Jessica "Jess" Ballen

children’s ballet or survival of the fittest

ballerinas      end      up as bullies who       tie   me up in        nylon           who      
plie         me      to       death      who          kick   the soft of   my      stomach
 
who      have my pain        for breakfast        who tendu step       across my   grave
 
 
who watch the weak one              cave      who flash their     blood stained  baby
 
 
 
 
teeth           who recruit           others                               for their                 brigade
 
 
 
 
 
who      point           their   toes        at     all   their             vics    who       foam        
 
 
 
 
 
 
for  my exit                who                      commit       homicide                      with a                             
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
chasse   who                                               use                                    their words
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
to                                crush                              my                                        brain     

---

Jessica "Jess" Ballen is a queer Jewish poet who is currently working on their MFA in creative writing at Antioch University. They live in Eugene, OR with their husband, three cats, and two guinea pigs. Their book Kosher was released in early 2023.

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi

Cascading ornaments of decay

the fat horror sits like a map of sores plastered on the skin.
oh sea, monarch of the earth's underbelly
 
custodian of waves and tides—from your veins sprang
the milk that made mother nature's breasts thump with possibilities.
 
now, you are just a warehouse of anguish. haunting
 
memorial of a splitting blue stretching beyond time lines.
you lay drunk with the marrow of drooling memories—
 
the very life you swore to protect sloughed out
of your lungs.
 
mother earth,
 
dressed in cascading ornaments of decay.
everyday, the chimney belches
 
in your face, your green apparel smothered in a mass of black current.
 
the blade says it wants to prune your hairs to perfection
but ends up eating your hands and legs.
 
we see it everyday. the river crouched behind your
eyes, only flooding their banks when the clippers have gone.
 
your crown is heavy with stench and the face of chaos,
revealing the molds of years trailing down your
 
hair and burrowing their nails of civilisation deep into your scalp.
below your scalded feet, a carpet of algae curls itself.
 
& dead rivers ferry a family of dead things to their grave.
once your bosom was a wellspring ushering in the sun like a dish of fat things.
 
now, our beaks quiver from the aftertaste of loss.
our bones drum the rhythm of sorrow in their unfiltered state.
 
all around, the edifice of decay towers like the pride of roaring lions.
like Loki, his eyes narrowed in mock-observance.
 
what was once our haven now a withering palisade.
flowers cuddle our tongues with nectar.
 
but not now. oh not now.
how do we sing an alien hymn
 
with cement in our soul?
under a dying mulberry tree we huddle together. 
 
bees drawn to the music of flowers. moths obeying the cadence of light.
birds flapping  their wings to the call of memory.
 
frogs trumpeting their distress to the calmness of water.
an older bird breaks into a dirge, her voice rising and falling.
 
the sun spits magma from its
mouth as it dips into the school of clouds
 
o mother/you need new clothes/
who will make them for you? / she sings
your breasts are thick with possibilities/
your sons and daughters are no more/
you're dying / yet you keep giving/
their eyes are awash with complacency/
who will take care of you now?/
 
her voice sails with the wind, across the Mediterranean.
evening descends. we wait.
 
the breeze dances around. we wait. dust clouds nuzzle our faces, our wings.
still we wait for the cement to dissolve into a garden of new song.

---

Ewa Gerald Onyebuchi is a Nigerian writer of Igbo descent. An alumnus of Osiri University 2021 Creative Writing Masterclass taught by professor Chigozie Obioma, he was a finalist for the Spring 2021, Starlight Award for poetry. His short story, wearing my skin, was shortlisted for the 2020 Ibua journal bold continental call. His interests are short stories and poems. His works have appeared  or forthcoming in kreative diadem,  the lumiere review, rigorous, the Temz review,  rulerless mag, and elsewhere.

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan

The Shores of Temptation

“…If
Persephone ‘returns’ there will be
one of two reasons:
 
either she was not dead or
she is being used
to support a fiction—”
 
— Louise Glück

To support a fiction, that death is
undead and sorrow not saddened,
that the Dolorosa did not cry.
 
