Brian Rihlmann

THIS AIN’T A MOVIE

when I relapsed
back in June I
drank the first beer
standing in front of the
bathroom mirror
I watched myself closely
and noticed that 
my hand didn’t shake
nor did my lips tremble
when I took the first sip
the way movie drunks always do
when they finally slip up
but if I’d known then
that it would take months 
to finally quit
and how much worse
than the last time
the drying out would be
and the panic attacks, too
and how close I'd come to death—
maybe they would have 

---

Brian Rihlmann was born in New Jersey and currently resides in Reno, Nevada. He writes free verse poetry, and has been published in The Rye Whiskey Review, Slipstream, Chiron Review, The Main Street Rag and others. His latest poetry collection, Night At My Throat (2020), was published by Pony One Dog Press.

Anisha Jackson

Eventually, for Samuel

We were two catkins from the same willow
guzzling at the same teat.
Now we’re genres apart and there’s always four years
on top
of that. 
At seven and eleven our rabbit died.
He kept her droppings in a film canister. 
At fourteen and eighteen he plucked our dog’s hairs,
folded them in a tissue, tucked away for luck.
I do the same with pinecones and bottle caps,
receipts and dice. 
When this happens to trees
it is called inosculation.

---

Anisha Jackson (she/her) is a first-class Literature with Creative Writing graduate from the University of East Anglia. Her writing revolves around the aesthetics of the everyday and the relationship she has with her mother’s home country, Nepal. She also writes about lesbian love. In 2020 she started the digital platform SIGNED, NEPAL for Nepali creatives. In September 2021 Anisha starts her MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths University, London. Her work can also be found in MIR Online, as of December 2020.

Claire Denson

Farm Wedding

You visit the farm where the horses 
wear sun-blocking blankets folded 
like gimp masks over their eyes. 
It’s for their benefit, you remind 
yourself, but they rub 

their faces in the ground. For ethical 
consumption, the farmers shave 
the shoulder meat from living lambs 
then repatch: little lambs
in bandages limping. That night

at the wedding, your gown’s aflame 
and somebody’s grandfather falls 
on the dance floor and doesn’t rise. 
A bridesmaid screams. 
You scuttle from approaching 

headlights, heels in hand and board 
the hotel shuttle. When the driver 
halts, items topple from your open 
purse. You think you’re alone 
but you’re not. Fear the imminent: loss 

of keys, broken zipper, lack 
of witness. Alighted from the bus 
you look back but it’s already
gone. Instead you catch the shadow 
of earth coating the moon, leaving only

a hangnail. Your heart sinks each descent.

---

Claire Denson’s work appears or is forthcoming in Massachusetts Review, Booth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Hobart, among others. She reads for The Adroit Journal and holds a BA from University of Michigan and an MFA from UNCG, where she served on the editorial staff for The Greensboro Review. You can find her at clairedenson.com.

John Dorsey

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Crazy Mark Crazy Mark

i imagine your youth
not as some dust bowl
of right wing political commentary
with good looking people
who can always afford 
to get their prescriptions filled

but as a true swamp of innocence

we both live in a country
where history walks with a limp

nobody goes around nursing a bad cough
for the sake of mystery

so when i call to you in the street
just know 
that i mean it.

---

John Dorsey is the author of several collections of poetry, including Teaching the Dead to Sing: The Outlaw's Prayer (Rose of Sharon Press, 2006), Sodomy is a City in New Jersey (American Mettle Books, 2010), Tombstone Factory, (Epic Rites Press, 2013), Appalachian Frankenstein (GTK Press, 2015) Being the Fire (Tangerine Press, 2016) and Shoot the Messenger (Red Flag Press, 2017) and Your Daughter's Country (Blue Horse Press, 2019). His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and the Stanley Hanks Memorial Poetry Prize. He was the winner of the 2019 Terri Award given out at the Poetry Rendezvous. He may be reached at archerevans@yahoo.com.

Bryan Joe Okwesili

I Shall Say Nigeria, Then I Shall Show Him Ashes

  What is the truth of love?
        Everybody burns.

                  –Romeo Oriogun

This fire began in my heart then smoked

into my lover's. 

Wrapped in bed like mating worms, thrusting, more fire,

more smoke, more sweat.

