Anisha Drall

THE FIRST PREGNANCY TEST

is lighter than I thought it would be.
Smaller than a gun, I hold it and
imagine how bad it could hurt me.
Positive, negative, positive, negative,
positive, negative — boom.
I play Russian roulette and the lump
in my throat gets bigger.
It could pass for a penknife,
a blade for my envelope stomach.
Cut me open till a gaping smile
looks back at you. Positive,
negative, positive, negative.
I am a seesaw of emotions
for someone who just has
to piss on a stick. Cut me open
today and maybe, you’ll stare
right at the strangest thing,
growing inside of me. If in the 
white lights of this bathroom 
that isn’t mine, pregnancy 
test in one hand, phone in another, I 
get The News, I’ll saw myself open
until my body decides it should’ve
just bled on its own. Positive. 
Negative. PositiveNegativePositive. 
I thought this test would be 
easy. Pink paper, instructions
in blue. Positivenegativepositive. 
The stick is heavy between my
legs — each dribble another echo 
of what could be. Positive, negative, 
positive, negative, numb. My 
legs shake as I clench, and the waiting 
game begins. 1. I would rather die 2. 
Body bleed, bleed just this once 3. How
can I raise a child when I’m still 
not grown? 4. I beg my vagina for good 
news. 5. Positive. 
Negative. 
Posit—positive—
—positively negative. 
And boom. I wipe myself down, 
rip apart the pink packaging. 
Today, Russian roulette had no 
bullets. Tomorrow, my body 
will throw itself into the gauntlet
again, and I will be right next 
to it, hoping it’s a blank. 

---

Anisha Drall is from Gurgaon, India, but currently lives in Singapore, where she attends Yale-NUS College. Her work has previously appeared in Vagabond City Lit, Germ Magazine, and Rising Phoenix Review. You can find her on Instagram, at @anisha.drall

ryki zuckerman

restoration

i have been working to restore
the glistening edge of dew
on the newly minted leaves.

and ensure that the sunset will spill onto
the horizon even longer than ever
in the past, before "the event."

i will beseech the inconsolate 
to curl up under the quilt of moonbeams
and sleep deeply, 
dreaming of their lost loved ones
as if they were still breathing.

let the silver coins that were placed there
drop away from every set of eyelids.
let the plague doctor hear only silence
when he shouts "bring out the bodies!"
for when i am crowned queen of lost causes,
i will bring back the dead.

---

ryki zuckerman is the author of the full-length volume, Looking for Bora Bora (Saddle Road Press, Hawai'i, 2013), and seven chapbooks.  Her poems have appeared in Black Mountain College II Review, Slipstream, Steel Bellow, Lips, Paterson Literary Review, and other journals, and online at anti-heroin chic, Nixes Mate Review, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars, Moondance, and poetrysuperhighway. She is a co-editor of Earth's Daughters magazine, the feminist literary arts periodical, in its 50th year. She curates the Literary Café at Center for Inquiry reading series in the Buffalo, NY area.

** First published in The Buffalo News

Tarek Ghaddar

apology poem, written to my unpublished poems

I’m sorry I wrote about genocide,
children curled in the streets, crying,
bombs falling in staccato rhythm,
a percussion of crumbled buildings.

I’m sorry I wrote about Islamophobia,
being called a sandnigger and beaten to a pulp,
“you people,” at Target, in the frozen foods aisle,
and “you people” at the music store, and the
build the wall, Islam bans, UK acid attacks—

and I’m so sorry I didn’t alliterate in the 3rd and 5th line
of every other stanza, that when the mosque crescent was sliced into
two pathetic horns, and Uyghur minarets levelled by wrecking balls,
that I didn’t allude to sex, or have a slant rhyme in line nine, 

I’m sorry for saying, “my brothers and sisters are dying,” 
in the form of, “crimson flowers lined the streets,” 
instead of, “they called us terrorists and killed my family.”

