Parker Logan

Swallowing Ron Desantis’s Secretary’s Assistant

I think about my father’s shoe collection
and my bare feet on the garage floor:
fifty different looks to grow into,
 
but my toes still won’t touch the tips.
 
I’m grown and a size nine
and he’s an eleven,
 
and another man is standing over me,
moaning,
 
and, 
 
oh my god,
 
he’s so ugly.
 
He didn’t even open the door
to let me in, wouldn’t let me
touch his face,
 
even though he is perfectly fine with penetrating me.
 
He wants lips without feeling,
a throat full of spit,
 
a body laced with blood and desire,
 
and as he chokes me, 
filling all the spaces,
 
I think about my Dad’s Air Jordans,
his yellow Crocs covered in dirt,
the pair of Heelys he bought
when they were still hot,
 
the crown of Adidas in every color.
 
In and out, back and forth,
tongues and soles 
 
and feet touching the naked earth;
 
on my knees, looking up,
I think about power
and I think about shoes
 
and I think about how I am only one
in an ever growing collection. 
 
Nikes, sons, lovers,
boys and men,
I am swallowing all their potential.
 
Give it to me, daddy,
 
I think as his head falls back
and he sinks into submission,
crumpling like a sock,
 
like an old pair of slippers.
 
This is power, 
on my knees,
thinking, reaching, 
swallowing,
growing into my inheritance.
 
Barefoot like a baby,
I am taking, I am taking, I am taking,
I am coming back for more.
 
Feed me, daddy,
 
I think, hungry for the weakness
he mistakes as strength,
 
my silence stuffed
with legs, his pants,
 
my father’s shoes and socks.
 
I am ready, I am ready,
give me more and more and more.
 
Touch my tonsils,
pull my hair,

don’t stop until I say so.

Look at you, old man,
withered like a used pair of New Balances.
 
I am the new Summer collection.
 
I am soft straps on a pair of sandals,
the very thing that keeps you
holding it together.

---

Parker Logan is originally from Orlando, Florida, and he is a graduate of FSU. He currently lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He is pursuing an MFA at LSU and tends to his poetry garden with his friends. 

Dane Hamann

Cacophony

after the painting “Excavation” by Willem De Kooning

A forest of winter,
scratchy avalanche.
 
Music. Motion. Or at least
the memory of them.
 
See criss-crossing
islands. Bursts of flowers.
 
Maybe a leaf.
Or is it a mouth?
 
People say ghosts
are flying off a mountain,
 
the land thrashing
as if it were the sea.
 
But where looms
the horizon?
 
Missing,
like a pair of eyeglasses.

---

Dane Hamann edits textbooks for a publisher in the southwest suburbs of Chicago. He received his MFA in Creative Writing from Northwestern University, later serving as the poetry editor of TriQuarterly for over five years. He is the author of A Thistle Stuck in the Throat of the Sun (Kelsay Books, 2021) and Parsing the Echoes (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2023).

Kathleen Bryson

Three-Eyed Frankenstein (Rewilding)

This morning my old pal Maz. 
Our sun had ejaculated on the road.
I walk there in dreams yellow bukkake,
that sparse, spread-out London or Anchorage. 
Wherever, on a hill. And down the incline I 
went and looked across the way. And there 
was Maz walking up the incline 
with the big painting. 
And I shouted out, “Maz, Maz!” 
And he crossed to my side, 
lugging the gold-framed artwork 
he had bought at a charity shop of a
three-eyed Frankenstein monster. 
 