The room is a squared witness.

Outside, fire sweeps through the streets, starved of wood

and flesh. The people who ignite are the people who 

once professed love for a country full of their mothers womb.

Here, it is easy to unlove, easiest to say it is not your country.

My lover knows pain. So do I. 

We are both males eating berries in bed while 

everything around us burns. It is how we say fire isn't always a flaming

yellow. It could be red, like berries. Like sex.

Tomorrow, a stranger shall ask my country without

moving his lips. I shall say Nigeria without moving my lips too.

Then, I shall show him ashes.

---

Bryan Joe Okwesili is a chocolate loving realist. A poet and storyteller keen on telling diverse African stories. He writes from Anambra, Nigeria. Winner Abubakar Gimba Prize for short fiction 2020(February). First runner up Defenestrationism Short Story Contest 2020.
His art have appeared on SmokeLong Quarterly (issue 69), Brittle Paper, Writers Space Africa, Lunaris, Expound, Kalahari Review, African Writers, Madness Muse Press, ARTmosterrific and elsewhere. He is currently a student of law at the University of Calabar, Calabar. You can follow him on Twitter: @meet_bryan_

Steve Comstock

Lunch on the first day of spring.

Trucks sit half-dissected. 
We wade 
towards the break room,
buzzing like tired honeybees.

Petroleum products
and wintergreen
tobacco
hanging on old men,

leaning their elbows on 
faded green lunch coolers. 
Talking about bush-hogs, 
campsites upstate,

orange gojo soap,
scratch-off tickets won and lost,
uncaught trout,
dogs on the run,

and 35 years clocking in at 6 am. 
The big bay doors are wide open
pouring sunshine 
across the floor of our shop.

---

Steve Comstock was born and raised in Baldwin County, Alabama. He served with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. He now works as a diesel mechanic in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Sam Gennett

Tongues

You can keep your black tongue,
keep your undead endearments & dry licks

on the neck. Somewhere, a circus packs
up & moves to an Indian burial ground

in Illinois. The elephants parade in fury
& trapeze artists are cradled by the air

then plummet one-by-one to the dusty
earth where you reside an arm’s-length

under since the day I pushed you into a daisy.
The children don’t understand why the lion

bit the tamer’s head off or why the ringmaster
started chanting in a dead language

& then foaming out of his eye sockets
but I know where we are & walked

out of the carnival’s tent when a bout
of cannibalism erupted & dropped to my knees

to bow my head to the dirt 
& invite you to rise back into the balmy
mid-summer air. 

---

Sam Gennett obtained a Bachelor of Arts in English from Lewis University. Her first chapbook, Schadenfreude, was published by dancing girl press in 2018. She currently edits for Witch Craft Magazine and resides in Chicago. She enjoys succulents, horror films, and unevenly bleaching her hair.

---

Note: Italicized line from the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Fever to Tell

Sneha Mohidekar

not a cargo ship

this stage is not an onerary/construction/it is not
a minivan/not a cargo ship/it is the ground floating on it
self/its edge/this thing we are on/in does not have shock
absorbers it has aftershocks/we do not need to rein
force the slipped axles first we need to reinforce the arch
ives/get back under the furniture cover your head with 
both hands hold the table in place by its leg hold onto
someone's hand/sway into the ground rip through the 
pop-art/pointillist sky/dig through/into the rubble and pitch
some into the ocean let it make current ground/grind
it into sand into glass look into/through it find the power
lines pull them down run/them through the gutters to warm 
the blood that beats there

---

Sneha Mohidekar (she/her) lives somewhat adjacent to linear time (though PST is generally a good timezone), in which space she attempts to write about queer monsters. Her work has appeared in The Indianapolis Review and littledeathlit, and you can intermittently find her online at @snehamohidekar.  

