Isra Cheema

Koi Pond

TW: Abortion

Look down and see your unborn baby
floating in the middle of the toilet
bowl—you see it spin slowly
like a lone koi fish, it’s soft pinked
flesh swirling in a murky pond
of blood clot-lily pads.
 
You were driving and pulled
over to throw up from the lightning
-strike explosion of sharp pain
in your uterus—you vomited into
a crumpled Walmart bag as the car
inched towards someone’s mailbox.
 
Feel the liquid warmth gush out of you,
life ejected, no—rejected from your
body, that life-giver. Peer closer at it,
that no-longer-life no larger than a
just-plucked raspberry squished into
some sort of spring jam.
You want to bury it.
 
Fill a small ring box with silk threads,
a few tears, a palmful of dust, and a
folded-up note of its name for the angels
to know and watch over—but no, this
maroon sea is its cushioned coffin, the
cold ceramic toilet seat its halo.
 
You flush, watch it swish around the bowl
in circles, life-blood swirling in water like
striped fins swimming away from you,
as if Allah didn’t say your unborn child
would drag you into heaven by its
umbilical cord, as if this angel baby—

---

Isra Cheema (she/her) is a poet from the heart of Oklahoma. She received a B.A. in English Education from the University of Central Oklahoma, and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Texas State University. She writes about what it means to be a Muslim American Pakistani woman in today’s world. You can find her poems in The Bosphorus Review and Jaded Ibis Press.

Todd Fuller

Mona Lisa Vs. Absinthe*

A Spanish painter, 
A Polish poet, and 
An Italian nationalist 
Walk into le bar . . ., 
a Parisian bar in 1911. 
Absinthe rounds,
The order of the day. 
Sunlight optional. 
Facial hair included.
All shade & no soap. 
They throw their 
Minds to the tight
Quartered & pinched
Wind. Two weeks
From this moment
Ghosts of Mona Lisa 
Haunt a vacant wall
At the Louvre. La
Police claim “It was
The anarchists!” Art
Historians insist 
It was Le boheme!
But miles away from
La Ville Lumière, 
Political soothsayers
Predict a rupturing.
And half-way to
Florence, a former
Employee (of the
Louvre) hides out.
He says, Lunga vita 
Al’ Italia! & Two
Years later, French
Investigators find
Him – le voleur, & 
It’s all, WTF / 
Putain! And before 
Returning La Joconde,
She becomes Tuscan 
Again, glowing to an
Orange prayer and
Singing Questo e per 
Te, Leonardo! And
Those 3 boys never
Breathe together 
Again. But they
Take silent turns   
Braiding gray hairs 
With fingertips of 
Light.

* The incomparable Pablo Picasso, the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and the Italian nationalist Vincenzo Peruggia, who actually stole the painting and later tried to sell it on the black market.

---

Todd Fuller is curator and poet at the Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries. He is the author of two books, 60 Feet Six Inches and Other Distances from Home: the (Baseball) Life of Mose YellowHorse (Holy Cow! Press) and To the Disappearance (Mongrel Empire Press). He lives in Norman, Oklahoma with his wife, kids, dog, unwanted gophers, and ornery field mouse.

Naomi Simone Borwein

star line

X was different.
You couldn’t see it unless you were right up close to
Her pupil.
A Glassy Galaxy of adhesions pulling in to
a five-point Star.
 
Like a tiny blackhole, drawing inwards
jade green and amber fibres
from her eye.
 
It’s so cool, Y says,
but how can you see?
through a pentagram
 
A stencilled iris
atrophying
in a ring of nodules and filaments; in the perceivable,
forms a canvas of
haloes and prismatic edges, all
willowing in the particulate light.
 
In the darkness, she sees.
Pulsing grains of violet and lime.
Blurred reds, and orange veins
crisscross like cotton fibres. In the rotation of X and Y.
where a small island, floats in
the centre
four-point perspective.
 
Instead of blackness, there are
Mach bands. Instead of saturation,
cochineal and clementine arteries
woven into the optical field. 
Stereographic 
Shrinking perspective
moving backwards,
accelerating away from the image.
 
Like the sable hairs of a cosmic paintbrush, gliding through oil slick landscapes
that only imagined a painter.
 
A constellation of rods and cones, in the seer’s symbolic—coordinates, Z—the uveal
chorus of optic nerves. The retina
flooding the pupil,
and X entering
into the star line.