I am so sorry, my unpublished poems, that I wrote you,
brought into existence to be rejected,
this is the Muslim-American experience, 

let the Muslims talk about Allah and war,
let them be about taking off hijabs for white boys,

not about the crow digging its beak into your sister’s spine, 
the re-education camps where your aunt is given to a Han man,
to be pinned down and have Islam cocked out of her,

never, never, never, let the Muslims have a human face,
this is the first rule, and if you do, my unpublished poems,
the nation may chant, “Send her back, send her back,” 

the color of your ink is all they care about,
and your ink is red, the color of genocide, 
red is the taste of the locker room floor,
blood dripping down your writer’s forehead,
because he worshipped Allah and his skin was brown—

you are the heirs of Gazans, Jnoub, Uyghurs, 
Syrians, and Yemenis. you, my unpublished poems, 
are owed so many apologies, for all the poems about
cedar trees, bar music, rondeaus, villanelles,
bouncing bodies, and growing old, that you were not.

---

Tarek Ghaddar grew up in Beirut, Lebanon. He attended the University of Miami for degrees in Biochemistry and English. He continued with a Master's in Public Health at the Miller School of Medicine, and will shortly be attending medical school at Florida Atlantic University. Trauma from war and his sister's cancer led him to pick up a pen. His work has been published in Eclectica Literary Magazine, Mangrove Literary Journal, Prometheus Dreaming, South Florida Poetry Journal, GASHER Journal, and The Emerson Review. He lives in Boca Raton.

Grace Kearney

Pause

We met during P.A.U.S.E. so 
all of our nights might as well have been one 
you come the door
peel the balaclava from your head
without hurry,
spritz your hands, a germaphobe 
even before—
and we climb to the roof

I had been reading Exit West when you buzzed
(Mohsin Hamid shares a name with your cat)
and his protagonists share an origin story 
meeting, too, at their city’s collapse 
they had doors that led them across borders
we have a ladder, and a hole in the ceiling

the tobacco clings to itself as you roll, preparing
what you smoke, I smoke
the premise of our intimacy, breathing the same air

we exhale plans we will never see through
trapped as we are in the present tense
camping, Long Island, the unused tent—
we wouldn’t have liked it much, anyway
our bodies too limp, too easily cold

no we belong here, lying
on the tar beach still warm from the day
your head on my stomach, your body jutting from my side
as if we mean to spell the letter H
for empty planes passing overhead

---

Grace Kearney is a Baltimore-bred writer currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at the City College of New York. Her writing has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, HuffPost, The Other Journal, Matador Review, Journal of Palliative Medicine and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn.

Rigel Portales

1 or 3 Tropical Cyclones in Your City

“Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame”
— Charles Bukowski

I felt Makati strand me. The woe 
and splendor, the splitting travel 
of grief. The trains are sleepless, 
parked or dead; the tweeting rats burden 
another guilty conscience below a glass, skylined
coffin. A hundred insomniac cars hit a thousand 
miles per hour growing imperial wounds 
traversing this city: always from someone 
to somewhere. The crime rate dictates that the old 
asphalt must be staring through the present cracks
while the freshly paved have chosen this moment 
to close their eyes. To be a naive petal wilting for rain 
then swimming in three typhoons through a flooded 
week simply because they asked for it. 

The loveless smile of billboards imitates 
an immense light, bordered and stuck— 
which was that way only in the summer,
now, the optimism has been sucked clean 
from their scaffolds. By the way, I couldn’t see 
a replacement for the headlights—some novel way 
of splitting glow into northern sky and if I should ever drive 
your heart across the metropolis, I will be spilling 
into every shameless district, and blinding, forever 
fairview.

