Silas House

Night Watch

When the blue hour conjures
the world belongs
to insects and the moon, to cooing
birds and the possum,
who is watching by the creek.
 
I am the only one awake,
and while some may savor
the silence, I fear
there is nothing else.
The world is full of wild things
in cages. They keep me
up at night, yet my troubled
mind does not assuage them.
 
I am haunted by a donkey
I saw in Mexico,
made to stand for hours
in front of a tequila kiosk.
He looked me in the eye
as I strolled by.
Maybe he is happy,
my husband reassures me later.
Yes, I venture.
 
Perhaps in Puerto Vallarta
they have gone home now
and someone feeds him
sweet oats, pets him while
he drinks his fill.
I hope, I hope,
as the western sky lightens,
and day begins
once again.

---

Silas House is the current Poet Laureate of Kentucky and the New York Times bestselling author of seven novels. He is a Grammy finalist, a former commentator for NPR's "All Things Considered", and recently won the Southern Book Prize and the Duggins Prize, the largest award for an LGBTQ writer in the nation.

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi

At The Table

When you're 8, lying on your belly, 
choosing infinity from the table, 
but wanting to taste yourself— 
taste everything, taste death. 
 
The back of my mind, 
a garbage heap; 
pictures woodenly framed from a past, 
growth hanging, carrying the weight 
of some other future, but it's still eve. 
 
My mother knits hope into a rope, 
my father ties it around my neck, 
while the other end is god, 
fiddling her fingers into prayers. 
 
Amen, I say, wanting something 
I won’t want someday. 
But the night is young, 
and holy are the stars— 
pointing towards the cathedral of tomorrow, 
where time is a road, fast and vast, 
smooth with people as mirages. 
 
This poem throttles home for dinner, 
the table still set with dreams.

---

Oladejo Abdullah Feranmi, a black poet, won the Deconflating Surveillance with Safety contest and received commendation at the 2024 HART Prize for Human Rights. He was a finalist in the Hayden's Ferry Review Poetry Prize '23, with work featured or forthcoming in POETRY, Heavy Feather Review, Strange Horizons, and more.

Eartha Davis

ora

Soft
reliquaries
of
speech. A paper
heart
meeting
fire (meeting
you). Doves
dunking
love
in
loss. Mothers
bowing
before
a
budding
moon. Pulse
promising
prayer, then
the closing
of
wound’s
fence. Apricot
admittance. A lover
sailing 
towards
absence.  Forgotten
summers. Still-breathing
light
dripping
from
a griever’s
jaw. You.
Earth. An ocean
afraid
of
her
salt. A river
that rhymes
with
saving. Us-
two, us
together, cupping
each other’s
loneliness
in
       the
                dark…

---

Eartha Davis is a woman of Ngāpuhi & Scottish heritage living on Wurundjeri land. She is a 2025 Varuna Residency Fellow. Her work is published or forthcoming in the Australian Poetry Anthology, Wildness, Cordite, Rabbit, South Coast Writer’s Centre Anthology, takahē, Frozen Sea, Minarets, Baby Teeth Journal,  South Florida Poetry Journal, Circular Publishing, Revolute, JMWW, LEON Literary Review, and ELJ Editions, among others. She is currently working with Red Room Poetry on their POEM FOREST project. Her loves are mountains, rivers, birds.

Sarah Fawn Montgomery

Brine

Salted sharp and bitter
as fishbones fragrant
leached and bleached
at the stock pot bottom
I am a taste acquired
as the night jet ink
of a venomous squid.
Burst bright on the ceiling
of a mouth concealing
displeasure with a smile
like the curved arm
of an octopus. Reach
across a crowded table
to heap my tender body
from the platter, claw
cracked as a man’s
rib to make a weakness.
Oil glistens on a clean
white plate. Smear
butter on my best flesh
to leave a smile stained,
shards of hardened shells
gathering at your feet.

---

Sarah Fawn Montgomery is the author of Halfway from Home (Split/Lip Press, 2022), Quite Mad: An American Pharma Memoir (The Ohio State University Press, 2018) and three poetry chapbooks. Nerve, a craft book on unlearning the ableist workshop and developing a disabled writing practice, is forthcoming with Sundress Publications, and Abbreviate, a short collection of flash nonfiction, is forthcoming with Harbor Editions. She is an Associate Professor at Bridgewater State University.

