Jeff Pearson

Google Street View in a rural, mountain town

What bothers me the most is when I turn the corner to highway 34, the winter is missing
where my father would be hit by a truck and killed driving the two-door hatchback he bought
from me. Google Street View jumps from cloudy July, 2008 to the cinder “chipped” roads of the
neighborhood March, 2009 to dry, September, '09. Turning corners means change, means
slowing down, means looking both ways, means the end of grief, means clicking between X's to
escape to March 2009 where I spent most mornings 60 miles away, staring into a slow
calcification of my one-bedroom apartment. Each night, I held myself up with the metal bars in
my handicap-ready bathroom, the kitchen floor sloped inadvertently and every hour the
refrigerator skidded to life the rent was low, and I washed dishes at a cafe.
In drive-by photos I hopscotch in clicks with my mouse from subdivision to highway, and the
virtual corner passes away from life to my father's death in a matter of months, and clearly,
highways are more important, updated, and snow plowed and missing seatbelts were just
becoming illegal in Idaho, and I was in college and if only IRL time had skipped over his
February death like it skips over so many things, once you finally jump out of your
neighborhood. Google Street View is not a time machine: it’s not a window: it’s not a vehicle
for grief: it’s not even stuck in time. It is a virtual car too visible to hit, moving too slow to crash.

Twin Falls, December 2015

Already dead, I owe you
these belongings
because you pulled me from the street
the way a deer owes the driver
who flashes their brights
at the passing cars
to wake them;
two bean and cheese burritos from El Herradero,
a Killer Instinct Super NES cartridge,
your red stocking cap I puked in,
a Christmas you wrecked with your suicide
since you failed the first time.
But still want to die and told me you
quit smoking
and you don’t want to live,
(You owe me your own mess to clean up: a hospital to visit,
a family to tell what you’ve really been
up to), the written conversations, I get that you are dying.
I owe you a way out. There are cliffs
there are guns there are waterfalls. The Snake River Canyon.
There are no words of how, just a Facebook goodbye.
I am still smoke free[sic], and it confuses me.
I owe you discretion; I owe you the lack of interest
in the how or the pill
or gun or height of the fall
or why
you mentioned multiple times in your letter
your car was repossessed.
And all I can think of is gas, gas, gas.

The subdivision

It is still July 2008 in google street view

hiding in the trailer court is a methlab
is an alcoholic
is a guitar guru
is each waxing memory of your father
and mother together

hiding in the neighborhood is a buried chest of Playboys
is a sandhill crane re-etched by a home taxidermy book
is your mom shoveling the macaroni and cheese
with hotdogs off of the carpet as you puked the rest
in the bathtub

what is left of the neighbors is their sewer hookups
you can’t decide why one family stays and one family goes
why you chose to show your mom 1-800-HOT-LIPS
or what lies beyond
the recorded message
the pay-per-minute or
why phonebooths are unplugged

you know hiding in the trailer meant
not a house not your home but
the trailer that took your father
and his stuff away

the porch where he smoked cigarettes
ashing on the astroturf or he just sat with patches
of nicotine on both shoulders, shirt off with an acid burn
from the phosphate plant. It is still summer.

Turning the corner, I see a white dog trotting behind someone
leash off and dreaming

---

Jeff Pearson is a graduate of the University of Idaho’s MFA Program and has been published by Noble / Gas Quarterly, Otis Nebula, a capella zoo, Heavy Feather Review, Shampoo, Salt Front, Axolotl, Monkeybicycle, Moon City Review, and most recently, The Mackinac and HOUND. His chapbook, Sick Bed, was published by Small Text Dreams Press. In 2015, he was a finalist for University of Arizona Poetry Center’s Summer Residency Program judged by Eduardo Corral. He is an instructor at Washington State University.

Nicholas Bon

Hit Song

This one starts with an ocean of drums.
There's like twelve drummers at least.
The bass sounds like vicious wind
or a stray dog. We see the two lovers
alone, asleep, then dead.
It's a tragedy, these kids. The bricks
fall out and the lights cut off.
We remember these moments
as the great romances.
Empty halls and empty rooms.
We remember daggers in our chests.
The guitar winds itself
through the hallway,
jagged like ice. I'd like
a last kiss, a last meal,
something less uncertain.
I remember the steel pressed
against my head in the theater
and the cold nothing on my lips.
The bridge swells, louder
and louder, as everything
crashes down. I stand alone
in the rain, with nothing left
but the water. Now the chords
are just a broken promise.

I’m Giving You Waves Because I Am the Sea

This is like being drunk
in an art museum, you say,
all filled with red and green
and sparkling bits of light.
There isn't enough paper
mache to construct a replica
of just how I feel right now.
A portrait of how our day
is breaking. A calm little
not here. I'm finding it
harder to keep my ocean
away from your beaches.
Look at all these failed
attempts to paint smiles
on the rocks. Look.

the opera

it's kind of hard
to take you seriously
when the world is ending

when that tangled mess of rope
is pouring out from your mouth

look at how it twists
around our bodies

you're a mountain you say
& at that moment you are

I'm a crescent moon I say
but we both know
that's not entirely true

I think about that time
we spilled our drinks
& they became an ocean

I think about that time
we missed the opera

---

Nicholas Bon lives in Georgia, where he edits Epigraph Magazine. You can find his poems in Wu-Wei Fashion Mag, UCity Review, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. Visit him online at nicholasbon.com.

Justin Chase Jones

i will be your boys in Southie

riding the ten-speed my father bought me
down the center of the street
thinking of his raised tan fist
on christmas last year
somewhere ‘round Hyde park tonight

lamps have blistered to burst
under pressure of sinking myths
in my lousy Atlantis
so i focus on the faded yellow lines
in attempt to guide me home

nothing i love looks quite like this big stray dog
in heavy coat of fur i pass
the pedals turn to roots
slick sound of my spokes
flat on the rear tire and
my heart is racing
matching pace to when his palms coined me
for the very first time

some movie star did an accent in this recent film
sounding just like my father
like that father
like the father

in hand to mouth images
this actor smells of champagne
new bruises just beneath the green ones
placing postage on his body
just the way i was taught and
i wonder how his rough hands may feel
living lonely in my bedroom some nights
bleeding into each feeling

dynamic in this dog-eared playground
near the townhouse where i first spoke
until the cold-hawk sun hits his windowsill
splitting clouds in youngest skies
studying a list of all the ways
the rainbow of curtains in a different room
pouring pigment over these hands i own

trembling softly
carving into some small dumb oak tree
red is my favorite color and
you know this

you were never worth
the bleach
on the lower half
of my body

a ted-talk regarding my contribution to the kink community

good lord
disclose all the personal information you catch wind of
regarding your friends and acquaintances
but nothing about yourself, please
because i'd rather not fall in love with you
by the chain-linked CN train-yard
near this brand new eyesore of an underpass tonight

