Clara Burghelea

Girlhood Lessons

Before you are exiled by narrative,
make room for your wicked views,
know that perfect happiness is hardly
a match to fleeting instances of awe.
Some gut-wrenching bouts of grief
will follow and life’s teachings and
unteachings remain solid gold. Strike
root in things that make your veins
explode, shed something radiant on
each pillow. A woman’s clavicle is
bound to spur the blood and birth a
poem. Beware of hands willing to clip
the moon, legs burning with fever and
the wear-and-tear memory of stale love.
Turn a blind eye to the sad taste of this
spring and look the other three seasons
straight in the eye before you thrust your
greedy teeth into their abundance.

Clara Burghelea is a Romanian-born poet with an MFA in Poetry from Adelphi University. Recipient of the Robert Muroff Poetry Award, her poems and translations appeared in Ambit, HeadStuff, Waxwing, The Cortland Review and elsewhere. Her collection The Flavor of The Other was published in 2020 with Dos Madres Press. She is the Translation/International Poetry Editor of The Blue Nib.

Kevin Ridgeway

MY UBER DRIVER GETS IT


I climbed into the passenger’s seat
and told the elderly woman
behind the wheel
who asked me
how I am doing
that I was “hanging in there”
she waited a beat
as she merged into traffic
before she claimed
that I stole her line
and to keep hanging in there.
she said life can be very difficult
and her weary eyes met mine
in the rear view mirror
to offer me a slice of wisdom
trembling out of the gushing
blood of her humanity.

Kevin Ridgeway is the author of Too Young to Know (Stubborn Mule Press) and nine chapbooks of poetry including Grandma Goes to Rehab and Girls! Girls! Girls! (Analog Submission Press, UK). His work can recently be found in Slipstream, Chiron Review, Nerve Cowboy, Plainsongs, San Pedro River Review, The Cape Rock, Trailer Park Quarterly, Main Street Rag, Cultural Weekly and The American Journal of Poetry, among others. He lives and writes in Long Beach, CA.

Eddie Brophy

Ryder is Daddy’s Lullaby

Swimming in watercolors

while their fingertips painted

an otherwise untouchable now brilliant sky

youthful ablutions drawn outside the lines

wash the sciolisms from my back

reaching for the sirehood of mercy

unmolded, from the malleable potential

of a cynical disposition 

that wants to cater to the abstract

somewhere in the art of the innocent

life is worshipped like clay

what is ideologically absurd

is a capricious conviction

and then I wake up at 3 a.m.

wrest from childhood again

with a cabbage patch soft

body to allay my fears

but the cold sweat of night

are the siren signals of abuse

I cradle you harder from the loneliness

unbeknownst of the shame unspoken

drawings from the integrity of a pen

while you find safety in the quiet

my life is profoundly and unequivocally

me searching for the blankets to cover

these things I’ve excavated and protect

holding my hand, snoring in my ear

Eddie Brophy is a poet and blogger from Massachusetts and has an MA in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Parnassus, Z Publishing's 'Best Emerging Poets in Massachusetts 2017' and 'Best Emerging Poets North East 2018', The Poet's Haven Digest: Darker Than Fiction, Rhythm of the Bones: Dark Marrow: Issue Two', The Penman Review, Terror House Press and Haunted MTL. You can read his previous publications and blog at: https://eddiebrophywriter.weebly.com/.

Rebecca Macijeski

Autobiography

My brain is a birdhouse
up on one stilt
at the edge of the lawn.
It’s got an alpine sloping roof
and little filigrees all along the sides.
Sparrows and chickadees come stay awhile
like thoughts, and let melodic talking
bubble out of them.
Their beaks are tiny megaphones.
 
The birds know their way back each spring
by their ancestors’ rhythms of song and flight.
The thoughts make their own magnetism, too,
imagining how many of themselves they can thread
through the little opening at the perch.
Sometimes it’s orderly and measured
like a parade. Other times it’s a mob
of rustling, bundles of feathers that fill and flare
like balloons, like lungs, an expanding universe.