Reagan M. Sova

THE SAME REVOLVER

my bags are packed
memories are flowing like the blood of
my hands when my classmates 
held me down and pierced my palms with
a buck knife 
they did it after my second-grade teacher
had said i was a dead ringer for young jesus christ
she was the champion of crazy talk
she said she didn’t wear a helmet on her motorcycle because
she knew she would go to heaven when she died
she said she played russian roulette
with her stepfather’s revolver while
her black dog zerubbabel whimpered in the corner
she said she was laughing and praying for heaven the whole time 

it was the same revolver that would get pressed to my temple
a decade on

my second-grade teacher’s stepfather
an affluent hog rancher
had plied my grandfather 
with peruvian marching powder to
get him mixed up with a fork-tongued banker
he swindled my grandfather 
out of all his raw gold dust in the cellar
that was my inheritance 
i learned the news 
when my grandfather died roller skating 
i drove the banker’s cadillac into the lake
i set all the hogs free under the moonlight
two hog hands caught me and brought me to the rancher
he put the cold steel to my head and said
who is your father
i said my father is a collapsed bridge
my father is a mule stung to death by the king’s bees
my father is hobo honey wine
my father is a soldier of thirteen on
a swaying ship of rats
i am the demon son you cannot kill
my ghost will ride above ground
unmoved by incantations 
i will return on a ship of hogs before
the next blood moon
and they will gnaw your faces to the bone

the rancher turned his gun around
on himself laughing himself 
to tears saying 
don’t think for a second boy
this is your gypsy spell
i know what i’m about to do
the lord is calling me home 

---

Reagan M. Sova is an American writer living in Belgium. His debut novel, Tiger Island (2017), intermingles the wide worlds of soccer, universal basic income, anarcho-syndicalism, and WikiLeaks. An underground bestseller, the book received praise from a member of the rock group Pavement and was featured on Artists for Assange. Check out Reagan's monthly newsletter here.

Sydney Vogl

THE FIRST TIME YOU LEARN YOUR BODY IS NOT YOUR OWN

you cry listening to fka twigs 

on your bike ride home 

something about being unloved, the sky 

wraps herself blood orange you wake up sixteen 

neon anger over a bruised skyscraping whisper 

in her ear like why don't i do it for you 

your body stopped belonging 

on the tiled floor of your mother’s bathroom 

you still itch for the years when you were only afraid 

of sugaring yourself against the pacific 

your body stopped belonging behind a thumping 

door, gravity could no longer claim, you thought 

of her pearls sewn into your lips, three days ago 

your body stopped belonging 

name your ribs an august lightning storm

your jawbone a peach from the farmer’s market 

name your spine the dead boy you found under 

a car in yosemite your throat the bottle 

of fireball screaming across the road your hair 

the snake tattoo on his back

---

Sydney Vogl (she/they) is a queer poet who lives and writes in San Francisco. In 2020, they were chosen as the poetry fellow for the Martha's Vineyard Institute for Creative Writing. Her work, which was nominated for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net 2020, has been published in Entropy, Hobart and Kissing Dynamite. They currently serve as a poetry editor for The San Franciscan Magazine, an assistant poetry editor for Invisible city, and work as an educator to Bay Area Youth. 

---

Note: This poem contains a line from FKA Twigs’ song “Cellophane”

Amy K. Genova

Sheltering at Twilight 

A nod to Henry Miller

So slow and furiously am I compelled to live now, there is hardly an instant to write. My husband listens to Zoom in the bedroom. Someone’s muted ranting or raging about procedure. With jam or without? Baguettes or bread? Voices seep over the transom like musk oil or smoke—dirty wool rubbing the ears. I roll out naan on the cutting board in the kitchen. Press in cumin and garlic slices with a rolling pin, so they won’t fall out. I’m either doing that or thumbing up the walls of plumb tarts.  For a minute, I smile before thinking. But all is eaten. Or fucked. Or driven. Or distracted. Thought I was someone once. There are rules about such things. What it means to be a mother. But it’s play-acting, like when we were in kindergarten and entered rooms of a playhouse. You’re the dad. I’m the mom. It felt real as a bureau drawer. Like tangerines, smog versus air, the upturned neck of a leaf among the Monet-hued leaves of my planter. A nail cut short, bleeding. That tick in its beginning. Flash of petticoat under my kindergarten dress, rustle of ruffles. Sand between my cracks when I forgot panties and played in the sandbox at recess. I wondered if anyone knew. Wet grains chafing. Even then I was guilty, even now falling. A pink light in the living room comes on across the street in an old lady’s house. White lights hang like gemstones on the neighbor’s garage. Three eyes of windows face the street, talkative as trees. A young woman walks to her rusty car outside my window. She tilts her falsely red hair to her young man. I go from Bremerton to Paris, stroll with my husband on the avenues of Montmartre or through the statues of Musée d'Orsay. The couple separates in diagonals to either side of the car. Drive away without feeling my connection.  Their taillights, red. Headlights, small coins of little worth. The day sky slinks into its crepuscular death so easily forgotten until dinner without bread. Without butter. 