In Las Pinas, I heave a half-empty gallon into the house.
In Makati, I haul a cyclone well into its departure.
A perpetual humidity blankets both cities
to be painted clear and tender into a
visible beat of tears: the waking steps of women
and the opposite way of quaking men.
They imbricated lips once during their last meeting
over baked spaghetti and balloons
in the birthless city. Just -day and -night
plus a sobering look from her mother.
Another man’s hesitant teeth and his woman’s 
eager tongue. Another rendezvous at the asotea
above streetlight. They kiss under buffoonery. 
They plan for nothing much, nothing above their stature, 
nothing to step over and shoot at, score, and cheer about 
under a swollen, hoopless sky. The boys are slipping 
up in their courts while a siren scatters them into hiding. 
Ask me about the clouds and I will spite how some feel God’s 
weathered voice through their bones: as if it will pass. 
I have my mother’s marrow and my sister’s wisdom. 
I have my dimming world inside a racing hatchback. 
The curfewed Genesis, the Third Day of three cyclones, 
the Great Flood which erased my windshield, 
the Great Escape of your city through my fingers.
In coming home, I am always leaving you. 

---

Rigel Portales has been writing poetry and creative nonfiction for over five years. His works are based primarily on his Twitter account at @rijwrites and on Wattpad where his titles are regularly read by hundreds. His biggest inspirations for writing are Danez Smith, ghosts, his awesome girlfriend, and his grandmother.

Maia Zelkha

Ether of Flowers

again I have plucked fluorescing 
laceleaf from the ground, 
for my transgressions 

I have plucked jacaranda 
from Yunnan morning glories 
from Jerusalem 

I have walked and I have crawled 
on bruised hips hallowed 
with your name 

through trampled lavender 
and sage in shavasana 
and cotton a man picked 

with the calloused hands 
of his father and grandfather,
I have seen the oaks bloom 

with sap and the poppies 
shiver with both delight both 
with fear of being plucked, 

the rice rise from paddies 
like false messiahs 
their stems outstretched 

reaching for a place 
without form 
without light 

the ether between joints 
the ether between planets 
the ether blossoms 

with yarrow and cornflower 
the ether between pistil and petal 
stamen and sepal golden 

pollen and wind 
again, I have scattered the seeds 
of solitude of sorrow 

I have gathered and dried 
piles and piles of wreaths that pile 
into hedges 

aimlessly, I have walked 
through mazes made of wreaths 
and I believe 

there is an ether 
there is an ether between 
the hedges of a maze 

---

Maia Zelkha is currently an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is passionate about history, literature, language, spirituality, and her Iraqi-Jewish background. Her work has been published in Blind Corner Magazine and JLiving Media. 

Liwen Xu

Desire and Drowning 

(After Kim Addonizio)

give me your strongest rum,
aged fine and dizzyingly sharp.
i want it by the glass, bitter
surrendering to sweetness, 
reminding me how in youth
i sought maturity.

give me the Chatelet les Halles,
the still standing Notre Dame, sunsets 
by the river. the crinkle and collapse
of an 8am croissant, the quiet
in movement. in memory.
even in your 107 degree heat, i am still
in love with you. city or body,
what’s the difference?

i want your timbre with the tears,
your lips on mine the way
mochi donuts melt— glazed, airy.
what’s in a tongue except sweet talk,
the taste of passionfruit?
lilikoi,
you call it, hawaiian and fresh,
consuming my neck, my name,
all the languages between us,
swallowed into the night.

in moonlight, you’ll walk with me
after we’ve untangled and curled 
back into our own skins. i’ll lead you 
to the sea, and everything will be black 
except the crashing of waves and glimmers of starlight
just on their crests. i’ll lean forward and linger,

losing myself to the lull of the ocean,
to a body kissing me so tenderly, so frantically,
that i can’t feel where i end 
and the water begins.

---

Liwen Xu is a writer based in the SF Bay Area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boulevard, Waxwing, Sine Theta Magazine, Mangrove Journal, and more. She is a graduate of the Tin House Summer Workshop and a fiction reader at The Rumpus. In her free time, she’s frequently running park trails, exploring new pockets of cities, and curating a haiku food Instagram @bon_appepoetry. You can find some of her work at liwen-xu.com or @liwendyxu on Twitter.

