sound of stink bugs landing on the window nets. The bodies keep piling up on the news. An ambulance came for the young doctor down the hall. “They brought out the body bag in the middle of the night,” she texts me. She texts all the time, every day, about everything. Sends me photos of empty subway cars on her way to the doctor. Breasts, teeth, eyes, glands, she’s got enough appointments to last her a lifetime. “Don’t get old,” she tells me. I promise her not to though with the way things are going promises won’t be necessary. There’s no money coming in, no work, no food in the supermarkets, and no one is coming to help. Her friend meets her downstairs with leftovers while the Turkish super with a cigarette dangling from his lips waters the plants, complaining about his bones. The days keep going like this.
Brendan Press is a poet, short story writer, and bartender. He released Beating The Drum, his first collection of poetry, in 2020. Born and raised in Queens, NY, he now calls the Hudson Valley home.
Fig. 1 — The Home Where It All Started
Random trees and tall grass infiltrate the structure. White crackled paint and a brown roof. Here is where
my great-grandmother choked on a piece of cantaloupe and died.
Fig. 2 — A Small Corn Field and Boxes of Honey Bees
Across the highway is where we spent Thanksgiving, on the dot at noon. The land the center of the family’s farming and cow fields and pig pens. My great-uncle always gave us husks of corn and later jars of honey. Keeping bees was his new venture, the corn and tending to the pigs a tradition. He took us in his truck to see the donkeys in the fields behind his house, my last memory before his Alzheimer’s took control.
Fig. 3 — The Barn That Held the Hay
Straight across the house is the barn. The hay the most reliable crop, where it was baled right next to the house. The hay barn was near the pig pen, where they would squeal, waiting to get the day’s compost and leftovers to eat. The quiet brother took care of the hay and the money that was made. In the end the hay was karma. He was alone when a bale fell, suffocating him for the money he stole that belonged to all the family.
Fig. 4 — The Small Grapevine
A mile down the road is my grandparent’s house. It sits down the hill, behind a field of hay. The vegetable garden used to be full of okra, tomatoes, and strawberries. The one trellis for grapes empty in an almost dirt patch. My brother as a toddler rode around on his John Deere tractor toy, picking strawberries with my grandma. It was the last crop grown. The grapevine all dried up, the remaining bottled up for the church’s foot-washing ceremony. The manual till of the land too much on my grandma’s back. My grandpa’s actions a risk to injure himself, his bad fall put him in the bed, his body and his diseased brain never to leave again.
Fig. 5 — The Chimney
Almost home, I give my usual glance to the abandoned home, where it all started. It’s gone. The bricks the only remnants.
Caleigh Shaw is a poet from Canton, Georgia. She is currently an MFA candidate at Oklahoma State University, where she is an Editorial Assistant at the Cimarron Review. She received her BA in Writing & Linguistics from Georgia Southern University and is the 2015 Brannen Creative Writing, Nonfiction Award winner. Her work has appeared in 8 Poems. When she’s not working or writing, you may find her watching historical dramas or reality tv shows and snuggling with her cat. You can find her on social media @caleighcal14.
I’d like to not write a poem about you.
or whoever I used to be.
the birds have a good idea
to move in a flock together,
a mass of life leaves little
for the universe to focus on.
life comes. it goes. in air or in the grass
in the park or soaring to Tabor at night.
will my life come? will it go?
rocks in dress pockets in deep lakes.
to disappear and tell no one.
no one sees me as I walk out to sit
before the sun sets to take a whole bottle
(sertraline or advil or whatever is bedside).
how fragile the body is after being so strong,
for so long. how strong the mind once it has chosen.
how strong the hands that can quiet the mind.
how fragile the beaks of birds and the mouths
of women called CUNT and BABE and BABY
in bed and on sidewalks and dead spit on buried
thrown from a car tumbled off the side of the Ortega Highway
dragged into lakes burned at stakes.
how fragile the skin and how strong the flame to burn.
no matter the cost, the end is always closer. is it worth the bleed?
is any of it? I’d like to stop bearing this. I’d like for no one to bear this.
we are the flock, the geese, or the crow
or the jay or even a molecule of water
glinting among pebbles. I’m the skull of
the second bird in my yard. I’m the bone buried.
we all bear too long and too alone.
how thick the wrist until it's cut.
it falls open like a page.
