K.R. Morrison

Red

After a bottle of merlot in my living room
i meet a woman who talked a man out of raping her.
 
            She says she said to him
 
                        I dare you.
                      In days, I’ll have you dead.
 
i pictured her in that moment –
 
            her hair, wild, blowing into snakes
            eyes two mercurial cressets
            her warning brutal like as his urges
 
                        It’ll be slow.      
 
She says she said.
 
                        Forensic.           Painful.
 
She’s annoyed the wine is gone.
She looks around for something red
tells me that upon marking her words
 
            his festering itch for conquest shed.
 
            No moral arousal on his end
            just fearful, full of her
            instead, fear full
 
            of grenades possessed
            by survivor riots, her warnings
stir within him
 
            dry bone dread.
            From his breath, he smells
            his sour spirit, his toxic head.
 
Her story relaxes me.
i drift into wondering –
 
            Where does justice go
            When assaults surpass 12-hour clocks.
            When safety visits, where do wounds rest?
 
i retreat, into girl pure, protected.
Together, we tuck the blood to bed.


Since the pandemic, K.R. Morrison has been searching for mermaids in a sea town in Southern California, often returning to the Bay Area for her poetry nests and to play drums for two all-female fronted rock bands – Harriot and Unicröne.  Morrison is a Pushcart Nominee for her poem, “Her Altar” and still enjoys readings and podcasts for Cauldrons, her first poetry collection published by Paper Press. Alongside years spent as a writer, activist, and musician, K.R. spent 17 years as a sea captain for the teens – using creative writing and books, she worked with countless students at Galileo High School in San Francisco, earning the name “Mama Mo” with many who left her classroom armed with writing and tools for healing. Morrison continues her work in education through the juvenile hall system and online teaching. These days, Morrison drowns in an abyss of new poems that will hopefully, take the form of three separate manuscripts. 

Phil Goldstein

Speechless

I tried to spell it out in my mind, one letter at a time:
n-o-t-h-i-n-g.
 
It was nothing, just touching.
This is what brothers do, this is what families do.
 
I was the moon overheard — wordless and bright.
I was the forest floor — alive and unseen. 
 
Can an eleven-year-old accurately describe an entire planet
splitting apart at the seams?
 
Earthbound, rooted, I was the maple burning
outside our parents’ bedroom window.

It doesn’t matter if this was the second time or
the eighth. 

It doesn’t matter what amount I remember.
I remember enough.
 
And I knew enough about gravity, even at that age,
not to breathe our reality into being outside that room. 


Phil Goldstein's debut poetry collection, How to Bury a Boy at Sea, which reckons with the trauma of child sexual abuse from the male perspective, was published by Stillhouse Press in April 2022. His poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net award and has appeared in South Florida Poetry Journal, The Laurel Review, Rust+Moth, Moist Poetry Journal, Two Peach, The Indianapolis Review, Awakened Voices and elsewhere. He currently lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and animals: a dog named Brenna, and two cats, Grady and Princess.

Sean Woodard

Solar Gold


Beyond thought,
love exists in the jungle.
Carnivorous plants swallow
 
the vast egg of lukewarm entrails.
Inscriptions speak secret terror,
eclipse earnest action.
 
My rite is a purifier of voices,
a canticle of blood woven
by an accursed heart.
 
I exorcise the liturgy
of dissonant love.
Centuries fall upon me.
 
I deepen myself in myself.
Unintelligible words trample God,
cornerstone of the earth.
 

Source: Lispector, Clarice. Água Viva. 1973. Translated by Stefan Tobler, New Directions, 2012, pp. 34-35.


Sean Woodard is an English PhD student at University of Texas at Arlington. He also serves as the Film Editor for Drunk Monkeys. His fiction and poetry has been featured in Screenshot Lit, Black Poppy Review, South Broadway Ghost Society, and NonBinary Review,  among other publications.

Taylor Nicole S.

[blackout in ‘07]

how strange my neighbors are
when darkness is prescribed to them
like friendly lobotomies. a blackout and i’m sitting
on the backrest of a brown couch
denting with the weight of me and the municipal
red bowl housed between my thighs. cyanide stones roll right
against our inner cheeks. grandpa spits
and digs around in my lap for new fruit
as i strain my neck to see outside
to see Laura.
 
