Lance Cheng

IN THE SOFT BLACK MORNING,

it is never enough to want until
someone's ready to gorge himself on it,
drink it out and out of you and wonder
why the glass ends up half-empty.
 
Think of all the men you've ever slept with.
Think of those days in the garden,
the country music and curlicue clouds,
candle wax the color of apples or gasoline,
 
think of the halcyon melting into
inoperable time. Think of the park bench
or his fingers, both curled Corinthian-precise.
Think, finally, of asking him
 
how long he'll stick around,
if he's leaving, if so can you too,
if so can you find the same crossroads
even in different places—
 
don't think of the body behind the mouth;
just close your eyes and lean in. Out here,
you have to make up your mind quick.
You know city boys don't like to kiss
 
anything but their teeth.

Lance Cheng is a graduate of Hunter College High School and an informatics and data science student at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He enjoys writing poetry, code, and literary (over)analysis of video games. Find him on the Internet at withoutanyparticularwonder.substack.com.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni

LONGACRES

My mother says they used to race horses here.
She points to a field.
They called it Longacres.

Now it’s a track.
My favorite cousin is training for her first meet.
Young pale bodies run laps.

She tells me her father used to have horses,
as if this is news.

Their names were Foxy Lady & Night Train.
There’s an art to naming a racehorse, she says.
It must never have been used before;
it must never be used again.

She points to a mound.
That’s where she threw popcorn at the jockeys who lost.

She points to the bleachers.
That’s where her father drank too much
& pissed himself one Sunday afternoon.

There’s a pause.
We take in the late summer sun.
The last we’ll see of it for months.

My mother has a thought she doesn’t share & frowns.
She finds herself. She pats her knees & claps for the runners.
They used to race horses here, she says.
It was called Longacres.

Vincent Antonio Rendoni is the author of A Grito Contest in the Afterlife, which was the winner of the 2022 Catamaran Poetry Prize for West Coast Poets. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions multiple times. His work has appeared in The Sycamore Review, The Vestal Review, The Texas Review, Quarterly West, and So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library.

Barbara Daniels

A Bobcat Waits

When I say I’m ready to die,
a nurse asks if I’m a believer.
No, no, I say, but I look forward
 
to all my atoms joining the universe,
a sign to the nurse that fever
carries me down a river past safety.
 
A thousand dollars to ride
in the ambulance, and I can’t say
I really enjoyed it. So this is death
 
I think and not for the first time.
Doctors gather round my bed,
my heart rocketing, salt tang
 
of a mouthful of blood. In the heat
I reach for a funeral-home fan
made from a tongue depressor—
 
cardboard resurrection, bolts
of light, rock rolled back. I touch
a small stone that falls open
 
to a trilobite lost in a mass extinction.
A bobcat alert in the long grass
flicks its ears and waits.

Barbara Daniels’ Talk to the Lioness was published by Casa de Cinco Hermanas Press. Her poetry has appeared in Qwerty, Image Journal, Rogue Agent, and elsewhere. She has received four fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Megan Mizanty

clump

lustrous hair--it was shiny, then i
pushed out                                                        hormones along with the placenta, looking down
clogs of my nests in the drain.        oh my, the frizz.         nothing helps,
cocoa, shea, avocado, argan. a husk, sometimes.                               a fistful, more times.
maiden, mother, queen, crone.     [the first morning i tried running again
my pelvis spiraled away from me, a frisbee to the grass.] my
hair cinched back, elastic,              still dripping wet from the quick shower. swoosh swoosh.
in between nursing.  look down: a long lock, coiled copperhead,             on the glistening concrete.
another part to discard, old and illustrious. dewy. mare thin.  the space in between follicles and pores.
fields. apart.           past the jogging route: a billboard for PANTENE PRO V.                    and I’m
back in middle school, puberty raged, steaming straightener, watching the shoulder length waterfall run slick
down my
vertebrae.