Rebecca Macijeski holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has attended artist residencies with The Ragdale Foundation, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Art Farm Nebraska. She has also worked for Ted Kooser’s American Life in Poetry newspaper column, and as an Assistant Editor in Poetry for the literary journals Prairie Schooner and Hunger Mountain. Her poems have appeared in The Missouri Review, Poet Lore, Barrow Street, Nimrod, The Journal, Sycamore Review, Fairy Tale Review, Puerto del Sol, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Conduit, Gargoyle, and many others. Rebecca is Creative Writing Program Coordinator and Assistant Professor at Northwestern State University.

Lauren Napier

bug repellant

The sun has been softened 
goosebumps arise upon flesh 
the gnats are starting to multiply
Mating with eardrums and invisible attractive creatures 
fingers in ears mute the reverberation 
echo of self 
now I can hear myself think 
smell the tendrils on the breeze 
smoke
lilac 
the remnants of the tides pull 
the rain of tomorrow 
the petals of a dried flower
I can see the harsh rays of the morning sun reflect upon how they disappeared 
head rested on thigh 
fingers intertwined in bristles of hair 
fingers intertwined with grass 
with melodies 
with possibility 
I taste the salt of potato chips 
of the sky’s sweaty self 
of iron 
 
a taste these mayflies shall never know 
no digestive tract 
mating in air and 
dying in the water 
food for fish 
food for frogs 
food for thought

Lauren Napier finds solace in melody and the written word. She has penned a children’s book, All My Animals, stories for NPR Berlin, amongst other texts and songs. Lauren is often traveling with her feline, notebooks, and acoustic guitar, exploring her surroundings and sharing stories. www.punkrockdoll.com (Instagram/Twitter threads: @punkrockdoll)

Montana Leigh Jackson

people i don’t want to be

one:  

in my closet i keep skeletons belonging to the people i don’t want to be/ sometimes they grow restless, anxious to wear my skin but mostly they hang in silence/ patiently waiting for me to take them from their hangers and wrap around my throat.

 

two:

when winter hits, the shivers keep them rattling/ at times i believe their voices to belong to sirens; their lust-filled melodies— come closer, we don’t bite/ my skin yearning for a time without solitude—just a couple moments won’t hurt/ but it will, anyways.

 

three:

a girl in a cap and gown stares into a mirror/ sees nothing but a cage of bone and sinew and skin and skin and skin/ i run my dirty fingers down the glass
in hopes that she will finally see me/ a timer rings in the distance,
a clock quits its ticking/ this is what it looks like when the screaming stops.

 

four:

in the dark i watch the twinkling set of lights play hide n’ seek against my eyelids/
they don’t understand how it is to be this tired, to feel this way/ they just keep on dancing, taunting me as i watch through the pane/ i tell myself they’ll understand
sometime, maybe if… but it is their naivety that keeps them
moving/ i send a prayer to the space above that their feet never grow ill of tapping/
that their hearts never tire of trying.

 

five:

i am told that i am a ‘handful’ but when i peer down at my hands they are not full, ever/ the spaces between my fingers look back at me, judging as if to say it’s all my fault/ they’re right, everyone knows so.

 

six:

at sixteen, i lose the split tongue and my teeth grow incisors/ i can cut through wires and thick ropes with the tips of my fingers/ every morning i wake up with claws/
every night, go to bed with blood beneath my nails— survival of the fittest.

 

seven:

on the days when i really hate myself/ i compare myself to the growth that naps restlessly in the crook of her neck/ impatiently waiting for her to join it in slumber. 

 

eight:

i don’t think i’ll ever be able to look into the mirror/ without seeing her staring right back.

Montana Leigh Jackson is a student in Montreal, Quebec. Her work has been featured in semicolon lit, Turnpike Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Capsule Stories, & Re-Side. She finds peace among words and within thunderstorms. Find her on twitter: @montanaLjackson.

Ephemeral Bunny

Kindling for the Stake

I tell my friends that I’ve matched with a witch
Again.
 
They say I have a type.

 
That I autumn for those that got bruja in their blood.
 
Boys so beautiful

you know they’ve got Venus in their veins
 
Women so wondrous

They birth plenty from eternal scarcity.
 
Them magic folk

with fractaling divinity.
 
