Marlo Starr

Tenants 

 I had lived for some time in a foreign country
without my knowing. When I returned I’d forgotten 
 
how to use my voice, a tinny, suspect thing.
Someone had left the faucet running; someone
 
drained all but a crystal ring. I trailed a finger 
along its salt pinked to the four walls and furniture. 
 
There was at least one ghost of my father, thinner
than memory, in ritual-trance weaving Morton 
 
streams through our rental home. The ragged bunch
of us followed his frantic pacing—he blessed
 
every room, cradling the yellow-skirted girl
safe in her dark cylinder, orbed against rain.
 
My face pressed to the rug, I taste the briny grains
sown once to protect us from harm. 

Marlo Starr holds an MFA from the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins and a PhD in English from Emory University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The Threepenny Review, I-70 Review, Berfrois, Queen Mob's Teahouse, and elsewhere.

A.J. Terlesky

(CW) The Bee Girl

I watch the bloated honeybees
as they violate innocent
        roses. Milking them for candied nectar. Weaving between petals
        like greedy, hungry men.
I breeze past them, a summer
ghost-girl. Lifting my dress.
      Inviting them in with white cotton-girl panties with red lady-
            bugs scampering along daisy-chain
            seams.
The bees billow under my dress
like wind, until I am floating
      along the measure of Summer and Fall. Their barbed sounds
             music to my ears, muffled as they
             are under my airy frock.
I am the bee girl. A child, soon
to become a woman. Wire
       stings beneath the resplendent yellow of my dress. Bees dying,
              following subsequence stings
              to inner thighs.
Their stingers, embedded within
supple child-flesh, invite me.
      I will bleed now. As the bees drop from my ballooned skirts
            to hard-leafed ground below.
            I fall.
Soft nipple hardening
against frail cotton fabric.

A.J. Terlesky is a Canadian writer that moved from New Zealand to the U.S. two years ago. Mainly focused on poetry, she has published in journals such as These Fragile Lilies, Tenemos, and Spank the Carp to name a few.

Kelsey Carmody Wort

I JUST WANT TO PUT THE STARS IN A BLENDER AND MAKE MYSELF A COSMIC MILKSHAKE,

I tell JD as he packs us a second bowl on the roof
of his house. Every Thursday and Sunday feels
the same, tongue scraping the peanut butter jar,
his flannel pajama bottoms tucked into my wool
socks. If I could do anything? I mumble into the mouth-
piece. JD always lights for me because I don’t want
to burn my fingers. Academy award for best supporting
actress. One time I brought tap shoes to our smoke
spot and his roommates yelled out the window until
we convinced them to join us. They called me Dick
Van Dyke for weeks. Everyone knows you don’t become
a leading lady without fucking yourself up a bit.
I climb back through the window knowing he’ll join
me in the middle of the night, already asleep on the shingles.

Kelsey Carmody Wort has poems in Nashville Review, Southeast Review, South Carolina Review, and elsewhere. She loves her home state of Wisconsin, pop music, and postcards with painted flowers. She holds an MFA from Purdue University and currently lives in New York City.

Ella Corder

Self Portrait on March 1st

In the anxiety attack afterglow,
rabid with foamy toothpaste mouth,
Vaselined floral rosacea,
skull bobbypin-bulletproofed,
feet poking inward skiishly,
teeth all chipped or gone,
Goodwill slip straps shortened shoulders,
gums bottom-shelf-cab grayed,
empathetic eyelashes up and out,
bare-browed mild trichotillomania,
pointy-nosed grandmother whispers,
fat paintbrush fingers,
I paint my blood vessels brown.

Ella Corder is 21 and a factory worker.

Jessica Brofsky

Seventh Month, Lunar

              For V

The misty poets wash the mountains in aftertaste tea. When you felt the fault lines’ broken testimony, you buried yourself in the Cangshan to give us a way through. I am in here, the wind sang between us in two languages. Wo dong ni de yi si. 