And I admired it. 
And he had something else, 
a smaller photograph with jail bars,
enclosing shiny happy people. 
Something to do with music. 
And maybe my dad in there, too. 
I don’t know. Maybe not.
I watched the painting for Maz; 
he had to go do something. 
So I watched it for him for a while. I
don’t remember how we said goodbye,
but we did. I think he later 
continued walking up the hill with a
big charity-shop painting of a
three-eyed Frankenstein. If you knew 
James Patrick Blackden Marriott, you would 
know that buying a charity-shop painting of a
 
three-eyed Frankenstein painting and 
listening to experimental music is exactly 
what he’d be doing in the afterlife.
These three-eyed ravens from
shows like Game of Thrones O Mary 
Shelley with your psychic New Age third eye,
did you foresee my pair of ceramic 
salt and pepper shakers, the happy couple 
the Bride of Frankenstein and
her groom I have a white streak in my dark 
hair since the pandemic and never had one
grey hair before; it wears on you 
it does. And then I decided to do the painting
very quickly this morning so it now 
 
exists in real life too.
Three months into the pandemic I
dreamed of a goat with tea in its udders

---

Alaskan-born Kathleen Bryson received her Ph.D. in Evolutionary Anthropology from University College London,. She studies prejudice/empathy in humans and other great apes and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at University of Oxford. She also is a published author of over 100 fiction pieces, including 3 novels of literary fiction. The most recent novel is the experimental The Stagtress, published by Fugue State Press (2019), and her non-fiction book Why We Struggle With Ambiguity: The Quiddity Question will be published by Ethics Press International in 2023. Her poems have been published in Magma, Eunoia Review and the Bombay Literary Magazine, amongst many others. An artist-writer-filmmaker for many years, she has had 10 solo art exhibitions, amongst them Once Upon a Spacetime at the Royal Institution (2019). She has just completed her second directed feature film Baked Alaska, for which she wrote the screenplay and performs. Read about her at www.kathleenbryson.com

Bobby Parrott

My Father's Head

I keep my father’s head
in a bike-helmet box 
on the top shelf 
of my bedroom closet. 
 
I found it blinking up 
through bubbles in the sink
as I was doing the last
of the silverware one night.
 
It’s not severed, but ends 
graciously at the neck 
in a smooth, flat stump. 
I lifted it out, rinsed it off
 
and wrapped it in a dishtowel. 
I remember at his funeral, 
how I rested my hand
on his bald scalp to say 
 
goodbye. It felt cold, not warm 
like this one which, I’ll admit, 
is different. Small words tickle 
him now. I wake angry 
 
to his The the the the wants is 
the the the the gets chant. Poetry 
never pleased him like this,
though we did play trumpet 
 
duets. Now, he can’t even whistle
“Begin the Beguine,” a favorite 
piece together. Whenever he tries 
to begin his beguine, regrettable 
 
in that breathless whistle of his,
I reach up, feel my own head
loosen on its hinge, my own body
stretching fingers for the door.

---

Bobby Parrott's poems appear in Tilted House, RHINO, Rumble Fish Quarterly, Atticus Review, The Hopper, Rabid Oak, Exacting Clam, Neologism, and elsewhere. Wearing a forest-spun jacket of toy dirigibles, he dreams himself out of formlessness in the chartreuse meditation capsule known as Fort Collins, Colorado. 

Amanda Hartzell

Since legislation is too much to ask

1_     Chalkboards hush one another
2_     lunches gently rot in the tray guns click
3_     like a night of endless crickets
4_     while new mothers nurse tongue at nipple
5_     not thinking finger to trigger
6_     No child is waiting to be gone
7_     Their afternoons melting like a bucket of ice
8_     I can’t write a poem with a diamond inside
9_     worthless sentiment from pressure even while
10_    a friend looks at my baby a girl and half-Asian
11_   and says I made her life more difficult
12_   I’m supposed to write a child with a poem inside
13_   It will have everything: Good grades and barrettes
14_   and swings at recess and space
15_   to hide under desks
16_   A poem will welcome her like others open armed—
17_   Columbine Sandy Hook Uvalde
18_   It will finally understand children
19_   are the target audience.

---

Amanda Hartzell is the author of The Heart Never Pretends to Be a Beautiful Muscle (Finishing Line Press) and Glowing Animals (Game Over Books), both forthcoming in 2023. Her work was nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net and appears in Breakwater Review, Carve Magazine, The Knicknackery, and New Letters, among others. She holds an MFA from Emerson College in Boston. Originally from eastern PA, she lives in Seattle with her husband, two children, and their dog.