Reflecting the light
of our holy inferno
 
My friends know that the truth is
when it comes to witchcraft

I am always guilty.

Ephemeral Bunny is a spoken word poet who wanders the streets of San Telmo looking like Moses. They are an Arab American Queer, in competing order. This would be their first publication.

Michael Hammerle

No Time Was Sacred and We Didn’t Complain

Terminator PinBall and Smashing Pumpkins
playing on the pool-hall jukebox.
When we were 11 (where’d we get the gumption?)
we’d set a roll of quarters on the billiards; call next.
We broke into the convenience-store ice cooler;
got on the roof and threw bags of ice to watch them explode.
Ventured out with the gas we’d siphoned from the mower.
Next-door-construction-site badlands like left-out au gratins.
We’d find bones and tar.
My cousin’s dad had to give us a gasoline bath.
Rode that swamp go cart all summer like a first car.
My mother was the live-in night auditor.
We could hear the bell ding from the living room.
No time was sacred and we didn’t complain.

Michael Hammerle is pursuing his MFA at the University of Arkansas at Monticello where he teaches composition. He holds a BA in English from the University of Florida. He is the founder of Middle House Review. His fiction has been published in The Best Small Fictions 2017 selected by Amy Hempel. His prose and poetry has been published in Split Lip Magazine, New World Writing, Louisiana Literature, After the Pause, Matador Review, Drunk Monkeys, New Flash Fiction Review, BULL, Misfit Magazine, and many more magazines. He lives and writes in Gainesville, FL.

Evan Cozad

Untitled #3

I lost my eyes from an unfortunate bet
with a bird. Now I stumble around
my apartment. I can’t make cakes too well.
I always misplace the flour and drop the eggs.

Evan Cozad is a poet from Indiana. His work has previously been featured in Unbroken Journal, Juked, and Confluence. He tweets @evanjcozad.

Clair Dunlap

Abstraction (1917)

after Georgia O’Keeffe

they gave me the mountain when i was still quite small. i came out already looking for it, with its name under my tongue so they didn’t have much of a choice. when i say they gave me the mountain i simply mean they put it straight into my heart. or rather, they gave me to the mountain. its heart a smoke chamber, violet and pearlescent. the throat of a lily. when i left its shadow, my body went wrong. the brain misworking. the doctors seeing growths which weren’t there. my knees cracking as if eggs, or small volcanoes fissuring with steam, into countless pieces. my eyes unadjusted to sunlight on snow, flickering red. my intestines filling and filling until i have been given to pain. i am only made of green and some days yellow—when i feel fine i think my eyes must look more blue. they gave me the name nostalgia when i was still quite small. this is not something you can outrun. a body needs to eat.

Clair Dunlap grew up just outside Seattle, Washington, and is the author of In the Plum Dark Belly (2016). Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in The Oakland Review, The Swamp Literary Magazine, Hobart, Love Me Love My Belly (Porkbelly Press), Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and more. She currently lives in the Midwest.

Thad DeVassie

Two Brothers

Lost their corner market, gaining a corner
on the market of despair, forced to forge
a cottage industry of threading hope
to a whole that knows no other hope.
 
This is their immigrant slog, an infinite
journey that is no man’s manifest destiny;
it is manifesting quite differently,
hamster-wheeling them to nowhere
 
like insomniacs who daydream of sleep.
Contrary to things seen, a fist in the mouth
can soothe, muffle the weeping, prevent
an open mouth from groaning its known groan.
 
They are told there is reverence in the suffering,
that there is something to be said for perseverance,
for delayed gratification. They wish they knew
what it was, why it must be this way.

Thad DeVassie's work has appeared in numerous journals including New York Quarterly, Poetry East, West Branch, NANO Fiction, Juked, Collateral, Unbroken, PANK, and Lunate. His chapbook, THIS SIDE OF UTOPIA, is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press. A lifelong Ohioan, he writes from the outskirts of Columbus.  

