Hannah Treasure

ROAD TRIP

I am relaying the time she saw a goat head in the field.
The men were getting drunk. Was it soccer or polo
they were playing? Horses emulate human energy
for protection, like a rural frat. Out of that house ran
boys with a hatchet, as a joke. They hang the weapon
as a wreath to adorn the entrance with a love language.
These days I make music in case of emergency, to say
there was a voice here, to make my silence sing.
Moths lust after a moon that proves only to be
a single troubled lightbulb. With just a flashlight
children in the garage morph into adult shadows.
You can see the fireworks tonight as we climb out
the bedroom window, and in that field something still
rolls through the bristlegrass, as part of a game.

Hannah Treasure is a lecturer in the English Department at Clemson University. Previously she taught at Brooklyn College, where she earned her MFA in poetry in 2020. She has served as the poetry editor of The Shanghai Literary Review. Her work appears in Cordella Magazine, Sonora Review, No Dear, Claw & Blossom, and Volume Poetry, among others.

Swarnika Ahuja

Cartography of Places never visited in any Year by the Author (See Notes at the back p. 1947-2022)

If I ever could,
I would love to write a History of Maps
Of not just places and figments of imagination,
But trace the paths to things for which we don't need
maps                                                              because no one is looking for them.
 
I would take great pains to draw maps for broken things.                                                                          
To find the shortest route to take to reach The Central Archive of Forgotten Dreams
 I would toil in the night                                                                                      
             to unearth the secrecy 
                    of pathways to all the lamps without a fuse
that render darkness a form
for lovers to kiss in peace
I would lean against thousands of doorjambs 
                             Walk through many university corridors
Sit in the shadow 
                     of so many shut windows —
Till I can draw a map of light itself
Pouring languidly at confounding times
I would chase the emptiness that escapes 
once cocoons fall vacant 
and make a map, easy and simple
                to trace that fleeting flight of air itself.
I would draw neat maps with clear instructions,
to all the places where people have wept anonymously
to the Souvenir Shop of Intoxicated Memories 
Overcrowded
                    with echoes of helpless laughter and timid embarrassment.
To the Factory of Mass - Produced Hate,
For it is a map so much in demand.
I would sit down at my desk and compile them all 
Writing a Forward, Acknowledgements, Table of Contents and a short history of each map drawn and
placed
 
And if I could, I will leave one map out
                          a single sheet of paper 
The least important one

1.              A blank map
naming in clear invisible ink 
the sites of death
Of people who were never murdered
By Nobody 
Using neither sword, guns or tanks,
Of thousands of sufferings that never took place in any era

2.              A history of utmost unhappiness 
That never can be written or mapped 
buried in graves with 
No year, no witnesses or mourners, 
             No
                  Afterword.

Swarnika Ahuja is currently an M.Phil scholar in the Department of English, University of Delhi as well as a Guest teacher in Hansraj College. After obtaining her Bachelor's in English, she went on to complete her Master's from Jawaharlal Nehru University. She has presented papers in academic conferences and published essays on various literary works/ themes. Apart from painting, teaching and petting stray cats, writing poetry continues to be one of her most enduring passions.

Madeline Langan

february’s end

i do not want to sink
    my fingernails into your back
 
or my toenails into the floorboard
    of your maple-kissed apartment – 
 
but it has been weeks now of 
    forgetting my own bed,
 
listening to your neighbor’s music
    through a thin gypsum nest,
 
carving our names into ice,
    seeing if it will shatter,
 
and still i find myself unable to
    face this cold without you.
 
i recognize in you a similar
    nervousness, timidity – 
 
but a reluctantly forward houseguest,
    i do mean to impose:
 
please keep your closet’s last clothes hanger threadbare for me.
    please let me stay past the winter.

Madeline Langan is an artist, writer, and architecture student pursuing her Bachelor of Architecture from Pratt Institute with a minor in Literature and Writing. Her work has appeared in The Prattler, Scud, and Ursus Americanus Press's Landfill. She can also be found modeling tiny houses, rereading Wuthering Heights, and watering her plants.

Ann Lilly Jose

my mother taught me

that a sentence should not end with a because because because is a conjunction. but with the onset of my rebel ages, i tarnished my knuckles rufous and crumbled my knees on the floor because. i leashed my lungs with fire and salt and wind that blew north because. i ruched honeyed skin to my ribs because. i welled my eyes with the brininess of a fading lover because. i uprooted houseplants and filled their pots with synthetic vinegar because. i dipped my head in the river to breathe another ecosystem because. i sandpapered the pantry door and mopped the garage floor on sundays because. i turned my vertebrae into a rosary of knotted remorse and felicity because. i harmonized with the verses of the church and the ghosts because. i freighted the local newspaper’s obituary with my minuscule name because. i breathed life into the ashes of my will to ignite a dying ember and inhaled once, twice, and a billion other times because.