Enobong

At Sunrise, We Are Waterfalls

they say in our youth we are daffodils
blossoming in the cutting edge of spring.
well, i’m with my pals
& there are no petals on the faces of boys who should be flowers.
so instead, i say maturity is a gunman 
who places his rifle to our temples and leads our ego to a jigsaw…
too proud to ask for answers;
too far to go back.
i say maturity is a compassionate thief that takes everything
& leaves us with memories.

i say at childhood, we were boys at shore picking seashells and making sandcastles.
& on one sunrise, paddles were shoved into our green hands,
to set sail and cast nets in cold waters that we have never known before.
i once read in my dictionary that
a waterfall is a cascade of water falling from a height, over a precipice or steep incline.
and the next day, i'd asked my geography teacher why the lexicographers did not say it as '…falling heavily…'
because i think the days of our youth is a weighty waterfall;
not a spring for daffodils.

tomorrow, i'll be asked to give a word of encouragement to some school kids.
i’ll tell them to enjoy their days at the shore.
i’ll tell them to pick more seashells. make more sandcastles.
watch the somersaulting and breaking of the waves.
& toe the waters occasionally.

because very soon, 
it shall be sunrise.

---

Enobong is a Nigerian writer resident in Lagos. He has particular interest in creative writing and essay writing; and has written several short fictions and poems (including haiku) that cut across subjects including nature, humanity, culture, Africanism, social and national consciousness, nostalgic events, politics, the Divine, and death. He has also authored a number of essays and articles. His works have been previously published on Praxis Magazine, Haikuniverse, Nnoko Stories, The Shallow Tales Review, Nantygreens Magazine, Nymph Journal, Words Rhymes and Rhythm, Writenow Literary Journal, The Zen Space, Nasara Creative, and elsewhere. His haiku is also forthcoming in the Wales Haiku Journal Spring 2021 issue. Currently, Enobong is a law student at the University of Lagos.

Serrina Zou

On my eighteenth birthday I cry myself a river

to wash the shores of childhood clean: when morning dies 
I bathe my body in the light leftover from its skeletal bone. 

When mourning, I remember there are 171,476 words alive 
in the English language & none of them are pretty enough 

to disguise this final act of departure. I want to recolor my daydreams 
& impregnate them whole again. Too late. I'm told this year: be careful 

what you wish for before I blow out my candles. 
But instead, I let them burn until wax blisters 

against white frosting & I think this could be enough 
of a poem to drown in. Outside the cherry blossoms furl 

into themselves, preparing for the wind. Its howling: ready, 
set, go. Enough of a miracle to turn water into wine, 

tears into truth. What I haven’t shown you yet: my memory 
fleshed into metaphor the way a body breaks when it is blessed. 

Or how I was offered a glass of wine last week when I was still seventeen 
& soft-skinned. The man who offered it to me said he was seventy-four, 

but lived only seven & a half weeks. Plucking the fortune creases 
that lined his palms, he whispered it’s time. To live this unending lie, 

mortality was only a metaphor for the dead—how youth is limited 
like cherry blossoms—fading between the winds that carry them 

to their dirges. In this love letter to all that I have lost, 
I let the river’s current tear me into next year.

---

Serrina Zou is a Chinese-American writer from San Jose, California. She has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation, the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the U.S. Presidential Scholars Program, the Poetry Society of the UK, and Frontier Poetry, among others. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Cosmonauts Avenue, AAWW: The Margins, Diode Poetry Journal, COUNTERCLOCK Journal, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. When she is not writing, Serrina can be found feeding her Philz Coffee addiction or devouring a tower of novels. She will attend Columbia University in the fall of 2021

Melanie Lau

room with no direct sunlight

my room in boston is so small. it is just a hallway with a bathroom attached.

i don’t call this place home.

outside my window is a wall. when the sun hits its highest point, 
the wall turns white.

my grandmother’s hair is the color of snow. 

her hair sifting through my fingers—my first snowfall.

