Tiffany Wu

镜

She asks what fucking sounds like
in Chinese and I choose
my words carefully, leave out the
ones I gouged from the mouths
of men, the sounds I learnt taming
the tongue, tuning my throat
to his want. How I sunk my teeth into
this language and woke with its shirt
balled up in my mouth.              How I made a ritual
of turning every mirror face-down,
refusing to see the noises crawl
out of me. But now, only because
she is asking, but also because she has sworn
off futures and I am desperate
to prolong this new, loud
softness and the only thing
I still worship in this
country is its centuries of singing
wives, I tell her
about the sound mirrors
make when polished down
to the bone. I leave one
on the edge to watch her eyes
meet mine, our reflections
taunting the moon. Come
morning, it’s shattered
by the bed, a million
small suns. I reach wrist-deep
into the shards. I finger
for a future, begging it to come.



* In ancient China, 磨镜, “polishing mirrors,” was a euphemism for lesbian sex.

Tiffany Wu is from Shanghai and Singapore. Her poetry has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Sine Theta Magazine, The Offing, Pigeon Pages, and elsewhere. A recent graduate of Williams College, she currently studies History of Art at Cambridge.

Eleanor Colligan

unMuse

I wake.
where your hands
have strayed
is stained
with light. Still,
the frozen lake inside me
remains. I will not
turn you into a god—
Not even
if you took an axe to it,
Not even
if you asked for it.
No, No—we’ve enough
of those. Light blooms
around us regardless,
unfurls and rises
like a ghost.

Eleanor Colligan is from the Midwest and currently based in NYC. She has a degree in statistics and is a reader for ONLY POEMS, Muzzle Magazine, and the Triquarterly Review. You can find more of her @pythonprince on Instagram and theestateofeleanorcolligan.hotglue.me 

Chase Cate

broken sestina

my doctor diagnoses me with terminal futurity; 
            which I name amalgam         that bright alive thing;
after those leaden hands
           
after lead hands
            diagnosis; after diagnosis
desperation for your hands     reaching
           
reaching, diagnosis ties my hands
            behind my back so that I can’t;
reach out for you         silly this way
 
to comfort diagnosis I read to it
            I read to it many poems about confusion
this makes it                feel; seen
 
feelings seen, with eyes always in; backwards
          the body keeping score
me, begging for the mercy rule
 
merciful paradox  of my inability             to see;
                   the contents of this weight    I feel between
the blades of my shoulders, pinching me together like wings on a fly
 
weight is the foundation of      this; being
            being is a kind of weight
demanding there is something still      to be said;
 
so much to be said         about naming
            which references a kind of nostalgia;
for a pain that has moved on
 
a pain that has moved on
            is an     overture;          ghost tone;       window;
a flashback of a place only remembered in a dream
 
in a dream, those you loved, still with their hands
            in a dream, a wish for another;             world
in another world, an inoculation of intimate failure
 
in another world, the claim      this is the best
                        in the best possible, fiction, like all of this;
the best possible is you, your     quiet subtones of subsumption
 
you subsume
                                    ask me to open
again I open
                                    again and again

Chase Cate is an MFA student in poetry at Colorado State University, where they serve as the Assistant Managing Editor for Colorado Review. Their work is interested in the cosmic, the mundane, the moving, and the space between. Their poems and ramblings can be found in Defunkt Mag, Literary Forest, and Beyond Words. When they aren't reading or writing, they love to watch movies, drink coffee, steal back small pieces of their time from the capitalist machine, and sing karaoke with their friends. They can be found on instagram @chasecateart and Twitter @chase36273419.

Sebastian Hunter

AERODROME

The ideological function of Alaska
is to provide an alternative,
or was it only a phase?
Because the “purpose” “of” “poetry”
“is” “to” “appear” “lifelike,” I have to mention
on Monday we blushed in the mountain air
and that the word I was thinking of was “ensconced”
I meant to say that Pope John Paul I
was last seen ensconced in furs
that fateful night the sacred
swans all disappeared

So the winter of edible arrangements was
only a detour, though cold days continued
as I occupied all the headroom
and a body slowly learned to regulate its own heat
When I sawed the table in half
I finally realized what a great fool I was!
I would never visit the moon,
but there was something beautiful about that

Besides
No one visits the moon anymore

Sebastian Hunter is a writer and musician from Seattle. His poems can be found in JAKE, Little Engines, and Squawk Back.