Victoria Spires

Fløyfjellet

Green through me, in teeming 


rivulets


of forest-feeling. I speak
tree shivers, fingertip 


meaning from fern tributaries.


Un-lung me.


Let me re-learn breathing,
deep skin drinks of 
sweetness. I am


feather-fall, water-
heavy. Bed me
in star moss and teach me 


your slow creep
of chlorophyll secrets -


within me, there is a sing
of mountain memory 

---

 Victoria Spires grew her wings in the Norfolk fens, but now lives in Northampton, England. Her work has featured in various publications, and she is a contributing editor at The Winged Moon Magazine.

Sappho Stanley

Five Act Lakeside Mirror Stage

ACT ONE

It’s spiritual & I’m sorry
if you’ve been told it’s not.
 
Look at these buoyant birds,
the erotic bee needles,
 
how our hands wrinkle perfectly
to embrace each other, how
 
I’m unsure if this is all ours,
or if any of it is even me.
 
I’m scared of wakes. Other
than with you, I don’t think
 
I’ve ever had a good fall.


 
ACT TWO

The first trans
person I met barely wore a shirt.
At home, he let his skin-
tone scars shine like an Adonis
allowed to grow old.
I’ve never met wrinkles
more hard fought—a belly
more round & sacred.
The gray wisps of his ears
whispered: grow old & ripen
yourself with breasts.
I now say: someday I’ll miss the purple
lights dripping across our eyes &
oh how lucky we were
to drape our bodies in pollen.

 ACT THREE (Interlude)

Music seeps into my ear like a cold lover / I wish I didn’t remember / my first flower / its color—lost to a fog like today: the morning / forest leaches into my mouth like a cough / drop / my boots slosh into the ground & I am told dandelions are weeds—bad / & not to be trusted / poison has happened on my trail / where is my neon summer? please find your way / into my mouth / dig deep into my lungs / allow yourself to be exhaled / and re-inhaled by passerbyers / in bed / allow me to become / the cosmos with my lover / let her inhale me sweeter / grief happens / in the ears / when a symphony ends / let me pretend my first flower was purple & soft & velvet / I have written / words on my body next to my tattoos of a blue flower / in felt-tipped pen / I read: I want greater fluidity to fuck up / a poem /

 ACT FOUR

The desire to change is spiritual
& I’m sorry if you’ve been convinced it’s not.
 
The birds are many & float
gloatfully on the waves.
 
How tender their feathers are
for protection in this cold, Fall
 
lake. Don’t you hate
how red my nose & cheeks
 
become in this breeze? Wait!
Do you see the bird?
 
The wakes of the boats?
Do you see how it struggles
 
like a bee pallbearing its sister?
In a room filled with a heart
 
wallpaper, what do you think happens?
Do you think the bee
 
stares into his sister’s eyes? Over night,
during her prudent wake, what other
 
futures does he imagine?
 
One is for the pollen uncollected.
Two is for all words unreachable to her.
Three is for the now. Tomorrow the bee will be
covered in leaves, given her favorite lipstick,
& marked with a stone:
Here lies Petunia, beautifully unchanged.
 
What is a poem if not an offering
of my body?

 ACT FIVE

In front of the lake’s mirror, I’ve been
trying to understand my hand.
 
Truthfully, I don’t want to die.
That’s lonely though, isn’t it?
 
My red isn’t your red nor purple & purple.
When we die, it'll be alone. Stupendously
 
lonely. I’ll never get to tell you about it.
Will it be enough? Will your love carry
 
me into that liquefying dark?
In front of my mirror as I stick
 
myself with a needle & plunge an inch-
and-a-half deep, I pause. I tussle
 
my de-receded hair, hang on-
to my breasts, & push
 
the estrogen in.