Megan Mizanty is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. She recently served as Assistant Director of the MFA Program at Wilson College, as well as Associate Professor of Dance. Her writing has been published in Danse Macabre Literary Magazine, Research in Dance Education, Zoetic Press/Nonbinary Review, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, iō Literary Journal, Mignolo Arts, and more. www.mizantymoves.com

Nikki Wallschlaeger

Morning Song

Good morning
how are u honey
hot weather today
just how I like it
not too humid tho
today is my day off
going to do some
chores write poems
lay and read in the
apple orchard take
Darby for his daily
 long walk maybe I'll
go to town but not
sure I like to take a
day off from driving
and there's plenty
of food here to eat
so guess what last
night a bumblebee
came into my room
I was able to save her
I think there's a nest
inside the wood trim
by the front door she
was brought to light
from my desk lamp
considering if I shld
only use candles at
night would they be
less confused? Light
Is still light regardless
of its source and their
lifespan is only 4 wks
but I'm feeling grateful
spring is spectacular
have a gorgeous day
call me tonight kisses
kisses hugs hugs xoxo

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work  has been featured in The Nation, American Poetry Review,  New York Times Magazine, POETRY, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015)  and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books.  Her third collection, Waterbaby, is out from Copper Canyon Press. Her next  book, Hold Your Own is also coming out from Copper Canyon Press in 2024. also She was a  Visiting Associate Professor of Poetry at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop from Spring 2021/ to Spring 2022.

Kevin Ridgeway

THE MAN WHO SLEEPS IN THE BED NEXT TO ME

My roommate looks like a wrinkled,
glazed-over Stimpson J. Cat at dusk
but transforms into a hyper confident,
thieving upright Yogi Bear at dawn
when I let him bum a cigarette.  He
lights it, jabbering my ears off about
how cool it would be if they blasted
Snoop Dog at Knott's Berry Farm
and the time he made out with a girl
in one of the caves on Disneyland's
Tom Sawyer's Island behind a nighttime
performance of Fantasia, when they
witnessed a stabbing while scaling
a phony cavern.  He tells me he caught
the guy who did it, and Mickey Mouse
presented him with a cartoon Excalibur.
He tells me the television is talking
to him, and that's the only word of his
that I believe at this point.  I wonder
what my roommate dreams about,
it must be better than anything old
Walt could produce on an acid trip. 
He's a dog on its birthday that doesn't
know it's his birthday, but I do.  I don
his head with a party hat while he tries
to gnaw at it and I snap a photograph
before giving him another special treat. 

Kevin Ridgeway's books include Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press) and Invasion of the Shadow People (Luchador Press).  Recent work has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, San Pedro River Review, Main Street Rag, Trailer Park Quarterly and Beat Not Beat:  An Anthology of California Poets Screwing on the Beat and Post-Beat Tradition (Moon Tide Press).  A Puschart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, he lives and writes in Long Beach, CA. 

Autumn Koors Foltz

empty incantation : wikipedia

excuse me, sorry, let’s begin.

sketch of a bird after
its nest collapses itself.
 
sketch of a bird after
the harmlit rays of light.
 
sketch of a bird after
the artist says that’s enough
 
and douses herself in water.
i hear there’s much to say
 
about bathtubs, their form,
and the bird-sketch agrees.
 
in 6.6 billion years the sun
may experience a helium flash
 
resulting in its core becoming
as bright as the combined luminosity
 
of all the stars in the milky way.
okay, says the bird-sketch, whistling
 
itself to sleep. sketch of the bird after
considering the heat-death of itself.
 
am i afraid to say i am sick of after?
am i afraid to say that there is nothing
 
before? the bird-sketch says you think
too much about disaster i am not
 
the artist in this conversation, i say,
relenting myself to the song.

Autumn Koors Foltz is a lesbian poet from Baltimore, Maryland currently studying at the University of Maine at Farmington. Their work can be found in superfroot magazine, fifth wheel press, The Sandy River Review, and the lickety~split, among others. Their moon is most certainly in Capricorn.

Reece Gritzmacher

Night Came and I Rang Too

Night came cranberry, red spilling
into water, into tree feathers, into
the skelter, all helter, of raven song.
A croak past curfew.
 
Night came indigo, came blur
between today and then,
and I watched it come, creeping
elbow over heel.
 
Night came lemon, sour and
pulling cheeks into skeleton.
I came, too, howling into memory,
into hand, like the transplant I am.

Reece Gritzmacher lives among ponderosa pines in Flagstaff, Arizona, but grew up in Portland, Oregon. Their work has appeared on Poets.org, Sundog Lit, Another Chicago Magazine, tiny wren lit, and elsewhere. They hold an MFA in Creative Writing from Northern Arizona University.

Mara Beneway

LILITH INTERVIEWS FOR A DAY JOB

Tell me about yourself.

There’s a small planet burning
in the back of my throat. I’m so sorry.
Do you have a lozenge? Thank you.

 

Why do you seek this position?

Like all the women
before me, I blur at the edges.
My coin purse clacks open
and shut. 