When my mother meets a stranger,
she feeds them, so as not to rouse
suspicion. He did the same.
 
When I left my mother’s house,
I did die. A part of me left my girlhood,
came back a shattered piece of that girl,
the hymen breaking into a child
I would wear there.
 
But the pleasure was real. All the rest, fictitious.
 
When I came back to my mother’s house,
after the pleas of my mother to God
for me to come home, otherwise
winter would not cease to end, I
thought it was all dramatics.
 
You see, she couldn’t bear the thought
of losing me, and I couldn’t bear the thought
of being alive. I chose Death, for a reason.
 
When my mother sees me for the first time
upon my return, she sees what she bargained for,
not what she wanted to see.
 
Not the child, but the adult. Not the girl,
but the woman. Not the smile, but the laughter.
Not the daughter, but the wife.

And the Dolorosa cried tears of joy, and a little of sorrow.
And her answered prayer brought spring back to life.
And her tears did not freeze vainly.
 
And that first plea closed the gates of Hell,
Melting the ice, so that the fire underneath that burns,
keeps the hearth warm above, for the grateful.
 
And the hymen, broken, bore the fruit of temptation,
in the shores of tears, in the spring of desire.

---

Angela Gabrielle Fabunan is the author of The Sea That Beckoned (Platypus Press 2019) and Young Enough to Play (University of the Philippines Press 2022). She teaches Creative Writing at Silliman University. She currently lives in Dumaguete City, Philippines.

Noel Yu-Jen

World introduces herself (el problema con nosotras)

after Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski

thighs slick
with illusion
I birth              this bestiary
 
in it:
 
all my women
are gorgeous                fat
fábula
made flesh
 
Gloria
be their hips
this acreage expansive
 
expanding
with ghosts      other
round delicacies
 
my chest is a bruised
masterpiece
in geography —
 
bodies laid in perfect
filaments of Earth        none
to prey for
nor pray
upon
 
just oration / or / oración
crafting gold
 
our thigh-high
(female, traditional)
moon
 
history will not
reject this
love-making
 
only the fathers
 
(categorized: daughters)
who demand
(mandar)
 
take me &
take of me
 
for angels
their thousand-eyed
nipples
                        dripping their sweet
 
milk
upon my chest
 
do not deliver
(mandar) me
today

---

Noel Yu-Jen earned her B.A. at Princeton University, where she was awarded the Theodore H. Holmes ’51 and Bernice Holmes Poetry Prize. Her work can be found in diode poetry, The Best Teen Writing of 2016, and The Cadaverine, and she has attended workshops with The Adroit Journal, Winter Tangerine Review, and the Speakeasy Project. She is a June Poet and attended the 2022 Bucknell Seminar for Undergraduate Poets. She currently sits on the Editorial Board of One Minute Press, a pan-Asian & Asian diasporic literary organization with a focus on small handheld zine series.

Ann Kenny & Kirby Kenny

FACING

                  You  asked  me  a  question.
 
What do you have to say?
 
                  It’s  you.
                  Of  course  it’s  you.
 
You do it for you—
Don’t
Play.
 
                  I’d  be  screwed,  Sugar  Mama.
 
I throw up love
In the light.
 
                  So  show  me  your  dark.
 
Your incest
Love smiles.
 
See my thrashing heart.
It is proof we are different.
It busts the lie clean open—
 
She’s not another me.
 
Woman transfer money gone.
Sister, gone.
Mother, gone.