Kaley Hutter

Imaginary Other

In theatre school I learned the eye of Prometheus,
how to fashion a tilting body from brick, bestow a blush,
 
offer fire. Stanislavski called it the imaginary other,
the partner you mold from air to provoke reaction.
 
Now at the open mic you pry open my jaw snakelike,
lure out the unformed lines. I pin you to the windows
 
as my hand maps the mic stand, and my rhyme reels out,
and I tempt our past selves with mixed myths,
 
let your shadow extract truth from my body like a flitting
swarm from a box. It seems you still are unspooling me,
 
roping out my gut responses in a Meisner drill
on a burgundy green room floor. You never asked
 
what I wanted from you, what I would’ve given my liver
to give you. And now from the bar wall your clay outline
 
plunges an arm down my throat and hurls up my honesty.
I can’t forgive how I crave the opening, how I carve
 
your easy grin on the liquor shelf, how I still conjure you
to access myself. Afterward the lines flare through the room.
 
A sticky relief sweats in the limp sheet of my eyelid,
licks off my skin like stolen flame.

Kaley Hutter is a poet, scholar, and essayist from Virginia, where she also teaches collegiate composition and wonders about space and place. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Harvard Advocate, Meridian, Funicular Magazine, West Trade Review, and multiple other journals. Kaley’s favorite color is that periwinkley part of the sky 45 degrees above a Blue Ridge sunset.

Jesse DeLong

Stops

Cheek railed on a window, eyes

unable to endure the little
light of the bus,
 
the Korean man next to me slops spit
around his lips—Like I am the only one           
 
who tolerates
this fucking sun, a fading star,

the way another passenger
touches me if he knows it is far

from his stop & wants to sit where sweat blooms.
 
To flicker: as if we didn’t already
imagine our lives like an old film reel
 
burning up before the end. This is wrong.
 
There is no movement into another, no
line scrawling forward, only
 
dimensions you know not dimensions,
 
actions, but not your actions, speech
but not your speech, movement, but not
 
real movement. I am
 
sweating as he stares at me.
He folds & unfolds
his map.
 
Please, stop. The breaks of the bus gorge
 
on their own wheezing. Someone gets off
or doesn’t.

Jesse DeLong works as Assistant Director of Creative Writing at Louisiana State University. His poetry book, The Amateur Scientist's Notebook, was published by Baobab Press. Other work has appeared in Colorado Review, Mid-American Review, American Letters and Commentary, Indiana Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and Typo, as well as the anthologies Best New Poets 2011 and Feast: Poetry and Recipes for a Full Seating at Dinner. His chapbooks, Tearings, and Other Poems and Earthwards, were released by Curly Head Press.

 

Marianne Field

bj

what if heaven is a naked night
with chickpea pasta & david lynch
and do you want to kiss a little?
what if heaven is a cock that can’t
get hard, what if it’s levi jeans
and socks on the pillow, freckled
shoulders, i want to watch you cum,
i want to watch a hallmark movie,
you are so fucking hot, sorry slow down,
i’d rather be depressed, and if you take
hrt  where are your titties? bryce, let me
tell you, they’ve always been there,
they’re just small. and besides i’m thinking
of maybe stopping, do you want to stop?
you need my hands on your chest,
hold them there  like it means safety,
and your skin is the opposite of
a secret, and the problem is not that
i can’t love, it’s that you don’t care.
when you ask can i touch you  i know
what you want to touch. what you
have yet to learn is i’ll do anything
you say,    well maybe not anything but
pretty close, anything to prolong
this careful life, your smile, your smile
my god, your deodorant, the scent
it tries to hide, and 
we don’t have to leave this bed,
      don’t you know?
we do not have to go outside,
a world unfolds between us,
we don’t need the angels,
we’re already saved

Marianne Field is a queer poet from Marietta, GA. She loves slow films, abandoned homes, rural woodlands, and gay poetry.