Adrienne Novy

kiwi walked so watermelon sugar could run

after harry styles, after potato salad by matt Mitchell

i got high for the first time
with the last love i had / i watched them
quarter blue raspberry gummies / on the nightstand
in their apartment / a bushel of flowers trumpetting open
through the blade of a table knife.
 
in his interview with rolling stone magazine,
harry styles points to the studio fridge,
as this is where the edibles are kept / once,
while recording, harry bites the tip of his tongue
& blood syrups down his chin / now rubied with sucrose.
 
back in that moment in bed, my pupils are swelling
like two berries in the dawn / i giggle into my partner’s neck
as my body floats between the dark & not / i live
 
a gentle life / with an icy pair of sunglasses /
drooling along my neck / i melt into the sheets
like an oil lamp, as hungry as a mouth / a pearl of june /
summer begins crystallizing /  in the back of my throat.

Adrienne Novy is a Jewish and disabled artist, Bettering American Poetry and Pushcart Prize nominee currently living in Saint Paul, MN. She is the author of trisomy 22 and Crowd Surfing With God (Half Mystic Press, 2018). Her most recent work can be found in Entropy's series The Birds, Glass: A Poetry Journal, Homology Lit, and Crab Fat Magazine. She loves My Chemical Romance and she loves being alive.

Ifeoluwa Ayandele

For Spirits & Bodies

& saying we are spirits, holding what
is left of us, without feeling the touch &
breaking our laughter into a thousand stars
 
of how we are becoming, firstly, bodies floating
in a pond of reverie, & then, spirits kneeling
before the altar of love, praying for at least
 
a pool of peace. Or perhaps, we are an ocean,
flowing through a vacuum of how February
brings us into a state of flight, like pigeons
 
leaving their holes on the shoulder of a bright
day. You know, days somehow, reveal
itself, breaking thru a pattern of sunflowers
 
growing above unmarked graves, leaving
an eyesore of how the word, peacefully,
doesn’t have to leave scars on the body.

Ifeoluwa Ayandele is a Nigerian poet. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming at Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Rattle, The Ilanot Review, Pidgeonholes, Tint Journal, MockingHeart Review, Thimble, Glass-Poetry, Verse Daily and elsewhere. He has completed an MA in English (Literature) at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. He lives in a room whose window faces a fence.

Lauren Peter

Order up (humanity)


Today’s Twitter refreshment 
is a story about how crustaceans
can feel pain. Tell me again how 
we’re behind the times. 
 
When science 
catches up with this 
express bus I’m on,
I’ll get my nerve endings 
swapped with the sea scuttlers.
 
Our life expectancy is dropping 
and the starfish and seashells 
keep buying more stocks,
believing in us
and our manufactured market 
demise.

Lauren Peter received a BA in Creative Writing from Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. You can find her on Twitter at @Eyes_LikeAChild.

Jack Sullivan

THE FIRST NICE DAY OF THE SEASON

Sweep the household cleavage,
Hang fresh custodies
In the wings, for
Helpful Fathers, drifter-types.
Put on a new drier
And come with me!
The season’s changing,
More embarrassment to come!
 
I know you’re a skeptic,
But look at the elm-tree,
Its little loaves
of sweetbread smells
Stinking up the sky!
 
Sorry if I scream, though
Who shall hear of us
In time to come?
Let them say there was
A businessman of certain stripe
Selling black brasseries,
Bush-barrell babies,
Fragrant as brandy-wine.

Jack Sullivan is a poet, playwriting, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Some of his poems can be in found in Yes Poetry, In Parentheses, and Firefly Magazine. 

Sean West

Cliff Divers

Flinders Beach
 
It is the season of chafing
and Vaseline shared between
thighs with nervous palms
 
We hear the hiss of water
dragon’s claws lacerated
through dead leaves
 
He moves away too quick
for us to catch a glimpse, darts
off cliffsides but the sound lingers
 
These rock faces are harsher against
our hands than they were last year
far less gentle than past summers
 
Their momentum crushes
sinking heads like brown grapes
as we hurl ourselves face-first
 
off their crowns. I first caught
her face beneath the water, felt
her hair cling like thrumming
 
fingers of a jellyfish around
my face. Her eyes licked red
as the tongue of the water
 
dragon we never saw. I moved
away from her quick enough
to be heard but not seen.