Ann Lilly Jose is a literary fiction writer and poet from Kerala, India. Her work revolves around the politics of youth, identity, individuality, innocence, and grief. Her poetry has previously appeared in 12pointfont.com and Poems India.

Nalin Saur

Friday September the 10th

I’ve been looking at pixels of
poppy seeds, of
Sunflowers, I’ve been downloading .jpgs of
things that remind me of September, I’ve been
catching my friends in video calls unawares, I’ve been
talking too much and staying too silent, I’ve been
crying all of a sudden lately, I’ve been
looking at gifsets of the moon.
This halloween will pass me by, so I harvest
PNGs of pumpkin seeds and I pump out mp3s
that bring back the sound of the smell of Herbst. 
The window’s closed to keep bugs out; no one will hear me if I shout.
Except the silent screen, which will imperceptibly
vibrate myself back to me. 

Nalin Saur is a poet and printmaker located in Oklahoma. She has previously won the Chickasaw Anolí Writing Competition for her poetry. She spends half her time with her family and the other half haunting her local library. You can follow her on Instagram. 

Diana K. Malek

The Man in the Field 

Is wearing a black and white checked sweatshirt
A wide brimmed white hat, gloves.
He walks behind the slow-moving tractor as it tills.
He watches the seedlings.
The sun on the top of his round white hat is a plate of light.
His face underneath shaded
Obscured and unreadable.
The crystal beads of my necklace click manically 
Against the laminate of my ID badge
As I power walk into the cool brick building.
Late, late, late.
I’ve been having a hard time getting up recently. 
The kids will stare at the beads and ask, are those real diamonds?
I could tell them yes and they’d believe it, eyes popping.
I want to be outside in the sun, in the moving air
Neck dusty, listening to the chuckle of birds
Not breathing in the still tombed dust of a classroom.
The man in the field looks up at me, looking at him.
Does he want to be wearing a plastic necklace
Walking quickly into a series of cold little rooms
Made of rectangles of dried clay
Thinking he is telling children the right things to believe?
No. Of course neither one of us really wants
What the other has.
I don’t need to see his face to know what we both want
Is only to be as the seedlings at his feet.
Effortlessly growing into their proper shapes.
Stems into stalks, buds into flowers.
There is no plant that says
This is not who I was supposed to be
This is not the life I was supposed to lead
The man looks back down and the sun is brilliant on the top of his hat.
The plates of light are above us.
The plates of light rest on our heads.
We carry them and we get tired of carrying them
Because it feels like we are carrying them for someone else.
For someone else to eat.
So someone else can shine.

Diana K. Malek is a teacher and tutor who lives in rural CT with her husband and dog. Her recent work can be found in Poetry Potion, 8 Poems, and Ligeia Magazine.  

Bryce Johle

Spirit Gifts

Meema came to me in meditation,
               Wrinkled, smiling face—the one
               Before the stroke, her invitation
                              To pack her things—pure glee, palm
Down, reaching to me, bestowing
               Unripe mayapple from her wheelchair,
                              Whispering, here you go.
I took it, frozen cherry knuckles
               Like lightly oiled oyster pearls
               Bowling over my skin,
                              And stuffed it in my pocket,
                                             A keepsake for contemplation
To lodge this visitation in memory.
               I didn’t know until the woods
                              What hung beneath umbrellaed leaves,
Or that it tasted like pink Starburst
               When ripe, a treat for box turtles
               Who disperse seeds like inspired
                              Wildlife, how she would give me
                                             A couple of fives for my report card,
Or wisdom over Diet Pepsi
               After mowing her lawn.
                              Her house clean linen and leather purse,
Aromas as apparitions, balled-up tissues
               Saturated in Estee Lauder,
               I feel her grandmother massage,
                              As I tell her I want to walk the length of the U.S.,
(But don’t tell my mom),
               And she describes the night her father
                              Woke her up when pizza first came to town.       

Bryce Johle is from Williamsport, PA and earned his B.A. in Professional Writing from Kutztown University. His stories and poems have appeared in The Writing Disorder, Shoofly Literary Magazine, Essence Art and Literary Magazine, draft Literary Magazine, platform Zine, and Nebo: A Literary Journal. He lives in Pittsburgh, PA with his wife and stepdaughter.