 

What are your qualifications?

I am anywhere like the place the cat goes
when it leaves the house. Like a birdbath
I overflow. My throat makes more
than birdsong. I rain opinions like bird shit.

 

What are your hobbies?

Have you ever watched two blue vocal cords flap
against each other? I flutter
open and shut open
and shut.

 

How did you hear about this position?

My dead family reads me the wanted ads
left at their doorstep. They sing to me now,
more often than they ever did before. It’s funny
how a grave can open its throat.

 

What are your biggest weaknesses?

            My favorite color is the mirror. 
I cry over inclement weather. I notice too much.
I can do nothing about it. Is it hot in here? My throat
sounds like screaming.

 

Where do you see yourself in five years?

            My breath comes like wind and weeds
overrun the garden. The birds have slowly taken
to the instrument of my throat. It’s beautiful
how I have stopped hiding from myself.

Mara Beneway is a writer, visual artist, and teacher from New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Bennington Review, Conduit, The Minnesota Review, Foglifter, and elsewhere. Her collection of linked flash fiction, Grandma June, won the Flume Press 2021 Chapbook competition. She holds an MFA from the University of South Florida and is currently working on her first book, a full-length collection of poetry titled DAUGHTERS OF LILITH.

Dakota Reed

Ablution

A proper baptism needs only
sure hands and water holy enough
 
to rinse away past selves, which is to say,
all wild water. After being released
 
from the hands of a man like a trout
in the Wyoming wilderness, let
 
the hole from the hook be small enough
that my mouth won’t flood with each
 
stroke upstream, but still big enough
for my tongue to remember. I recently
 
heard a former rabbi claiming that
we are starving for the sacred,
 
and it’s true. Some days I think
I wouldn’t mind being eaten alive
 
by coyotes as long as it’s done
ceremoniously. Sitting by the river
 
I find a wishbone-shaped stick
wedged in my boot. I make a deal
 
with myself, or against myself, depending
on how you look at desire. I assign
 
a wish to each hand and crack
the wood in half, hoping for the right
 
thing. I’m left handed but my right
hand always wins. My mother always
 
wins. Watching you watch the horses
storm the camp under the inked
 
black sky, the Tetons like jagged teeth
closing its hungry mouth around us,
 
the horses’ bodies strobing in frantic
fragments against the flashlight’s
 
ghostly beam, I realize the holiness
of the space between our bodies.
 
I decide, yes, I would let you
feed me to whatever is looming
 
beyond us, whatever has spooked
the horses into their midnight frenzy,
 
as long as you promise, afterward,
to lick my bones clean.

Dakota Reed is a writer and editor from Georgia. Her work has been published by Hayden's Ferry Review, The Shore, Blood Orange Review, and NELLE, and has received awards from The Poetry Society of South Carolina and the College of Charleston, where she received her MFA.

Ela Kini

The Rabbit As A Mouth

My mother sobs her stories so softly that she is smiling.
                  Every daughter perches on her knees
                  and learns to wobble, learns to spill over ledges.
We were determined for an ending but didn’t know
which. So she taught us the only one she knew:
                  old shoelaces. My mother cradled these
                  more carefully than she did her daughters,
gently as glass vases that reckless hands shatter so easily.
The laces were so simple and so quickly bound.
                  Polyester. Cotton. Made from so many knots
and here we were to make another.
The body of the lace would consume itself,
                  ears of a bunny sweeping together
                  until all she has is breath. Silence. Body.
My mother cried again. Begged us to attempt willingly.
                  We were daughters in pollen-stained skirts
                  with bare feet, bare hands.
Our swollen fingers stilled, hesitant to press, to swallow
                   another choking point. I reach.
I sink my fingertips into my mother’s cheek, pins into fabric.
Without trying, we have already bled.
                  They tell me this is the nature of womanhood,
                  these flushed cheeks and closed eyes. This ache.
A hold on simplicity, things that can be done
                  without thought. Quietly. Our fingers twisting
                  over a budding knot that resembles the noose.
My sisters watch, hushed; for the first time,
                  we have chosen our silence.
My nails wrap around one another;
                  this is the closest a daughter comes
                  to forming a fist.
Our hands held so taut they are red,
this is almost the ending we asked for.
                  Blood taunting wind. A taste of violence.
When have we ever brought bleeding?
                  Tying the ends of these laces,
                  I am spelling a prayer in hot air.
Begging again for a freedom that will not come.
The breaths of daughters are mingling
                  and we pretend we are holy
                  as the empty space we fill. And the air. And the knot.
My mother sews threads thin as hair between us:
                  with the parting of her flesh, she called for our bodies
to emerge bound. By our blood. By red canvas sneakers
                  we use to swallow our feet. I bind my sisters
                  into these second mouths.
Suddenly, we are heavier. My mother hums a hymn. A psalm.
                  So many stories spill from her tongue and lap
at our ankles. We are begging to run but have tied ourselves
                  to the sweeping loops of our laces. They semble tears.
                  I lift a foot, and with it, a sorrow.
The laces drag us and our hollows through the rain,
                  undo to leave us as we were made to be,
                  undo to leave us kneeling.