---

Twin sisters Ann Kenny and Kirby Kenny are writers and artists who are motivated to seek meaning through creative expression. Their work explores themes of confinement, redemption, and self-discovery. They juxtapose folklore with realism as a means of probing their world. Their work will appear in the first edition of Hell of Fame Magazine and a forthcoming issue of Rogue Agent Journal. Their debut collection, New Myths, will be available in early 2024

Eben E. B. Bein

Pistachio with the tiniest slit

If fireworks mid-eruption became plants
then my poems would be fireworks
which he would see if he ever read them but
he’s too busy just staying as he says
open to life. He’s bent on it
like while shelling pistachios he asks me
if I know the Chinese word for pistachio
                   开   心    果
then says kāi  xīn  guŏ.
Kāi means open. Xīn means heart.
He sets the pads of his fingers in the gap.
It snaps. Together it means open-hearted fruit.
He smiles, hands it to me
forgetting I don’t really like pistachios
I’m just trying to help. I just want him
to be happy and anyway I thought
that kāi xīn meant happy and he says yes
but there are many kinds of happy.
I toss it into the harvest bowl take another.
Nut goes put. Shells go clack.
I’m struggling. He takes it from me
opens with ease, reminds me he won’t be here
to open them for me if he goes back to Jakarta
and did I know there is a huge tree
in his backyard there that’s great for climbing?
Is it a pistachio tree I ask trying to wedge my nail
into the tiniest slit. I don’t know
he says. It hurts. The beds blanch under pressure.
I tell him he would know if he stayed
anywhere for more than a few years. He shrugs
and turns back to his nuts. Now I’ve fumbled it—
I could come visit. Do they have
Basking Sharks? I always wanted to know
how they swim with their mouths open so wide.
I don’t know he says without looking up
 
and suddenly    I can’t I’m     throwing it
into the clack bowl unopened      the screen door is     
the new spring    so strong     I can barely       
slam.        walking.               
 
 
The only thing open about him is his calendar.
My calendar is rainforest Fourth of July
fronds and tendrils willows crossettes waterfalls
dragons’ eggs flying fish chrysanthemums
peonies opening into every empty cell
like this glorious Red Maple I find myself under—
does he even know the kind of taproot
the kind of fire it takes
to open a canopy like this? I’ve never seen him
plant a damn thing. The one succulent
on his toilet tank is dusty. And plastic.
And made in Jakarta. Him
and his green dry heart and his bowl of shells
and his installing the screen door tube-y thing
I bought 2 years ago but couldn’t figure out—
yes the screen door slammed but
that doesn’t mean anything.
I can be open too, it’s just
the spring   I swear   so strong
like his fingers. Anyway this maple is
at the end of some couple’s driveway
and they must be very kāi xīn because
the trees have friends—daffodils, a mailbox
with the door left open.
I could stand here for centuries.
Take root.     Someone is walking toward me
 
and ugh they’re waving and I just … no. I turn
like this is my driveway turn like this
is my mailbox yes I’m just returning from
my mailbox with its mouth hanging open
past my daffodils, their lips a frilled Oh
and I can see him so clearly watching me
head for a house which is not my house
with his stupid kissable mouth hanging open
though not in judgment. That just isn’t his way.
He’s a Basking Shark.
He could take in the whole sea while swimming.

---

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws (Fauxmoir lit, 2023) is forthcoming and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection From the top of the sky about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com.

Kyla Houbolt

Appropriate Drowning Outfit

I'm not sure how to turn this life into a resume.
I don't write that kind of poetry.
I do notice that the cloud
has a bone missing and
I can relate to that. I'll be honest
and say I have learned only one word
of heron language and it may be
that I made it up. It's easy for me to do that
and I hear people lie a lot in resumes
but I can't, not without vomiting the truth
later on. Which defeats the whole purpose.
Meanwhile is a word I use too often.
It's because so much else is also happening
all the time, and I keep noticing it.
For example, the way I continue to, impossibly,
live. Paying close attention
to the wrong things. The boneless cloud.
The inscrutable heron. The abuse of sound.

---

Kyla Houbolt's chapbook, But Then I Thought, is forthcoming from Aboveground Press. Also forthcoming is chapbook Surviving Death, from Broken Spine Arts, in November, along with a re-release of the chapbook Dawn's Fool. The chapbook Tuned is currently available from CCCP Chapbooks, here. More of Kyla's work can be found on her linktree. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet.