graceful girl with a ballerina's body
don't mean she's lean like that
but she certainly is cradling a dead woman
who happened to dance professionally

pick up the telephone you are already holding
in your left or right hand
we met on a wrong number
it could happen again

when i walked in the room
they were googling
alternatives to phrases such as
"jesus christ" & "oh my god"
this is such a tremendous thesaurus

buzzfeed article ideas since u been gone:
12 ppl we don't deserve to miss for these endless embarrassing reasons
15 apologies we play out in our heads daily that will never be enough
which character from rugrats best represents your clinical depression
9 full house memes that will help you forget the trauma they caused
23 reasons why i am not okay & they are all that you are married now

we were waiting patiently for a cab in the cold
holding hands
the first & last time we read
haiku poems about your cutest outfits
when you told me to
"be less sad about this"

i am not proud of you because we have nothing to do w/ each other

i say it
i say the entire thing and
that bothers you
but somewhere in your life
someone did the same
i can only imagine
your six-letter taste of chalk
rippling off each cell of their expression
used to melt your mouthful
dirty up them teeth
breaking up slowly like urban decay

boxing chains wrapped 'round denim haw
watch the walk from eleven storeys up
down bay from new sins of catastrophe
telling you to look away
from your oh-so human reflex to rubberneck

rivet lips sewed into the boat-line
calling me nicknames in spanish
this nomenclature stuck for years
the first time
it was awkward

lateral stars drawn on coughing up trust
when i loved even your morning breath
it made me feel both right and real
but i haven't learned a thing

---

Justin Chase Jones is a soft child poet living in calgary, alberta, canada. they have previously published work through sea foam mag, spy kids review, pajama party zine, bottlecap press & vagabond city lit. they also post work via their youtube channel & blog at youlostthestarlightinyoureyes.blogspot.ca.

Devin Kelly

Under the AA Meeting

Upstairs mother became invisible,
like God or ghosts or the kind of good
I thought everyone else believed in.

I don’t think I ever talked so much
about what I didn’t understand. My sponsor
had just come back from meeting

the Dalai Lama & was filled with a kind
of quiet only holiness can provide.
When I spoke, my tongue felt numb,

so I burnt it with hot chocolate, let myself
gain a weight of sorrow. Afterwards
we met mother in the lobby of a church

& spoke of nothing, not even the stars.
Things move. People grow old & go
away. They sometimes never come back.

Dear God & Jesus, Virgin Mary & all
the saints, Dear John F. Kennedy & each letter
of a textbook in some other child’s hands,

I always wanted to follow you, slide
spikes-up into second base, hit a home run
my next time at the plate, but I

forget what you’re supposed to mean. My mother
made mac n’ cheese for my brother & I
each time we visited her after she left.

It was the best in the whole world. Now,
when I am sad, I think of driving a car
into a body of water I’ve never seen before,

the rain falling & the sound of someone singing
& the way my loneliness has a name, like an old friend
I haven’t seen in years, but still forever a friend.

Fractions

Nothing simplifies itself. A fraction will stay
at its highest denominator until a little kid slices
a few numbers just for fun. & so tonight,
over the soft meat of a burger with no bun,
my father told me his heart was failing, slowly
slowing down, number by number, to that low
rounded digit no thing can be divided by.
He said there are cures for this & that such cures
will be tried, but cures can fail, & failure can take
a real long time. My brother looked up
from his phone & asked if either of us had seen
the fight between Bryce Harper & Jon Papelbon,
that ex-Red Sock everyone in Washington hates,
& whatever lingered in the air, that stench of death
near putrid & fried, an undercooked chicken tender,
well, it vanished, & I’m on a bus now & the moon
is supposed to be doing something vaguely close
to beautiful, & there are people on roofs in New York
looking up & maybe kissing, but I’m thinking
of someone opening up my father without me there.
The last thing my father said was don’t forget to wash
your clothes & now I’m spelling up a night near two years ago,
taking a girl’s old clothes to a laundromat at half-past
eleven, the day before she left for Central America,
& how I burned through cigarettes under the stars
while her clothes tumbled around, a bunch of panties
I knew & loved, the thin lace of bras, some old shirt
of mine, & tried to casually & without notice snap a photo
of a puppy plodding tenderly behind its owner. It was dark
& the photo came out blurry & most things my father
will never know about me & I have not told him
how much he taught me about love & how scared I am
of failure & how failure, I’ve heard, can take a real long time.
That night, the girl & I ate chips coated with rosemary
& olive oil & she spilled out the just-cleaned contents
of her bag & sat cross-legged on the floor, simplifying.
I knew then it would be possible to love a woman forever.
Most things take a good & honest time & most people
pretend they don’t have time for them. Outside,
the night inks the layered sheets of this earth’s paper
until all is dark save for the dotted yellow tracing out the road.
The moon, too. The stars. I almost forgot. Look up. Pause.
Kiss me. Take your time. Look up. See how they shine.

On the Staten Island Ferry with Your Brother

You board the ferry’s western side, facing
evening, the sun’s blind & colorless gleam
burning up the haze, the aftermath of smog.

You haven’t seen your brother in the longest time –
he stands, eyes brimmed by hat, squinting
toward Liberty. Narrative is like this,

progressing without your knowledge, not even
a plot line, some kind of fault, a cracking
resemblance to quaking, shaking, so that,

when you wake, you have nothing to say
to fill the gap your absence left. Imagine
destruction without violence, morning coming

as a ruin you could walk through, shoving
an entire arm through a window. You’ve spent
years huddled in the fallout shelter, waiting

for a bomb to justify your waiting. You know
you will remember orange, the ferry’s paint,
the reddening landscape of your brother’s arms –

white sand charred to auburn. To your right,
slowly moving away from your brother’s distance,
the tip of city shrinks. Night will come & it will

glisten. Some things are not disturbed
by the potential of disappearance. It takes a mind
to be scared of death. It takes a heart to die.

Your brother turns to you & says I can’t believe
this is free. You’ve passed Lady Liberty. The sun
sulks behind New Jersey & in another direction

the geometry of each bridge intersects the other
until it seems all of humanity travels the same
span of line & triangle, how someone you know

could be out there taking a picture of someone
you know. You want to say what might
bring you closer: I can’t believe it either or I am so in love

right now or do you ever wonder how we are each affected
by all this traveling? Instead you nod, eyes squinted
away, toward a light that neither shines nor shimmers,

only weights the distance, makes real the knowledge
that something lives in air other than air. It’s been
so long & it will be forever longer. Everyone will scatter

like dots on the line of your story. Some will touch
& some will sit beyond registration. This ferry
has a destination. It travels slowly & bellows a horn

when something gets in its way. The city nearly
disappears, but it will get bigger when you return
& then you will be in it & it will be too large

for your body to find in it a home. Your brother
is so close you could reach & hold his hand
without effort. He stares back from where

you came. He is pointing at what remains
of Lady Liberty. Look how small it is, he says.
You nod. Yes, you say, it’s so small. It’s so far away.

