Kaitlin Stone

Victim Impact Statement

They ask me to measure the impact you have had on my life,
As if I can pull a ruler from my pocket and find meaning
somewhere between tick marks –
As if the fullness of what you have done to me can live
in the space between each inch –
I hate
the imperial system, anyway.

.

The word impact can mean so many things –
A collision. A strike. A hit. A smack. A ram. A touch.
Remind me the difference
between affect and effect again?

.

Victim does a lot of heavy lifting, too.
Am I a victim?
Some call me
a survivor – part of me
survived, at least
(every action has an
equal and opposite –
Does that make you a
Victimizer?)

.

Well I guess we should
dive right in I suppose
the Body Count is a good place
To start with
The body of my childhood
ravaged and gone
The body of my adulthood
broken and infirm and
The bodies of the
children I thought to one day
make with it
Counting a negative feels like
an impossibility so let’s
call it an even infinity

.

I heard once about
Opportunity Cost,
so why don’t we throw that
on the books, as well –
The cost of lost opportunities and
The cost of loss itself and
The price of pennies and
held breaths and
sick days or really
mental health days because
there is no name for
The Sickness of not
being able to
meet your own eyes in
the mirror

.

My Statement is
is that the impact on this victim is
is that the collision of your fist is
is that the strike of your match is
is that the hit of your pipe is
is that the smack of your lips is
is that the ram of your body is
is that the touch of your life is
is that the affect of your effect is
Is
Is this.
Is this enough?

Kaitlin Stone is a writer, yoga teacher, survivor, and wanderer. A graduate of Portland State University with an MFA in creative writing and a registered yoga teacher, Kaitlin strives in all aspects of her life to push for a world that accepts, understands, and supports survivors of trauma. She lives in northern Wyoming with her cat, her beagle, and far too many books. Her work has appeared in The Gravity of the Thing, nominated for 2022 Best of the Net, as a finalist for Carve Magazine's 2022 Prose & Poetry contest, and as a semifinalist for North American Review's 2022 Terry Tempest Williams Prize in Creative Nonfiction.

Paul Goudarzi-Fry

Musculature

When I take the rock to your body,
its smoothness bears a river; my strokes
bear under your skin in the shape
of a river. Like the enchanneling
 
that was a river once. What murmured
encouragement meets these motions.
What's a riverbed to the rain filling
fall's early drought. What if the earth
 
stitched over its dead rivers like a body
fills itself with scar tissue, solid shale,
and—right there, a knot undone,
kink in the back smoothed to submission.
 
I could've been loved once. Let me,
for now, follow your deep fascia, dig
low and gently. All the work that a body
does not leave behind.

Paul Goudarzi-Fry received his MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop, and his microchapbook After the Hands of Another was featured in Ghost City Press's 2023 summer series. His work has been published in Alocasia, Reservoir Road, and Beyond Queer Words, among others. He lives in New Hampshire.

Joshua Zeitler

Coming Out

A hummingbird’s wings
beat fifty-three times a second—
keeping still

Joshua Zeitler is a queer, nonbinary poet based in rural Michigan. They received their MFA from Alma College, and their work has appeared in Cutthroat, Stanchion, manywor(l)ds, Transients, Black Fox, and others.

Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr.

Unto These Men Do Nothing

we all returned to ancient Sodom
did heed its brimstone beacon
time after all just a construct
my brothers and I agreed to keep
ticking away
and were greeted at the gate
with wine and whores and sand
and Lot came by with men
we already knew were angels
and they looked upon
my sweet cousin Jamie
who even back then they knew
would in 2009 be murdered
and stuffed into a plastic box
in some suburb of Louisville
when he fled the closeness
of creeks and hollers and hills
for some form of sodomite freedom
and the angels said unto us we are sorry
for what you have all been through
cause that’s not what this story is about
but we had already been through
what we had already been through
because of what this story would be
and we joined the angry mob
and called out with them to Lot
to bring down the men that we might know them
that they might speak to the fullness of blazing ruins
whose smoke rises beyond time like a cracked furnace
and Lot stood at his door, already drunk, and said,
No, my friends. Do not do this wicked thing!
but weary of being clutched between verses
we named this a time for gathering stones
and cast them til thunder shook the earth with ink

Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr. is an advocate, a Kentucky Teacher of the Year, and the author of a bestselling collection of narrative poetry about his childhood growing up queer in Appalachia, Gay Poems for Red States (University Press of Kentucky), which was named a Book Riot Best Book of 2023, a Top Ten Best Book of Appalachia by Read Appalachia, an IndieBound and American Bookseller’s Association’s must-have book, a 2023 Top Ten Over-The-Rainbow book by the American Library Association, and, most recently, was awarded a 2024 Stonewall Book Award – Barbara Gittings Literature Honor Book Award. Carver’s work exists at the intersection of queer identity, Appalachian identity, and the politics of innocence.