---

Sappho Stanley (They/She) is a trans poet from Appalachia. They are a poetry candidate in The Ohio State University’s Creative Writing MFA where they serve as Poetry Editor and Production Editor at The Journal. You can find their work in Waxwing, New Delta Review, & West Trade Review, as well as others and you can find them on any social media with @sapphostanley or checkout their website SapphoStanley.com

Nikola Milosavljevic

Bereaved Coping

The night is the elephant's face
carved with dead ends.
The windshield gloss is black
and red and then black again.
The red flashing light above
the stop sign revealed my father
standing on the sidewalk.
He tried to hold the light and
the darkness, but they melted
between his fingers as hot resin.
The syrup drips on his shoes
we buried him in. His ghost
wants to speak about issues
that his body couldn't. His ghost
is breaking into a number of
wheezing shrapnels of silent syllables.
The light is still flashing with
my father's heartbeat, in the colors
of his blood, black then red,
and black again. In three seconds,
we made amends for the past
27 years at the stop sign.
Left then right and left again,
we looked. The throttling engine
swaddled our throats. The headlights
can reveal only so much.
We parted in the rearview mirror
and flashed at each other from afar,
like the trembling light of dying stars.

---

Nikola Milosavljevic was born and raised in Belgrade, Serbia where he studied literature at the University of Belgrade. For the past ten years, he has lived in Orlando, Florida where he writes his poetry with a fresh perspective. Nikola's work appeared in Bristol Noir, Blue Villa Magazine, and Poetry Super Highway.

Gahl Liberzon

Shapeshifter

after Fiona Chamness

I was born in a hurry. Mother woke up waterbroke, and within 2 hours I was out– 8:30am, as if late for work. Father, seeing the leap, turned me into a frog. I jumped for days and mastered bug eating, but I couldn't stand the swamp, wouldn't croak, my neck all cicatrix since the slit. Grandpa turned me into a monkey but by then I'd fallen in love with my true name and was done dancing for the organ grinder. In elementary school the teachers turned me into a mockingbird but I wouldn’t stop singing. In middle school they turned me into a ghost but I wouldn’t wail on command, so they turned me into a dog until I bit the hand that fed. They turned me into a tortoise but I kept jumping out of my shell, stared them down with orange eyes and licked my wounds in the dark. When I got to high school they turned me into a bird of paradise. They beckoned for a mating dance but the feathers had long since been ripped out of my wings. I turned into a marionette and hobbled on slack ankles but I couldn’t find the puppet master. I got wet in the rain and huddled in caves. I turned into a wolf but I couldn't find a pack. I turned into a fox but I couldn't secure a den. I turned into a coyote but my throat went raw from crying. I turned into a bear but I couldn't sleep. I turned into a sparrow but I couldn't get my nest together. My brother turned me into a penguin trying to help, but I hadn't the blubber, fish or the brood. I turned into a falcon but my fear of heights stopped me from leaving my perch. I turned into a magpie but my roommate stole my jewels. I turned into a cockroach but the neighborhood had already gentrified and my landlord had the fumigators on speed-dial, so I moved to Japan and turned into a beetle. The schoolkids chased me with nets and their teachers kept calling me “a fine specimen,” so I turned into a tanuki. Everyone wanted to party but I couldn’t take the hangovers anymore. I turned into a red panda and lived off grapes until I met my mate. We grew fat in our bamboo forest while the news said to avoid gatherings of more than five. We turned to ibexes but a drought parched our savannah. We turned into tarsiers but loggers clearcut our grove. We turned into longhorns but the Texans kept eyeing our hindquarters and talking about steak. We turned into sea lions but they built a derrick in our ranging waters. We cough on the oil and the fish are harder to come by, but we’re taking our time; we want the next change to be our last.

---

Gahl Liberzon is a writer and educator in Long Beach, California. His work has appeared in The Museum of Americana and The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, and he has previously taught and performed throughout southeast Michigan, the greater Chicago area, and the greater Tokyo Metropolitan area.

Stephen K. Kim

“I’m calling about your daughter”

after Leila Chatti

When the man on the phone mentions casualties, it summons that Chappell Roan song—the one she skipped in the car because the chorus mentions getting eaten out in the passenger seat—and as he speaks, I’m rubbing my forearm tattoo, the blackbirds we both got on her eighteenth birthday, until I stop when he mentions a blast radius because I never thought a radius would trouble me beyond forgetting to square it in high school geometry, but when I hear the start of a condolence, I clench my hand over the tattoo, as if to keep it from vanishing into the air.