my room echoes with my father’s voice. he asks me if i know how to survive the cold.

snow sits as grains of salt on my windowsill. heaven’s urn has tipped over upon the city.

outside my window is a wall. when the sun hits its highest point, 
the wall turns white.
sunshine streaming down the brick.

a memory: my grandmother’s legs give out. she falls to the floor 
and lays mute like nothing is wrong. my father 
grows so angry he spits when he shouts. my grandmother’s face wrinkles with hurt.

i am pale as a ghost. but i am not a ghost.

if i were a ghost, i could walk through walls, i could see my grandmother again.

a memory: my father demands i stay home. he does not ask what he can do to make me stay.

my father does not know 
i left home because i am tired of him 
looking through me.

outside, death is just falling from the sky.

my tears taste of salt. sunshine streaming down my cheeks.

the night after my grandmother dies, it snows so gently. i catch a snowflake in my palm. 

i think that snow is a sign of love. i think she is watching over me.

if the world is an oyster, people are pearls, lacquered and lacquered with grief.

home was my forehead pressed to my grandmother’s neck.

i refuse to be my father. i swear he was the reason for half my grandmother’s bruises, patches of
blood just beneath the surface of her rice paper skin.

the afterlife is a box with a bathroom attached.

the snow outside is white ash on my windowsill, light and loose, gleaming.

crushed pearls.

---

Melanie Lau is a writer from Honolulu, Hawaii. She is currently working towards a BFA in creative writing at Emerson College. Her writing has been featured in Catfish Creek, Flash Fiction Online, and Blue Marble Review. Although she specializes in fiction, she loves to dabble in nonfiction and poetry. In any case, she writes emotional stories, ones that strike the heart and linger in the mind. 

Raphaela Moreno

Salsa for Jesus

Last night, I gave a lap dance to Matthew as Mark looked on.
Cigarettes fell from Mark’s lips to burn
circles in the vinyl upholstery as he yelled,
“Who wants to fight me?” to anyone
within earshot. Matthew spilled
beer on my t-shirt and begged for penance,
running sticky fingers across the rosary hanging
between my breasts – Mother Mary
full of grace and guns and roses.
The vigil joined hands to spin madly around us.
Ashes. Ashes.
Eventually, we all fall down.

Luke got caught stealing Ho-Ho’s from the Piggly Wiggly,
and his Father had to bail him out. He showed up at 2am
with an aspirin bottle full of what
he called Molly Magdalene. Waiting
for the dilation, we played truth or dare
and seven minutes in heaven, pushing
the furs out of the way to break
vows in a mothball confessional.

We did bodyshots on the kitchen counter with my mother’s
miniature teacups – until the salt burned away
our belly buttons and impure thoughts – then cleaned
the wounds with lime and holy water.
John is the best tequila girl we’ve ever had.

When we eat mexican,
we always pour an extra bowl of salsa and leave it
in the corner by the window –
mother insists we save something for Jesus.

---

Raphaela Moreno received a MA in Poetry from the University of Chicago and have since split time between working in higher ed and travelling, primarily in Latin America. 

Ian Brunner

Dreams of Lives that Never Happened #2

Water nearly too hot for the skin to handle.

Reminiscent of a small apartment in Allentown where we spent many hours pressed together
breathing each other’s recycled air. 

It is winter, as it is most of the time in this part of the world. 
For now,     the only sounds are our hearts and 
our exploring hands beneath the sheets. 
Sometimes, the snow battering against the window 
sounds a lot like what we will try to say later. 

Instead,        the world turns, and        
distance turns the language of touch into symbols we never send.

---

Ian Brunner is a fiction writer and poet from Buffalo, New York who is currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. His work has been featured in various journals and zines. Most recently in Riggwelter Press, Selcouth Station, Ghost City Press, and Dear Reader. He is the author of the chapbook, Ruminations (CWP 2017).