Eddie Emma

Days

sun in its place or out of place
neighbors staring or not staring
 
ground I lost or can't stop finding
ground I never had to keep
 
never in a hurry things
the train that comes, the reading chair
 
gone or not gone or so close I can see
in pieces the train the chair the sun
 
you the rattling closer sun
train of doctors or of neighbors
 
setting days like furniture
sturdy and as far apart as years 

---

Eddie Emma is a Brooklyn resident and emerging writer. They are grateful to Ghost City Review for being their first publication.

Paul Shumaker

BELOW TUNGSTEN LIGHTS

At the beach. 
It’s here I relax. 
 
I pronounce my name. 
It takes time. 
 
The scene is unclear, distant. 
As distant as 
 
the acidic horizon, 
cornered. 
 
I hear murmuring.
 
I hear. The words, spliced
together. 
 
My eyelid, rehearsed. 
 
It’s here I relax.
At the beach.
 
It's here I see 
the camera.
 
It's here
in the camera.
 
Black square, shivering. 
 
Black square above 
 
a red circle, motionless 
between 
tongue and jaw, congealing.
 
I am a syllable.

---

Paul Shumaker holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Sarah Pritchett

The Night Orchard

As we step into the street,
I can’t remember if I left
my wallet in my other bag.
Night swarms around us
like wasps. You say the stars
look nice, but I know the night
like Coriolanus knew Aufidius.
You say all great adversaries
are secretly super into each other,
and I know you’ve said that before.
 
But when the night comes for me,
I forget my clothes. Under
the moon, I watch the world
burst apart like the seam in a dress
that I forgot had a zipper. A dress 
that now lies in the streets of Antium.
 
You ask a question that involves
the word “again,” or maybe it’s
again that you ask. I can’t hear
over your loud voice,
waves of sound so bright
they sting like shards
of metal in my palms.
I wonder if I’ve put the right
clothes over the right bones.
 
As my fingertips blacken
like the fern in my home that 
I can’t care for, I answer that 
it’s a kind of Object Unimpermanence. 
When the apple goes behind your back,
we have to start all over again.
 
I can’t remember, at the party,
if the table’s edge is close behind me.
I put my hand behind my back
to feel for the table or an apple -
I still don’t know the trick works.
My glass falls, and out pours smoke, 
dust, and all the trust I had that 
by next year’s birthday,
we’d be at that motel in Antium.
 
And more pours out: It tastes like
apples; your hand in my mouth;
and something I can’t remember.
I tell you night poisons the punch. 
And as the apple snakes behind your back, 
I know I’ll have to start all over again.
 
Someone’s mother has a napkin.
She says I had a different haircut
before. I squirm in my dress – it’s
the dry skin of a dead girl that
no one remembers but me.
Different hair, tight skin -
my bones crack under her knotted waist.
The apple snakes behind my back,
and someone’s mother has faith
that it will still be there tomorrow.
 
I have faith too, in a God
of our own creation.
In every nerve, a catapult,
a driving force of life and light,
of getting that job at Costco,
and kissing your children.
I believe in the God of pain.
 
He forms a map of walls
In the skin of each potential life. 
It hugs us tight under a dome so big,
we duck our heads so the
car won’t hit the garage ceiling.
So big, yet I scrape my knees
each day in avoidance of
a God who bears my name.
 
God takes the apple
from my hands,
the apple snakes
behind his back,
the snake slithers wildly
up the walls of the dome.
And somewhere in the night,
the paper bottom of a soda cup,
left too long on a dresser,
finally gives up the ghost.

---

Sarah Pritchett is a PhD candidate in Philosophy, Human Rights at Lund University in Sweden. Originally from Texas, Pritchett moved to Sweden in 2015 and has studied a bachelor’s in human rights, a master’s in criminology with a focus on political violence, and a secondary master’s in human rights with a focus on migrant justice. Pritchett has had a lifelong love of poetry and the Arts and is currently working on developing a collection of short poems.