Tohm Bakelas

rain

the rain. the
soft, soft rain.
falling down
from the
colorless sky.
falling down
onto every street,
onto everything.
 
and everything
everywhere,
grey and wet,
and filled with
soft sounds and
soft smells.
 
and darkness.
always present, 
always waiting 
for sundown.
 
and the rain. the
soft, soft rain.
still falling.
still.

---

Tohm Bakelas is a social worker in a psychiatric hospital. He was born in New Jersey, resides there, and will die there. His poems have been printed widely in journals, zines, and online publications all over the world.  He is the author of twenty-five chapbooks and several collections of poetry, including Cleaning the Gutters of Hell (Zeitgeist Press, 2023).  He is the editor of Between Shadows Press.

Nate Maxson

Centuryfade Haibun

The snapshot, instant polaroid, of a smiling, rail thin child: gender indeterminate, is dated in the corner of the frame in old-digital red as 12/31/99, unclear if that was the day or if someone forgot to set the clock, at 11 years old I learned what entropy was, don’t forget to set your clocks back at midnight

The greenhouses that grow, all the roses for the supermarkets, just in time for Mothers Day
And the smoke that follows you and clings to your clothes, from a campfire, decades ago

---

Nate Maxson is a writer and performance artist. The author of several collections of poetry including Maps To The Vanishing which is available now from Finishing Line Press. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico

Robby Auld

PSYCHIC

The psychic asks my friend if I plan to kill myself.

She misgenders me and gives the wrong birthday
            but still I listen to the recording.
 
My friend tells the psychic I did at an earlier
time, which is true, and tells me when she plays
the recording of the reading that she was mainly
            thinking of my poems.
 
I have to look my friend in the eyes and say,
            I’m not going to kill myself.
 
Strangely I love being alive,
            foolishly,         fleetingly.
 
The psychic says he senses a heaviness in me,
which I feel too, driving along the dark night lake.
 
I sense its denseness, the way it absorbs
moonlight, could absorb me. I want to
 
swallow it, be swallowed, still want
to be, alive in the belly the body
 
of water that becomes everything,
            that everything becomes.
 
Nothing can take that from me, I tell
the psychic, this poem, my life.
 
I will meet Nothing when it comes,
            but until–

---

Robby Auld is a writer living in Waltham, MA. Their poems appear or are forthcoming in the lickety~split and BULLSHIT LIT. Find them on Instagram @heartthrobby666 and on Twitter @robbyauld.

Dylan Webster

TUESDAY TIME

A northern highway spills south
Like a black tongue down the mountain,
Clouds of steel hover low like dirigibles of old,
And I am absurdly driving at a stop.
I will not make it on time
Repeats in a perpetual loop,
I realize time means nothing and everything —
Invisible and oppressive, alluring and impersonal.
To my right a rapid skeleton of apartments
Is being sutured and sewn together
By reflective men in rock-hard white helmets.
A ridiculous crane hilariously hurls
Life-ending weight rapidly, swinging acrobatics
Above our jammed, highway heads.
I gaze down this line of immobilized cars
Driven by frenzied people in a hurry,
Trying to be on time,
Trapped in time already past.
And the crane swivels again.

---

Dylan Webster lives and writes in the sweltering heat of Phoenix, Arizona. He is the author of the poetry collection Dislocated (Quillkeepers Press, 2022). His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Amethyst Review, The Cannon’s Mouth, The Dillydoun Review, and The Chamber Magazine.

Reuben Gelley Newman

Cello Song

I’m on a dwarf planet, in a hive of sound and gravity,
the lush architecture of a cello, strings rustling softly
against the stars, thick with sixteenth notes, sweet
 
honey of bees, and I’ve freed myself from the real world,
the boys I’ve loved are comets flashing by, bursting
into my memory, disappearing into orbits so far
 
I can barely see, but then I’m whiplashed by a cloud
of deceptive chords, strung along by a boy who never
loved me back. Take me, I want to break into shards
of varnished maple, I want to be an exploding cello, my love
 
too large for its chamber. I want the strings to fly off
the fingerboard, the fingerboard to break off the neck,
the neck to spin off the body, a love unheard of,
a love that hurts to be heard.