I lost my Ithacas; I cry in the dark; I make all of my mothers lonely. We sit on fire in our paper boats. Something is making us sad, but we cannot say what ghost.

Jessica Brofsky is an English PhD student at Princeton. Her work has appeared in After Happy Hour Review, Marginalia, and Notes.

Samantha Padgett

My father tells me when I finally grow up, I’ll become a republican

and I tell him almost all of the universe
is unobservable, but we keep looking
anyway. When my father smokes
cigarettes, he always offers me one.
No, thank you, I say, again and again.
No, thank you. No, thank you. No—
I don’t know anything about my father’s
childhood except he was a mama’s boy—
he used to crawl into her lap, and she’d sway
like a drunk. He was drinking
when he told me this, but he was sober
when he saw a woman on the news
who was raped by her Uber driver.
She shouldn’t have been drinking,
he said, leaning in like it was our secret.
No, thank you. No, thank you.
We never talk about it. We never talk
about the universe—how it’s impossible
to see all of it. Since he got sober,
my father doesn’t call anymore,
and I never call him. I never call.

Samantha Padgett is an MFA Candidate at Sam Houston State University. Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Driftwood Press, Moon City Review, South Dakota Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Rust + Moth, and New Ohio Review. She lives in Huntsville, TX.

Lucas Restivo

Watching School Of Rock As I Turn A Year Older And More Pathetic With You

I close the laptop, the movie half through.
You're already asleep.
Joan Cusack would pronounce Jack Black’s rock n roll dreams dead,
rock n roll dead,
to parents forged by math
and gold stickers.
The children (always)
still believe they can save something
feeling saved themselves,
so what does the rest matter?
What else do you need to know?
Right now you’re stirring, burrowing closer,
wrapping three fingers around my thumb

Lucas Restivo is a writer from Massachusetts. If you'd like to give him money, he will accept it. His Venmo is @Lucas27

E. Jesse Capobianco

now a body is given corners

There is a stone garden
in a suburban Wendy’s
parking lot. I want you to lie
in the lot by the bright road
but you are in it already, you
are wrapped up in it already, 
you’re covered in hard plants 
and a sunburn-peel-plastic 
bag and there, already, your face
is tied up through it. 
 
If you are born in poison
will you feel differently 
about the moony breeze? If you
tuck an inked broccoli asphalt
lump under your pillow to gnaw
at night will you breeze
differently when you are struck
still in the stone garden—I 
do not have to say.

E. Jesse Capobianco is a Chicago-based poet. He has received graduate degrees from the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven in Belgium and George Mason University’s MFA, where he completed theses on poetic epistemologies and hypnotic hermeneutics, respectively. His work has been published or is forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Cordite Poetry Review, Puerto del Sol, Scud, The Stockholm Review of Literature, Rabbit Catastrophe Review, Mannequin Haus, The Cardiff Review, Lammergeier, and elsewhere.

Andy Lopez

Alternate Universe In Which I Eat the Rubber-Rubber Fruit

after One Piece

Today I 
choke at 
the throat 
with dreams of the 
fantastic elastic kind.
I’m practicing for a world in which 
I hold the mechanisms required to make
me stay. I mean, if my hunger could stretch 
itself around the world, I would never miss brunch. 
Sucking the bones clean, I’d dare anyone to say, too much, 
leave some for the rest of us, you rubber-headed idiot. Can’t I be 
that prolific? Built to baffle, immune to cannonballs, combat,
electromagnetic shock? Apparatus powered by the primal desire
to consume the season’s sweetest pear. Limbs spiralling infinities—
and still room for dessert. No guru would ever dare say, raise
your vibrations!! the universe is waiting to meet you!!! I flood 
my mouth with hot starch, coconut meat, open seas; all of life’s 
delicious things. I eat until I am a brand new planet. Spinning. 
Let me lap up the juice. Let no fauna or flora escape this mouth. 
Allow me gulps of debris, micro-plastics, yesterday’s old heart-
break, belch strong enough to uproot factories and untangle 
the vein of trauma connecting you and me. See how a bite
can transform us? Look; this time I promise I’ll hold us
together, be soft yet durable. O cursed devil fruit;
my beginning and end: I want to be
touched by something 
and be changed.