S.D. Dillon

In Miro’s Farmhouse

Objects are set out
In a Richard Scarry taxonomy
 
Ladder & bucket
Cart, watering can
 
Outdoor implements 
So much depends on
 
How you weigh maize & soil, 
fields & machine

Parts & whole
whole & parts

---

S.D. Dillon has an AB from Princeton and an MFA from Notre Dame, where he was Managing Editor of The Bend in 2004.  His writing has appeared in the Detroit Free Press, FIELD, The South Carolina Review, the Hawai’i Pacific Review, The RavensPerch, and Lighthouse Weekly, and is forthcoming in Walloon Writers Review, Tar River Poetry, and Tipton Poetry Journal.

Sam Johar

until it is Arriving

I Fell
into the train tracks
just so i could be the main character,
for once,
the subject of all the talk in the
City they would
blame me for the
Trains that will never
Come if they
could they would
Idolize
my image and stick honey to
the eyes
that were never mine
 
dyed my hair for Halloween
& the water
still runs red
& the Water still runs
red each time i
Rinse it
out
even after all this time i Find myself
in the lines of the floorboards, i
understand
why the Lady Macbeth would wash
& wash the blood out from
her hands
 
i Miss the little
things in the light of
day
how the
city streets would
Glisten
after rain,
how yesterday’s triumphs
& heartaches alike
stick inside my skin like
Honey traps, how i said we could
Mean
what we
thought we meant and
Say
what we wanted to say
 
How i Looked
at Each and Every one of
My Cells
until
it called itself a
City

---

Sam Johar lives in New York City and is currently a senior at Hunter College High School. Sam has been writing poetry since 6th grade.

Connor Beeman

Art and Politics in the 1980s // Akron Art Museum

north of the city’s heart, I wander
the art museum’s chest with you. 
 
it’s a Tuesday, the building nearly empty,
and there is a visiting exhibit on AIDS. 
 
it takes me by surprise, around the corner,
all my strength undone by withered bodies and protest signs. 
 
there is nothing to say, just your hand to reach for,
as the videos play on loop for a silent gallery.
 
sometimes I wonder what it could have meant to know one of these men,
to know them full-bodied and foolish – unaware of any virus.
 
would they have taught me how to live?
 
would they grant me the wisdom of a queer elder – 
the ever-vital knowledge of survival? the ever-elusive promise of our joy?
 
could they have told me what belonging would feel like when I needed it most?
 
told me that one day I would feel it in heavy in my gut,
light in my chest, in my very bones and radiant through my fingers
 as I danced in a crowded club – just as they had.
 
maybe, but there is 
no way to know.
 
what’s done is done.
what’s lost is lost. 
 
sometimes, I want to feel fractured,
 as if I’ve earned the shattering. 
 
four highway lanes, all empty,
off a cloverleaf interchange.
 
an IV plunged deep, medicine’s expressway to the veins,
carrying saline and antibiotics and never enough time.
 
sometimes, I want to bleed for my city, weep for my elders,
but I see them as separate wards, separate bodies – 
 
more often, we are one and the same.
 
some of us came home from the coasts to die,
  some of us never made it back.
 
some of us never left, lied and did everything right,
  and our bodies failed us anyways. 
 
I am always relearning the nature of crossroads, 
reminding myself to consider it all. 
 
on the screen, a dying man in a nursing home I know
  says his name for the camera.
 
in this quiet white, it is the only sound 
  I can hear. 

---

Connor Beeman is an emerging writer and recent graduate of Ohio University. Originally from Akron, Ohio, his work focuses on themes of queerness, history, and post-industrial space. Connor is the 2022 winner of the Mark Ritzenhein Emerging Poet Award, and his chapbook "concrete, rust, marrow" is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Previous publications include New Reader Magazine, Black Fox Literary Magazine, and The Oakland Arts Review. 

Allison Tobey

Another Airplane Poem 

I’m blushing.                     It’s the smell. 

I can smell sour bread and sugar—an intimate smell. 
The smell of unwashed bodies after sex. 

I imagine the man naked, the intensity of the aroma exploding. 

I think of the word crevice. A dirty word. 

The man sits with the arm-rest raised. 
The side of his stomach sneaks over the border. 