Sean West holds a BFA in Creative and Professional Writing. In 2019, he was shortlisted for the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in StylusLit, Stilts Journal, and Baby Teeth Journal, among others. He lives and works in Brisbane, Australia. Find more of him at www.callmemariah.com.

Shahé Mankerian

Celestial Smorgasbord

On your birthday, find a restaurant that serves
orange chicken over basmati rice. Of course,
 
the fried vermicelli noodles must be the color
of angel locks. If you desire naan on the side,
 
you must also request a bowl of roasted egg-
plants with the charred skin intact. Be gentle
 
when you drizzle the pomegranate syrup; later
you’ll whine about the lie bumps on your tongue.
 
The busboy is not a poet; don’t make him recite
Gibran by heart. The misprint in the menu
 
claims the coffee they serve is Turkish. Mama,
remember to complain. Even God can be misled.

Shahé Mankerian is the principal of St. Gregory Hovsepian School and the poetry co-director of Rockvale Review. His manuscript, History of Forgetfulness, has been a finalist at the Bibby First Book Competition, the Crab Orchard Poetry Open Competition, the Quercus Review Press Poetry Book Award, and the White Pine Press Prize. Online publications, Border Crossing and Cahoodaloodaling, have nominated Shahé’s poems for the 2018 Best of the Net. Visible Poetry Project’s animation of Mankerian’s poem, “The Last Mosque,” premiered at the 2018 New York Poetry Festival. He received the 2017 Editors’ Prize from MARY: A Journal of New Writing.

Kyla Houbolt

Days

days pass like a row of ducks
the bishop of falsehood cries out save them
and the days keep passing like leaves on a river
and the mayor of time refuses to tax them
and the days roll out like ash from a cigar
Pa used to call them SEEgars
smoked them til they killed his swallow
so he starved to death in a hospital bed
the windows still boarded up from the storm.
"Why is it so dark?" his last words
but I know he went out like the light he was
and the days keep passing
the days keep passing
endlessly
like they do

Kyla Houbolt's debut micro-chapbook, Dawn's Fool, is available from IceFloe Press, here: https://icefloepress.net/kyla-houbolts-dawns-fool-a-microchap/ . Most of her published work is available on her Linktree: https://linktr.ee/luaz_poet and you can find her on Twitter @luaz_poet. 

Holly Day

The Poet


The ship crashes against the rocks and a poem
Forms in her head right as she flies over the railing
Something so perfect and beautiful it must be written down
Must be remembered. She invokes the first stanza
 
For the otters watching curiously from the rocks,
The seals lounging carelessly on the beach
The dolphins she knows must be lurking just past the shallows
Because there are always dolphins watching shipwrecks
And dolphins are smart and literate enough to understand.
 
She shouts the lines as clearly as she can
Despite the screaming of the other passengers
Despite the rending, grinding agony of the hull against the rocks
Despite the shrieks of the confused seagulls whirling overhead
Because she knows this is a poem that cannot be lost
And somebody has to be left behind to carry it on.

Holly Day’s poetry has recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, Grain, and Harvard Review. Her newest poetry collections are In This Place, She Is Her Own (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press), A Wall to Protect Your Eyes (Pski’s Porch Publishing), Folios of Dried Flowers and Pressed Birds (Cyberwit.net), Where We Went Wrong (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Into the Cracks (Golden Antelope Press), and Cross Referencing a Book of Summer (Silver Bow Publishing), while her newest nonfiction books are Music Theory for Dummies and Tattoo FAQ.

Britt Cannon

Ferns


Ferns remind me of dinosaur times;
Clawed reptile feet stomping in the
Wild and untamed dirt.
I bet the earth pulsated with energy,
I bet she radiated chi,
I bet you could hear her breathe.
Can you imagine a world without the
Incessant buzz of fluorescent bulbs?
Roars of the triumph of some beast
In the distance,
Water so clear one could see
Just exactly what lurks underneath,
New life emerging.

Britt Cannon is a psychedelic space cowboy, tasked with traversing the farthest reaches of all timelines and dimensions to raise the consciousness of human kind. A glitch in the matrix, they exist beyond the constraints of gender and time. Riding the rainbow wave of The Love Vibration. Turn on, tune in, drop out, be free.