---

Reuben Gelley Newman (he/him) is a writer, musician, and library worker based in Brooklyn, NY. His poems have appeared in diode, The Fairy Tale Review, The Journal, Alien Magazine, Baltimore Review, and elsewhere. A Content Editor for The Adroit Journal and a Co-Editor for Couplet Poetry, he’s on Instagram and Twitter @joustingsnail.

Jessica Nirvana Ram

Flight Risk

I wanted a flock of hummingbirds to burst
through my skin, threaten to undo me.
But when he kissed me it was only flesh,
 
tentative lips & a hand to cheek, hand to waist,
an easy caress, like stroking a flower petal. I fluttered
when he kissed my thigh, bit my tongue instead of asking
 
for more. Memorized ceiling patterns when he burrowed
between my legs. & yes, there was that tight heat, that coil
in my lower stomach pulled taut before unspooling.
 
& it was all just fine, bodies moving like bodies are told
to move. He was kind & we laughed between kisses
when he struggled with my bra, an intimacy I’ve run from
 
since the last heartbreak. I didn’t think I could have it again,
even if only this once. This isn’t like me, to unfurl for a man
so soon. I didn’t think I could do it, didn’t think I wanted it.
 
But it was nice to be wanted. To see desire pooled in his irises
when he looked up at me. I could almost touch the clouds
& for a moment, I swear, there were wings.

---

Jessica Nirvana Ram is an Indo-Guyanese poet and essayist. She received her MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and her BA from Susquehanna University. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Hayden's Ferry Review, Honey Literary, Chicago Quarterly, and Prairie Schooner, among others. You can find her on Twitter @jessnirvanapoet.

Jamey Temple

The couple asks how they can afford adoption

I know what they want me to say:  The money will come.
Trust and it will happen.
 
I want to say, Picture this: Babies lined up,
dressed in white
 
K-numbers hang off their hats
like price tags.
 
To protect privacy, the agency says,
Black out
 
these numbers, black out their faces.
I curled up
 
inside the picture. I stayed within
the lines.
 
I wanted. So I believed: God
would make it right
 
But nothing was right in country.  There,
Min-su had a family.
 
There, a foster mother who crouched to the ground,
sang his favorite songs. 
 
There, Min-su giggled, kicked his feet.
I smelled funny, talked funny,
 
knew none of the right songs.  In country, I kidnapped
my son. I took
 
a screaming child from his mother, strapped him
to my chest, hurried
 
away thinking, Don’t look back.  I was naïve,
white—
 
Love covers a multitude of sins.  All you need
is love, right?
 
No matter how hard I try, my hands won’t come clean. 
I hear myself say, It’s the best thing
 
that ever happened to me.

---

Jamey Temple is a writer and professor who teaches English at University of the Cumberlands in Eastern Kentucky. Her poetry and prose have been included in several publications such as River Teeth, Rattle, Appalachian Review, Bending Genres, and Still. She was named finalist in Fourth Genre’s 2022 Multimedia Essay Prize and finalist for Newfound Journal’s Prose Prize in 2016. You can read more of her published work through her website (jameytemple.com).

Miah Arnold

My Mother Was a Tele-skate Girl

In the shady pink of a growling dog’s throat  
beneath teeth like stalactites: I was born and banished 
between two thumps of a tail.
Adopted out at birth,
my new folks adored me
though                I never softened
their families, Presbyterians perturbed
by a crow-haired infant, filthy
with strangers’ blood.
 
Later in life aunties felt shame admitting
they'd never picked me up when I cried,
they hadn’t dared
                  touch me.
 But my mother held me.
My mother was
a tele-skate girl who worked night shifts at Ma Bell
on roller skates, flashing
from one end         of the switchboard
to the other, connecting people.
This is my favorite memory of her,
though it happened                 long before
my birth, before my father, before
his cancer and his dying while
I sat alone
on the hospital lawn,
not yet six.
 