---

Naomi Simone Borwein holds a PhD in English literature. Her work appears across a spectrum of presses: HWA Poetry Showcase IX, Farside Review, Superpresent Magazine, Gatorbites, and elsewhere. A past head poetry editor for Swamp Writing (2018-2022), she is a reader for Thanatos Review. Her poetry has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Cyril Wong

At the Hawker Centre

An elderly couple sits down at my table.
Because I might be asymptomatic,
I eat faster than usual and try not to make
conversation. But when the husband
stands up to buy lunch for his wife,
he looks so much like you decades from now
that I almost stand up to help him, presumptuous
fool that I am. And continue to finish
my plate of whatever, wondering if both of them
still touch each other in bed, if the wife
could carry on after her husband had died
and for how long. The woman asks
if what I’m eating is delicious. Meekly,
I nod. And tells me she’ll try what I’m having
next time. I agree that she should.
She gazes off into the distance at her husband
coming back, balancing a tray of food, and again
I do my best not to fly from my seat
to take the tray from him and carry it all to her.

---

Cyril Wong is a poet and fictionist in Singapore. His last book of poems was Infinity Diary, published by Seagull Books. His poems have appeared in Atlanta Review, Poetry New Zealand and Poetry International.

Tyler Truman Julian

Young Once

I wrote that, before
the games, the spinning
wheel and chance. O—
to be young in the US
when, suddenly, you’re
in a Kelly Reichardt film
or Florida, but it’s too
warm and dry
now; the bombs are
falling and it is just
too much.
 
I crave clarity,
black and white,
and imagine some classic
unspooling, but even
then it’s Nicholas Ray
and Technicolor, and death
is waiting. Young once—
and where’s America?
 
I’m sad.
Alone, under the dying
sky, riddled by heat, I
miss the start of things,
the belief that we
could stop, would stop
the escalation. How
many films end with death?
How often do we expect it?
We did. And still we hoped
our youth could save us.

---

Tyler Truman Julian lives in Wyoming, where he writes, edits, and teaches. He received his MFA in fiction from New Mexico State University and now serves as Review Editor for The Shore. He is the author of Wyoming: The Next Question to Ask (to Answer) (Finishing Line Press, 2019), from which work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His work has been published in Barren Magazine, Tupelo Quarterly, South Dakota Review, EcoTheo Review, and other journals. For more information, visit his website: tylertrumanjulian.com.

Saif Sidari

Shelter-Cat

The neighbour’s ancient shelter-cat hobbles
for a drink at dawn—a shaggy muff with one eye
 
and half a tail. She drinks from the shallow pool
that my mother poured in the backyard one sojourn.
 
She walks as if through quagmire, at the edge
of eternal sleep, passed a bed of cherry tomatoes
 
ripe with time. A careless hive of hanging red heads
ready to be picked, bathed, cut, and swallowed.
 
In the yard is an antique mirror that stonewalls
the shelter-cat; her wise amber eye travels her form:
 
a mild garden of histories seaming over scar tissue
and patchwork fur—stories of survival in the flotsam.
 
You see her thread the space like a dream, a brittle body
without a shadow, a mystical relic which swings

between life and a rumour, the lone ghost in my yard,
her head bent over the precipice, witless with thirst.
 
Breakfast’s ready! My mother sighs, hunched deep
carrying a modest feast on her back, a swelling cloud
 
of downpour, in the columns of her spine, to feed
and empty, a smile that no longer spreads to the eyes.
 
A gaunt woman with string, tethering kites to children,
thread she pulls from a withering nightdress, uncovering
 
why a harsh wind sings in the narrow gullet—reminds us
what happened to our bodies. Dizzy in the noise
 
I try to hold her hand, white in her eyes, prayer entwined,
while stray in the pool is a floating grey matt in the blue.

---

Saif Sidari is a transnational writer from Palestine. He recently graduated from the University of Sussex with an MA in Creative and Critical Writing, where he wrote a dissertation on queer shame and notions of body and manhood in James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. His work has appeared in Blink-Ink and Eunoia Review. You can find him on Instagram @saif.sidari.