---

Amy K. Genova is a former teacher, but always a writer. She recently self-published a chapbook of prose poetry, Flavor Box: 7 Words Repurposed, available on Amazon. Also, three ekphrastic poems were chosen for the 2020 Ars Poetica show on Bainbridge Island, Washington. Among other publications, her memoir entitled, “Moving,” appeared in Stonecrop Magazine, No. 1. Poetry publications include 3 Elements, Homestead Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and many others.  

Elissa Calamia

Uncle Bobby in a Hospital Bed with Pneumonia and Barely Breathing

He doesn’t look good, says Joy.
I want to cry, right here in this karaoke bar with UT playing Notre Dame on TV 
and the lady in the green dress singing 
Katy Perry, and all the people out there who are so 
far, far away, 
floating like balloons,
lives let go on a string up towards dust or heaven,
holding onto a breeze weightless and carried
the way we’re all supposed to be when you close your eyes and think about it 

And I know the full crushing rock-laden 
weight of your life 
will peel off like a shell, 
your armor left like a giant insect
on a couch in Amityville, New York

And your son will greet you, he’s been gone a long time now,  
and your mother will greet you, your mother
who used to hold me when I was too young to remember,
sing me lullabies in Italian, rocking me, like the rocking motion of the ships of the boats that brought them here, rocking the empty space that held her other, 
wished-for life 

There was no hope for our grandmothers, 
they went back to their families in Italy, 
or Ireland, or Russia, 
but there was no home for them left
and so they came back to their husbands in America to live silent lives, 
in house dresses and stockings, to rock their babies, 
and their babies’ babies

Through the knots in their hands and the fresh smelling dirt baked into wrinkles and skin
they gave us their lives, 
ripe and plump from a seed.
With the weight of their hands and their backs and their heavy, tired hearts, 
they died too young, from 
cancer and tumors and heart attacks 

and through the lumps in their breasts we grew backs, we got wings. 
We rose up like baby birds with knocked knees and wings the size of giant moths, we ran to the ends of our Mother-May-I streets and at the corner light jumped and took off, birds of flight, mid-air wings at my back, the sky rising and rising…

Chloe Bollentin

Signal

Find you in the radio signal midday
somewhere midway down a
three-thousand-mile escape route,

find you crack of dawn McDonald’s
weak black coffee on the table weak
wifi in the air weak connection

in the notes we pass back and forth
like paper airplanes landing
on a dirty floor down where

we can’t reach, and what if
this time you stayed, what if
this time you didn’t come back,

what if all along we were 
shouting over white noise on a
dead channel, whispering into the

waves of the Gulf of Mexico,
crashing on the beach and
dragged back out to sea

---

Chloe Bollentin is a writer and proofreader based in New Jersey, where she lives with her girlfriend and their miniature Australian labradoodle. She received her BA in classics from Smith College in 2015 and has spent the intervening years working in publishing and writing in her spare time. Her poetry will appear in the forthcoming edition of Blue Moon Literary & Art Review, and she is currently revising her first novel.

Sam Frost

2016, Bar in Evansville, IN 

The air is hot smoke in virgin lungs
as “Can’t Feel My Face” threatens 

to break ear drums. Dirty feet pulse
in tippy-tap circles and hands raise

up to someone’s Heaven. My drink
teeters on the edge of it’s plastic cup

as gravity is denied by young vanity. 
Hands graze into their own hair,

showing off shoulders of steal. Sour
tightens my throat as you enter. Four

or five bars line this street. Inevitable,
really, like us. My best friend glues

himself to my thigh, wraps an arm 
at my side as a concoction of support. 

He’ll fuck me long after midnight.
Tomorrow, Grandpa will die. I’ll drink 

red wine in the cream living room 
as his body is rolled by. I will not watch.