I remember in college thinking of my professor’s naked body. 
His voice a boat floating on a lazy river. 

But I’d imagine his breasts. 

Two pasty half-filled sacks of vanilla pudding. 

I’d fight the urge to think of his penis—his balls—

Then, they’d appear—

two wrinkled, sagging moons, a soft, bloated space slug. 

I am convinced he knew, just as I am now convinced 

this man knows. 

He will pull apart the sticky layers, the crevices, of my brain 
and see his own naked, sugared body

staring back.

---

Allison Tobey earned her MFA from Antioch University in Los Angeles. She spent many years in many roles at Gertrude Press, including both managing and poetry editor.   She is also English Faculty at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon. Her poetry has been published in many journals, including Rhino, Concho River Review, Sugar Hill Review, and Paper Nautilus.

Tom Barlow

How to Avoid Those Awkward Moments

Never tell your lover about your STD 
before putting on your shoes / never 
give the finger to the tailgater who 
follows you home only to pull into 
 
the drive next door / never tell your 
sergeant you lusted for him before 
your discharge papers are in your hand / 
never threaten to punch out your 
 
mechanic over the bill until you 
make sure the car starts and he didn't 
box Golden Gloves / never call your 
mother a ballbreaker and slam 
 
the door as you leave before confirming 
the Uber driver is in the driveway / 
never read your BFF the CNF you wrote 
based on her troubles with romance 
 
while she is driving you to the airport 
for a flight that will be cancelled / 
never confess to your moribund father 
you were the one who stole and wrecked 
 
his T-Bird just before his miraculous 
recovery / never share your poems 
with a new girlfriend if all your poems 
are about failed relationships 
 
and how you burn for revenge / 
and finally, never outlast your audience.

---

Tom Barlow is a widely-published Ohio author of poetry and fiction. He writes because conversation requires a great deal of give and take and he's always considered himself more of a giver. See more at tombarlowauthor.com.

M. E. Silverman

Hunger I

The black bear comes to my yard as if invited. Her shadow trails
beside her. The rising curtain before a one-act play. Her graceful,
slow rumble. A walking mountain. She sways, shakes her head, sits
in front of my apple tree. She fills every space, center stage, focuses
on the dangling sweets, those red light, the hypnotic ripeness. I know
this hunger. She snorts. The tree whispers back. She strains for the
low-hanging apple. She bends the branches to her will, sniffs each
one. She paws one back and forth like a boxer warming up. It
loosens, lands at her feet. She consumes one, two, three, four before
she leaves. Now I am alone, yet my appetite remains. 

---

M. E. Silverman had 2 books of poems published and co-edited Bloomsbury’s Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry, New Voices: Contemporary Writers Confronting the Holocaust, and 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium. @4ME2Silver

Hillary Smith-Maddern

Ashes

I lost two dreams this week.
 
Each one gripped
heart meat, made lungs heave
for oxygen’s tangerine burst.
It is always you -
 
from before you were birds -
perched on leaving’s ledge,
your dyed autumn hair a jolt of life
so disparate from when chemo had scalped you
and greyed every hair that grew back.
 
Somewhere between doubt and a dream
I woke up.
My eyes rained solitude.
Held a mirror to my gluttonous misery.
 
I have been eating my loneliness again.
 
Empty
stomach consumes
hollow syllables that taste most like guilt
after the lipstick wears off.
 
The day you died there was unrelenting
sun, a relief
from winter’s aftermath.
I stepped outside with just a t-shirt on. Nothing
 
about it seemed real.
They cashed my check and burned your body. 
 
I furied your ashes
room to room, tried to fit you in spaces
I’d punctured and fed
in darkness. My guilt was born without eyes.
Which is to say:
so were your ashes.
 
In some dreams, I crouch in corners
and eat both.

---

Hillary Smith-Maddern is a proud cat mom and collector of dilapidated plants. Her favorite things include cats, coffee, cobblestone streets, and the crisp, blank pages of a writing notebook. She resides in Holyoke, MA.When she’s not writing, you can find her teaching, hiking a mountain, or seeking out her latest adventure. Some of her work has been featured in As It Ought to Be Magazine and Coneflower Cafe.