---

Devin Kelly earned his MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and co-hosts the Dead Rabbits Reading Series in New York City. He is the author of the collaborative chapbook with Melissa Smyth, This Cup of Absence (Anchor & Plume) and the books, Blood on Blood (Unknown Press), and In This Quiet Church of Night, I Say Amen (forthcoming 2017, ELJ Publications). He has been nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes. He works as a college advisor in Queens, teaches at the City College of New York, and lives in Harlem.

Mark Gurarie

Switch to Shut Off America

Like the partial rainbows we forget to look at
I am not the storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

Pics or it didn’t happen, the pathetic acoustic
guitar mine smashed in the credit card commercial.

What songs are these we sing in the slaughter house?
What songs take bodies and make money of them?

I thumbing my privilege steeped in yelling screens
and wondering, will the weekend warriors really rally this time?

When I accidentally walked in on you in the bathroom
it was unfortunate that we locked eyes in the mirror.

I promise I saw nothing, it all scans the same
is one way to read it, the perspectives buzzing

Hornet’s nest in the chimney, plastic bags
in bloom and collecting rain along the coast.

There’s a hunger that only wolves have
and there are so many wolves.

Paradise Redux

after Pop. 1280

nostalgia is a form of self-healing
the post noted I didn’t read the article
but it occurred to me what occupies
my 90s college radio playlist what I remember about
the yellow & orange tile the kitchen 1986-91
is a small part of what brought us here

are we not running into death on the dance floor
as a country somehow wearing out the buttons
gnashing them teeth at each other

when the deportations begin a cracked whip
between clients will signal the need
for detention facilities the slipped stitch
in an arm band will break up families
police will shoot to kill

& that one to wrap the bodies
in their own charcoal to wear gunmetal pin stripes
while signaling the order

what I’m saying is it will take more than
our favorite sweaters to stop the slide
backwards the assaults the camps

Parallel Parking the Moon

It gets difficult here,
I’d like to text the moon
while reversing,
lying through my teeth
through the stale stomachache
of the surface content.
In North Korea, US American youth
are characterized as living
in their parents’ basements
joylessly masturbating
to the internet,
growing fat.

The body tells a story
I read elsewhere in orbit,
and not having walked
an appreciable distance
in quite some time,
not having run enough
fingers in the dust,
I could only chart
the movements,
both hapless pedestrian
in the thick of it,
and poor driver.

To move the moon aside
is to fall into a gerund trap,
you might say, or to chew
on the same pencil
in second grade, taste eraser,
that shiny aluminum circle
that holds it
bent out of shape forever
as all things are
in the mouth.

---

Mark Gurarie currently splits time between Brooklyn, NY and Northampton, MA. He is the author of one full-length poetry collection, Everybody's Automat (The Operating System, 2016), and his poems and prose have appeared in Pelt, Paper Darts, Sink Review, Everyday Genius, The Rumpus, The Literary Review, Coldfront, Publishers Weekly, Lyre Lyre and elsewhere. In 2012, the New School published Pop :: Song, the 2011 winner of its Poetry Chapbook Competition. Alongside Alex Crowley, he founded and is curator-at- large of the Mental Marginalia Reading Series in New York and helps edit poetry and reviews for Boog City. Gurarie lends bass guitar and occasional vocals to psych-punk band, Galapagos Now! and works as an adjunct instructor, book reviewer and free-lance writer.

Ashley Sgro

Intent

This is how we’ll die: on the roadway late one night. I’ll be the car that crashes into yours. Not that fleshy thing behind the wheel. I’ll be the car—that block of heavy black. I’ll heave across the highway. I’ll press my tires to the surface. I’ll be on the move in hunt of you. And there you’ll be: at some empty exit. There’s no yielding on these roads. I’ll flash past you, change lanes to cut you off, and spin. How long will we sit glaring? Hot headlights to hot headlights. I want to feel the impact: that solid force. A forest falling. I’ll blow your motor. I’ll crush your hood and send your side view mirrors flying. I’ll keep my eyes open to watch for consequences: your body plunging forward, your body jolting back. Your arm and hand have flown through your driver’s side window. Glass stipples the asphalt. There’s silence—except for my engine running. Mine will not be the first to stop. Through my leaking fuel and shattered windshield there’s still us two. You: stagnant. Pieced out on midnight pavement. Me: hoses hanging and reversing from the scene.

Belong

I have a request: I want to see you naked in the early morning hours. I don’t need to lie beside you. I don’t need a chair to sit. I can watch you through the side window of your bedroom while you wake. Let the sun light your figure; let it replicate your form onto the floor. I’ll outline the shadow of your shape with my fingers, leave you scrawled love notes on the glass. Don’t turn away. Don’t cover your head. Don’t lift yourself from your bed. We’re not finished. You’re mine until the day begins.

I’ve picked you flowers once before. A pool of tulips spilling over your windowsill. I saw your eyes latch onto stems while washing dishes late one night. You paused your hand on the window’s lock. You walked away. You should have claimed them. They would have complimented your bare kitchen, the bowl of beets on your whitewash table. I’ll try again two weeks from now with roses, maybe cherry blossoms.

My years of watching you will not end today. I will not go unfulfilled. Give me something: one loose piece of jewelry, one strand of fallen hair. Leave your old clothes in boxes on your doorstep. I’ll take them for myself. Just give me one—one thing to have. One thing that will connect us.

All the blood in my body wants to be near you. I’ll bang on your walls to get your attention. I’ll force my way in. What did you say last week? I heard your whisper through the crack in your front door. Do not deny me.

If I want you, I will have you. Your nos mean maybe. Your maybes: yes. I don’t believe in fate. I’ll take what I want at my discretion. You’re the one for me, I know. You’re the one. You’re my love, loved, beloved, one.

Dirty Oceans

Forget those babied blues. The eyes were the first to go. A couple cuts like piecing out blueberry pies. I squeezed. I suctioned out two filmy ovals. Secretion as if birthing babies. Long gone features. Our marine memories. I sewed his mouth in a criss-cross pattern that reminded me of stitching from his only jeans. I sliced his ears. I ripped clumps of hair from his scalp as deep of a red as the deep red of a Bing cherry.

Then I took a hammer to his bones. Then I brought a machete to his skin. I heard the sucking of tissue and blood. I served myself some of him. That first slice looked like beef. That second slice looked like pork. I think that third looked like the fat of duck, but I’m not quite sure.