Lindsay Miller

Tremors

There was another earthquake. 
Usually, I sleep through them, 
undisturbed by the insistence 
of the earth beneath my body 
and the bed. This time, though,
the jolt was enough to wake me.
To make the dog stand up like 
there was something he should 
be hunting. I fell back to sleep
easily, like I tend to, thinking 
how the crack in the living room 
wall would etch deeper. Thinking 
how everyone else in LA was 
grabbing their phone to tweet 
“EARTHQUAKE!” 
so I didn’t have to. 

We are overdue for the big one. 
Something the landscape and I 
have in common. The one that will
come at us like Robert DeNiro 
in Taxi Driver, but in Beverly Hills
instead of Manhattan, wiping all 
the scum and goodness out, ripping 
your McMansion from its foundation. 
In my mind, I see the palms burning, 
clichés flaming, pom-poms in the slender
long arms of cheerleaders, but 
I’m not sure how they’d catch fire,
only that they should. I think of asking
a psychic about the image next time 
one stops me. I am always being 
stopped by them. They slip me cards 
printed with ancient looking symbols, 
tell me something in my eyes spoke
to them across the gas station display of
gum or condoms.

Once I had my tarot cards read.
I approached it like a cross-examination.
Are you in love? she asked and I sat back, 
wondering why she wouldn’t just tell me, 
then debating whether I was, now that 
someone had asked me plainly. Anyway,
I put their cards in my pocket, and then
when I get home, the trash under the 
kitchen sink. It’s a bad omen, I’m sure. 
But I don’t want the future until I’m 
in the future, and even then, 
maybe I won’t. 

For now I will sleep through
the small quakes, wait for the 
real destruction.

---

Lindsay Miller lives and works in LA. By day, she's a journalist and editor. She's at work on her first novel, and her fiction and poetry has been published in Black Heart Magazine, Cleaver, Literary Orphans, Rogue Agent, Angel City Review, to name a few.

Kate Wright

Untitled

The boys beg me to come
quarantine with them. Their mothers 
never taught them to cook a meal 
or be loved by a woman. Only one
of these is a skill easily learned
in a crisis by a late twenty-something
in a one room apartment. I imagine 
them sitting on a couch or in bed
as filth slowly settles—first, mold 
creeps at the edges of windows 
and shower doors, soon, a film 
developing on every surface. 
Strange times these are. Still,
the boys sit, cellphones in hand,
and tell me they miss me, tell me
to get in the car and drive. The dust 
collects around them in thick 
furry layers, soft and gray 
as cat’s fur. They are hungry 
for attention or food or something 
other than Coors and the empty pit 
at the bottom of their stomachs. I am lonely, 
too. Two glasses of wine deep
and I google one-way flights
to the cities where they live.
I take a deep breath, hands hover 
micrometers from keyboard, 
release breath, and close 
the page. I dig a sewing kit 
from a storage container to repair
the seam on a ripped shirt—
my hands pulling black thread 
through black fabric just like my mother,
my sister, my best friend
all taught me how to do.

---

Kate Wright received her BA and MA in English from Penn State and her MFA in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State. She is currently a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Tennessee. Her work has been published in or is forthcoming from Up the Staircase Quarterly, Okay Donkey, Rust + Moth, Rogue Agent, Ghost City Review, and elsewhere. You can find her on Twitter @KateWrightPoet

KB

Butts & Balls

You said the sky from our hammock looked like butts & balls 
so I thought up another world from its purple & pink. 
Sitting pretty on cloud-cheeks with a wrinkled physique, 

I see your butt— the best damn thing in my purview. I ask you,
this world’s creator, what sound does the springwater oozing 
from your blue-red skin make when I move my harpoon 

into it. If the revolution doesn’t include gay sex, then it’s not real, 
baby. If the revolution isn’t trans (because gender is a myth), 
you can keep it next to the world where pigs fly 

& Beyoncé doesn’t exist; no one wants it. If the sky 
is disguised as a gloryhole & a butt in the atmosphere 
admits that we are actually the joke, 

at least I have you, kissing the grass beneath us 
with what I can jiggle in my hands. Damn, how cool it feels
to be on loop until Jesus returns.