Autumn Echo

The Contortionist

i wasted all my 
best metaphors 
on men
such a typical thing
you know 
everything is 
wasted on them
good intentions
time spent confusing love 
& a desperate need for attention
i, empty vessel
i, too full 
also broken & leaking 
always taking & leaving
never good enough 
i’m sorry 
not good enough 
isn’t the right way to say it 
molecularly incorrect
i have cried 
every time 
a man touched me 
before 
during 
& after
cry when i think of my father dancing with me
a well of tears 
to dip my fingers into 
too much salt 
for any man to swallow 
peroxide lovers
my face paling 
every passing minute 
a deep soul irritant 
i can’t take it anymore 
the pretending 
the grave clothes & the bending 
marrowless 
contortionist
i have fit into everyone 
by being no one

Autumn Echo is a performance poet from Jamestown, NY. After a brief and painful hiatus in all genuine emotion and inspiration, she is once again feeling & writing. Autumn is the creator of Pulse Poetry Slam, a mother, provocateur, and a menace to society as deemed so by her local city council and school board. She was once called Jamestown's underground poet laureate which was a pretty strange attempt at an insult because it's dope as fuck. She hopes you like her poems.

Von Wise

How to Read a Poem

You are an animal,
so act like it.

Feel the sun
burning its way
 
through you like music
you will never
 
understand. Rain
sounds like sand
 
beneath your feet.
Your tail,
 
where did it go?
You will give
 
birth to each
green day
 
and crouch
motionless on foliage.
 
The smell of new
soil. Dark and wet.
 
Lick your teeth.
Swallow.
 
It tastes 
like the world, 
 
doesn’t it?

Von Wise received his MFA for Creative Writing from Florida International University. He teaches English composition and creative writing in Philadelphia, where he lives. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Lucky Jefferson, Inverted Syntax, Fatal Flaw, Islandia Journal, Red Ogre Review, Lost Pilots, and Kitchen Table Quarterly among others.

Ahmad Imam Aishah

My gaze baked with the porcelain of hope. 

My living has this thing that shreds meaning, one thing that grows like US lifers.
While we'd sit to pray; my mother always had us curl around the end of her

hijab, like beads formed on a rosary. Us, of five, forming a sacred circle, seeking
blessings, either to live or be lived.

This story has it that one bleeds not as an option once she thinks of grief.
And here, I talk of grief.

Every Thursday in this room have talked about something & for the passed lives.
We'd recite Suratul-Mulk to beseech for those that knew to live, passing on as

to be dead. Sometimes, laughter pours out in sweet regard to gestures & oftentimes,
we become drunken to our own quest for water from the thirst on earth.

Air escaping through the eyes, as they stagger through the space of nothingness.
They barely make out sounds that lead out words; all that means we have to see.

Mother & God, the only feet I ever stumble upon, seeking refuge—I remember
one night, she only had Ameen to say, staring at space. In her head, pleading to

God to foster for her, her burden.
Her eyes, a torch awoken along nights, also the skylights in mornings. Her eyes, a

witness to silhouettes of cold bodies, staked down the heart of the earth. Today, her
eyes turned home to warm water foaming out boiled tears. The young face with

wrinkles now brim tears to be worried about. Her canines turned fangs like an
alpha so acquainted to the feeble world. So much upon a woman stranded of love.

How long is this pest a venom that makes a mother turn so grown with grief?
How true is a wife's yearning, a salt that stings too harsh at peace?

How far has the faces & palms & fingers of guidance I touched, fading then void,
gone in seconds? How often have I seen death stalk livelihoods more than I have, birth.

But oftentimes, my mind takes on an odyssey outside its choking casket, off a strange
railing where I know of nothing, even of myself. The pricy dream that the well would

bend for me to take water from it, if one day, I become stranded of pail. While I do not
weigh worthy of what I've made of myself, rather, of what was made of me—

Right here, atop the breath of life; I have myself akin to roses, devoid of its thorns.
So does she.

Ahmad Imam Aishah is a Nigerian writer and a second year student of Linguistics at the University of Ilorin, Ilorin, Nigeria. She was the second runner up of the University of Ilorin SU writers' competition (Poetry Category). She is a budding poet. 

Lee Irby

Morning Duty

The hungry ones come early for breakfast

I see them approaching as I patrol the sidewalk that leads to the cafeteria

                    Some haven’t
                    eaten
                    since yesterday
                    at lunch

To each
I offer
                    Good morning!
                    Welcome to school!

They hurry past
                    eyes down
                    hoodies draped
                    over their heads

like monks at vespers

An angry god has brought us together to this moment

                    Well-fed white man
                    in his late fifties
                    who hungers for death

beaming benevolently

                    at the famished
                    children
                    who get devoured

by life

When my morning duty is done next quarter,

I’ll sit at my desk before school

                    and another teacher
                    will shepherd
                    the starving

fatten them up
before the slaughter

Lee Irby is the author of three novels, all published with Doubleday. He is a Fellow of the Florida Studies Program at the University of South Florida. Currently, he teaches middle school.