Chisom Eze

HOLDING A FLAG ALOFT

In another life, I am not my mother’s son.
I am warned, but I kiss the tattooed girl anyway,
refute fear. Grow addicted to life and do not conceal the sweet stink of it with bergamot.
I lock my hair and let my bluest lover run henna-stained fingers through it.
Take my black of a body to a gallery and wall it up with glass.
Recognize that it/I is/am meat, is/am meant to be a statement,
so I join the protest. Gyrate with abandon. Hold a flag
aloof. Sing solidarity songs
until my mouth is made wholly of wanton smoke.
I take art classes and paint to my heart’s content. Make everything I touch
my canvas: your skin, mine, the false wall in the living room, the naked sky.
I do artsy things, like get a piercing. Perhaps two. Do pretentious things. Laugh
with all my crooked teeth. I am as shiny as
every girl I have ever loved, as shiny as
reddened clay in God’s hands. In another life, my father’s world does not fold in on itself, reeling, when I stagger into it.
In another life, I live.

Chisom Eze is a writer, poet and artist living in Port Harcourt. His writing explores themes such as boyhood, love, grief, rage and the general ordinariness of being human. Chisom is a finalist for the Kofi Awoonor Poetry Prize and his work has appeared or is forthcoming at the Martello Magazine, Healthline Zine, Akwodee Magazine.

d.S. randoL

neighbor kids in kansas beating the hell out of each other / joyfully

The metal rope frayed under the frame of boy molars during this violence game us kids played near a rusted car and a fish tank by the empty fields. Gardner farmland, where wicks of wheat stood pick-eaten, from long before — today, it was warm out.

We were kids — we were perfect. Stuck in the backyard, we would stand adjacent and look inside each other; how much hope could we really contain? How much should we, can we wring out? All over me, even now, there are still those loose welds and fingerprints. For each of us, a black-lit bedroom

back home housed something forbidden. We knew. When we fought, we were exposing the dirt on our mothers' lips — our fathers' plastic lines. The sweat bore fruit in our kitchens and brows and told us better than the cathode dreams, the buzzing in our ears — the blood turned.

The copper salt, our celebration. We'd pour it out everywhere and in the sand,

the gas light would go out and nothing was gentrified, it was raw. In the construction site, we were just wrestling for the cause. In different ways each week, we picked a wrestler and fucked each other up.

Decked and teeth-cuffed, we came home flinching with bully trust. We called each other by our own names and no context or the prefix,  my best friend.   

Alone at sundown, I would cut barefoot toward my unlocked door, clutching mud-soaked shoes and their laces in my purple hands.

My mother would see me and spill her greeting on the table like ceramic clashing, shrieking at my tender face. I would grin, say something like, I lived. Over salisbury and asparagus, I would think about Pokémon while my body swept in its blood.

I think I was learning, even then.

d.S. randoL (she/they) is living timid in NFK, VA. She is published or forthcoming in Bullshit Lit, Passages North, Door is A Jar Magazine, and more. You can find her full publications and eerie acoustic EP, "Guitar Knots," at www.linktr.ee/dSrandoL.

Zoe Reay-Ellers

How to get the ‘Perfection’ achievement in Stardew Valley

Memorize the Starfruit life cycle. Judge time by the number of iridium-level wine bottles in your cellar. Work the same soil again and again. Faint on your stoop after planting three hundred strawberries in one day. Catch gruesome-looking fish. Quest for obscure lamp-post schematics. Sleep seasons away. Only wake up to shove more ancient fruit into kegs or to check your stingray ponds for dragon teeth. Watch your friendship with your spouse decay. Decide that it’s a necessary sacrifice. Become as economical as possible. Stop attending egg hunts and buying fairy rose seeds to sprinkle over your porch railing in the fall. Drag your bed beside the front door. Don’t eat anything apart from the grounds grouped at the bottom of your coffee mug. Optimize your greenhouse layout. Lay thick wood across every patch of earth that isn’t growing something useful. Buy obelisks, a clock. Dig up walnuts and pan for fossils. Revitalize the entirety of Pelican town. Harvest crops until your hands are hard to the touch. Bear your grandfather's legacy as well as you know how.