Emma Jahoda-Brown

Undressing After The Memorial

Crushed paper in coat pocket
Is this what I read 
The room had become like an orchard
they let loose on her life
with small scenarios of scissor  
made a pattern of her
unforeseen and therefore
I made a conclusion against destiny 
Conversations like windmills I hear
The city won the league tonight there is cheering in the distance
Meanwhile dressing gown thoughts of her name written in gold 
on the stone what surprised me 
was how clean they were surfaces like black ice
and it didn’t rain despite all the talk of it 
Did I know her just for that moment or does it go on 
as one can unexpectedly start adoring things later in life 
at 10pm he drove me home I could still but didn’t want to think 
the hardest substance on earth is transparent this kind of emptiness 

---

Emma Jahoda-Brown is a writer and photographer. She splits her time between Los Angeles and New York City. She holds a BFA in photography and media from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in poetry from Columbia University.

Christine Drohomyretska

***

The mist is thickening, the woman is cleaning her shoes - her hands are red with blood,
As soon as a coastal voice can be seen through them, she repeats what another woman 
Told her – a recipe, how to treat a patient. You can look in between, you can look through, but
Never catch her direct gaze on any of the things as if she were ashamed of them,
She warns herself not to faint when she looks into the rectum while hunting
The scream that rolls up like the smoke that reaches the sky and reaches the face that
Is waving in the middle of the flag. I remember when I had to pick the fruit, when
The mother came with other people's children and exchanged them for her own. The wine 
Was black, the wine that was froze on his tongue before he uttered anything that buried -
Several times a tough body. Even when the earth threw him to the surface, 
He was covered with her breasts and flared with rage and love. Someone walks in the shade, 
His steps covered the whole garden, someone by all means overcomes the same distance 
And falls breathless near the threshold. He makes holes of the cry and the rain on the dark sky,
He returns to what he heard before, he heard it from those whom he did not remember. 
The yard is black and white and a hunchbacked man is sweeping from east to west, 
He is pulling a mannequin taken out of the river in a wheelchair, wherever his foot steps, the doll
leaves traces

---

Christine Drohomyretska, 32, Lviv // writer, researcher of literature and cinema // author of the poetry books Navigators do not work in the dark and Dead Grass

Juliet Cook & Darryl Shupe

Spinal Column Nuggets

This barn involves a giant slice of chicken,
the entire spinal column cracked 
then swallowed.
 
Engorged throats stuffed full,
unable to fit anything else in.
Unable to shut.

A display of raw meat burns
then sizzles into
freak show apparitions.

They try to fly away,
but get sucked inside a giant portable fan.
 
Spit out feathers,
a pail of chicken piss,
and pieces of mechanically separated
chicken heads are all that remain.
 
Take a bite of each one
to figure out the order
of their demise.

---

Juliet Cook is 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.

Darryl Shupe is new to poetry (even though he's middle aged) and enjoys collaborating with his partner. In his spare time he likes to work on cars because as he says, "how else does one come up with new swear words?"

Robert Laidler

Occhiolism

— The awareness of the smallness of your perspective.

I ordered bacon on a sandwich that comes with optional bacon
during a Thursday morning sandwich shoppe session.
 
I eaves dropped which requires stealth, and I am, according to one
friend, a ninja. The November air in an Ann Arbor February
 
felt like weather to golf in, this meant the hard ground buckled
underneath your boots, and the cold slips all the way through
 
to the sole. The reason I said bacon was because on the menu the shoppe
said bacon, ham, or sausage and I remember saying bacon. They
 
forgot the bacon but the guy who took my order was so nice that I just
ate the sandwich. It was a way for me to say my meal was almost
 
100% plant based––stupid eggs ruin everything. My wife had a miscarriage
on super bowl Sunday and the Rams won. Maybe the stupid seeds.
 
The teal snow fell like someone had buckets of white blood to pour over
the city. I thought I was being judged. I don’t know how to be direct.
 