Laura is allergic to drupes, and i cringe
at the thought of her
smelling their sweetness on my breath. her beltless
father               shoo                from my house, the front door a cathedral confessional:
hold my hand this claw hoof humane, he says, but
Laura is deaf
to his war sounds tonight. i study the nuclear
families in the midnight of the living
room.
 
i am limestone and can’t move—the discolored cushions and i conjoined twins
with no plans for surgery. Laura escapes
heat, feet skipping over feet, staining her soles
in the bruised stars of precious asphalt. i am fine
with paralysis.
 
bitters, onion skins, scents returning to my scrunching nose.
grandpa leans over me, his palm a thermostat, flat to the window
checking the temperature. his hand is cold and
solid against my cheek. the ache for Laura is feverous, one explored
only in Circadian rhythm, only in shadowed
blackout.
 
grandma stole the cherries for me, and i wonder why:
why the unlawful gesture that
she hates me? she made me
a walking repellent— i Laura’s living,
breathing anaphylactic shock.
 
when august is 9 o’clock, the purgatorial street
hears the final whispers of sneakers and slippers and bare feet
tracking in with them a heat you can reach out, touch,
slice for keeps. i am the image
of driftwood in my stare at still
wings of a broken ceiling fan. i pray in lucid dreaming
for sound, a static loud enough to mask
the gagging of dry-heaves
yielding whole stone fruits
hear them plop! in toilet water.           
 
i won’t stop
trying to flush her father my family away,
down a sewer pipeline
 
a telephone line to her room
the purged cherries a love letter:
 
L—
still haven’t found a way to remove
the veil
our families hung in solidarity. they are anti-us.
i know you’re hurting.
i’m sorry.


Taylor Nicole S. is a poetry writer born and raised in Queens, New York. A writing and English Literature tutor at St. Joseph’s University. At this same university, Taylor earned a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature and Sociology, and is currently a first-year graduate student at The Writer’s Foundry studying poetry

Mark D. Bennion

Year of the Rabbit

For my brother and son

I’ve seen them dash
through the paint chipped slats
of our backyard fence. They offer
 
the same nose-twitching
silence and definitive pause at 10 am
or 3 in the afternoon. You’ve seen them
 
raise their ears and look
as if they’re one hop away
from finding or finishing a meal.
 
Aside from PT Barnum furry
and county-fair cute, they haven’t darkened
the yard until news of our son’s
 
impending arrival—three dozen years
since my brother showed up
in the Wisconsin humidity, a wide open maw.
 
They say rabbits are introverted,
artistic, song-for-hire creative. They make
good therapists or administrators.
 
GQ stylish and cup of cocoa kind,
they opt out of the spotlights
for a backstage pass with headset
 
and one hand on the pulleys. I’d like
to speak for either one of you,
claim you both popped out
 
of the hare-like mold, see you
dash next to one another in the Chinese
zodiac cycle, and play the peacemaker
 
at the next family game of Scrabble.
What I can say, though, is that you’re both
decisive—keen for the scissor-kick
 
hungers of the body, aware of who walks in
the front door and what it might take
to make them walk out.


Mark D. Bennion hails from the Upper Snake River Valley. His most recent collection is Beneath the Falls: poems. He and his wife, Kristine, are trying to figure out how to parent two adult children, two teenagers, and one tween. They welcome your advice.

Greg Kosmicki

What I was doing at the time

I was standing by a pump at a gas station in Dodge City and a woman screamed at a man in Spanish.
I was listening to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth and thought of my sister who first played it for me.
I was looking out the window to watch a Downy woodpecker.
I was wasting time looking at a blank TV screen.
I was thinking about the concept of wasting time.
I was watching a bird take off and saw it piss as it flew away.
I was writing something down about a time I remembered in 1967.
I was watching TV and saw the President who was lying.
I was holding my grandchild just after he was born and our daughter was weeping.
I was getting into a car to take Debbie to the hospital.
I was putting on a winter coat to walk to the bus for work.
I was shooting a shotgun at my first pheasant.
I was smiling at my brother when he visited from college.
I was sitting in a chair crying when I thought of him.
I was walking in a pasture near some black cows that looked at me with interest.
I was saying goodbye to my parents when we moved away.
I was wincing when the doctor told me it was my appendix causing the trouble.
I was holding my mother in the recovery room.
I was sitting on a table talking with friends over beer.
I was walking up the stairs to get to the attic.
I was talking on the phone about the next peace conference.
I was looking up a name of a guy who could help.
I was standing in the bathroom looking at my hair in the mirror.
I was looking for something in an old shoebox.
I was picking up my grandson from school.
I was dusting off a chair and watching the motes in the morning sun.
I was asking a question when the cop cut me off.
I was watching a man beg but I did not make eye contact.
I was trying to forget that the next day I saw him.
I was listening to a woman talk about civil rights.
I was trying to hear something but I went back to sleep.
I was looking at a sign but I was still turned around.
I was holding hands with you when we crossed the bridge.
I was trying to tell you something.