Andy Lopez is a writer and advocacy communications manager from the Philippines. Her work has been anthologized in the Best of Small Fictions 2021 and can be found in Longleaf Review, CHEAP POP, Non.Plus Lit, Underblong, and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter at @andylopezwrites.

Tess Nowadly

And what about the cities that we wanted?

The ones that walk around our minds with their backs turned toward the sun, 
looking more like Hunter S Thompson every day.  
Or maybe they look like Johnny Depp playing Thompson, 
or like a million dying Bisons running in every direction but home.  
 
What about the cities that don’t call in the morning – 
that said the sweetest things to you the night before;
fucked your stupid heart into your stupid chest 
when you’ve been smart enough to keep it out like a dog all these years 
then lost the taste for North Buffalo chicks.  
These cities don’t blossom flowers for you on Valentine’s Day
they snow in May. 
 
But these cities have the bluest eyes –
they know all the most obscure poems by Hemmingway’s girlfriends and mistresses; 
they’ve smoked cigars with his ex-wives. Sadness dies 
like blossoming roses in the islands they won’t let you come back to, 
their grandmothers grow young instead of old 
and women never sleep with whole big rough buildings and sidewalks pulled up around faces, 
they sleep with strong, beautiful men as individual as cocktail olives. 
When you leave these cities they change their names and pretend they never even met you, 
they don’t even wave from across the street or ocean or bus stalled in San Francisco, 
across years and lovers and cats we couldn’t fly home from Shanghai.  
They know all the big and tiny lonelinesses you have created and they’re giving them all back.
 
Some cities did not order you.  
They did not put you on the menu and no one takes a bite.  You go out at night
and its everybody’s birthday but yours,
walk home alone blowing out the candles in your mind.  
Whooo one for Denali and one for Wyoming, 
Whooo one for Mars and Venus and the Rocketmen who didn’t know how to come home either, 
and one for the sun they’ll all fly into.  
Some cities are kind and explode behind you, leaving doors dismantled and no address to send letters, bless their souls.

But some.  
Let you in like an adult watching children playing a game of hide and seek. 
You hear the cities counting to 100 and olly-ox-an-freeing 
through open windows and clinking drinks, 
you’ll swear to the tallest trees that you climbed them all before and will never forget their names,
but it doesn’t matter. 
Cities will try to be ours only for so long, 
and then they’ll swallow a whole bottle of whisky and build a grudge the size of Canada.  
Cities fall out of love like apples fall from a tree, without guilt, and constantly.

Tess Nowadly is a freelance writer and video game developer living in Buffalo, New York. Her poems and music reviews have been published in local Buffalo publications and she provides resources for Buffalos youth to learn about and learn to love their writing and their voice.

James Cichocki

Too much bologna has me fried

The drunk next to me
     is eating a fried bologna
     like David Hasselhoff
     making love to a cheeseburger.
 
And I wish I could find
     a fraction of the joy in life
     that this man
     finds in a sandwich.
 
But it’s 3am Buffalo-time
     and in the humidity
     the lukewarm beer I’m drinking
     lies to me
     and tells me
     it’s still cold.
And that I’m still relevant.
And that life is good.
And that Buffalo will bounce back.
 
And the lie echoes
     through the empty downtown streets
And falls on the deaf ears of
     the exhausted liberty statues
     who face west towards progress
     and east towards decay.
And the lie becomes elevator music
     played by a senile philharmonic
     to an audience of dusty corpses.
 
And the lie whispers from our TV sets
     as soulless Stepford newscasters
     talk about sports scores
     and where to find a fucking fish fry.
 
And the lie is splashed over the city like blood
     on a grocery store floor
While politicians scrub their hands
     and their search engines
     like Lady MacBeth
     and offer thoughts and prayers
     and platitudes
     and ignorance.
 