---

Stephen K. Kim (he/him) is a writer and college educator in upstate New York. He enjoys spending time with his husband and his cat.

Gretchen Saint Gretchen

We Make Moon

our mother 
we pass moon 
between us 
we ask moon 
answer 
we wail moon 
feed us 
we eat moon
starving 
we run moon 
ragged 
we think moon 
and thank moon 
we sing moon 
full-throated 
we scream moon 
voiceless 
we pound moon 
a drumhead 
we hit moon
cry moon
scared moon
soothe our fear

---

Gretchen Saint Gretchen is a Michigan-based transfemme writer. Her works have appeared in DIAGRAM, The Albion Review, and Nightingale & Sparrow, among others. She writes to find and feel her place in the world. She can be found on Instagram @GretchenSaintGretchen.

Matthew Isaac Sobin

Back When Zombie Killers Flew Coach and My Brother Got Googly Eyes

The first time my family came to visit
San Francisco, Andrew spoke
to The Walking Dead
actor on the plane. They stood in line
in the tail to pee, & my brother,
that brave boy, said, I love
 
your show. & that fictional archer
said thank you, shook his hand
in a sky overflowing with technology,
free of zombies.
 
What I admire about zombies
is their intelligence, their cunning
that persists after the turn
seen so rarely in the genre.
I want the monsters
 
to be the monsters. So I stopped
watching after season one
when the director departed
& all that was left were mindless
rabid primates. Our mother
 
did the opposite. When
my brother returned to his seat
she asked, Who was that?
What show?
& she only saw from season two
a world where the humans
destroy themselves.

---

Matthew Isaac Sobin’s (he/him) first book was the science fiction novella, The Last Machine in the Solar System. His poems are in or forthcoming from SoFloPoJo, Orange Blossom Review, Ghost City Review, JAKE, MAYDAY Magazine, Roi Fainéant Press, The Hooghly Review, Stone Circle Review, Hog River Press, and elsewhere. You may find him selling books at Books on B in Hayward, California. He is on Twitter @WriterMattIsaac and Instagram @matthewisaacsobin. His Linktree is linktr.ee/matthewisaacsobin.

Shams Alkamil

Amira’s Stunt Double

after Todd Dillard

Bored of all the grief I vomit on her
in my metaphoric poems, Mommy hires
 
a stunt double: same forehead scar,
same fiery laugh, same bald head, same cancer.
 
Now when I write “Mommy curls like orange rinds”
it’s her stunt double pretzeling itself in a fruit smoothie.
 
When I write “On Friday’s my mother sheds the skin of
my mother revealing more mother”
 
it’s her stunt double who unbuttons her body,
stands there all double mastectomy and fascia,
 
waiting for the next cue card. “How much are you paid?”
I ask. Mommy’s stunt double remains mute,
 
places one of those familiar salty tasali treats
in her tongueless mouth, cracks the shell with
 
her veneer incisors, totally off cue. Much too messily
and amateur, not enough fiery laughter between
 
salt rimming the edge of her cracked lips. “I’m new here,”
the double telepathizes. So she doesn’t braid my hair,
 
doesn’t have the same beady gusto in her eyes.
All pupil, a shade too light. Her scent: freshly printed
 
paper and five sprays of J’Adore.
Mommy spritzed only three.

---

Shams Alkamil is a Sudanese poet who has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes. She speaks on her struggles of queerness, the immigrant experience, and race. Her newest book is When Time is Circular (Broadstone Books, 2024).

M. Klein

Sudden Unexpected Death in Epilepsy

The girl left sleeping
and her mother buried both of them               under blue ridge soil
 
and the girl became a great wrong bottle,
and a warning, and a wild night.
 
Sometimes the girl fizzed                               on her mother’s cathode TV
while she dreamed the long days
 
and the girl was a scratched journal,
a blanket fort, an open eye.

---

M. Klein is a poet and artist from an Appalachian basement. Her work is tangled in hunger, and promise - shaped. Her writing has been published by Pile Press, Not My Style, and Fifth Wheel Press. Klein’s debut chapbook, Brentwood, was published in 2023. Find her online @ stone.spiral on Instagram / st0nespiral on 'X'. 