Greg Kosmicki is the author of 8 chapbooks and 6 books of poems. His most recent collection, We Eat the Earth was published by WSC Press in November, 2022. His previous collection, It's As Good Here as it Gets Anywhere, from Logan House, was a finalist for the 2017 High Plains Book award.

Vivian Wright

Aristocracy

I am not a woman who was made for man.
Not carefully grown or dutifully kept,
            not dutifully kept like those who were bred.
            Who whispered so as not to shout,
who whispered so they would not disturb man.
My voice echoed off the classroom walls when I spoke.
            I spoke with my echoes, for no one else would.  
On rare occasion was I seen clearly.
On common occasion was I seen barely.
Never did they dare touch the thought of me;
The thought of me was but a nightmare.
            Ladies did not wish to taint themselves with me.
Ladies did not wish to scare off men, like me. 
For I am not a woman who was made for man.


Vivian Wright is a 19 year old English Education student at Misericordia University.

Ruth Towne

Deer Receive the Ash

Lent arrives, and the deer fast
their own antlers. At dusk,
at dawn, they graze buds
of clover. Hollow honeycomb
dense as bone sops oxygen
and blood below the fabric skin.
But the antler is a false bone.
 
The deer, gentle as prayers
in the open field, drape
sackcloth across their faces,
velvet dry as ash.


Ruth Towne is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program. Her work has recently appeared in Inlandia Literary Journal; WOMEN. LIFE., a special issue of Beyond Words Literary Magazine; and Monsoons: A Collection of Poetry by Poet’s Choice Publishing. She has forthcoming publications with Black Spot Books, NiftyLit, and Drunk Monkeys.

Olivia Lehnert

Sodom & Gomorrah & Me

I imagine the final seconds of Lot’s wife. 
The godhead infesting her body, setting fire to
her molecules and fanning it. The inside of a woman 
eviscerated by an angel while her daughters watch.
The inside of a woman granulated and then dissolved. 
The inside of a woman as an altar for which to practice 
obeisance. For which to sacrifice bulls and cows and 
chickens and women and girls. Salt flooding her central 
nervous system as she watches from above, floating over 
the body that is no longer her own and watching it fall away. 
Witnessing her own exodus, one crystal at a time, on an 
unforgiving desert wind blowing mercilessly through Israel. 


Olivia Lehnert is a 22 year old graduate student living and studying social work in Chicago, Illinois. She has a passion for poetry and pursues it privately in her own time

Mason Hayes

The Most Perfect Old Fashioned

I was piecing together the glass I threw
when your face appeared in the window.
My hands were red, the floor streaked
with suppressed illness, sadness
to be ashamed of. I stayed sitting
as you tried the door, the bell, knocked.
We’ll get you help, your words frosted.
I riposted, I’ll get you a new drink.
I fixed you the most perfect old fashioned,
poured it down the front of my dress,
then
       lit it
              on
                  fire.


Mason Hayes, originally from Los Angeles, holds a Bachelor's in English from Oklahoma State University, a Master's in Philosophy of Ethics, Law, and Politics from University of Nevada, Reno, and currently works at Utah State University. You can find more of her work in Clarion and Zaum.