---

KB is a Black queer nonbinary miracle. They are the author of the chapbook HOW TO IDENTIFY YOURSELF WITH A WOUND (Kallisto Gaia Press, 2022), winner of the 2020 Saguaro Poetry Prize. They are a 2021 PEN America Emerging Voices fellow. Follow them online at @earthtokb.

Sheila Dong

Slow Learner

You didn’t know what it meant when the kindergarten teacher showed you a white rat laid motionless in the cup of a shell. But the rat was connected, however obliquely, to the woman flailing on the television screen, spoon jammed down behind her back teeth. It was connected to the helicopters that flew at night, searchlights roving over your blinds. A buckskin is the wildest horse, the girl on the playground said. She clawed the dirt with all ten fingers. A buckskin can tear your face off. You hated the sound of that, and you hated her. Molly is asleep, you said. But you knew it was a lie, and you couldn’t explain why. The teacher fit the other half of the shell over Molly’s body and buried her by the flagpole. Some of the kids cried. Not you. After school, a girl with short hair said, Girls shouldn’t have long hair. You know why? Because someone can do this. She went behind you and started strangling you with your hair. You laughed because you couldn’t think what else to do.

---

Sheila Dong is a Chinese-American, queer, and nonbinary poet based in Arizona. Their work has appeared in SOFTBLOW, beestung, Heavy Feather Review, and Juke Joint, among other places. They are the author of the chapbook Moon Crumbs (Bottlecap Press, 2019). Find out more at sheiladong.carrd.co.

Meg McCarney

sometimes i have dreams where i eat myself for the warmth

the skin’s a little dry, fluid-drained by trauma’s mallet, 
but it still has a lot to offer. bruises bloom in the mouth 
like blueberries fresh off the bush, little bursts 
of a pulse i didn’t know i still had. 

i know you’re watching me from the window,
so i keep licking my tibia clean-- an artist driven 
to self-righteous madness in old age, 
making bad art just to stay relevant. 

in my head, the vision of me gazing up, bloodied lips 
parted in a strawberry-jam smile, sinew hanging from 
my front tooth gap, will send you running, ripping 
the screen door from its hinges. it’s you: 
my familiar degenerate, my little dog in heat 
who just needed a reminder of what i’m capable of. 

instead you glare at me, so disappointed in my selfishness, 
leaving me out in the rain for a timeout, double-bolting 
the door behind you. i whimper all night long, cleaning 
my sorry wounds. when i paw at the screen door, howling, 
you just pull the pillow over your ears. 

you don’t want to sleep next to such a dirty thing, 
but that’s unfair. we all have needs; some are just more 
despicable. i don’t like the graduate and i’m not watching 
it anymore, even to make you smile. sacrifice is a curse. 
i’m young and dead from the waist down. 

sometimes i want to roll up like a pill bug and lay waiting 
to be unraveled, just because i have the time to waste, 
just because what’s more important than knowing 
someone can’t stand to not touch you? 

be quiet, watch; the twin dogs are talking 
through one mouth, breathing through it, too. 
everything’s stale, but they’re just happy 
to share spit, sing the same note. 
is it too much to ask?

---

Meg McCarney is a full-time student, poet, and friend at Lesley University studying Creative Writing. Her work has been published/is forthcoming in CP Quarterly, Rust & Moth, Commonthought, Sigma Tau Delta Rectangle, Plum Recruit, Apricity Press, and Oddball Magazine. She adores Jeopardy re-runs, corgi puppies, and baking oatmeal raisin cookies. 

Emily Jern-Miller

Winona Ryder’s Boyfriend

Runaway Train is the name of the song.
I used to watch the music video on MTV.

Sat cross-legged beside my sister
on the carpet in the dining room.

I haven’t told you how I saw the lead
singer once. He had dreadlocks back then.