Tiffany Elliott

Diagnosis: Woman

“We have normality. I repeat, we have normality. Anything you still can't cope with is therefore your own problem.” — Douglas Adams

the surgeon sloshes me around     tells me there is water trapped      but      this is normal      all women experience this      as the water leaks out my seams      stains my clothes bright yellow      at all my creases     

he hold a crowbar between his white knuckles      creaks at the hard core of me      this is normal      he shouts over the cacophony of rushing water and my screams        hard steel finding a crack      it leeches heat from my core      splits me down my center      this is normal    

this is normal      as i fall across the gurney      a geode at my middle      the last of my water dripping onto sterile tiles      i cannot hold together anymore      cannot will myself into one anymore     

the surgeon sighs      wipes his glasses on an edge of sleeve      whispers      this is normal     

i am sent home with a stack of paperwork and some gauze      tumble unevenly into a car      across all the paperwork the words      this is normal      are written over and over     

on the day of my post-op appointment      i roll myself across town       crookedly      gauze caked in dirt and loose gravel       all my slosh is gone      as i try and try again      to fit my irregular form into bus seats      the driver impatiently tapping his wheel    

i roll my jaggedness into the surgeon’s office      then onto the examination table       when the surgeon comes in he does not touch me      writes      this is normal      onto the prescription pad       tells me he wants to see how normal i will remain      in four months   

i return home       take my normal pills     roll myself raggedly through my normal life     

tell myself in the night      this is normal     when i wake with a start     

---

Tiffany Elliott’s Bones Awaiting the Blaze was awarded the 2022 Hillary Gravendyk Prize, and her work has appeared in Typehouse, Spectrum, and other journals. She is an asexual, neuroatypical, and disabled woman and mental health professional who received her MFA from New Mexico State University, where she was awarded the Mercedes De Los Jacob’s Thesis Prize. Her works explore the mythologies we experience, those we create for ourselves, issues of abuse and trauma, and how people can remake themselves.

Michael Hill

A STONE ON WULLICAW BEACH

You can feel it when your
hand finds me, sandy fingers
digging me out of wet earth-
 
My skin carries the inverted
fingerprints of the ocean-
my life story, my history, written in
the native language of the world-
 
You can feel the strokes of the churning sea,
the tempo of the in-and-out, the rolling dance,
the collisions and cacophonies that brought
me here, and then left me behind-
 
I lived a generation on Wullicaw Beach,
in a hollow that fills with salty water
during high tide, and dries slowly
over long summer evenings-
 
I nearly forgot the weightlessness,
the anger of the currents, the honest hope
that comes with life in the roaring deep-
 
and then my journey met yours,
just long enough for you to turn me
over in your palm and throw-

---

Michael Hill was born and raised in upstate South Carolina. He has a screenwriting degree from Western Carolina University and currently lives in Indian Land, South Carolina with his wife and son. He has published a number of poems and short stories in regional journals and also creates comics with his brother, artist R. Case Hill. 

Justin Carter

Sneaking Into Monster Jam

We didn’t really “sneak
into Monster Jam.” We had tickets, four
            of them—me, my parents, their friend Lisa
 
who died a few years back.
            She used to live in this trailer
down a heavily-wooded driveway
 
            & had a lot of pets,
including a red dog named Red Dog that I swear
            was 35 years old. When my father
 
started making wine,
            the first grapes he used were the muscadines
that grew on Lisa’s fence. Anyway,
 
            monster trucks—
we got free pit passes from Diamond Shamrock
            which let you go out on the floor
 
& meet the drivers before. But
            the problem was you had two hours
to meet them all, & the line
 
            for Grave Digger was so long.
We’d have spent the whole time
            waiting, missed all the others,
 
so afterward, my mother said
            she was going to get me that final
autograph. I’m not sure how
 
            it all happened—she said
to follow her & we weaved our way
            to the Astrodome floor, talked past
 
security guards until we got down there,
            surrounded by the trucks,
the smell of exhaust heavy over everything. But
 
            here’s the thing—we ended up where
we wanted, but didn’t actually manage
            to get that autograph. Just stood
 
in the dirt for a few minutes
            until someone came over
& told us to leave.

---

Justin Carter is the author of Brazos (Belle Point Press). His poems have appeared in Bat City Review, The Journal, Sonora Review, and other spaces. Originally from the Texas Gulf Coast, Justin currently lives in Iowa and works as a sports writer and editor.