Chelsea Palermo

ALIVE

Newspaper clippings of dead women. Cunt. Pleading letters. A promise to be good. Better. Whore. Articles: Abusive spouse, women who stayed. When her sons asks. Whore. Murdered women on the page. In case of emergency.  Dial 911. He will kill you. Bitch. Her son asks. Did you love him? Knife in her car. Bat next to bed. Did he visit me? Restraining order. Bullet holes. Stop. Breathe. Yes. Why would you be with him? Whore. When her son asks. She lies. Shaking in terror, in rage. Knife in her car. Bat next to bed. Just in case. 911. Press send. A promise to be good. Better. Counseling for battered women. Cunt. Newspaper clippings of dead women. Restraining order. Headline: Bitch. Headline: Abusive spouse. Headline: Woman slayed. 911. Help. In case of emergency. In case he came to kill her. Letters pleading apologies. A promise to be good. Better. Knife in her car. Bat next to bed. A promise. Listen. He will kill you. Listen. Women who stayed. Bat in her hand. Bitch. Call 911. Cunt. Bat high. Knuckles clenched. Dead women. Around cold metal. Alert. Whore. Swing. Swing hard. Alive. When her son asks Did he visit me? She says yes. She lies. Liar. Liar. Whore.

Chelsea Palermo is a poet, musician, and artist.  She holds an MFA in Poetry from Drew University.  In addition, Palermo is an Usui Reiki Master, Somatic Attachment Practitioner,  Sacred Awakenings Akashic Records Reader & more. She incorporates her multimodal healing practices in her work as a Transformational Writing Guide.  Palermo was nominated for Poet Laureate of Asbury Park, NJ, and has hosted numerous events in her community including Underground Poets, Poetry & Jazz Jams, WaterWitch Poetry & Writing Series, and others, through her arts organization the Ministry of Artistic Intent.  Her poems have been published in various magazines including This Broken Shore, Soup Can Magazine, Lamplighter & more. When not immersed in all of the above, Palermo instructs as an adjunct English Professor. Learn more here: www.chelseapalermo.com. 

nat raum

absolutely torqued

the question is what do you want to drink
& the answer is always yes. i am
the inside of a fountain in that i suck
scum into my crevices like
a bottom-feeder turned loose
in a field of carrion. i open
my blinds & stare down at traffic,
shutter released longer & longer
the emptier the bottle gets—taillights
blur to flowing cabernet & eastbound
traffic shines like sauvignon blanc.
(my father was an oenophile
& my childhood fever dreams
are tinted like the contents of crystal
goblets.) i always imagine someone
is watching me wobble across
linoleum floor, triple-sheeted & tossed
to the wind. imagine with delight
that a stranger sees me stumbling, waves
hello. i think of how much i care
about how glamorous i must seem
with a glass in my hand. in the mirror,
i rake fingers through miles of hair,
nearly manic—the question is what
does it say that my beauty is all for show
& no one is looking at me right now?

nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist and writer based on unceded Piscataway land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of you stupid slut, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and others. Find them online: natraum.com/links

Gion Davis

What It Means

The most beautiful part of a man is the back of his neck
when he’s sad. He has to be sad for his neck to be beautiful,
exposed to the sky like a clam pried open,
a giant muscle straining out to nowhere.
He woke up yelling I love you to an empty house
he dreamed was being vaporized with you inside.
Even a monkey can understand the glory of closing your eyes
and forgetting you ever had them open.
Forgiveness isn’t holy but neither is loving every man
you meet no matter what good people are supposed to do.
He forgot to kiss you goodbye at the airport this morning
and drove home wearing the sky for eyes.
The mountains were the molars and the foothills his cold blue jaw
and pain used to be something he saw at the rodeo. 

Gion Davis is a trans poet from Española, New Mexico where he grew up on a sheep ranch. His poetry has been featured in HAD, MAYDAY Magazine, Sprung Formal, and others. His debut collection Too Much (2022) was selected by Chen Chen for the 2021 Ghost Peach Press Prize. He performs poetry on the road with the band Clementine Was Right and currently lives in Denver, Colorado.

Christine Rikkers

Everything is organized

After the divorce, after the kids
are finally sleeping, I open
the kitchen drawer and stare
at the new knives arranged neatly
on soft black shelf liner, 
and I weep as if someone has died.
 
My father has, of course,
but only now, years later
do I miss his slowness,
his somehow mournful
joy in watching this world.
 