Ela Kini is a student based in New York. Her work appears or is forthcoming in the West Trestle Review and Eunoia. She has additionally been recognized by the Alliance for Young Artists and Writers and the New York Society Library.

Shannon Marzella

MY BODY IS A CHURCH

I have built myself into           the architecture          

  of this house                its bones                      ache

             silent messages scribed           in tiny              imploding                    dream

worlds that                  visit me while I           lay blankly                  in a bed of scripture–

             how many words        have I inhaled             because of you?          My body

is nailed           to the t                         of trans fix ation,                     trans form ation

                        but always a cost, accosted while I sleep by remnants

of a forlorn church                  its pews                       slice rows of petulance with bobbing

             gray heads nodding yes and, oh                                  how I want

to say yes                    not to a god                 or the many gods I have

placed                          on my altar (god of shame, god of good, god of nothing)

how I want                  to say                           yes                   to a garden

            of spindly yearnings               that desicate                            the architecture

of that good                 and that god                            and grow like ivy cracking

             marrow–          it happens this time                             each year

my dreams turn toward                       death chiming                         while I kneel

             in the shadow              of my own spell                      casting stones at stained-

glass windows as        my eyes, too,                           shatter and blind

Shannon Marzella is a poet and teacher from Connecticut. Her poetry has been published by Sky Island Journal, Stonecoast Review, Glacial Hills Review, San Pedro River Review, and is forthcoming in White Stag Publishing's #SPIRIT anthology. Shannon is pursuing an MFA in Creative and Professional Writing from Western Connecticut State University.

Cindy Ostuni

Sometimes You’re There in the Felled Caramel of a Snickers Bar—That One Strand of Goo Refusing to Make a Clean Break

I was the green canoe
roped to the porch, you were the angel behind No
Trespassing, hands cupping your heart.
 
Graffiti finds its way into abandoned places
like the loudest voice anyone can have
is to scratch i was here into stuck salt on your car door.
 
Beneath every cliff ledge is shelter. Someone makes
blankets to cover entire empty gas stations. Sometimes
I circle the parking lot and whisper
be leaving be leaving be leaving.

Cindy Ostuni is a writer and clinical social worker living in Syracuse, N.Y.  Her work has been published in Entropy, The Pinch Journal, Unearthed, The Stone Canoe, the Reader’s Write section of The Sun Magazine and The Comstock Review.

Rachel Becker

A Risk of Lobsters 

My son presses his freckled nose to the lobster tank,
watching blue-rubber-banded claws bob
and float without forward motion.
 
Are they a family? he asks,
counting ten in the tank.
I used to watch them too,

their ruddy alien exoskeletons,
but what could living mean
in water that dark?
 
A man in latex gloves opens the lid,
removes one of the largest, its eyes brighter
than they appeared in water, tiny wet marbles.
 
I’m about to tell my son to step back
when he puts his mouth to the glass
and whispers something to the bereft.

Rachel Becker teaches high school English and Creative Writing in the Boston area. Her poems have most recently appeared or are forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, New World Writing Quarterly, Funicular Magazine, and RHINO. Find her @rebecker30 (instagram) and rachel-becker.com

Alexander Duringer

August in Florida

To get cool we exhale 
on each other. Puffs of morse code 
against a nipple. A belly. Busy as lice,
 
the month drips round us– 
creeps yellow along arm hairs
& pubic bones. Stained linoleum
 
sags like our messed bed sheets.
Sometimes we nap beside the lake 
where water never stirs. Not even 
 
with thought. Beside it tickling 
fire ants took my chest in pieces,
but left their pincer love bites
 
in a palm tree’s waving fan. 
Our schnauzer danced
along the spot’s mercury edge. 
 