But what do I know?
I’m just a drunk in a dive bar
     staring into a murky mirror,
     terrified by my own reflection,
     and eating a fried bologna
     like David Hasselhoff
     making love to a cheeseburger.

James Cichocki is a local theatre director, costume designer, award winning actor, and now, apparently, poet. They are the Executive Director of the Elmwood Village Association and lives with their senior rescue dog, Isabel.

Brigid Hannon

Ode to a Bar, or a City, or Maybe Just my Grandparents

It was Early Times
in my early years,
my Gram walking me
down Seneca St. in the sun.
She, keeper of the books; 
Poppa, sometimes,
keeper of a bar stool,
amongst the smells
of Guinness
and fry oil.
Long black coat
hanging in his closet,
reserved for parades
with his fellow Blackthorns-
top hats and white gloves,
walking sticks and silver cups.

St. Paddy's Day in Buffalo, 2022-
I step onto Seneca St. for a cigarette
amongst curly haired girls
with poufy dresses
dancing a jig along with the accordion player.
I puff,
and pray for Poppa,
for Gram,
no longer keeping books
here in her 91st year.
(They've been parading without Poppa
for a while now.)
I smell smoke and food,
the wind carrying laughter on its back.
My Celtic blood courses
as I consider
the children of immigrants,
and the life they gave to me. 
I smoke my cigarette to the filter,
my green sweater as deep as my pride
for a country I've never been to,
and a city I will never leave.

Brigid Hannon is a writer from Buffalo, NY. Her poetry and short fiction have been featured in various online journals including the San Antonio Review, Ghost City Review, Soft Cartel, and Queen Mob’s Teahouse. Her first collection of poetry, A Lovely Wreckage, is available on Amazon. 

Maya Staples

Medallion

On the pier there is a man and a woman trying to predict their future. They turn to me as if to ask if I know the answer. I choose the latter; the man says before turning to walk towards Athens. The woman sits down on a bench with a cup of frozen custard--the only loveable thing about Delaware. I see her swimming two days later. I watch until she becomes a prune of herself. I walk back towards sandcastles shaped by my children's hands. I think of her man in Athens who has surely turned to what he thought was his to miss, back to his other. To think grass will ever wait for you is the biggest mistake of all.

Maya Staples is a poet and artist living in Boston, MA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Hobart Pulp, Queer Art Collective, Jabberwocky, and The Eunoia Review. You can find her on Instagram @0nlinemaya. 

Andrew Byrds

Listening to Pinegrove @7AM, Walking

October whets your teeth, it shatters your ankles
It's a door for 2018 after 2017 nearly killed me.
In the cracks of asphalt, the bleed from music I see patchwork faces,
The swollen wounds from the people I hurt and wish I could say it all different
Or goosestepped instead as an idea or curiousity at best for their own sake.
How many ways can I describe the ghosts?
How long can I hang to the crows staking in the dogwood?
On a fencepost moss peels from morning dew, a lip to a mouth of something else.
And back home Alex sleeps in late waiting on coffee from the next room.
And when I get back from the borderlands and count the dogs on the streets,
I'll have a mug waiting for her and I'll climb in beside her, breaking through.

Andrew Byrds is a queer writer based in Portland, OR. They've had pieces appear in Hobart, Maudlin House, Entropy, Philosophical Idiot, and tl;dr magazine.

Luke Daly

POEM AFTER LIFTING WEIGHTS AT THE DELAWARE FAMILY BRANCH YMCA OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, JULY 1, 2019

I

When I closed my eyes I saw something.
Light on waves, lit lines
                                    back there blighting the dark
                                                               
brightly writing and dissolving notes like
fractured hexagons or yellow alphabets.
 
And it was a private beauty, a salve.
Which I deranged by seeing.
 
What hot marigolds behind my eyes
caused a shadowed and voltaic air.
 
What neon seagulls going home back there
black lake after black lake or wet
                               mountain crests walking at dawn
                                                   
lifted my body into upper air
                              on the flooded high fibers of light.
 