Megana Dwarakanath

An American Question

“Are you and your daughter close?”
Some warm afternoon when white hands clutch
A cold glass
Someone will ask
And I will remember:
Knowing the syllables of your name
Mee-Rah
How they fell like silver anklets in a quiet room
Before I ever knew the fall of your
Feet striking clay in disbelief of gravity
As red hot air balloons rose around me
Around us I would realize
Clutching my belly with each stride
And you inspired would
Swell in me like a greedy mango
Lapping up monsoon rains and I
Greedily searched for your soft pulses
Your knees and palms skittering across
A wide expanse of brown
Earth that you are and I am your
Bridge across (sub)Continents
So that you will not forget what it is
To have fingers saffron-stained from milk sweets
Crush cardamom with
Stones my own mother laid in two lands
Grief she could not return
And instead set in my
Tongue I am not speaking
But pressing the hard rahs rounded ōs
Into your still soft palate like
Seeds pressed into soil
Husked hope I press
Against my chest each evening
Your father and I run our fingers over your
Cheek so smooth we can scarcely believe it is flesh
Let alone our own
Breath yours then mine
Yours then mine
Spaced in even intervals
I remember your first
You will remember my last because
Yes. We are close.  

---

Megana Dwarakanath is in her final year of medical training in Pittsburgh, where she loves learning from young people and spending time with her husband, daughter, and dog.

Jacob Griffin Hall

In Which the Klan Ignites a Cross atop Stone Mountain and is Reborn, November 1915

The first thing that comes to mind
is the color of the light caught in the coarse dimples
of the stone, and the way the wind must have moaned
and licked the flames, shadow roaming rock
with treetops below overhanging Confederate graves
all the way to Atlanta, and in my mind it is not beautiful,
and the cross is burning beneath a nation of stars.
The timing was right, though, and the city
was a window into Jim Crow’s open heart
as Birth of a Nation hit theatres, lost cause
sweeping the streets like a salve for the city’s scars,
and the mark was oblivion, dazed taste of exile,
as Helen Plane rallied the Daughters of the Confederacy
to make a martyr of the mountain, and when that night       
in November the new members donned their robes
atop the granite dome, the cinematic fantasy broke free
of the screen beside a deadly altar: open bible,
unsheathed sword, canteen of water. When I named
the mountain as a child, I savored the shape of the vowels.
On the peak, I played with a toy switchblade comb,
raised a canteen to my mouth and drank slowly.
I felt blessed above the Confederate bust
bigger than Rushmore, sun at my back and blood
running hot, eight years old, caught in the dogmatic scene,
and I’m terrified of why the first thing that comes to mind
is the color of the light, which could be mistaken
as beautiful, and why when I think of the robes I think
of my bedsheets pinned to the ceiling around my bed,    
backlit with a flashlight, my dad watching Law & Order
down the hall, and I think of the days now, at thirty,
when I wake up and feel like a guest in my body,
spend half an hour measuring breath, trying to shake myself
back into the real. But it’s all real. There’s no dodging that.
In the mornings I replace the saucer of water
on the kitchen tile for the cat, and I refresh the news
on my phone like a slot machine for hours,
eyes numb until half the anesthetic day has passed.            
The record lacks what happened after the new members
extinguished the fire and descended the western slope,
and it lacks the death that might have stained their robes
that night, and it lacks the families below, extinguishing
their lamps, holding each other and holding their breath.

---

Jacob Griffin Hall was raised outside of Atlanta, Ga and lives in Columbia, Mo, where he is a PhD candidate and works as poetry editor of The Missouri Review. His first collection of poems, Burial Machine, was selected as the winner of the 2021 Backlash Best Book Award and is forthcoming with Backlash Press. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in 32 Poems, New South, DIAGRAM, New Orleans Review, New Ohio Review Online, Ghost City Review, and elsewhere.

Emily Kramer

Waking Up from a Deep Sleep

In a video online, a group of people saves a beached orca by dumping buckets of water on it until the tide comes back in.

I sleep underwater,
wake up empty-lunged,
breath stolen by
night’s urgency.

I think of the orca who
leapt from ocean’s embrace
and crashed onto the rocks.
The shock of land rising up to
meet her. How
air would feel like lack.

She cries out as the tide
rises around her, salt water
rushing in to reunite her with,
un-rend her from the dark.

I stand at my kitchen sink
gulping down tap water,
acclimating.

All this time spent
breathing air
and I still can’t adjust.

---

Emily Kramer is a poet based in Orlando with her master's degree in English from Ohio University. Her work has previously appeared in Split Rock Review. In 2015, she received the Staff Sergeant Robert J. Miller Award for her poem, "Hiding Places." She lives happily with her husband and two cats and enjoys video games, sushi, and having weird dreams.