Whenever we were together, he’d tell me where he’d want his body to rest after he died.

“Throw me in the sea,” he’d say. “I love the waters more than anything I know.”

Tell me about it, I’d think.

Of course I disregard his wishes. Of course I leave what’s left of him on his apartment floor. And an exception? Of course: one pair of eyes. I take those marbles the color of the midday sky and dump them down the sewer. I hope they do not float. I curse them. I pray that he can see his once clear world turn deep and dim. I leave two parts of him inside that liquid space—one dirty ocean for two dirty ocean eyes.

---

Ashley Sgro has always been infatuated with words and writing. As an avid reader and eternal writer, she dedicates her free time to composing poetry and flash fiction. Ashley currently lives in New Jersey. Visit her at ashleysgro.com.

Charles Kell

Arson Watch

By the time the last bitten
lip flame licks a rotted
portico he’ll phantom slide
toward the green barrel.

Forgive the skipped wrist
its numerous trespasses.
Forgive the forgotten note
he meant to send yet kept

tucked in the pocket of his
worn coat. The blazing orange
is an unusual, sick passion.
He feels skin tighten, breath

quicken. Heat beads wet his
upper lip, inside his legs, arm-
pits. Black charcoal cicatrix
reveals who he thinks he is.

A Cell the Shape of a Ring

does not really exist, I think.
Each one with four tight corners
stuck fast with dust. Dirt rot yellow,
spider skeleton bone still under
fluorescent. Opens into an oval
when you’re alone, walking in slow
circles. There is a way rats feel,
chewing aluminum foil, running
over a water-wheel. Garbage night
sits heavy, never dark enough for deep
sleep. Touch your ring now. Imagine
moving around it for hours. The bag
over your face goes in and out until

the brown paper gets stuck in your mouth.

The Castle

Caught unawares by a heavy
truncheon from behind, I woke
sweat-bloody in an open ditch

& thought about a cockroach
I kept as a pet in a little glass
jar. It would scratch wanting

free air & I’d open the top
to let it roam. I fed it slivers
of rotting apple. I really

thought this place would be
different. Large structure
in the distance casts shadows

over all, touching each corner.
The walls, people here say,
are sharp to the touch & the closer

you appear to get, the farther
the structure grows. Trees don’t
really sway so much as vibrate

in scared silence through the crisp
air. I let my roach go, back there
in another life. Its body ambled

over the floor as though carrying
& running from a heavy burden.
I better get up; the notes I wrote

lay scattered in the mud. Night
falls & the longer my body
stays still, the more it feels

permanently fixed—suspended
—between my own walls
of blood & grass & the shadow

hovering over my shape.

---

Charles Kell is a PhD student at The University of Rhode Island and editor of The Ocean State Review. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, IthacaLit, and elsewhere. He teaches in Rhode Island and Connecticut.

Alain Ginsberg

Ode to Carly Rae Jepsen, To Be Sung Next To The Amps and Drowned By The Vibrato of Bass

After Hanif Abdurraqib

How can you say the sky is clear,
when it is clearly holding the whole world in place?
say it sits there and does nothing but wakes up
to see you again and yes, sometimes Sky cries
tears so cold we all get sick and Sky never gets better
and yes sometimes Sky smiles so much the mouth
of it bares fangs,
oh how sharp a mouth can be when it kisses for the first time,
how big the jaws of Sky are, and I get it.
I get how it looks to be clear, like glass, like shatter,
like enough pressure and we become dust all over again,
but it can sit there with the weight of our sadness
and only vibrate out it’s eyes, not glass but stone,
chunks of quartz melding into your palm,
a blood type that is found only in the places where Sky cannot see.

Have you ever been held so vigorously you no longer feel it?
The sky that loves this body without touching it holds me
in the palm of it’s mouth, floats this body in it’s heart and
it’s hands, the parts of the sky that the sun and the moon live in.
I am not going to say I did not wish to be held
in the crowd by someone familiar but I also can not say that
I wasn’t held above the crowd anyways,
suspended by the 21st Century mystic of pop,
how the spray of bass and lights made affection
a naturally occurring element, made the weight of my heart
dense enough to suspend itself from the rafters without the noose.
How this body does not trust itself to be tender, but I know not to deny
myself the safety of a hand to hold that has also
been broken in the same breathe.
let down my guard tonight, I just don’t care anymore...
warm blood feels
GOOD
I can’t control it anymore.

---

Alain Ginsberg is an agender writer and performer from Baltimore City whose work focuses on narratives of gender, sexuality, and mental health and the ways in which trauma informs, or skews them. Their work has been featured or is forthcoming on Shabby Doll House, Rogue Agent, decomP, and elsewhere. Outside of writing they tour the country performing in concerts, slams, living rooms, and caverns. They are a taurus.

Ashley Miranda

Infrequent Remedies

on the coastline of sympathy, you’ve visited sand dunes that molt and turn into the fractions I've
kept in utero. tepid as the overwhelming sound of sincerity i’ve held an open discussion
with the flagellation imposed on my mind by your silence and determined two things:
byproducts of intimidation and intimacy are similar we cannot define the atmosphere of
deterioration by delirium.

the phone rings

“uterus calling; have you heard the news? on the streets, we’re writhing in riots.”

the phone rings

“miss, vacancy in your uterus is a sign of malcontent or miscommunication”

the phone rings

“misunderstandings of what the famine of femininity means; you are an aries, fire tongue willed
and wistful; fucking fruitful; fucking famished”

the phone rings

“i’m staring at this tattered moon you call self in the sky and wishing angst or violence in your
mouth, is the ringing in your ear yet? tinnitus is a symptom of derelict actions your uterus is
rebelling will you fill it”

the phone rings

“you are an aries an orpheus an orphan an empty and unmentioned hysterectomy; silence slit
across your wrist, bleeding only phantom dances; if not now when, ram?”

i disconnect the phone.

safespaces

there is a crevice
i call my own

wrapped in the twine of dusk sulfur tears salt membrane
i have lived in
a hollow

cradling lucidity

the fringes of discord
forlorn veins tainted yellow

—i h a v e trembled in the alcove chanting

a melted ordinance

a vocal negation of glass embryos



we will burn in the cavity
of temperance

a fractal of my enigma
smeared across your cheek

this was never my space

---

Ashley Miranda is a latinx poet from Chicago. Her work has been previously featured in The Denver Quarterly, White Stag, pioneertown, HOUND lit and has upcoming work being featured in Civil Coping Mechanism's anthology, Shadow Map. She tweets impulse poetry and other ramblings @dustwhispers.

Sanjeev Sethi

Chrysalis

Poems in various stages of undress look
for locker-rooms where their intrados
are preened without awkwardness of eyes.
They are shy, before making a bow they
stutter and stammer, to turn amphigory
into expression and face trajectories no-one
can vector. The parting is peachy-keen,
mist of music awaiting the paraprosdokian.