And what is this world
we have created? Who
are these children, cursing us
because we made them;
full of black joy
for the shadows they are
or will become, 
they race the sun
sliding over the rocks
that skirt the lake, then sliding
further, past its never ending
awakening -- and everything
in its place still;
 
the poor knives that dream
on their black bed, and brush
softly against each other, barely touching,
and the lonely spoons
that spend their first night shining
in the clean rubber compartment,
back to back, unable to turn
and face each other;
waiting only
to carry our endless hunger, to feel
the hot wash of purity
storm across their bodies
night after night.

A graduate of San Diego State University’s MFA Program, Christine Rikkers lives in Montreal where she is busy raising two beautiful children and teaching English at Vanier College. When she first moved to Canada in 2010, she was chosen for the Quebec Writers Federation (QWF) Mentorship Program, where she was privileged to work with the poet Anita Lahey as her mentor. Her work has been published in a number of American and Canadian literary journals, including Louisville Review, Portland Review, Contemporary Verse 2, Cold Mountain Review, Tidal Basin Review, DMQ Review and Raw Art Review.

Devin Veilleux

opisthotonic death pose

staring at her feels funny. funny in the casket of red velvet rope way, funny in the presentation of our findings way, the mirror way, the humiliation way. it’s the i know you’s preceding the differentiation. she’s been dead for sixty-six million years. her jaws rusted open, head thrown back, inevitably curving the spine, nerveless, attracting men who harden pathetically easily at curvatures of similar pretenses. they think she died of natural causes. i think she’s god. i think of the woman holding her baby up in front of the painting of the woman holding her baby. i turn my head upside down to see if i get the same revelation in understanding. the museum guide says they discovered her in the limestone beds of Southern Germany. i ask if he meant that she donated her body to science. i ask if she would have rather died in fetal position. he says he can’t answer for her. i say he’s been doing just that. he says my questions appertain to a different building, try the museum of art. i think he is confusing my inquiries for interpretative theories. ancient animals that carried eggs sixty-six million years ago are often just hollow calcium and pomewater. the parasaurolophus hides her young in the molten womb of the earth. the archaeopteryx dies sixty-six million years beforehand where nobody will ever find her. the diplodocus rots beneath falling stars. birds of heaven die in baptismal pangea; live to haunt halls of glass and signage. metaphors carve the notches in her vertebrae: to die to provide to self-paralyze to entertain to fossilize to oxidize to rot to comply to do it silently. she says only a meteor could outperform me.

Devin Veilleux is an English major at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She is currently working on finishing her bachelor's in English and will move on to a master's, with hopes for a doctorate following in later years with plans to teach creative writing and the study of literature.

Kyra Lisse

10/7/23 – 10/14/23

I learned last week that there are several
species of immortal jellyfish
that begin life anew in the wake of decay.
This week, I’ve been telling everyone I know.
Hope is a good storyteller, my mom hears
on the news, from the mouth
of a dad of a dead six-year-old.
What does it mean? she wonders, a bolus of
bloodshed stuck in her throat.
No good answers, I say, only scientific names:
Turritopsis dohrnii and Laodicea undulata.

Kyra Lisse is an MFA candidate and graduate assistant at Hollins University. She serves as Editorial Fellow for Jewish Book Council and as a nonfiction reader for Orison Books. Her work has been published in Sky Island Journal, Paper Brigade, and Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies, among others.

Anoushka Chauhan

We’re in a Recession

All the good ones have been taken, you
solemnly declare. Books, men, houses.
We were taught to ration everything like
we’re at war. Flour, fruit, detergent, love,
grief. I never said I love you because I had
only one left in me and I was saving it for
later, like insurance. Plenty of fish in the sea
I tell you. Do you ever imagine our father
 
in his apartment this smoggy evening, only
the tacky glow of his work laptop to light
his face? Screaming over the phone about
commute, petrol, interest, us, liability.
Then screaming about the phone bill he racks 
up. No fish in this economy, you say, some 
took all and orphaned the sea. It’s Christmas 
and I don’t know what old age looks like 
on him, he loves from the other side of a valve
that won’t turn. Guilt coaxes its way up but I 
shut the door. Don’t worry, it’ll trickle down.

Anoushka Chauhan is a law student writing from India. She likes owls, the color red, and the occasional Monty Python movie. Her works can be found in Parentheses Journal, Harbor Review, and Sweet Tree Review.