Zoe Reay-Ellers is the proud EIC of the best dish soap-themed mag worldwide. She owns 20 plants and is currently an undergraduate student at Cornell. Her work has appeared in a number of places, including Kissing Dynamite, HAD, and Fish Barrel Review. You can find her on twitter at @zreayellers. 

Eddie Jolton

Bus

I settle in the smell of dirty stair runners and the bowels of decay
Calvert elementary school closed for renovations in 2007
An old brick schoolhouse tucked between Nebraska Highway and Holmes Lake
Named for its proximity to Calvert Street in what used to be a small town of its own
Now another square of the 100 square mile star city quilt
Surrounded by starter homes raised up on small hills against the otherwise flat expanse
They bussed us all out to a sports complex on the edge of town every day of 5th grade
It took nearly an hour to pick us up and cross the endless landscape
Of houses, strip malls, wheat fields, houses, strip malls, wheat fields
The hydraulics squeaking and crashing with every bump in the road
The bus driver didn’t let us wear seat belts so our asses would just barely lift up and
Out of the square vinyl benches cracked and peeled from years of wear
To expose patches of the spoiled cream foam hidden underneath
Small towns annexed and annexed, we’re somehow still in the same place
The smell of processed corn and diesel would mingle with the sharp plastic scent of the bus seats every time we passed the purina dog food factory
Which is how I always knew we were close
On the last day of the school year as the bus approached the end of the cul-de-sac where my house lay waiting
I had my first kiss with a boy named Alex who spent those empty bus rides next to me with his mp3 player and always let me put one of his headphones in
I tepidly kissed him on the cheek as I stood to leave
He said hey and called me closer with a finger
And planted one on my lips
So whenever I smell industrial animal feed, I think of Good Charlotte

Eddie Jolton lives in Buffalo, New York with his wife and two cats. His work can be found out loud at Caffe Aroma’s poetry open mic every other Wednesday. His poetry is informed by his experiences as someone in places he’s not supposed to be.

Clare Bayard

Object Permanence 

Last night driving up Linda Street my kid asked

Do you remember when we played with Drake in that playground?

The sand playground? I do remember. Do you?

I remember. You have that picture
Of our shoes together. How did Drake die? 

Oh sweetie, I’m not ready to tell you about that. 
I’m still too sad. 

I’ll help you not be sad, she said. You can tell me. 

You help me every day being less sad. But I’m not ready
To tell you. 

Ok but sometime soon. It has to be soon.

I’ll try, love. Ok. I’ll try to be ready to tell you soon.

This morning she crawls into bed with her little-kid radio
listening to the My Neighbor Totoro soundtrack. Letting me
read my book. Occasionally narrating
exactly where in the movie this song plays. Here the snail climbs up the grass.
She says, This part is like a dream.  Her cupped fingers 
keep stroking my collarbone. She asks for definitions
every day. What’s ensconced. What’s indecisive.  
If it’s something she can touch
or imagine touching, from a picture—
a capybara, selenium, small-leaf spiderwort.
She only needs to hear it once; next time
she sees one, she will shout its given name.

I have protected her from the word suicide. 
Something changes forever
the first time you can imagine
despair heavier on the palm
than a body can lift, or the rushing
of that same body 
to meet water far below. 

Sun needs to get into peoples’ mouths,
she says. It helps you to grow. 
I’m making altars for creation myths. 

For her, the opening sky  
means only water the life-giver.
Nothing that could break you
no matter the height of the fall. 

We will sing, she tells me
But not out of our mouths. 

Clare Bayard is a nerdy queer writer, parent, and organizer who has been working for decades to build up multiracial grassroots movements that can midwife a democratic and sustainable future. Clare is dedicated to the liberation of Palestine and the end of U.S. empire. Clare's writing on demilitarization and racial justice has appeared in outlets including the Guardian UK, Common Dreams, and Counterpunch.