Megan Crayne is a queer poet and artist based out of the Pacific Northwest. She has an MS in Book Publishing, and design books and ebooks freelance. Recently, her work has been featured in Headline Poetry & Press and the upcoming COVID-19 Anthology from Train River Press. She writes a weekly poetry newsletter, which you can read on Substack. You can find her elsewhere: @megancrayne | www.megancrayne.com
death says that we will house her forever, that she will become
the perfumed rice on the morning of the funeral
that she will become the ash after the incense has burned out,
the soot on the gas furnace at the cremation ground;
she says she will anoint innocent banana peels with
the sandalwood we save for special occasions. she will become
a special occasion; death sobs, the night is too cold
to carry him away, the body will not decay, can she stay?
we bring her pale flowers and a blanket that night; his hair still has a pulse
she mutters matter-of-factly from the corner of the room
she scrubs the horrors of the night off his face
with ice water and kerosene, the brush bristles at her touch
there is work to be done, she does not eat when we offer
death says pregnant silences make for a humble meal
death has locked away the hospital machines and rotten teeth
in a little coin-purse she stuffs under her armpit
she is a kleptomaniac, we soon discover
house guests can be odd that way
death rides with us in the funeral wagon the next morning
snaring tears with her tongue the way buckets woo rusty taps
when they come to take the body away, lather him in butter
for the pyre, death straddles him and waves
there is an empty coin-purse where there used to be a body.
she is laughing in the distance now.
Hiya Chowdhury is a college freshman and aspiring writer from New Delhi, India. She was named the Senior Runner-Up at the Queen’s Commonwealth Essay Competition 2017, was shortlisted in the International H.G Wells Short Story Competition 2019, and long-listed in the Palette Poetry Prize 2020. Her work has appeared and is forthcoming in Rust+Moth, The Hellebore Press, BBC 500 Words, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere.
I've seen animals when they love
They do it better than me
At the Art Institute I look at a stone carving
of a calf drinking from its mother
I know I'm only capable of giving to
& taking from myself
but I think about it for days, the emptying out
the manipulation of nourishment
I’m like an animal I don't wear jewelry
I'm ready for fucking & for decomposing
All I wear are your insults
They carve lines into me, mark me
like a dog pissing on a tree—
is there a reason it picked that tree?
Can animals be insulted?
Is being insulted the opposite of nourishment?
Would it nourish me to forget you?
I think about this as I wait for your response
I think about this as I empty myself
until I realize I don't care anymore
Now I'm only thinking about how
the biggest insult is that poop is low in calories
Now I’m yawning
when your name marks my inbox
more interested in you
when you were depriving me
of something
Francesca Kritikos is an editor living in Chicago. She graduated from the English literature and creative writing program at the University of East Anglia in the UK in 2017. Her poetry has appeared in Ache, Peach Mag and Hobart, among other publications. Her first chapbook, It Felt Like Worship, was published by Sad Spell Press in 2017; her first full-length collection, Exercise in Desire, is forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2022. She is on Instagram @fmkrit.
it’s like my nana
used to say it’s
garbage in
garbage out
if you listen
to the right music
eventually you’ll
kill yourself
pair of nails
through your eyelids
a humming donut
of devil energy
silver-blue
boombox an orb
appearing in the center
of a bedroom floor
this was the year when
shooting up
your school became
cool as fuck
when all the fault
lines had a route
that didn’t lead
right back to us
but reached away
to touch an other
place we couldn’t see
the fear of what
it means to touch
ourselves as we are seen
Zach Peckham is a writer and musician from Massachusetts who quit his marketing job to study poetry in Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, The Lowell Son, Happiness Pony, @tuffpoems, Poetry Northwest, and on the Academy of American Poets website. He is a candidate in the NEOMFA where he works at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.