Lubricity

Spectators aren’t liable for symmetry in ballonné,
I can’t rein in on frequencies of another. Love is
few drops, at best fistful of feelings. Those who
praise matter little, one I look for looks elsewhere.
Ardor vaporizes: like batts are tucked in buffets
some connections need the quiet of quarantines.

Goings-On

Soliloquies of visiting sparrows
rib and rub the bird inside me.
Some debates are conversations.
I fail to categorize this one. In my
headspace sounds that please are
positive. All others, noise. This
reminds me of television. Can
anything evolve in maelstroms,
except ways to eschew them?

---

Sanjeev Sethi is the author of three well-received books of poetry. His most recent collection is This Summer and That Summer (Bloomsbury, 2015). His poems are in venues around the world including 3:AM Magazine, The Tower Journal, Peacock Journal, The Penmen Review, Red Fez, Indiana Voice Journal, The Penwood Review, Easy Street, Soul-Lit, Novelmasters, Poetry Pacific, Transnational Literature, Postcolonial Text, Bluepepper, Otoliths, and elsewhere. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Alexandra Pasian

Caught

The metal bars hurt
only on direct contact.
I am transforming myself
limb by limb into a giant
insect, beginning with
what will become
my hind left leg. It bends
now in ways foreign
to human thought.
If successful this thing
trapped in my throat
choking me
from the inside will escape
or better yet be swallowed
down to the base of my spine
sputtering until the last
lights give out and the cage
releases me.

Acquisition

We’re learning the language
of violence; midnight

thumbs at your throat.
The slow ache cranium-deep,

unrelenting. I fear
for my teeth. Surely

they’ll crack from the force
so much holding back. So much

said and unsaid. Morning comes
we’re wet with crying,

sweat aching
to get through. Morning

and I am hoarse
with new words, desperate

shouting under sheets.

Demolition

Tear it down. Tear it all down. Take
a skill-saw, sledge hammer, crow bar
to the whole lot of it. Work until
everything is in pieces. The smallest
parts of their former selves. Dust
settling on the broken floor. Your heart
measuring out the acceleration, trying
to keep pace with your breath.
You’re breathing hard now, gulping
down shovels of air; your lungs
can’t expand enough, accommodate
everything they’re being asked to hold.

---

Alexandra Pasian is a freelance writer living and teaching in Montreal, Quebec. Among other journals, her work has appeared in Arc, Cosmonauts Avenue, CV2, Event, and The Fiddlehead. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from Concordia University.

Dan McKeon

The Duck

I’ve only just moved in to this house but the porchlight shows something I’ve never seen before,

A duck staring out at the lake, thinking about what he wants for lunch. He debates many options but knows the choice really comes down to either leftover lasagna or a sad burrito and the lasagna wasn’t very good the first time but he wouldn’t exactly describe it as “sad” so is it worse to have bad food or sad food?

It’s not my place to comment but I do anyway, recommending an ice cube garnished in lemon sauce and while the duck can’t tell if I’m mocking his small avian predicament, he quacks earnestly and loudly which I take to mean agreeance.

Three hours pass and I hear the quacking again, the sort of “hey buddy, I know we already talked today but I have follow up points and also I’m a little lonely” kind of quacking that you might expect from your duck father after the divorce and so I head back out to the porch to see what he’s on about.

The duck is perched on the handrail and he gives me a head nod which I take to be the equivalent of a smile since duck bills don’t really bend enough to signify emotion.

He’s staring at a bag ripping with grease, particularly sad grease, the kind of grease that might suggest the ice cube wasn’t satisfying enough and the lasagna wasn’t emotionally charged to his liking. Half a sad burrito, I suppose a melancholy burrito at this point, is sitting on the ground and the duck refuses to make eye contact with it for fear of starting up that old fight again. I wonder if the burrito started off sad or if the duck’s own despair is contagious.

I head back inside for fear of catching the depression but the duck quacks at me, desperate for some company. I tell him “look man, I’ve been through a lotta shit too and I mean I don’t want to abandon you here but I gotta look out for myself sometimes, you know? I recommend seeing a therapist and stop taking this out on the burritos in your life before you end up alone.” The duck says nothing because he is a duck and I decide to stop projecting.

---

Dan McKeon is a Long Island exile living in Buffalo, usually writing about buildings or lawn gnomes in his spare time to avoid having to learn how to ice skate.

Chloe N. Clark

I Call You a Liar but I Have Never Told the Truth

People who can't read body language don't make sense to me,
one of us said, as if the sighs and nods of another were some kind of lesson to
be learned in childhood—the ABC's of boredom, the mathematics of discontent.
We watched her from across the room and there was a huge window behind her and
him and everyone. Outside people kept collapsing onto the ground in waves.
Everyone was concerned, they rushed to the fallen, but did nothing except
hover. Concern is the newest form of help. Concern makes you a good person.
Concern is an ambulance that keeps its sirens on all day but never picks anyone up.
I can't take being called kind, I told her. Twenty-eight is an impossible
number to wrap my mind around, it's like the twenty-eight times I tried to dial
his number but couldn't. That doesn't mean I called him. I just attempted to.
Twenty-eight tries doesn't make me brave. I'm not going to say that I am.
She can't stop being a nice person. She tries. She thinks that nice is like a
faucet: hot or cold, just switch it off. I want to tell her that back when I
was nice, I kept thinking the world was more frightening. Let everyone in and
you won't ever be able to kick them back out.
He told me once that he can't stop remembering. I didn't understand. It sounded
like a good thing, everything laid out in his mind. He told me it was like
stepping through a mirror and finding that the world you found is just like
this one, except that there's nothing there that you haven't already
experienced. I asked him what he'd want to forget first and he just looked at me.
You keep saying that "can't" is your favorite word. It's the negative
of what life is supposed to be. It's better than "won't" and less
harsh than "don't." I can't believe you sometimes. I shake my head in
disbelief, to choose a word like that out of so many more beautiful. But,
finally, maybe, when you tell me this, I can understand what it is that can't
be undone.

To This Half-Truth

When at 3AM our lips, our mouths, felt hot like tea. That one spiced kind that reminded you of
chai and reminded me of sticking cloves into oranges until my fingertips ached with indents.
I told you I thought I might be almost immortal, the kind that can die but just doesn’t, and you
thought then to check my pulse but couldn’t find it. Even the beat of my heart can tell when I’m
lying and never learned to bluff well for me.
When at 1AM, your fingers trailed up my skin, you told me you once thought you saw God but it
only turned out to be the shadow of a very tall tree. And you said that you used to be scared
of the way that darkness moved. It was like shadows dancing until they convulsed in waves, waves.
You are always waves when I think about you, too.
When at 2AM, you told me that you spoke another language but only almost, only sort of. I wondered
at almosts and sort ofs and the way that everything can spin away so easily when things aren’t concrete. The smell of oranges half remembered never quite reminds enough to warn. The citrus of your soap,
still the scent upon your skin, I can taste it on you.
When at 4AM, I think of saying something honest but never quite find the words I instead revert
to almost, to sort ofs, to maybes, to mights. Here’s the thing, though, listen to the thuds of my pulse
and you will learn not to believe me either.