Elly Katz

Estuaries

It happened like this

I stopped my working hand midair
to tread the waterlogged tunnels of memory

or maybe it was your hand that pushed me past
perforations in the paper

we sank raw nerves of our incoming teeth into candy-apples
the buzzing hive of the sea
the late July heat swollen with everything we had become
posing for the bright future, putting the now aside in our pulled-down wetsuits
we dressed ourselves in skin and sand
licked every side of chocolate ice cream as it melted
mom touched the shutter to retire, reset, cure the minutes
we didn’t know were blowing
running naked wisps of wind
we didn’t know we knew nothing 
how the sun could leave us, mendicants in bruised darkness
how the moon was on its way
how our brittle yet proud boats of eyelashes and dust
rendered us resolutely under siege
against the gurgling shore
 
but the spellbinding song of that breaking day
but my country, the country of my brother’s face
spelling words

I arrive on nightmares
I pray for dreams
how history, its wrenching pain, can’t be unlived
how to give birth again to species long departed
the dinosaur, the dodo, the thylacine
tokens of dreams
dreamt
 
we forecasted fantasy, your mouthful of far-sighted status
my slack eyes piquant for the blue-green algae
of your shark suit over your skinny legs
the helium wishbone of your chest, your ever-inflating gills
the helicopter of you rising up and up to
disallow context to chafe the
slosh of waves

I gorged on the summer air and your tattoo band-aids
maritime cryptogram of your upper body
turned me
inside out
 
the organ pipes of your raspy voice going on and on
about The Gonnies and staying up past bedtime
to watch the bonfire charge our marshmallow graham cracker sandwiches
in its theatre of flames
seahorse veins pumping your arm
you dove into the treble clef of
endangered speech  

I didn’t know we were surrendering our bodies to gravity
evanescent legs to
black water and showering sunlight

the wound heals but the scar reiterates its
unresolved infinitive

I knew it as a head but didn’t know I was taking in myself
my after-body stoked in the hemorrhage of
what hasn’t yet happened

mom persistently apologized, apologized with the kindness of
what she couldn't control
her voice crumbling into an unnatural register to relieve me
pressuring my left arm in her bay
to resume me to a we
she fed our ritual of combing her reserved fingers through my
riddle of curls to log my body as legible to her nimbus eyes
she felt me voraciously yet cautiously as if I were
both shedding myself and returning to
the origin of my body’s compressed wholeness
rewinding me to the nourishment of her preverbal devotional
sheathed in the bewildered parentheses
of my winding-down rib cage against her iron
cord of emotion

I refuse this poem
there isn’t a gesture sweeping enough for our tragedy
glue in the dirge of my wayward flesh
these tears deny ink

I must record its fractal sea glass
to reclaim the full stretch of things
the capacious planet floor 
its rocks and shells in my gullet
I must endure inventory indexing The Beach Boys and the
new human I materialize out of dispersal  
I must practice its constitutive momentum

I foamed at the lips to become the child who lived
in the bumper-to-bumper traffic of her brother’s
leonine aptitude to quarry light that reminded her
of how silly it all was when they were
sunburned and unashamed of their Southern drawl
but not yet broken
of how only ten million years earlier
their feet were fins

Elly Katz—at twenty-seven, verging towards a doctorate at Harvard—went for a mundane procedure to stabilize her neck. Somehow, she survived what doctors surmised was unsurvivable: a brainstem stroke secondary to a physician’s needle misplacement. In the wake of the tragedy, she discovered the power of dictation and the bounty of metaphor. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Stardust Review, the Sacramento Literary Review, The Amsterdam Review, and many others. Her first collection of creative nonfiction, From Scientist to Stroke Survivor: Life Redacted is forthcoming from Lived Places Publishing in Disability Studies (2025). Her first collection of poetry, Instructions for Selling-Off Grief, is forthcoming from Kelsay Books (2025). She is enrolled in the MFA program at Queens College.