Carrie Moniz

Kiss me

like your back kissed the concrete
the night the ladder slipped
while you were breaking into your house. 
As your body floated away
from the eaves, you noted the abundance
of leaf-muck near the downspout, the moss,
before the earth called you down. Kiss me
like the dove kissed the bedroom window
as she passed through. Lie down with me
beside her on my grandmother’s quilt,
glittering like stars, with glass 
and blood-mist. Kiss me
back into a girl with redwood splinters in her feet.
Kiss them up through the skin
like the lips of a fish, breaking the surface
of a pond, in its final weeks
before the earth calls it down. And I will kiss you
like the last click of ice, locking the pond for winter.


Carrie Moniz is a poet, Deadhead, nature lover, and teacher. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Superstition Review, Third Wednesday, Read America(s): An Anthology, and elsewhere. She loves dogs and hummingbirds, and is San Francisco-adjacent.

Amy Snodgrass

Black Hole: A Poem to my Future Self

Face down on the grass, I think of you. Face down on the grass, hands grasping
at roots and stones, I know you exist. Surrounded here by this invisible
 
collapsing light, I love imagining you. I will call you Rocío, the sparkling dew,
and I trust you will be here at the end of this erratic grief-filled night.
 
The point of a blade of grass tickles my cheek, pulling me back from the deeply held dust.
Light can’t escape and yet I feel warmth wrapping me. Distrustful, I wonder:
 
How something so soft, from something so sharp? How such comfort from such utter dark?
 
Oh, do you see? Do you see what I do? I receive love and question it.
I am offered glowing caresses and I doubt them, lying face down on these blades.
 
But, for you, I roll over. I wipe dirt and damp pebbles from my arms.
I need to know you understand what I am speaking, out and through the air:
 
the earth and the universe hold you in between, the now becomes what was.
 
Do not expect, as I expect, the blades to slice. Do not believe
you deserve to be burned. Believe instead the truth: the light
 
belongs to you. If you hear me, I can hold on and wait, wait
as the black hole evaporates, patiently releasing itself
 
into shining droplets of you.


Amy Snodgrass eats a lot of Dove dark chocolate. She is from St. Louis, Missouri, lives in Costa Rica, and is inspired by her two children.  Her work has been published in one sentence poems and was longlisted for the 2022 Fish Publishing Poetry Prize. She is an MFA candidate at the University of New Orleans. She offers accessible-to-all poetry-based classes and individual tutoring through her website: linesofbreath.com

Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

Whatever Crime


Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Gulf Coast Journal, Salamander Magazine, South Dakota Review, Plume Poetry Journal, The Texas Observer, PANK, Four Way Review, Harpur Palate, and Passages North, among others. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College's MFA program, Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal.

Jane Zwart

The Doubters’ Bench

I was not the only one
to open her eyes
when our reverend prayed
 
for the souls
on the doubters’ bench.
I should not speak
 
for the others:
maybe they always prayed
like that, awake
 
and rubbernecking. Maybe
I craned alone
to see which pew
 
was reserved for the souls—
hot water bottles,
raisined balloons—
 
filled with reservations.
Why I imagined skeptics’ souls
that way, without
 
their pudgy armor, gracing
church naked, not
wearing round shoulders,
 
I don’t know.
As if we were not all bowed
around something.
 
As if we were not each intent
on the wedges of bench
between our knees. I should not
 
speak for the others.
I should say: Intent on the bench
between my knees,
 
having calculated whom
the sanctuary lights
would impale falling, I felt
 
safer. I felt a familiar plum,
warm as a blood clot,
blush inside my skin suit.


Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. In addition, she is the co-editor of book reviews for Plume; her own reviews have been published there and in The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Robert Carr

The Breathing

the sound of respiration / hot air through oak leaves / though she’s been / for months / garden ash in the root ball of a pink hydrangea / her tennis net strains toward the familiar / a longer line across the lawn / than when she sat beside me / the hypnotic of that small machine / tsss ah / tsss ah / hydraulic wheeze / a jolt on every train / the hiss of steam / a single café latte / a sizzle in every scrambled pour / her empty seat / the flushing suck of every airplane loo/ the persistence of her plastic bag / blowing sour on my neck / i’m coughing days / departures / as bubbles blow into an unsettled gut / tsss ah / tsss ah / the stems of her watery shrub / sealed / cocooned / where even the garden hose / is on a timer


Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published by Indolent Books, and The Unbuttoned Eye, from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in The Chestnut Review, On the Seawall, Sixth Finch and Tar River Poetry. He is a 2022 artist residency recipient at Monson Arts and lives in Maine.

ry downey

-enter the void-

Do you remember when we watched
that movie about death and sex
and reincarnation? The lights above
my bed were low and purple
as were we, aliens together in the world
as the ketamine took us through fabric
and I put my head underneath
your crop top and tasted the metal
in your nipples and warmed it
with my mouth.
 