My Year as a Medium

I once went home to find the dead crowding into my bed. They tossed and turned all night, stole
the covers, talked in their sleep. They said the names of lost lovers over and over until I almost
believed that they were people I too had lost. Sometimes I dreamt the same dreams as the dead.
They dreamt as one and I fell into them as easily as one might fall back into the bed of an ex-lover
who you never see but still remember the breath of against your skin.

They dreamt in tastes. Pulling candy down from off the top shelves. They were so sweet. Tiny
chocolate bears with tummies of milk. Placed them on our tongues and let them melt. The sugar
was electric. It caused us to shiver. Of the taste of river water gulped, of the taste of tea leaves
bitter and rich and filled with the future, of the taste of sweat off another’s skin.

They dreamt in sounds. It comes to us like flashes of ecstatic light, the blood of saints, the way
it wraps and breaks us up. Of the sound of rain echoing down the sides of the house, of the sound
of whispers into ears and the breath was hot against our skin, of the sound of palms being read
in the version of our lives where every line stretched on forever and wrapped around our hands
over and over again.

They dreamt in lightning and ice and the electric pulse of skin meeting skin. They dreamt of hands.

Of mouths and lips.

They dreamt of silence and the way dirt tasted so bitter and salty.

The way that ashes sound.

I wished I could sleep at night without their arms embracing me; they seem so cold and, yet, still
burnt me to fever. I wished I could sleep without the weight of them surrounding me.

They dreamt of silence but screamed at night. I was no comfort to them, so I just dreamt along.

I left them once for days I spent pacing with open eyes; they seemed to forgive me for this. Please forgive me for this.

---

Chloe N. Clark’s work appears in Apex, Booth, Hobart, and more. She teaches college composition, bakes many things, and writes for Nerds of a Feather and Ploughshares. Find her @PintsNCupcakes.

Dan Bodah

Fluid Ounces

"Catherine Daniels called 911 when she couldn’t persuade her son, Lavall Hall, a 25-year-old black man, to come in out of the cold early one morning in February. A diagnosed schizophrenic who stood 5-foot-4 and weighed barely 120 pounds, Hall was wearing boxer shorts and an undershirt and waving a broomstick when police arrived. They tried to stun him with a Taser gun and then shot him.... Hours after her son was killed, Daniels said, officers investigating the shooting dropped off a six-pack of Coca- Cola.”

— Kimberly Kindy, "Fatal police shootings in 2015 approaching 400 nationwide," Washington Post (May 30, 2015)

After he wouldn't come in to get warm clothes on;
After his mom noticed he must not have taken his meds; After she realized she wasn't getting through to him; She called 911 for help.

Ghosts gathered and transcribed the call —
Ghosts felt electrons carry voices through the wires —
Ghosts grew excited, wavered, quivered beneath her message, wiggling her words
When she told what was happening, feeding on her panic in ecstasy —

After she ended the call and told him the police were coming;
After he picked up a broom handle and whistled it in air;
After the red-flashing cars unloaded their small teams of problem solvers;
Lavall Hall joined the ghosts.

Ghosts gathered in the wisps at the end of the barrel —
Ghosts danced through the tendrils of steam from his mouth —
Ghosts frisked and fed and danced on their heads in the runnels the rivulets
The black & red effervescence rolling to the sea leaving Lavall empty red & white —

(Inside me would fit nearly three times he
Inside of me three little Lavalls
Inside of me the fears and totems of three of he
Bury them beside the red broom handle in an oversized white coffin)

After the measuring men arrived in their white coats;
After they placed yellow cards with black numbers;
After they took photos and labeled everything in plastic bags;
The last detective left a six pack of Coke on his mom’s porch

[Enter Lieutenant, in uniform with miter, leading twenty officers holding pens and memo books:]

[Lieutenant, chanting:]

Oh sacred red cans
Oh sacred silver logo
Oh effervescent black brew

[Lieutenant nods to officers, who begin copying into their memo books:]

The officers secured you in plastic flex cuffs.
At time and place of occurrence they did observe
The bitter visionary drink.
Secret medicine was vouchered for analysis
At the holy hidden labs.

[Lieutenant raises his right hand and gazes upward; officers go to one knee with heads bowed:]

We pray to you now:
Accept our sacrifice of one dollar and ninety eight cents a six pack
And forgive our sins for two point eight cents per fluid ounce.

This statement done and executed under penalty of perjury In this the year of our Lord 2015.

[All:]
Amen.

[All exit. Curtain.]

Parsed

The sunny work of clever fingers is done.
Inside this basket you can find a bird.
The cops would love to see your face, to stun
Your goddamn guts and plug your empty word.

In secret holes, in moments torn, absurd
Precaution put its hands inside your pants.
It scoops for dirt in there, as if a turd
Would bring about some long-foreseen advance.

But cameras placed inside intestines glance
At nothing, after all -- just walls of skin.
As microphones pick up our senseless rants,
Grave terror hides among our petty sins.

When all our deeds are gathered in one place,
We'll all be mannequins stuffed full of tapes.

A Unified Theory

Some other dark head dreams within
mine with a mind as wide as the sky
and as speckled with freckles of white light.

What love is felt here in gravity’s dent
where the matter in scraps
spins and swirls? Look for a tear
in the world that isn’t there,
leading into tighter stars.

What love? Why do southward motes
slowly loop in waves, quaver, subscribe to an orbit?
What dust slithers, how clumps to human
form? The quickening glisten of carbon, the phosphorescent
gloaming...what machine drives it?

Love, I say, but might also say muse, magnet,
accidental amino acid, wandering seed, sly
miracle on the sea’s edge.

What else there is
cannot be said

for certain...
multiples contain me.

---

Dan Bodah is an attorney and poet. His chapbook Eyes & Roots was published in 2014 by Many Moons Press and poems have appeared in Blueline, Adirondac, Modern Haiku, and Ghost City Review. Bodah hosts a reading series at KGB Bar in New York City featuring writers from the staff of freeform radio station WFMU, where he produces a Monday night radio show, Vocal Fry, featuring music with extended vocal techniques such as yodeling, throatsinging, beatboxing, eefing, etc. Find him on Twitter: @vocalfrier & @wfmulit.

Kari Sonde

Three Micropoems

i only see whole people

they can poke holes in
flimsy paper me.