Which were given without my asking
an unbearable gift from God
                                                  I nevertheless require.

 

 

II                                                       

Not linesmith or fibersmith; no nickname yet
for a maker of needles, but the brass-plated hinge
 
on the slow door of my childhood bedroom
did faithfully purchase the waking mind each night
 
by pressing onto the floor a golden needle.
Here is the light needle spanning the basin
 
breaking over the bedshelf and back for my heart.
The nightly needle seeking the nightly eye
 
and here its fine stitch in blue iris.
Then “Only You” from a little clock radio
which is when
                        thought leaves like wet egrets
 
wingtips waking briefly the signatures
the returning dead put down at dawn.

  

 

III

The man opens eyes among bells and plates
and bikes that go nowhere but inward.
 
Yea he says, “It will be fine
                              if I can just recall this…”

 

 

IV

By Persephone’s bright black roses
your poetry will fail you
 
on the day your heart is desolated.
 
 
But try, or damn you all—
 
Bring out the hot blossoms from your nimbus brain
all footspilled, lift up the torn embroidery.
                         
Stranded in that horseshit home
                              Built of your every sound—
 
Can the ghost of beauty be held into grief’s beating river?
This is it.  Do you see it?  You have been asked
 
in the time you read this poem, as I am,
to walk down the path of grief, eyes forward.

 

 

V

You are the ghost
and the machine
                                           and the ghost
  in the machine.
 
Yet you are the loss of all three,
not the moment after the loss.
 
Go on and find your city there.

Luke Daly lives in Buffalo, New York and teaches writing at Rochester Institute of Technology. You can find more of his work in Subtropics, Cream City Review, and Basalt.

Daniel Boyko

For Sale: Blubber

At Yankees Stadium, I stand in
row twelve with Anthony and Tim.
It’s then that I first see it. The pitcher
 
arcs the ball to the catcher. As its seams
catch the light, it glows like a slice
of freshly carved blubber. A late swing.
 
Strike one. The next pitch is a curveball,
spit slipping off the curves. The wooden
bat smacks the bottom hard, a clang
 
like dropped metal tools, the ones
I used to peel off the skin. Foul ball.
Strike two. The pitcher readies himself.
 
Leans forward. Behind his back, hands
massage the ball, no bigger than an orca’s
eye. Whips it towards the catcher.
 
The swing is fast. His hips twisting
into place. I wonder if the wad
of hundreds in my right pocket weighs
 
the same as a jockstrap. Probably more.
It’s a home run. A goner. Some lucky,
middle-aged, dad-bod dad catches
 
it, takes a selfie with his son. About
to post it on Facebook. The team,
the crowd cheers as number seven
 
rounds the bases, but all I hear
is the wail of a daughterless
mother crying into the waves.

Daniel Boyko is a writer from New Jersey. His work appears or is forthcoming in SOFTBLOW, Nanoism, Eunoia Review, and The Aurora Journal, among others. He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony Lit. Wherever his dog is, he can’t be far behind.

Nick Shipman

Starved

My father used to paint
Cold War night terrors
nukes sliding obscenely
from sinister silo mouths
bloody teardrops swimming
in shadow
stylised silhouettes emerging
against stark monocolors
 
He had two sons, sat down
at a bench to sculpt false teeth—the family
business, fingers and eyes strained
over minute lines of bicuspid and incisor
never returning to his easel.
 
My brother used to paint
psychedelic visions—I remember
one rendered strange a dollar bill
pyramid in brutal olive green, that Eye
staring staring through your secrets
 
He enlisted as a teenage runaway
trained in imagery analysis
opium fields
who moved wrong
which truck accelerated too sharply
toward the Green Zone
satellites replaced canvas.
 
My partner used to paint
fractal dreams of bubble worlds
goldfish and silver screen stars
bangles and reaching trees
rainbows bleeding into grayscale
 
She went to work in archives
amid dust and red rot
the dustier public
leering to know who their planter ancestors
might have met
or killed
or owned
then they laid her off anyway
right at the pandemic's peak.
 