I forget how many times I heard you
say God's name or how many times
I wakened your breath as I knew you
again anew. Your eyes opened, closed,
and opened again at me, lights
in the purple night, satellites
finding me again.
The metal in your dimples winked
with your heart colored grin
until I needed it against mine.
 
Oblivion was us, swimming in the void.
How many times did we return,
I didn't know this was going to happen,
I recall you saying some time before
under a ceiling of red light
and how did I find you that first night
in the house of lights and fingers
and at not quite just the right time.
I remember you falling in love with me,
just a little bit and I had your eyes
in the gloves on my hand.
 
How do I get back to the place
only existing in memory. Recycled
reality calls me and I wonder
if I will see you again somewhere
for the first time.


ry downey is a pushcart prize nominated poet and lifelong resident of the pacific northwest. He has published two books, flowers leaning toward the sun and the dinosaurs are orange in seattle and is now in the stages of compiling his third. He likes trees, cats, clouds, and walking around finding different places to sit.

Joe Nasta

Freemans


The bar was decorated
with taxidermy:
birds,
 
that regal blue heron
splayed above
eye level,
 
the buck severed at
the neck, his
antlers
 
dulled down into gaudy
ornaments. What
past?
 
There was nothing left
to be had
there.
 
The man with a white line
on his left hand. What
present?
 
A possum's white nose
behind his lover's
ear
 
next to his fingers
on her silky
shoulder.
 
Cocktail shaker ice
sounds like
gravel
 
crunching underfoot
like a laugh
across
 
the room, a table,
the years. So
natural,
 
yet missing light
behind the
eyes.
 
There is too much
death. What's
one more?
 
The woman in silk
got up and
left.
 
And as for us and
the birds, we
played
 
dead. It was over before
our drinks arrived
anyway.


Joe Nasta (ze/zir) is a queer multimodal artist and writer who works in Seattle and writes love poems. Ze is one half of the art and poetry collective Eat Yr Manhood, head curator of Stone Pacific Zine, and a member of the team at Voice Lux Press. Zir work has been published in The Rumpus, Occulum, Peach Mag, dream boy book club, and others. Zir first book I want you to feel ugly, too was released as a handmade limited edition in 2021. Find Joe on Instagram as @jaynasty77 and @roflcoptermcgee.

Samuel Strathman

Steamed Sticky Rice

After the film “Branded to Kill” (1967)

sometimes the only way
to steady a tremor
is the smell
of steamed sticky rice
 
heat wafting from it
like a mini sauna
 
dark thoughts dissipate
in the company
of such a delight
sun cutting through brain fog
 
 
*
 
there is nothing quite like
cradling a tub
of freshly steamed rice
in the morning
and before bed
 
eating it with the relish
only a rice pervert
can muster
the texture and flavor
incomparable
 
it’s better than medicine
which has things in it
that we do not know
 
whereas rice has all the essential ingredients
for a happy stomach
and mind
 
 
*
 
a shot of steamed rice
heals better than a shot
of anything else
 
anything else suffocates
makes me forget
what’s worth remembering
 
I must remember
good memories are the rice
that sits in the soup
richening with time
 
same recipe
superior results
shackles of the mind lifted
by carb goodness
 
 
*
 
I’ve been resurrected
in the name
of the number one comfort food
all other foods
are pesticide this
and preservative that
 
while rice maintains
its luster and purity
cultivated finer
than heaven’s garden
 
and although it may seem
like a joke
it is not
 
steamed rice is sanctuary
it is what bind us
 sticky
        shiny
               resplendent
 
*
 
and when there is no rice
not even in the rice shop
all that is left
is desire


Samuel Strathman (he/him) is a writer, poet, visual artist, and author. Some of his work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Quilliad, steel incisors, above/ground press, and other publications. His debut poetry collection, Omnishambles is forthcoming with Ice Floe Press (2023).