Natalie Eleanor Patterson

[In July the whole city]

In July the whole city smells decayed, like a vase of flowers going to rot, & you’ve got the sure sense of a wet thing molding. Peppers ripen in the black dirt & you pick them so the dogs don’t get sick, give them to the woman who’s hired you to feed pills to her aging Boston terrier, who will have seizures every other day until it dies. Cell towers blink in a mid-afternoon storm & you have to be good, you cannot farm your pain for poems, you have to find something else to say besides O God, O God, I’m terrified of being wrong. You’re wrong about everything, even your terror, you keep nearly fainting on the downswing of the week, crying in the shower as the index hits a hundred. Every morning at sunrise there’s a great heron by the lake, always looking out over the water in the same place by the cypress roots. You’re sure she was once a person. You don’t think you’re a victim; you’re sure it would feel different from this. You keep feeling things that can’t be measured on a scale from one to ten & you keep dreaming about things that haven’t happened yet but O God you wish they would. You wish you’d gone sailing when you had the chance. You wish you’d punched a hole through yourself with all that expensive bourbon, let that older woman take you to bed, pressed time into a flat circle. You wish it was winter: horse sense, lumber, one hundred leagues of snow.

---

Natalie Eleanor Patterson is a poet, editor, and instructor with an MFA in poetry from Oregon State University. She is the author of the chapbook Plainhollow (dancing girl press, 2022) and the editor of Dream of the River (Jacar Press, 2021), and has work featured in Sinister Wisdom, CALYX, South Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She is Managing Editor of Jacar Press and a PhD student in poetry. Find her at poetnatalie.com.

Sergio Brito

In the spirit of Punk Rock:

I was born on a Thursday in a country we didn’t belong to, to parents who never belonged to each other; and I got a tattoo of the Virgencita on a Friday the 13th in a tattoo shop somewhere outside Oklahoma City, even though when I was 10 I lied to the priest at my First Communion, unwilling to admit that I’d begun watching porn 2 years earlier after stumbling across a video of Ash Ketchum penetrating Misty while trying to illegally download music onto the family computer; and when I graduated high school I wept like a baby in my father’s arms, and wept even more when I felt his tears falling on my shoulder; and I cheated on my ex-girlfriend with a young woman who had a unicorn tattooed on her thigh somewhere in St. Louis while on tour “selling” merch for my friend’s band; and I lost my virginity in a Honda Civic next to an electrical substation on a dark desert road, sweating profusely, beause it was early June, and maybe also because I was nervous; and I used a razor blade from a carpet knife to slit my thighs open and relieve some of the pressure that had been building inside me while lying prostrate on the shower floor; and I mercy killed a mouse with a hammer after it had gotten caught in a glue trap my friend had set out for it, and I was left uneasy at the sheer unremarkability with which the mouse departed from the plane of the living; and I never wore ear protection when my band and I ripped off Cream in my neighbor’s bedroom during high school; and I smoked my first cigarette on a park bench in Madrid, shaking as I lifted the cigarette up to my lips; and I had a dream in which a man performed oral sex on me and I bludgeoned him in the face with a stone immediately after I finished, still naked; and the first time a man performed oral sex on me in real life I enjoyed it and came in his mouth and kissed him immediately after I finished, parked next to a canal, the only light coming from an orange hued streetlamp; and I worked in a bakery with a man from Veracruz who told me stories of climbing up mango trees to harvest fruit for an international distributor when he was my age; and I was vegetarian for one month on account of ethical concerns regarding the meat industry; and most of the time the music I listen to is too loud, and leaves my ear ringing, but I don’t want to stop it; I don’t have a choice.

AMEN!

---

Sergio Brito is a construction worker and writer working in Los Angeles. Born and raised in the Coachella Valley, he enjoys dry heat, the sun, and quiet desert nights. Look for his other work published in Where Meadows, and follow him on twitter @Bskergio

Luke Johnson

Doppelgänger 

My daughter puts
her face against the creek  
 
and says
when I smile, the me 
 
beneath me smiles back 
but is empty—
 
silence dressing the trees.  
 