His salty beard made wet from play.
His movement coaxed the log
I’d ignored at water’s center
 
into gliding, perfume-gentle, closer 
to the shore where I laid
beside the dog who performed 
 
smart tricks: played dead & held 
out his paw to the alligator 
who snatched him into its vice.
 
Jaws broke the dog’s thin wet 
leg & took its body under the surface 
which became, again, an opaque cradle.

Alexander Duringer is from Buffalo, NY and earned his MFA in Poetry from North Carolina State University. He is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Dorianne Laux Prize for Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, &Change, Plainsongs, Cola Literary Review, The Shore, and Poets.org among others.

Josh Potter

Joyride

The dishwasher sounds
like the ocean’s teenage son
 
who stole the family car
and drove to my house
 
sunroof open the whole way
because of the rain
 
snuck in through
the cracks in a window
 
found Kool-Aid in the fridge
and a leftover bottle of gin
 
drunk dialed the moon and
told her what a MILF she is
 
pulled what seemed to be
a hideaway bed
 
down from the weird
short wall by the sink
 
sang himself lullabies
in a Tom Waits style
 
and now snores
tide songs til morning.

Josh Potter lives with his wife and four children, two cats, two dogs, and a bird on a small island in New York. During the day, he works as a family physician on that same small island, and in the evenings, he tries to put his Master’s degree in English from a former life to good use by writing poetry.

Kendall A. Bell

unthread

i will build an altar with your teeth,
spread your sweater across the floor,
sprawl my joint sore body across the
threads in wait for you, loose the
thickest veins of my arms as a rope
to climb to me—your salted sanctuary
in wait for the candied blood rush
of you bound to me.

Kendall A. Bell's poetry has been most recently published in Olney Magazine and The Aurora Journal. He was nominated for Sundress Publications' Best of the Net collection seven times. He is the author of three full length collections, The Roads Don't Love You (2018), the forced hush of quiet (2019) and, the shallows (2022), and 32 chapbooks, the latest being Still. He is the publisher/editor of Maverick Duck Press and editor and founder of Chantarelle's Notebook. His chapbooks are available through Maverick Duck Press. He lives in Southern New Jersey.

Allison Blevins

Some nights, I fold my body over the body

Allison Blevins (she/her) is a queer, disabled writer and the author of Cataloguing Pain (YesYes Books, 2023), Handbook for the Newly Disabled, A Lyric Memoir (BlazeVox, 2022), and Slowly/Suddenly (VA Press, 2021). She is also the author of the chapbooks fiery poppies bruising their own throats (Glass Lyre Press, forthcoming), Chorus for the Kill (Seven Kitchens Press, 2022), Susurration (Blue Lyra Press, 2019), Letters to Joan (Lithic Press, 2019), and A Season for Speaking (Seven Kitchens Press, 2019), part of the Robin Becker Series. Allison is the Founder and Director of Small Harbor Publishing, the Executive Editor at the museum of americana, and the co-organizer of the Downtown Poetry reading series. She lives in Minnesota with her spouse and three children. For more information, visit allisonblevins.com.

S.K. Hisega

Kinds of cutting II

In her kitchen my mother kept 
coin-edged knives and a swayback 
board that skeltered on the counter. 
When it was my chore I really did
try, but my slices went ever wider.
My wrist got sore and I gave up.
She was always serene as she reclaimed
the work. I grew up and learned sharp
was safer, offered to buy new knives. 
My mother declined. Said certain things
should be kept dull. And in her house 
she’d decide what to hone.

S.K. Hisega (she/her) is a queer writer, soapmaker, and attorney living in Minneapolis.  She is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Queens University of Charlotte and serves on the editorial staff of Qu Magazine. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Foglifter, West Trestle Review, Spout, Booglit, and elsewhere. 

Andi (Andrea) Horowitz

a world plagued, blood-clotted, and strained

the city moaned—

fingerprints    blood splattered  
                       once bulletproof    safe
                        within our walls
 
gummy-thick       blotted out
 
my flesh spent
time’s remainder
trying to siphon
off stained lives
 
 
green earth
arched her back
 
heaved me
    from
pursed lips—
 
wind   poached
my breath
 
carried me
beyond skylines
 
beyond perception
 
 
a dismembered gnat
who can    no longer

Andi (Andrea) Horowitz is an older emerging poet who lives in Fort Myers, Fl. with her husband and their two cairn terriers, BeCa and Bleecker. Andrea can be read in VARIANT LIT, STONE PACIFIC, NEW NOTE, VOICE LUX, and others. She thanks you for taking the time to read her work.