Spare a thought for the paintings that starved
for want of a dollar.

Nick Shipman is a university administrator and editor, originally from the Boston area but currently residing in Richmond, Virginia. He has earned degrees in English, History, and Gender Studies. His writing has previously appeared in such publications as Whurk, Quail Bell, and The Other Herald, among others.

Jason Ryberg

Any Given Night

I would wager
                     the single one dollar bill
         and sixty-some-odd cents
                                     I have in my pocket (or the
hundred and sixty-some
               thousand dollars in gold coins
                                                  that I may or may not have 
                             buried in rusty mason jars
       out in my backyard) that
                                     there are few night skies
                   on any given night (above
                                                         any locale the world over)
                                               as congested with stars as
the night skies of Kansas,
                nor spaces as all-over wide-
                                                open with as much wild blue
         yonder and mountainous
                                                       cloud range above, nor
                                      rising and falling backroads
                        through rolling, tumbling hills
                                                                          of green below.

Jason Ryberg is the author of eighteen books of poetry, six screenplays, a few short stories, a box full of folders, notebooks and scraps of paper that could one day be (loosely) construed as a novel, and a couple of angry letters to various magazine and newspaper editors. He is currently an artist-in residence at both The Prospero Institute of Disquieted P/o/e/t/i/c/s and the Osage Arts Community and is an editor and designer at Spartan Books. His latest collection of poems is The Great American Pyramid Scheme (co-authored with W.E. Leathem, Tim Tarkelly and Mack Thorn, OAC Books, 2022). He lives part-time in Kansas City, MO with a rooster named Little Red and a billygoat named Giuseppe and part-time somewhere in the Ozarks, near the Gasconade River, where there are also many strange and wonderful woodland critters.

Dina Paulson

Sex Antagonisms

A lurch/lull in 5 parts

I.

 They’re not supposed to complete you,
A hole here or there, needs your tending -
But, what hole
Can’t you tend just for me?

 

Intermission

-         searches “a while”
-         2 weeks to 8 months
-         not helpful
-         (the internet, not my soreness while searching)
-         analogy: the difference between things made the same
-         then, you show up...
-         silly as usual...

 

II.

 So, where do I put it - recommendations?

the \

once-i’ve-put-you-partially-in-my-red-yellows-making-me-autumn

.

III.

 What happens when we fall,
body and bro, not the least
bit of fancy?
When we’re layered up loose,
like the terrier next door,
and his bud,
the blonde lab,
sniffing out babies
& exercise sweats
from this cold, perfect day?
What it means for us -
here, dancing, the dust
between plant pots,
not waiting on anything
but ourselves. And, our ankles,
wet, because everything
is wet.
 
So, that’s us -
in place,
laid out,
moaning.

IV.

 who needs these childhood bios / repeated / what a relief / to skip it / tea lights at a bougie cafe / you know we’ll always find it / later / if we look

for now -

butter toast & termite-holes & tree-babies / surprise / at 1am (i touch your face like we’re both a joke)

“i’ll hold you tightly   i’ll squeeze it all out of you   let it wash away”

…                                           

fuck me, i’ll store up fantasies, let them blow                                    

…

 

V.

no space / for more obsessions / but your hands / hard / coaxing / grapes / out of me /

 

Dina Paulson is a poet, essayist, and entertainment writer. In 2017, she founded Aqua Editing, a storyteller for creative thinkers. She published her chapbook, Parts of love, with Finishing Line Press (2018), which placed in their New Women’s Voices Chapbook Competition. Her second poetry collection, TOUCH / breaks is forthcoming from akinoga press (2023/4). Her writing appears in Collider, Cine Suffragette, FanFare, The Rumpus, and Flash Fiction Magazine, among others. Before starting Aqua Editing, she worked with startups, nonforprofits, and schools as a content writer and taught writing and second language learning in English and Spanish.

twitter @writeandsea • instagram @dinaspaulson