Was attractive, even in person. It’s summer now.
The vineyards are full of themselves,

the air, hot to touch. I take the backroads
home to avoid the tourists. My hand

grips the wheel. The other lingers
on the dial. I can still see him

walking with the famous actress
past the pews. It was evening.

I don’t remember if I had school the next
day or if I cried. The old Catholic church

on Liberty with the stained glass
was packed. My mom and dad were there,

and my sister, of course. And the murdered
girl’s mother who looked right at me

as I made my way towards the door.
I turn the car down my road, and 

soon will greet the people who love me.
We’ll make dinner. Read books

before bed. I was just a child. I had no idea
what all this meant. I thought 

I did, but I didn’t. Who would have thought

I’d be thinking about the funeral all these years
later. And her mother’s face.

Aren’t you a cute one is what she said to me
before I left. She even touched my cheek.

---

Emily Jern-Miller received her MFA from California College of the Arts, and is the author of the chapbook, You Are Not a Bird (Dancing Girl Press). Her poems have appeared in The Journal, Poor Claudia, and Narrative, among others. She lives in a small town in Northern California, not too far from where she grew up.

Liza Sparks

A Story About Poverty

She has four children and very little money. She scrapes by. She scrapes money 
off of rich people’s toilet bowls, granite countertops, and refrigerator shelves—
sticky with rings from the bottom of Worcestershire sauce and honey. 
Who keeps honey in the refrigerator? 

Her children frighten her. They have large, hungry mouths. Their hair and nails are always
growing. They need new clothes and shoes. They ask too many questions. 

She is not even sure if they are her children. She reaches inside her womb to remember and feels
each of their imprints, like handprints made in wet concrete. 

It is night and the house is quiet. The children are sleeping. She closes her eyes. 

The youngest child wails. Her high-pitched screams cut into the mother’s skin like fiber glass.
The mother runs into the children’s room. The youngest child is sitting up in her bed, crying
wasps—they swarm the room and sting the mother again and again. 

What’s wrong, yells the mother, her hands gripping the screaming child’s shoulders. 
The other children are awake now, their eyes are beacons, searching for the cause of the cries. 
What’s wrong they ask, echoing the mother. My tooth screams the youngest, my tooth. 

The youngest child opens her mouth and a stench shaped like a ghost comes flying out. 
The tooth is pulsating decay. The mother thinks about money. How much money 
will it cost to pull the tooth? 

With pliers, she pulls out the youngest child’s tooth.

There is so much blood and screaming; and all of the children 
are afraid and wonder where their mother has gone. She is swollen with wasp stings.

---

Liza Sparks was a semifinalist for Button Poetry's Chapbook Contest in 2018. Her work has appeared with Repave, bozalta collective, Cosmonauts Avenue, and many others. She is a brown, multiracial/multiethnic, bisexual woman living and working in Colorado.

Susana H. Case

My Mother's Rose Garden

Joni Mitchell sang, paved paradise.
That's what the new owners did—
killed the bushes
in the back garden, 
where the neighbor's kid used to shoot up.
He's dead too.
There's more than one way to seek paradise.

Embroidered on one of my shawls:
Life is a bed of roses.

My mother let her rose bushes breed
every which way, had stricter rules
for her daughter. 
The garden and the daughter 
did what they wanted, a blossom boom,

taken for granted. Joni, Joni—
we don't know what we've got 'til it's gone,
though my mother grew the best,
our terrible thorns.

---

Susana H. Case is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Dead Shark on the N Train, from Broadstone Books, 2020, which won a Pinnacle Book Award for Best Poetry Book and a NYC Big Book Award Distinguished Favorite. She is also the author of five chapbooks. Her first collection, The Scottish Café, from Slapering Hol Press, was re-released in a dual-language English-Polish version, Kawiarnia Szkocka by Opole University Press. She has co-edited, with Margo Taft Stever, the anthology I Wanna Be Loved by You: Poems on Marilyn Monroe, forthcoming in 2022 from Milk and Cake Press. www.susanahcase.com.