Tonight, his blood is still unholy. 
Strained speakers scratch sweltered 

linoleum. Someone will mop after doors
lock. This will all be rewritten, again. 

You’ll go home, hands tight in somebody
else’s hair. Her spit dangles on your lip.

Tonight, I think everyone who’s tasted 
you must miss you in their own way.

---

Sam Frost is a writer who constantly digs her past up and spews it onto the page, spends too much time and money drinking kombucha, and is always craving fast food breakfast. Find more work at The Hellebore, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Floodlight Poetry, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @sammfrostt.

M.C. Mars

"The Patriot's Rally" in Front of the Denver Museum (10-10-20)

Watching snippets of various videos
on Twitter—it's hard to tell
the provocateurs
from the provoked. You acted tough,
puffed out your chest
and, pushed into the man with the black guns
matter t-shirt until he
violently shoved you away. Then he warned you
for the sake of keeping your life here on earth not to touch him. You pulled out a can of mace 
and threatened to use it. He
dared you. He begged you to use it. 

Then mysteriously you were out
of the frame, distracted. Something made 
you leave the orbit
of the altercation. No camera captured 
what it was. Something sucked you into 
the black hole of a karmic 
encounter. Suddenly,
a man standing several feet away
points a 9mm at you, and you
respond by unleashing a
can of pepper spray at him. A swarm of 
aerosol particles
turns urine-colored in the sun, the
enormity of your mistake registers
in a split second
of clarity. What flashed  
through your mind
before consciousness exploded?

---

M.C. Mars is a Bay Area rapper and the author of two books: Burner, a novel; and Don't Take Me The Long Way, a memoir. In the 1970s, he studied with Jose Garcia Villa and Alan Ginsberg. Until now, he has never attempted to publish his poetry. For more information, please visit www.mcmars.net.

Anna Leonard

Lullaby of the Exothermic Chemical Process of Combustion

A toxicology report confirms:
this macrocosm does not care for him.
Not even passing thoughts from passersby.
The news could paint a beautiful painting
of boys turned men too soon. They don’t. Instead,
every young man just taken from this place;
crude diamorphine, semi-synthetic
piss seeping into depressed souls. Do we
decide to give in, to ignore? Both hurt.

And after, huddling round a casket frame
of cardboard: stupid, bending bullshit box.
Can’t breathe deeply enough to handle this.

Some inadvertent, accidental blend
of cremated remains from the residues
of previous cremations is possible.

But, I am not afraid of fire today.
The oven burning sins, concealing with 
a glaze of all mistakes he made, the scorns 
he caused, turned back on him. Hurts, doesn’t it? 
He now knows the blistering heat we’ve felt.

His own remains the weight of just four pounds,
yet heavy is the mass of this: losing
and losing, and I can’t wait to be lost
so I can find him. Will he be alone?
Is someone there to hold him when he’s too
far gone? When his eyes drip, droop, drop;
still ruining family dinners now.

I hope his eyes are open there. There, there,
momma says with her hands, not gentle here.
I don’t want to let go of you, you might 
leave, too. I just might. Now, I am sorry
for us, not him. He is safe in the arms
of God or Death or Sleep. The big question:
where is he and why is he gone? This fight
against the fight is tiring for us all.

Aren’t you tired, boy? God, let us sleep with him.

---

Anna Leonard is an Atlanta-based 21-year-old graduate from Virginia Commonwealth University with a Bachelor's degree in Theatre and a concentration in Performance. She cultivated an interest in writing through dissecting plays and chose to adopt a minor in Creative Writing. She is an avid singer-songwriter with music out on Spotify, Apple Music, etc. and aims to create pieces dedicated to sincerity.

Rosa Crepax

Toxic Blue on White Skin

Only in sleep there’s no fleeting from obsession or its aftermath 

Only hands grabbing ankles, eyelashes in every direction. White fabric and whiter legs, resting on high temple steps
painted blue 
by the moon (stone)
Their toxic fumes getting us high while we sway back and forth     smiling and not talking 

Is this the essence of what I was thinking about?