Eleanore Tisch

Girl Sonnet

I watch girlhood grow older in grocery store aisles.
She buys fruit, at first, and later meat. In the gas station,
pumped full of gender and leaking an age-appropriate
intestinal fluid, she chats with the attendant. In the
fitting room she tries on denim pants that refuse her, jests
apologetic with the clerk who rearranges gas-
trotracts for a living. In the garage her oil’s changed
and tank refilled, she flirts with the feeling of being seen.
Grapefruit, jar of pickles, six kinds of mustard, cheerios,
chuck roast, pork chop, tenderloin. Belly button crop top,
hydraulic fracking. On public transportation she takes
risks, whistles and loots, makes out scot-free because she paid in
full. Awkward sock stuff. She milkshakes at the mall in awe of
the attention. She orders at the butcher like she knows
one knife from another. I order one more martini,
filthy, gin. Backlit and relaxed, I bloodsoak, brimstone, grin.

Eleanore Tisch is a poet and educator, born and raised in Chicago. She has a BA in Writing & Literature from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and an MA in Education Foundations, Policy, and Practice from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She is currently working towards an MFA in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, where she is exploring the neurologic and philosophical relationships between language, the brain, and the body.

Lennon Sherburne

Bosc

I made out with a pear
yesterday.
I used teeth
She didn’t.
 
The guys at the market
Said
To put her on the shelf until she got
 
Soft.
 
So I left her in the dark for a week
In between my
Two cans of black beans and a shriveled-up clove of garlic.
She didn’t appreciate
that.
 
 
I couldn't help it though
I wanted her how
I wanted her how I
wonder if the bruised beguile
the bruised.
 
 
She tried to tell me something
In the middle of it all.
Something about being
Firm
as I felt her yield
underneath my fingertips.
 
I didn’t catch it
though.
Could only think about how with every
Second
I had
Less of her.
 
 
When we were done
Her fleshy spine drooped in my palm
And I wept. 

Lennon Sherburne is a queer and trans journalist, audio producer, and creative living in Washington, D.C. You can find their work on NPR's All Things Considered and Weekend Edition, or buried somewhere in their computer. Sherburne's poetry and photography have appeared in Bullshit Lit and at Rhizome D.C.

Mariam Ahmed

We, As Poetry

   soft waves
            beneath
     my skin
 ripple like braille
 
who said
      words
            won’t stay
after ink
    fades? not piercing
 
or memorable, each line
            pulled
from my vein, the largest
    runs from the lower
 
half of me, back up into my heart.
            these words: goosebumps
they’re shadows, remnants
   of past lives
 
what hypocrite would
            I be, if I didn’t push them
   out of me? for you, always
                        for truth
 
 you are
            Sacred. every area
   we sit in, imprinted, with meaning
serious & inconsequential
 
one word etched into my
    arm connects us,
            a mirror image –
a mirage when time
 
fades into a new
     muse.
   if you cannot feel
            it now…
 
someday, you will.
            it will rise in you,
too, this appetite for
    expression
in a moment of
            joy, maybe
    or out of boredom in
the quiet of your bedroom
 breaking free: poetry
   even when pushed
down –
 cannot fall
                                    that’s why
                                                we gather here
                                         today, pulling letters
apart
like stalks
of corn, & consume them
   greedy, as if we know
            anything
 
or have a
            say in what
   lasts when our
organs decay
 
  but these scratches:
    this one — and the next—
 prevail, burned into
             space
 
read it, let it rise
            to your surface
   in unexpected
release
from hubris

Mariam Ahmed is a Californian poet who holds a Bachelor's degree in English with a minor in Sociology from UC Davis and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry from San Diego State University. As a Pakistani-born American raised in the Bay Area and Folsom, CA, Mariam is a first generation scholar and the first woman in her family to attend college. She is a certified Poet-Teacher with California Poets in the Schools, and her work has been published by many literary journals and presses, including Poetry International, The Los Angeles Review, The Elevation Review, Flint Hills Review, Progenitor Art and Literary Journal, Maintenant: A Journal of Contemporary Dada Art & Poetry, and elsewhere. In addition to writing and teaching, Mariam enjoys meditating and exploring beaches.