Raphael Emmae

in which i implode

the sun slices rain in half with a pocket knife
and i mourn it with soggy fingers,
eyes coral pink like the time the skyline bled
into heat’s ripples. sweat boils in lungs, cooking
a feast of maggots—it leaves cherry blisters
on skin, bleach corroded leather and bloody knees
                 split open      &      horrible
veins licking the wind. a bouquet of serpent tongues.
little writhing worms for bone marrow,
                  little      palms      pressed
against the inside of murky eyes—they say
eyes are the windows to the soul, all
i know are little cobweb woven curtains
and little woman shoulders cradling my little ghost.
sometimes i drown in the shower the same way i do
in stagnant pools & dream & burst into liquid tendrils
like body horror or a sonata or a clump of red moss—
rusty waves flooding the sewer, palm prints
on water-varnished rocks, a timelapse of fungi
growth until my neurons crumble and the world
folds in upon itself into a single ball of lint-
adorn microfibre yarn, rage red august sunset,
broken ac and opaque smoke. all i know is everything
crammed into this empty room. the walls are bursting.

Raphael Emmae (they/them) is an Asian writer. They’re currently a junior at Interlochen Arts Academy, where they major in creative writing. They like safety pins and other shiny objects. Find them on Twitter @chlorinecrow.

Andres Sanabria

CNN: Messy Eating Habits Might Reveal Elusive Black Hole

At school, I could not read
the assessment without the asses
 
they clung like nits to the root
of the word. Those egg-round
 
cheeks pinched firmly to the sment
waiting for the perfect moment
 
to be born. You can’t just brush them off,
Mrs. Nurse said, those grape big grapes.
 
Dad did his thing— he massaged my head,
breaking up my skull into white lumps of dough
 
in his hands, hands I wore as glasses.
Dad pushed me into cuneiform
 
books he pulled from stacks. I couldn’t see
how the other children saw. The Indian
 
in the Cupboard in 4th grade
I wasn’t good enough to read.  
 
His rivers run backwards,
Ms. Mirror said, as she pointed left-my right
 
to the map I’d drawn. The only one she’d hung
inside the bathroom door above the wash
 
your hands. Dad figured it was all distraction—a cat
5 hurricane of disoriented dreaming reversing the course
 
of my headwaters to my mouth & 10-fingered delta distributaries.
He hid my soccer ball in the gravity
 
well beneath his bed where he thought I couldn’t reach it.
But I pulled it out like Magic Messy did—
 
genius footballer, foodie and astrophysicist,
as Mr. CNN said— I reached into the singularity,
  
  light-warping
                    letter-bending homo
                                                        phone & graphs             oh mission!         
                                                                   Trans’
                                                                                                                           position                                                   
Rev’s
                                                ersals 
                                       sub’s tits
                                            you tions,
                                                my tions,
 
                                                     all the tions my heart caught
like fireflies beneath the dark
                                                       print & mind like a cupboard clinging
to the indian in the corner forever in 4th grade
not allowed to read the nits on the roots
of the rolling ball, my asses to the sment like Magic Messy did
when eating casually a churrasco he revealed a bleeding
light, a chewed up, spat-out star left tumbling through the universe
by an elusive black hole. Trapped it, touched it, and tapped it
                                                                                                  beautifully into goal.

Andres Sanabria is a Colombian born teacher currently working at an international school in China. Before that, he worked in Korea for 9 years. He teaches English Literature, which he suspects his own ESL teachers—the same teachers who identified his dyslexia—would find hilarious. Somehow, he’s made it work, though.

Costantino Toth

Two a.m.

Some animal grew cathedral
out carcasses of Baroque;
     bloomed Gothic arms to pull heights
down—     down to frantic ribs
     —and draw fingers up to spires.   
 
 
Come up high,     odd garden,
     to snort sacrifice(’s) smoke—     my
two o’clock eyes
fanned the billows.     Then,     get on
mon cancerous tempo(s) and riff,     riff.
 
 
Animal,     do you like the world
you’ve started?     The one I’ve brought up
big and strong with hours-so-late
and salt-aromas?     Let’s commit
this adolescent architecture
 
 
to determined form(s).     A dance
of mirroring moons,     of
monkey-see-monkey-do—      doppelgang
me,     cathedral!      Make that nave
follow my hips’ o’s,     that sepulcher
 
 
fall in ruts scooped out with jimmy arms,
     that choir trace the walls of my throat
and the cursives stuck there.     Spell them out:
     a  j-o-b  w-e-l-l  d-o-n-e.     A reading,
     odd hours’ neon,     that robs sleep.

Costantino Toth (b. 1995) is a freshly-turned writer, having worked beforehand as a musician and sound artist. She currently resides in Sarasota, Florida where she works as a substitute teacher. In her off-time she chases moths (without harming them) with her sweet little cat named Romoletto.