Her cancer
sunk 
into soft pink spots, first inhabited by
chewing tobacco.           Doctors planted
uranium seeds beneath her
tongue. Her jaw
disintegrated.
She’d had time to tell me
almost nothing.               They cut
my mother’s tongue out, her cooking
got lousy   I never heard her voice again, my mother’s
             voice, no
jokes, no help with homework.
 
She sent me her photo 
when I was stuck
in Vietnam, she was grinning wide
in a pretty grey dress, one hand
on the wheel of a    white convertible
a friend let her pretend was ours,        the other clutching
a bottle of Vodka I knew
belonged to us.

---

Miah Arnold wrote the novel Sweet Land of Bigamy, the 2014 Best American Essay selection “You Owe Me,” and she is finishing up a book of poetry. Though raised in rural Utah, she has lived in Houston, Texas, for the last thirty years. She is the founder and principal of Grackle and Grackle Writing Workshops, where she makes it possible for anybody who wants to take a writing class to take one with the best teaching writers from Houston and around the country.

Tatiana Bell

hairy

a new strand protrudes            from my once smooth skin. an uninvited       wildflower.

i was getting introduced         to my new body-         one that left a soreness over my breast and malodor behind arms.

i snuck            tweezers from mother’s beauty bag

& attempted to pluck away each new insecurity.       unrooting them like wild onions in a once clear yard.                       mother hid razors from me because i was too young

innocence shouldn’t be embarrassing.

embarassed was the girl in the corner of the locker room.     vigilant- of every eye.

glancing- glaring        at every body to compare. noting brassier hues                                             & guessing their cost             jaundiced

of the sunshine haired girls because gold                   on their skin looked lovely-  like decorative cactus protecting their fruit

i noticed i was trapped in never ending                      awkwardness

& black body hair & soon blooded garments

another part of life to hide                  another part of newness

a commencement of questions

 & longing for             her before        her

---

Tatiana Bell (she/her), is currently an undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina Wilmington studying creative writing.

Holly Day

I Search the Mirror for TragedY

flesh moves toward you as if summoned, and here, far from
fairy tale castles and big screen love
I am waiting by the telephone, in the dark--
one last pastel-colored cocktail and she is yours
 
she will be. she glides through the walls of
thinking, lying here, rotting from hollow places
I am begging for just one last bite from you for
ever, or just tonight, whatever you decide my role will be
in the days before I become a rotting corpse
plow me under.
 
waiting by the telephone, in the dark, in
far away, I know exactly what you are
in our bed, I am always waiting for you
you’ve finally caught her, across the room, promises
I am in our bed, always waiting for you.

---

Holly Day’s writing has recently appeared in Analog SF, The Hong Kong Review, and Appalachian Journal, and her hobbies include kicking and screaming at vending machines.

Lucas Peel

ALL SCIENCE BEGINS AS HIPPIE SHIT

or vice versa.  Who says
the heavens aren’t codependent?
Strange growth, falsefruit;
a calligraphy of stars.  Too much
beer and too many pea plants. 
We have nothing but time. 
X becomes Y and parabolas
a field into multitudes.
The continents inch ever so gently
towards loneliness. 
Mother, ever the poet, named the dirt
which sprouted ribs then cities
and steam and skyholes. 
What is inevitability but burning? 
Boolean, a teapot screams in absolution.
In the dead of winter you boil your skin
into a bouquet of roses
and I learn there is something sacred
about the freeze;  dawn of flesh
over valleyed palm.  You become
yod become glide become the in-between
of sound.  All you can expect from
shattered glass is blood, bifurcation,
chimneysteam in the snowstorm. 
They say algebra is the study of absence.  
They say it takes approximately 8 minutes
for the photons emitted by the sun to reach us; 
They say sometimes we can’t actually see the planet,
we just sense its relationship with its star.
Every tragedy becomes more beautiful
with distance.  See: shipwreck, sea glass,
artificial reef.   What is solace
but an endless drink? Nothing ever ends
in a gasp of light but longfall, detritus,
some drunk asshole looks at the sky
and asks, what about them?