Ewen Glass

Sleep is a Small Central-European Country

My good friend explained it
in that matter of fact way;
small and many-plundered,
Slovakia is a passage for armies
west to east and east to west.
I asked if that’s why
the people are so attractive.
I think about that now in bed
as the country leans to the right,
and into the east;
I feel my social faux-pas
keener than his grief,
closer than the coming sea.
Tomorrow I’ll tell him I couldn't sleep
because I was worrying about
his home, and the way
my good friend explained it
in that matter of fact way.

Ewen Glass (he/him) is a screenwriter and poet from Northern Ireland who lives with two dogs, a tortoise and lots of self-doubt; his poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Okay Donkey, HAD, Poetry Scotland, Roi Fainéant, Bridge Eight, and elsewhere. 

Maceo Nightingale

BREAK A ROCK WITH A WINDOW

And I isolated so much that I talked to TV’s,
My friends called me and I threw my phone into the ocean.
I had to hate myself to understand myself,
A true friend will grab the sky for you, stab you in the stomach
And hide the knife in your imagination.
When you’re being fake, there is a realness to your acting,
Contemplating carrots while sitting on a toilet
Flush down those intrusive thoughts
And let your mind run free from the small penis police offers.
 
An invisible monster with sweaty legs followed me around
And raped my mind with horrible thoughts.
Thoughts so horrible that I’ve never told another person,
This depression will pay off through creativity.
I flushed my medications into the sewer
And the rats ate the psychiatrist’s toenails.
Oh therapist, what should I do with these thoughts?
Pay you more money, smoke more marijuana,
Clouds of smoke echoed out of the alley.
 
There is a lingering sense of doom when I am without marijuana,
I haven’t smoked in 4 months
And I’ve lost a couple of pounds.
Been living in a sober living with hairy redneck men
And once success and financial independence enter my life, marijuana will come back.
That first hit will be beautiful like a lady wearing fish shoes.
No more smoking marijuana for depression,
It makes me more miserable when I smoke from a place of stress
And the redneck blew tobacco in the cage.

Maceo Nightingale lives in California with his pet fish.

Tim Stobierski

Hagiography of the Woman Next Door

Pink bonnet atop flat twists
giving up to gray

American Spirit
between her teeth

Steamed-yucca robe
over crushed-Vicodin

skin over goose-quill
bone becoming corkwood

three years before
her broken hip

and so much blood
the sidewalk like hopscotch

like fairy tales
like don’t-walk-

on-the-graves-of-the-dead
But today         

but yesterday
knees bent over the stoop

ants teething at her ankles
she blesses them

and even the trees
smell like sex

Tim Stobierski writes about relationships. His work explores themes of love, lust, longing, and loss — presented through the lens of his own experiences as a queer man. His poetry has been published in a number of journals, including Chiron Review, Gay & Lesbian Review, Midwest Quarterly, Anthropocene, Dust, and Connecticut River Review. His first book of poems, Dancehall, was published by Antrim House Books in July 2023.

Blaine Purcell

On Discovering Masturbation:

I pressed my soft against the slip-safe floor of the tub.
I pressed myself against the jacuzzi jets, the wall, myself.
The mountains, undressing in the fall’s chill, watched.
 
I didn’t know I didn’t want that part of me
that felt so good scratching against ceramic
like sandpaper, not yet trying to whittle myself down
 
to the dolls I played with at Alex’s house
while everyone ate dinner. I cleaned and I cleaned
and I cleaned. The water flew over the tub’s lip
 
like freedom, like imagination, like the mountains
change outfits season after season and we never
stop thinking they’re beautiful. So beautiful
 
I get jealous now that I’m a few years older,
gripping too hard when I touch myself 
as if it could just fall off, like a dead leaf.
 
But I was just  ___ and alone with my naked body
in the bath. I let the whole room love me–the suds,
the drain, the pale lights–it felt good. Yes, it felt good.

Blaine Purcell is a writer from Greensboro North Carolina. They are a recent graduate of UNC Chapel Hill and hope to begin an MFA in the fall of 2025. When away from the page, you can catch them learning to vogue or knee-deep in video games. They have previously been published in Beaver Magazine.