I don’t smell like coffee anymore. The woman at the shoppe sitting across from
me was sitting with her friend as they talked about why they shouldn’t
 
break up with their boyfriends anymore. Another person behind me made eye
contact with me because I turned my head when they coughed. We
 
were right across the street from CVS, and I’m sure there was someone in there
buying water, the 100% Plant-less based drink. In the hospital
 
room I repeated my vows to my wife, and she did too without saying anything.
She just grabbed my hand, shook, and squeezed it tight. Someone from
 
the south would’ve said “she squoze it.” I couldn’t imagine a better word for the past
tense of squeeze, other than squoze, I think it isn’t a word because phonetically,
 
how would you go about spelling a word? And how did any word get spelled
before it got spelled, and how come they chose letters instead of numbers
 
and numbers instead of letters. A word could look like 300000, and a phone number
could look like I-ATR-YGED. Which when unscrambled would mean tragedy
 
or tyranny. One of these is a lie, but the scope of a lie is just a hole in the truth.
And what else would you find after calling that number, except lies
 
and Approximately 3 million callers ahead of you. This was the number
we searched when asking how many times this happens a year,
 
and to whom it happens too. Whom sounds like womb. After my sandwich tray was
empty, I took my napkin and    tossed it in the garbage, ran quickly
 
out of the shoppe. I didn’t want the people sitting next to me to know that
I had experienced a loss of bacon. I wrote a poem that ended
 
with, God knows what he is doing, and I don’t have to. I truly believe that ending feels
the way it does. I truly believe that I don’t have to know anything. Apparently,
 
there was mistake at the doctor’s office because a sample wasn’t sent alongside the blood,
and I don’t know about you, but bacon is always terrible when it isn’t fully
 
cooked. Maybe they left the bacon out because of some defect and the bacon
couldn’t fry like it was supposed to. Everything reminds me to trust God.
 
And what if the numbers and letters were replaced and the binary code looked like
noonnononnononnonnnonono,
 
which would take you to a website endorsing plant-based meats. We were really close
to finding out the gender of the baby, and we had names picked out regardless.
 
Neither of the names were mine, it was not going to be a junior. The etymology of junior
is not that surprising. It is an adjective, from the Latin: “lesser standing, more recent”
 
“a person younger than another; one of less experience or standing,” “opposite of seniority.”
The Sandwich shoppe was probably closed on super bowl Sunday, maybe that’s
 
when they forgot to order the bacon.

Robert Laidler, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Wayne State Department of English, is the author of a poetic libretto, The Fallen Petals of Nameless Flowers, which premiered at Chamber Music Detroit in 2022. He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where he is currently a Zell Fellow. His poems have won various awards and have been published in a number of places. He enjoys music, eating, and eating while listening to music. 

Zoé Robles

Lightning Round

After Tongo Eisen- Martin 

I must tell you their names without choking     insert my name and make it
a rising whisper     and make it matter    and make you taste it     I’ll have you know
the winds of a hurricane can power         my mouth     for months on end
 
I must tell you I was raised amid the busy stride         of an army of women    by a
spectrum of expectations    by the distance     between     my body 
and a police baton stick    I was raised as bright silence    but also as a splinter under your nail
            
Understand that my body can comfort you     or be gun & noose     that our arms 
can daisy-chain and become     a new element     that every new morning 
the street makes me believe            it’s a clean slate    but still makes me trip 
over bodies and headlines
 
Make no mistake    a mother’s single tear could drown us all
Make no mistake    a mocked syllable in a foreign name should condemn us
Make no mistake    a mouth dripping hunger is a siren that should hush howling dogs
 
I would like for us to become pulse     to choose unsilence     to grow into wave and tide    
I would like for us to get to know our neighbor    and say their name    
and savor it     and retain it     before     it dissolves     in a headline         before 
it becomes      a tealight memorial     at the park

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Zoé Robles was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico. She studied Comparative Literature and Italian Studies. Her poems have appeared in Adobe Walls, Malpais, Voces Nuevas, Third Wednesday and elsewhere. She currently teaches English to immigrants and works as a translator. She lives in Los Alamos, NM.