“let me reward you for thinking just like me.”
little insects dance on the white page;
he brushed them away with the back of his hand, but they came back with
every gentle swipe.
i crushed their little bodies flat on the white page and left marks
but they still came back.

find me
in hearts colder than my own.

---

Kari Sonde is a journalist and a Damn Good Cook. She sometimes tweets haikus.

Robbie Coburn

Mutilation

An unscarred child in the womb.
there is an image but no meaning.

born into knowledge of nothing
and promise of everything

the inescapable drive to know yourself creates the voice
the body gives but cannot speak of.

inside the skin of a child
I push the cruelty further until there are bloodlines
and reason.

the unbearable flesh
the face of my mother
holding me, still her child

when these wounds create a voice in response
to the drive of longing

and a love conceived
in fire.

Collapses of Breath

Riddled with distance cannot remember the momentary framing of time
without this connection the day palls itself against thoughts consistent drive
as the imagination preys on the senses unceasing recollection
again emerges restrictions pulse along the nerve ends
whatever passion has exhausted cannot be revived
skin worn by a harsh distance in the breath dancing across your face
where you rest alone in your body I hear your voice before you answer
I interpret the silence traced along your breath. with your flesh in its course
of abandon. when winter comes your skin withstands the wind's visitations

It has been months since I have touched you all longing sitting down
inside the body your expressions recurring
I cannot remove your body cannot take your hands from my skin
your promise of permanence I predicted would collapse in the drive
of your ambition for an emptiness you felt belonged to you
you could not find a love of yourself my love of you fracturing within your irises
still I love you never forgetting the rise and fall of your chest beside my body

these days assault the skin with exposure to regret knowing completely
severing all ties to your body and remaining unchanged
I cannot silence this urgency beyond the contortion of time

my body fails at this vast distance the blood ceases
does not pulse running along the veins with the unending uncertainty
of waking the distant positioning of my body with no way back to you.

The Night World

Today, the year begins
with someone escaping
the bones of scattered footsteps
touching the asphalt—
I am not inside these words
and beyond the sky is silence.

the sound of a person crying does not mean what you think it does.
here, when the earth becomes an ache, you do not need to run.
I will whisper into your eyes

and let your tongue
become a stranger.

your body is fixed to this room, emptying it of everything
especially when you are not here.

you are the voice that moves
the rain
and flesh that will soon wake—

I'm telling you
there is nothing else.

---

Robbie Coburn is an Australian poet currently based in Melbourne. His poems have been published in various anthologies, journals and magazines including Poetry, Overland, Cordite Poetry Review, Westerly and Going Down Swinging. He has published a collection, Rain Season (Picaro Press, 2013), as well as several chapbooks and pamphlets, and his second book The Other Flesh is forthcoming later this year.

Sam Ferrante

A Note From the Editor

I want you to read to me
so that I can begin to understand.

I will eat each of your words dipped in smoke
and inhale.

I will kiss you on exhales, each transference a little less
sharp for having come through me.

You can not stop me or frighten me with
your artfully arranged ambivalence anymore.

You've showed your hand.
I think you meant to.

Last One in the Pack

I can almost go
an entire day without putting
you between my lips.

Almost.

I can forget in the 7000
menial tasks of any moment
that my body and brain
need you or it gets grumpy.

So when I remember you exist,
I smile.

I pull you out and light you up
and that first draw,
oh,
it gets me every time.

Rest between my fingertips.
Latch onto my hair.
Slide around my tongue,
my throat,
right into my lungs,
and back again.

Inhales are never as slow
as I'd like them to be,
intend them to be,
but that exhale,
it's years in a moment.

Don’t you get fiery with me,
as my breath draws you closer.
I know how you race yourself
to the end.

Don’t fret.

I’ll toss you away,
but I always come back.

I need to.

Upon Waking (Dreams pt. 4)

“Just let me hold it.
We’ll see if it fits in my hand,
if I can coax glass of shifting sand,”
he said.

And with a wet thud and a hard bounce off
of doctor’s-office-clean, clinically pristine kitchen tiles,

he dropped my goddamn heart
and I became a cliche.
He wrote me as sunshine from light years away.
I brightened and let him.

When icicles dream of heat,
you listen.

I mistook his melting for emotion,
crossed atmospheres in a fiery rush
to get close enough to press a cold blush
into my boiling surface.

I had to.
He had asked.

I squeezed my collective stardust
into the room next to his igloo,
six centimeters I could have burned through,
but I could see him expanding into a puddle,

his limbs trembling outwards,
slithering away from the sun he’d turned me into.

So I set the dimmer on my shimmer.
Spoke more softly than I’d been born to,
started eating myself to keep him solid, shiny, new,
and woke up hungry.

I creeped into the hallway,
bare feet splashing through melted dreams,

toes catching on the Van Gogh swirls
leaking through his closed door.
Blues, golds, a few reds pooling on the floor,
oils and inks started crawling up my leg hair.

Two palettes floated by.
I know one used to be mine.

I yawned,
blinked the morning off of each eyelash,
and sighed loudly enough that lightning flashed
through the crack in his doorway.

“You woke me up,” he accused,
grumbling and not quite awake.

And for the first time since
my atmospheric relocation,
I saw just how much of himself
had melted in my lucid hands.

“I’m sorry; I love you,”
someone said.

He might have closed the door again.

I don’t know.

I flew away before I forgot
what I looked like glinting through his crystals,
back when we created prisms
dreaming together.

---

Sam Ferrante is a poet, editor, and facilitator born on Long Island, college-fed in Western New York and Paris, and then poetically raised in Buffalo, NY, Ireland, and Australia. A former member of the Pure Ink Poetry team in Buffalo and a regular competitor in Dublin's Slam Sunday, Sam was a Co-Creative Producer at Melbourne-based Slamalamadingdong in addition to serving as a Melbourne Spoken Word board member and a founding facilitator of the Melbourne Spoken Word Workshop. Sam has been published in Ghost City Review, Blowing Raspberries, and The Dirty Thirty Anthology. She has been privileged to feature at The Owl & Cat Sessions, The Dan O’Connell Hotel, La Mama Poetica, Girls on Key, and White Night 2016, among others. She was also the founding Editor for online magazine,CrowdInk. Her debut book of poetry, Pick Me Up, got rave reviews from her Mom.