Juliet Cook

Relax

Nightlight eyes
for when it's dark
outside, when other names
are less likely to interrupt me.
 
All the same, other bodies
won't stop staring
at my albino nightlights.
They want their own
 
eyes to be as red as mine.
They will pretend otherwise.
They will cut out one of my eyes,
swallow it, then try to replicate it.
 
They will somehow manage
to convince themselves
they're not torturing me.
They will tell me to relax
while they torture me.
 
They will suddenly stab me,
then tell me I'm the one
who is filled with animosity
just because I didn't stay silent.
 
I was only supposed to scream inside
my own one-eyed head.
I was only supposed to bleed in my own bed
after they got what they wanted.

Juliet Cook is brimming with black, grey, silver, purple, and dark red explosions. Her two most recent poetry chapbooks are red flames burning out (Grey Book Press, April 2023) and Contorted Doom Conveyor (Gutter Snob Books, July 2023) and she also has another new poetry chapbook, Your Mouth is Moving Backwards, forthcoming from Ethel Zine & Micro Press. Find out more at www.JulietCook.weebly.com.

Patrick Paridee Samuel

Lake Leaves

I hear the sea
in rustling leaves,
waves just barely
 
trip thinking lake into
sea.
Slowly green
 
browns before me,
dyed in leaf shade.
I attempt over
 
and over to attribute
meaning to it, the lake.
A song instead
 
gets hold, grips
the gut back, the shimmer
and stink beneath releases.
 
Spilt seeds once
plucked now fall, sag
and bragging
 
of the suburbs, the leaves.
Going nowhere, the only
open places play bad
 
music and the food is fried,
crackling like paper to get
at some present. I tuck
 
my night owl down,
sheets clipping its beak.
Elsewhere, the warmth
 
the night flower blooms,
the black
not quite folding back
 
as it should once in
the air, splits
like shoal under net

with those waves
scraping the chintz
off their fingernails.

Patrick Paridee Samuel received an MFA from Columbia College Chicago. His debut collection, And Another Thing, is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books in 2025. He lives in Nashville where he works in university press publishing.

Kurt David

Sylvia Rivera and Harvey Milk Answer the Crisis Hotline

for Violet

Sylvia agrees she did not die for below-knee hemlines.
Harvey insists you crack too many hate-crime jokes
then blathers on about hope. It was brutal, you say, Monday
drunk, face wiped clean, laughing. Ashley’s ready to slash tires.
You laugh again: What car? Say, I was screaming.
So Harvey’s like, You should call the cops
but Sylvia slaps his pink mouth shut. Honey, she tells me
to tell you, please just focus on tomorrow’s lesson plan. Allow me
to haunt that prick senseless. She cackles and the line clicks.

Kurt David is a current MFA candidate at The Ohio State University and former Macrorie Fellow at Middlebury’s Bread Loaf School of English. Before moving to Columbus, he taught at a public high school and agitated for social and climate justice as part of his teachers union. Also, he ran a queer book club called Reading Rainbow. His work has appeared in Foglifter, Split Lip, and elsewhere.

Vishal Prabhu

waiting

ante-
room
to
ante-
 
room which is
room which
 
has no
doors
in but out
to a
 
balcony
 
from
where
it
enters

Educated as a chemical engineer at Bombay, Cleveland, and, for a while, at Georgia Tech, Atlanta, Vishal Prabhu has since tried to live and travel, simply, in bare conditions. Over the years he has stewarded a forest, worked the chops in a film institute, lived in a strife zone, learnt languages, taught English, and written poetry in English and Hindi. More recently, he has managed a museum, and an art gallery, related to Himalayas and Spirituality.

Brandon C. Spalletta

I Know the Look

for John

One arm is casually resting off the edge
of the green Saturn’s window,
 
shrapnel of a half-burned cigarette
raping her lungs while her shaved head
 
is attuning to the beat
of Don’t Fear the Reaper.
 
The driver is leaning over
at the intersection, preparing
to split oncoming traffic,
sharing what appear to be
 
the recently discovered secrets
of the universe
while, listening
 
she trades the daytime calm behind her eyes
for a volcano’s fire spitting its challenge
as far into evening as possible—
 
staring down oblivion
with a matador’s unwavering smile.

Brandon C. Spalletta’s poetry has been published in Dodging The Rain, Panoply, Elysium Review, Maryland Literary Review, WWPH Writes, and The Mid-Atlantic Review (formerly Bourgeon). New poetry is forthcoming in Gargoyle Online, and his poem “Daydreaming” received an Honorable Mention for Day Eight’s 2023 Luce Prize. At twelve years old he stood atop Old Rag Mountain in Virginia and his heart never left.