*
 
Silence dresses trees 
in sequins of ash 
 
and scatters 
when implosion 
 
comes from God bombs.
Too easy a name I know, 
 
God bombs.  
But when a child watches 
 
buzzards pluck eyes 
from infants 
 
and cries, 
but cannot 

hear herself crying, 
what else is there 

but silence 
and the language of it? 
 
*
 
LOOK! 
my daughter says 
 
and I do: 
flames of light 
 
like shrinking doors 
turning 
 
            and returning. 
 
*
 
I read a man met fate 
while bending 
 
the bow of a cello 
and that each 
 
plucked note 
echoed the valley 
 
and rose in volume 
the further it flew. 

That at midnight, 
as the enemy slept, 
 
the psalm 
of his fingers
 
foraged a wail 
and from them:
 
frozen children. 
 
*
 
I want to say 
something
 
of wind or snow 
or how 
 
the powdered mist 
coats the pond 
 
causing prey
to statue. 
 
How my daughter
traces her face 
 
in a window
and smears 
 
it when her 
breath burns. 
 
But I've already
said that before. 
 
So let me 
instead say this: 
 
when my daughter 
screams
 
and belly bloats, 
she begs 
 
to be carried
to water. 
 
She says she hears
the voice
 
of a ghost 
calling from under
 
its surface. 
That when 
 
she reaches
the girl pulls back 
 
and the two 
of them
 
turn into one. 

---

Luke Johnson is the author of Quiver (Texas Review Press), a finalist for the Jake Adam York Award, The Vassar Miller Prize, and The Levis Award; A Slow Indwelling (Harbor Editions 2024); and Distributary (Texas Review Press 2025). Quiver was recently named one of four finalists for the 2024 California Book Award. Johnson was selected by Patricia Smith as a finalist for the esteemed 2024 Robert Frost Residency through Dartmouth College. You can find more of his work at Kenyon Review, Prairie Schooner, Narrative Magazine, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere.

Erika Grumet

Sex Education for (Nice Enough) Girls

First Semester Syllabus

Week 1: Act like you don’t want it. If you want it, you’re a slut. 

Week 2: If you flirt, you're a slut.

Week 3: Don’t like doing it too much or you’re a slut. Be like Queen Victoria “lie back and think of England.”

Week 4: Say “yes” sometimes even when you don’t want it. If you say “no” too often, you’re a prude.  Letting someone else use your body like a Fleshlight isn’t a big deal.

Week 5: Never be the girl that needs a condom. If you are, then you’re a trashy slut. Always be the girl that has a condom. Then you’re just a regular slut. Week 6: Sluts give blowjobs. Dirty sluts let boys reciprocate. 

Week 7: If you smile too much or your boobs are too big. you're a slut.

Week 8: If your lipstick is too dark or your hair is too nice, you’re a slut. 

Week 9: If you use a tampon, you’re a slut.

Week 10: If you get a bikini wax, you're a slut.

Week 11: If you masturbate, you're the worst kind of slut.

            Midterm Exam: Gag a little to show him just how big he is.

Week 12: Never go on the pill. That makes you a slut. 

Week 13: Never get pregnant. That makes you a dirty slut.

Week 14: Never, never get an abortion. That makes you a whore. 

Week 15: Don’t sleep with someone else’s boyfriend. That makes you a skank. 

Your Final Exam: If you cheat then you're just a cum dumpster.
            For Extra Credit: Only have anal. Then you’re still a virgin. 

Girl Math

Using your Girl Math Reference Tables™, Please Answer the Following Questions in One Lifetime or Less:

Relationships

Our best scientists have determined that bad relationships cause aging at a rate of 1.2 years for every twelve months.  If Jane says, “I spent the better part of 20 years with him because I thought I could fix him. Apparently that was a mistake,” find the correct amount of time Jane should keep trying to fix a guy over a 20 year relationship.