John Leo

Two Orange Pips, Planted in August

Let us camp in the jungle. I have heard
the demon-speak of a cougar, and want

to hear it again before I die. All memories
are twins, only sometimes we die before we meet

the other halves. I can't remember my sisters'
names, only that they are both pale

wisteria draped over a pond, moonlight
whitened, my uncle almost died so many times his heart

is a chicken's foot, his stomach an old bucket, he stays clean
shaven, unhandsome but clean, his brother

my father, is nearly finished. He twins everything,
double girls, double boys, a watch on each hand

and the cougar, its throat bloody and dark,
licking ink from vellum in an old tomb, I dreamed

I loved a pair of wives, one of them my own,
another I haven't ever met. Imagine a life

so real it echoes, two orange pips planted in August,
a jungle, a verdant clearing to set our camp

The Danish Master

Last night I dreamt a Danish painter died, his mouth
so purple. I woke to the year's first snowfall, silent,
every vector aching, the cold meat of my thighs,
the skinny cutlet of my shoulder. I think sometimes
of robins gathering on white arms, spackling a sycamore at the riverside.

There is a red bridge. I have walked toward traffic with my eyes shut,
a pale arm looped through mine, the birds glowing, purple,
red chests purpling at dawn. How bloody,
the red bridge splinting the river, the robins
bleeding skyward. I have seen so many awful things,
the painter, his mouth, the river

The Long Weekend is Over

after Paige Lewis's “The River Reflects Nothing”

Alone among the tidepools, I
prayed, and in answer the tide pulled
me seaward. I beached on my back,
on my knees puked 'til empty,
my golden shovel flipping in the surf, soggy fists
and knees in sand, alone – and
when you were in the hospital, it
buoyed in my heart-reef always.
Even while you slept, it seemed
I had found the poetry at the heart of you, and things to like:
a seahorse anchored to eelgrass, a
tiny twitching seahorse baby, a magic trick
of gender, these tidepools, those
books I brought you, the light, the tadpoles.

---

John Leo’s work has been published in Reality Beach, Tinderbox, Breakwater Review, and elsewhere. I'm an MFA student at Butler University.

Lizz Schumer

This poem is not for you

This poem is not for you

No matter how badly you want it.
No matter how hard you push and shove, scream, whimper, cajole her for it
She belongs to no man with grabby, grubby fingers

And does not need to be wanted
to validate her worth.

This poem is not for you

No matter how nicely you ask for it.
She does not bow to propriety

or stoop for convention.

She does not thrive on the glistening droplets of sweetness you

deign to spare for her
between the largesse of your “earned” affections.

This poem is not for you

And it never will be.
No matter how powerful the law of the land
She does not live for you, open to you, spread herself upon your table

like a feast for the stomach you’d satisfy with any old meat

cast on the floor of your castle

with the rest of the trash.

This poem is not for you

And you’re going to have to get used to that
Because women, we’re stronger than you thought

And in case you didn’t notice
You don’t hold your power between your quaking legs.

We do.

“Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty?”

Ophelia, honestly

Your honesty never mattered.
Because as soon as you emerged
wailing
pink
[and beautiful]
into the world

For the power of beauty will sooner transform honesty from what it is to a bawd than the force of honesty can translate beauty into his likeness.

Except there is no transformation where beauty is concerned, because we are all just painted faces regardless of what lies between our ears, our legs, between our two arms and sides of skin. The skin is what matters, and so beauty has no likeness.

We are all our own meat suits, unless we can scream loudly enough to cajole public opinion to tell us otherwise.

This was sometime a paradox, but now the time gives it proof.

There’s beauty in bereavement, in crow flowers, nettles, daisies, long purples dragging phallic by your corpse. We prefer our women dead, make icons of Ophelia with her nipples showing in the Louvre. A lady’s sexy when she’s wet.

As one incapable of her own distress, Or like a creature native and indued Unto that element

We’re socialized blind to our own iniquity. It’s our female lot in life. Wait for our Prince Charmings, sighing, sleeping in glass coffins, towers, castles. Voiceless, breathless, fatherless we need a man to bring us back to life.

Ophelia, dear drowned sister:

We are all the more deceived.

---

Lizz Schumer is a writer, journalist, and photographer who lives and works in Buffalo, NY. Her writing generally deals with the interplay between the personal and universal, including themes that address religion, geo-politics, and family as they relate to an individual’s sense of self. Lizz’s first book, “Buffalo Steel” came out in 2013 and her personal essays, poetry, and hybrid text can be found in Manifest-Station, Minerva Rising, Connotation Press, Punchnel’s, Salon, and many others. She can be found online at lizzschumer.com.

Jordan Alan Brown

Pale Blue

Coming of age in the
Backseat of your car--
Tucked in the corner of
Your studio apartment--
The back room of your
Mothers home.
I've lost and found you
More times than I can
Hold in my clenched fist.
Trapped in 3am and a
Text from you--
Watching these minutes
Grow to forests.

You don't cry the way
You used to, but you
Smell the same and your
Hair still makes a home in
My beard and pillows and
Shower. Shackled by the
Uncertainty of your intentions,
I love you so much that it
Breaks my heart.

Soft hands that tear
The words out of my throat,
Blue eyes filling my lungs
With saltwater and seaweed.
You kept me braided
Between your legs and arms.
Rescued from the rubble
Of my broken life,
Breathing life through
My nose and mouth.

My Heart Is Too Weak To Hold A Grudge, But For You, I'll Make An Exception

You said I moved like a movie star whose name you can't recall,
Sang like a windmill or time capsule.
I am no longer alive, just a memory you can't grab hold of.
Shaking at the sight of land or misery, I watch as you choke on your words.
Broken blood vessels call me back home to hills of winter's fever,
All of my friends looked like ghosts.

Everything means nothing to me, stored away in a violent storm or shotgun shell.
Everything means nothing to me, a lie I shouted to your bedpost and collarbone.
Warming myself in visions of a woman I'll never love as much as I hate myself,
I keep watch of the water in my shoes as I trudge
Through this snow-filled driveway and set fire to your home.
Waiting fourteen months for the dust to settle, just to hear you say my name once more.

La Renaissance D'une Montagne

I hung to you, the
Thirteenth of August,
The way you hung to
The Plateau and red
Plastic cups. Fixed
On solving you,

Rewriting the demented
History that lingered
In your closet.

Subtle and profound,
The first downpour
In twenty days and the
Sun dried soil I had
Become. Topple
My pedestal,
Crush this throne of
Arrogance. I am the
Beggar, withering and
Weak. Supplication
From your cistern,
Please make me green
Again.

---

Jordan Alan Brown is a poet and mixed media artist from Buffalo, NY. He explores the emotional depths of the human condition using his own experiences highlighting his vulnerability in pieces about family, faith, guilt, hopelessness, his desire to understand love, among other personal struggles. Incorporating original photographs with his writings adds another layer of honesty and emotion. Through the scope of mixed media, Jordan is able to capture, for a moment, the sensuality of feeling bare. Still, continuing to hone his craft, Jordan has been published in several online journals, as well as Buffalo Black Book. You can follow Jordan on Instagram; Manascactus, and Tumblr; Jordan-Alan-Brown.tumbler.com.