---

Lucas Peel is a _______________ based in Honolulu, Hawai'i.  Sometimes he makes bird noises @lookchrlz.

Lucy Loftus

Elephant Graveyard

the gathering of the end to itself
 
found;
the proper scope of air and light
/ to fill with
a celebration of birds
 
and do elephants,  in their long slow dreams
scent a hazy polestar 
not to know the place / but just the shadows it would cast
 
found.
the plain packed earth
to drumskin catch
that first breath to last momentum
thrown off a car-wreck’d life
 
gnash and flare, the wheels screech.
but / the spin goes ever on
            the spin the spin the spin the spin
 
                         goes vwhooming into earth
                         goes corkscrewing into air like smoke,
                                  around which vultures carousel
 
      and emphasize
           that certain slant of sunlight / in late afternoon
      so clear that you could swear / you see the air,
      and all the light inside it
      like yellow plates of glass
 
a softly burning bedsheet / strewn across the room
 
which clarifies the contours that it kisses
of the floorboards, the old chair,
as if they were
for the-first-real-time-alive
 
found (thump)
clear light like a knife
that in its shaft
cuts through the foamy rumors of the world
to incandescent bones beneath
that ring like tuning forks when struck
 
we go stumbling onto fleet cathedrals
of tented light unfolding ordinary rooms
 
dirt a death has swelled with blood
air a life has sharpened with last looks
 
and if you / are to die in bed
or in this kitchen, years from now,
is your house coiled round you
lovely with anticipations
 
for were there any other perfect nights of your silhouette
that you sat at kitchen table
with the overhead the only light on in the whole house
the first cool autumn winds / rattling outside
and a warm mug held in both your hands
            (steam spinning up into the light)
 
these premonitions of your dying / pose / the moments
bending time like light in water
to gift you glimpses of that room
as last it ever was
 
(for [you] were never quite so beautiful
as the last time that i saw [you])
 
wreathed soft
     in holy fire / of goodbye

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Lucy Loftus lives on the foggy south coast of Massachusetts and can often be found wandering around graveyards there. She doesn't bite, hard.

Flower Conroy

Deer(est)

it’s a waste to save the good towels. the chocolate covered cherry. who doesn’t think they’ve time mortal aplenty? i’m saying i’m letting go by holding on i’m following my own mourning ritual of suspended state room & open burial. people also ask what do you mean by emptiness what does thudded mean what is a farand? instead of appointed departure ensconced in incense & afternoon candlelight—i wished lucy wouldn’t wake to disappear aslumber to’ve portaled vouchsafe on pink clouds over the prism bridge into animal heaven— that’d i’d not have to make this decision. v mishearing lack of instead of lap of love—it was valentine’s day everything twisted. —& this on the heels of another grief & so in no mood i said to lexi growling showing teeth don’t make me tell the vet you’re lucy. unlike the tissue wrapped finch something midnight scavenged i mean to keep her frame—outline of vertebrae nearing surface as if a rising from within no more than a rag i cradled. days later i visit the magnolia that shades the kennel coffer. first cut in the cooler weather & Lucilia cuprina acrawl, sheep-strike the fallen. sky to tomb now crowned in camellias—socket-sunken, nose lifelike but not wet. i’m waiting for piano & clover, for the adrift to stir in the slightest—the way i (& dana gay) (& v) hallucinated beloved kiki in her casket mirage as if stillbreathing

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LGBTQ+ artist, NEA and MacDowell Fellow, and former Key West Poet Laureate, Flower Conroy’s books include “Snake Breaking Medusa Disorder,” “A Sentimental Hairpin" and “Greenest Grass” (winner of the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize, forthcoming 2022). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in New England Review, American Literary Review, The Yale Review and elsewhere.