Dating

Before accepting an invitation to go out, please calculate the following:

The amount of alcohol you can drink that is socially acceptable but doesn’t invite danger

(Blood Alcohol Level=alcohol consumed in grams(body weight in grams.55)  100)

If the invitation is for a dinner date, also include the cost of a meal that 

a) won’t incur pressure to put out (see your reference tables for internalized expectations coefficient and ungrateful bitch coefficient).

b)  will express to your date “I would like to fool around but I will not go all the way." 

c)  if you might want to fool around, what to order that says the following:Lim -> x=desire to drink/desire to avoid unwanted sex 

Limit as x approaches the desire to drink or to avoid unwanted sex

Sex

Determine the range of sex partners from prude to slut and the mean number of sex partners it is appropriate to have in order to avoid being called a prude or a slut, 

(Just kidding. You’re still going to be called both of these things. Possibly by the same person. c.f. Heisenberg’s Sexual Uncertainty Principle) 

Use the following formula to calculate the Consent Coefficient

(Alcohol+Cost of Meal+How Long You've Known a Person x  Self-Defense Training)

(Cost of a taxi x Deviation of the Neckline from the Clavicular Meridian in millimeters)

Remember to multiply the denominator by zero, because recognition of consent is always undefined.

Mona is in bed with Randy for the second time. Express as a ratio, the probability of retaliation if Mona says,  "thanks but it's not working" vs faking it?  Then, using your protractor, calculate how protracted this experience will feel for Mona. 

Customer Service

Factor the Help Coefficient  to determine while shopping, that is, the degree of assistance you can ask for that gets an answer but does not imply helplessness or invite unwanted intervention. The table for triangulating body mass index by pretty privilege is on page 72 of your Girl Math Reference Tables, right above the table for throwing your hands in the air in frustration.

Sally needs to take her car to have the brakes looked at. Using your Special Girl Tools find the Angle of Condescension between her actual knowledge and what the salesman assumes she knows

 Existing in Public

Using crowd density and brightness, determine how far away you can safely park in case you have to walk alone. 

(Brightness= luminosity 4d2)

Find the amount of force needed to beat off your attacker to enable you to run to a well-lit well-trafficked space, so that you don’t have to beat off your attacker.

Elevator math:  How much space between you and strangers in an enclosed box such as an elevator or subway car to avoid unwanted touching/groping?

Distance=√((x2 – x1)2 + (y2 – y1)2)

Distance=√((pelvis person 2 – pelvis person 1)2 + (arms’s reach person 2 – arm’s reach person 1 )2)

How much travel time can you safely allow with one or more strangers before “I’ll wait for the next one” is the solution? (This formula can also be applied to subway cars and other forms of public transit.)

Travel Time=Distance/speed

After each time you receive a hug from the guy who propositioned you while his stroke-patient-wife was in the adjacent bed, what is the interval until feelings of relief and safety return…because at least he didn’t go any further this time?  Use values of a brief hug equals an affectionate-touch-coefficient of 7. (My personal threshold for screaming and punching the guy in his stupid face is an 8. That is equivalent to brushing a strand of my hair out of my face or hugging for longer than 1.75 seconds.)

Have you answered every question? 

Check your work before you move on. 

A miscalculation could cost you your life. 

The Short Answer Questions:

How many people should be in a supermarket checkout line to ensure that it will be the one that balances efficiency with the number of times you are instructed to “smile more”? 

no

How many days in a row can you serve a coffee to the same customer before he figures you’re already practically dating?

No

At what volume, in decibels, must you stop ignoring catcalls without inviting escalation to further harassment or even violence from a man?  

NO

How forceful must your “no” be to end unwanted requests for dates or sex or whatever else while still remaining safe from violence?

NO

How many times can you use the phrase “Girl Math” before you realize that there is no quantity of mani pedi time or bubble baths with scented candles or bottles of wine with girlfriends that you pay for on your credit card because you can’t even afford them on top of your rent that will fix things, and you finally admit that the so-called man-hating radical lesbian feminazi dykes have a point about destruction and it’s the system that needs to be recalibrated? And where the fuck do I sign up?

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Erika Grumet is a middle aged, queer, gender apathetic, Jewish, redundantly-disabled writer exiled from her beloved New York to the part of Florida known for homo- and trans- phobia and talking rodents. She is also co-founder, managing editor, webmaster, columnist and volunteer psychotherapist at the writing school/literary magazine/adult orphanage, 2 Rules of Writing. In addition to 2 Rules of Writing, you can find her work in Lilith Magazine, Bi+ Women’s Quarterly, and at Kveller.com.