Juliet Cook and j/j hastain

Please Respond

The florist peels the petals off,
replaces them with human skin
sewn in to flower shapes then hangs them
to the curtains in the nearby neighbors
mobile home. In the middle of the floral arrangement
is an RSVP card."Please respond by opening the door
to your refrigerator". Someone opens the door and sees
a serving tray filled with red jello shots 
they don't remember makingand another 
gold fold it sign that says follow the throbbing sent by the
bio mat. The oven mat turns into a wrestling mitt,
the foliage starts on fire inside the oven.
The worlds last redwood forest appears there,
singing songs from the perspective of prized trees,
blood spewing out of their broken branches,
bird nests screaming, biohazardous wings.

Juliet Cook is a grotesque glitter witch medusa hybrid brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. She is drawn to poetry, abstract visual art, and other forms of expression. Her poetry has appeared in a peculiar multitude of literary publications. You can find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

 

j/j hastain is a collaborator, writer and maker of things. j/j performs ceremonial gore. Chasing and courting the animate and potentially enlivening decay that exists between seer and singer, j/j hopes to make the god/dess of stone moan and nod deeply through the waxing and waning seasons of the moon.

Jill Danto

hypnotic daddy distance

google, how to burn an image into our retinas
“did you mean: how to burn an image into your retinas”
no…
okay,
anyways,
the first responder is a reddit post and the next is from forbes magazine
(note: trolls, then: money trolls)
the last is a wikipedia article about afterimage, but that wasn’t what i was looking for,
was it. i wanted to email you to see how you were doing on father’s day, since all hope
seems lost and our fathers are either here or not; and each father has a loaded history, a couple decades
more loaded than our histories; and sometimes they use their hands for healing and sometimes they use
their hands for harm; and there is no way of choosing who your father is, if we are referring to a father by
the classical definition (instead of the sexualized definition); and i want you to know that i can be a father
if you need me to be; father   
       being   a lakeside beach; the sand not 
                broken enough, instead takes the form of chunks of 
            glass, nothing lives there, and we cannot not want to walk along the shore.
there was this one day that we were walking around a car show on a cross-street with a well-gardened
meridian and you told me that you would go to car races with your father; let the lungs soak the exhaust
from each engine; to be near him; and it was loud; and i don’t remember the full story but it was
devastating in its own way and each of your stories keep transforming from tender to cruel; like a grape
being rasined; as if my dog was bitten by that wildcat near the days inn; but that never happened; and i’m
just a worrier, that’s all. xx

jill danto (b. 1998; Detroit, MI) is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. They have been published in The Moon Zine,The SEEN, and Chicago Artist Writers. They are currently studying Visual and Critical Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Janna Grace

Womb Bones and Ancient Fences

I never feel like a bone.

My edges are porous, yes, but they keep
the water inside,
like a mountain keeps its lake,
thin lines snaking odd silhouettes of cartilage,
maybe,
or perhaps the skin that cups the soft bits in the cheek.
 
Hollow whole outlines rise and the inside depresses
as one large land mass,
towards the earth's core,
an orange
ever bitten crust.
 
Bones can't be woven, like hurdling branches
three months after they're cut
(you must give them time to dry out),
and that's how my lines are-
an ancient craft once used for making fences,
not much more than an old man's hobby,
pull me over                      and around
                       and under                       each edge post,
to loop back,
                                        over and under
(but don't wait too long; I can't be too dry
to move).
 
These lines are then pressed upon themselves,
like that fencing
to scoop out a chance for air.
 
Bone would never be able to do that-
it becomes brittle much sooner
after its cut, and it's never soft enough to weave,
except maybe in the womb?

Janna Grace lives in a half-glass barn and her work has appeared in The Bitchin' Kitsch, Plastik Magazine, and Red Eft Review, among others. She has pieces forthcoming in Eunoia and Alpha Female Society and she teaches writing at Rutgers University. Her debut novel will be published through Quill Press in 2019.

Lisa Lerma Weber

Unclean

I always watch when my blood is drawn—
focus on my skin pulled taut 
and ready for the penetration,
the needle biting into my vein.
I don't look away as the syringe
becomes crimson, choking on me—
that tiny vampire feeding on my sins.
 
I sometimes imagine needles piercing my heart,
the barrels filing with thick, hot darkness
and leaving me empty—
clean of all desire and bitterness and sorrow and rage.
Clean of all the poison I've injected
into my body and mind and soul.
Cleanliness is next to godliness they say.
And God watches as we draw blood,
vampires that we are.
 
I sometimes imagine blood pouring from the sky,
every head tilted back, every mouth wide open
and filling to the point of choking.
Every throat scoured of the words caught there—
all the apologies and confessions,
all the unbearable secrets and truths.
Every vampire drowning.
 
I always watch when my blood is drawn—
watch as ghosts float out of my body
and out of my soul and over my head.
I watch and they watch and God watches.
But what can any of us really see in the darkness?

Lisa Lerma Weber is a wife, mother, and constant dreamer living in San Diego, California. Her work has haunted the pages of Marias at Sampaguitas, Mookychick, Nightingale & Sparrow, Royal Rose, Vamp Cat, and others. Follow her on Twitter @LisaLermaWeber.

Marisa Crane

A LETTER TO MY FUTURE CHILD

they say that you become your parents.
I hope for your sake that you become your other mother
‘cause then you might have a fighting chance
at a savings account with her same love
of scanning the circulars & exclaiming from time
to time, eggs are two-for-one! &
salmon is $7.99 a pound!
oh wait, that isn’t much of a special. fuckers.
if you have any desire to come into
this world with a good attitude,
you may want to stay cooking a little bit longer.
we’re both sore losers & we love to talk shit.
Lebron is the most overrated player to ever play the game.
he’s got no heart. no fire in his eyes. 
we drink beer & yell at the TV & it’s satisfying
in a very predictable way.
that is to say, 
we won’t ever force you to do something
that doesn’t ignite your every cell 
(even if it will buy us a house overlooking the sea).
& if you by some off chance wind up like me,
I’ll teach you how to fall in love
with your sentimental spirit.
it looks better on you than it ever has on me.
the problem is that
I want to buy everybody a pair of baby binoculars
to prepare them for the sudden appearance of beauty.
I want to carry everybody’s baby binoculars for them
when they are tired or cranky or hungry
& if they cannot see,
I want to buy them go-go gadget arms
so they can touch the faraway mountains & faraway sands.
your other mother will spend her days
talking sense into us both
but not so much sense that we forget
to wave to the birds-of-paradise on our walk
to the cliffs where she & I 
first suspected that we’d swallowed 
the sky & that the sky had swallowed
a forest full of yesses. 
what were we to do but everything?
we now know that all the trees in a forest
are connected to each other
through underground fungal networks.
I like to think of us three as trees,
I like to think that Log Lady was onto something
when she said my log does not judge.
what do you say we ruin every pile of leaves
this side of the Prime Meridian?
I won’t have to show you how to misbehave—
I’ll leave that joy of discovery to you.
we will take you camping & point out the
stumps of cut-down trees kept alive
by their friends.
I will say, did you know they feed them
sugar solutions through their roots?
a pause. an exclamation.
an inevitable question. 
no, unfortunately we can’t do that for people,
we will say.
it will make us sad to break you so young.
I don’t understand time. I want to eat it.

Marisa Crane is a queer writer whose work has appeared in Wigleaf Top 50, Jellyfish Review, Hobart, Crab Fat, and elsewhere. She is the author of the poetry chapbook, Our Debatable Bodies (Animal Heart Press, 2019). She currently lives in San Diego with her wife.