You don’t have a brother but I met him today, he swore you were twins, you had the same lips
Offered me a strawberry lace and held the other end. It tasted sweet nonetheless. 
I promised him I wouldn’t kill you. I wanted to scream “but what do you do when something looks good?” He didn’t want you to come.

I took a plane, then the ferry 
And I slept on the deck 
I knew from the wind that I needed to rest
then pitied a happy family eating fried eggs.
So many dunes but you knew where to go, I showed you the pictures “just meet me behind that thing over there”

The blue paint had stuck to your palms, your soles and the tip of your tongue. The dress was pristine. Let me sit here with you, let me take off my shoes, just wait here a bit and I’ll be toxic with you.

We’re sitting down now
But we are still moving     oscillating. We eat grapes sucking wine and ice cream
with tiny straws from a bowl. The straws are see through, you’re white, and everything else the moon is painting blue.

In a little while we’ll no longer be able to breathe. Let’s keep moving, caressing what’s left.
“At dawn I’ll make you fried eggs”

Live in the moment     but only in sleep pure moment exists

---

Originally from Milan, Italy, Rosa Crepax lives, writes and teaches in London. She has a PhD from Goldsmiths University and is an academic with an interest in aesthetics and gender. As well as publishing in academic journals and books, she writes poetry. Her work has been recently featured in Hobart.

Crystal Ignatowski

Spring 2020

In my dream, a mare ran 
circles, kicked up dust. 
Its coat became hidden 
and I couldn’t see it anymore. 
When the dust settled, 
it was gone. 

Friesian. Arabian. Thorough
bred. Draft. Shire. Morgan. 
Appaloosa. Paint. 

One time I almost lost you 
in the dust bowl of my bad 
intuition. Your eyes shone 
like two copper discs. 
Spring drug on like a weak 
follower of the pack. 
We only found each other 
in our sleep.

---

Crystal Ignatowski's poetry has been featured in Parentheses, Barren Magazine, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cotton Xenomorph, Four Way Review, and more. She lives and writes in Oregon.

Trenna Sharpe

Skinny Bones

You’re number one with a bullet to the brain in the place
below the chin James Wright wished he could sing of. 

Remember telling me you felt like dying? What a date!

I’m stealing. I’m still reeling from love coming on strong and love 
disappearing. Love is a ghost this year. 

Next year my Co-Star app says it’ll keep hurting still. 
So here we are, and here I go again with my spatchcocked heart. 

Gimme that operatic country. Gimme those rusty tunes. 
Gimme that gospel come from a burning throat. 

When the stars call my name I’m down on my knees in a field waiting 
with my tongue out to catch them calling, catch them falling.

If on anyone, why not me? 

I am 99% sure Hannah Gadsby would love me
if we got the chance to lock eyes, to stare from below eyelashes.

If she saw the dip in my wrist where my lips fit perfectly,
I wouldn’t think anymore about the divot in yours 

where you’d line up cocaine like a trough. When you bend down
to your own supplicant hand, the stars in the room fill you for a minute.

One minute and one minute more.

---

Trenna Sharpe grew up in Tennessee. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon. Her poems have appeared in WMN.Zine, Homology, Five:2:One Mag, The Tangerine, and others. She graduated with an MFA in Poetry from UMass Amherst. She's currently working on a series of poems addressed to the comedian Hannah Gadsby.

Yvonne Lin

THESE FOUR 

My friend who owns a condo saw the yellow walls 
in the room I rent through my laptop camera and 
asked, "Are you committed to that color?" It is a mild 
yellow that reminds me of rabbit piss. This question 
paws at other maybe commitments: to metaphor, the 
madhouse, the bit? I first read “The Yellow Wallpaper” 
standing in the front of a classroom, pretending to 
proctor exams. It was a good time for the grifters 
when I was asked to surveil, unable to care about 
integrity in a school remodeled from a Microsoft 
building, where I learned more about structural 
inequality and all that than the kids did in those 
julienned days. Like them, I just wanted to shift 
a classic story into the past perfect and remember 
little. It's too bad. Italic words unfurled over a 
too-orange sunset have told me that the answers 
to humanity’s gilded questions lie in literature, but 
at least, there’s no arsenic in my walls.

---

Yvonne Lin is a grad student who lives in California and lurks on Twitter @__yvonnelin.