Poetry

Tricia Bogle

Fingerprints

A friend calls, says someone she knows is dying
a man she once loved, and still does. 

I don’t know him.  
So.

It’s tragic, she says.
He has two daughters. 

I turn a wineglass in my hand, 
hear the hiss of a car in one ear,

her voice in the other,
watch snow circle down in fat flakes.

I have no children. 
So.

She is sad for these daughters—
the tragedy that a father will die.

As she talks, I can make out some fathers
through my window, over in the park 

pushing children in sleds.
She cries, and I begin to wonder:

If I were dying,
(I with no daughters)

would it be less a tragedy?
At least she left no children. 

It’s like the way they choose a soldier
for the suicide mission—

the one whose life matters less
(because)

In my head a small bell chimes: 
self-ish, self-ish

That’s what my father said 
about women like me, 

and I’ve gone and proved it
thinking about myself as a friend cries,

as I drink my wine, 
study my own  

fingerprints on the glass.

Outside, the children 
are flopping in the snow.

I hear laughter, 
muffled, distant,

try to imagine this man,
            his daughters.

My interest in the exercise wanes.
(I am a bad person.)

I rinse my glass,
take a soft towel from a drawer,

wipe my fingerprints away.

Tricia Bogle (she/hers) is a NYC-based poet with deep roots in Missouri. She holds a B.A. in Creative Writing & Philosophy (Loyola Baltimore), an M.A. in Political Theory, and a Ph.D. in Philosophy (Fordham). For over a decade she has taught advanced courses in Gender & Sexuality, Law, Philosophy, and Bioethics at Montclair State University, exploring various ways to negotiate what is human in a world increasingly mediated by technology. (During the pandemic, Trish propagated a truly shocking number of succulent plants, which now live on her window sills and remind her that new growth can happen even in the darkest times. She can often be found sitting on a park bench in Washington Heights, sipping cafe con leche from her favorite local bodega on 175th, and reading translations of Basho out loud to the trees.) Find her on Instagram and Twitter @boglepoetry. On Facebook she can be found under "Trish Bogle" (https://www.facebook.com/trish.bogle.14).

David Guiden

CAPITALIZING ON MY NONEXISTENT LOVE LIFE WITH A BOTTLE NOT WITH LIQUOR INSIDE

Picture it

Exterior: Paris, France

The sun is ascending from the east shimmering the Seine.
My penis is penetrating through these white sheets in this temple, this temporary living 
arrangement with a balcony, where it is implied that you fucked me senseless last night.
There is no evidence of that besides some sheets that are doing the wave off the bed.
Morning is knocking and you answer the door but only after we skedaddle to the top of the 
Eiffel Tower with colored lights shooting out of our assholes. 
It’s romantic, I promise. 
We have fifteen seconds left until this fragrance commercial for Macys is over. 
We are not supposed to be here. 
This slot is never advertised for us. 
Five seconds left.
You and I stare into each other’s eyes atop the Eiffel, our eyes gleaming with different visions
of cotton fields and angel dust in the clouds. 
The camera circles us as we lust for an exit.

At least we smell good.

TRYING TO LINE UP MY HAIR WITH A SHATTERED MIRROR

I hate broken glass/makes me uneasy/makes my skin tingle/ I itch
Especially when I break the glass

Who are you     you unwanted heathen residing in my brain rent free

You keep telling me: the homosexuals have zero interest in me so why would the heteros 
                                    : to lose weight then gain it back
                                    : to look at myself in this mirror and spew self-hatred
 

What are we really looking at   and lower your voice sissy   you sound like a fag
 

When I was younger you bet on a dead priest a pedophile wouldn’t even look twice at me let 
alone touch me            who says shit like that      
 

You keeping telling me: cupid went out of business as I was next in line
                                         : it has nothing to do with the fact that I’m Black
                                         : I’m depreciated 
                                         : my appraisal came back under value 
                                         

You keep telling me: a change of scenarios would do me some good 
                                    : open houses always have showings this time of year
                                    : an upgrade is required   my soul should be enough for a down payment
 

My hair is starting to recede like my mind 
I’m just trying to cut my hair because my barber moved away

I have no idea who to listen to
I keep going against the grain

David Guiden (He/Him/His) is a former award-winning actor and current writer based out of Chicago. Born and raised in Muncie, IN, he graduated with a BFA in Acting at Ball State University. These poems are his first-ever published pieces. He is working hard to get his manuscript published soon. Writing keeps him sane and constantly curious about how to navigate this insane world. Catch him on Instagram @dlguiden.

D. Dina Friedman

Tell Me What You Know About Dismemberment

When my head was cut, it was supposed to roll. There were supposed to be severed sinews in the 
neck, muscles released after fifty years of dull ache—a spurt of blood happy as an orgasm. I 
expected that like a chicken 

the rest of my body might spend a few headless seconds pacing the contours of the bathroom, 
circumventing the toilet, stepping over the cat litter box, perhaps washing its hands, since 
dismemberment is a messy business. I didn’t

count on my heart to shrivel so quickly, before I could reach palm against chest to feel its last beats, 
or think my head would remain alive for more than the number of nanoseconds between evil act 
committed and recognition of evil act committed. What I didn’t anticipate
 

was that fuzzy in-between state, an ability to hear and sense without pain in the neck, to smell 
manure, taste whatever anyone brave enough might put on my tongue—like the head offered on a 
silver platter for Salome 
 

not what she thought she wanted: a head like a pet, nestled by her feet as she slept; a head like a 
canary in a cage singing to the sunny morning even when the morning wasn’t sunny. Now, what I 
know is that dismemberment contains the false posit 
 

that once upon a time we were members of something: humanity, the promise of the Messiah, a cult 
of mean girls.

D. Dina Friedman is the author of two YA novels, Escaping Into the Night (Simon and Schuster) and Playing Dad’s Song (Farrar Straus Giroux) and one chapbook of poetry, Wolf in the Suitcase (Finishing Line Press). She has published fiction and poetry in many literary journals and received two Pushcart Prize nominations for poetry and fiction Originally from New York City, Dina now lives in western Massachusetts next door to a farm with 500 cows. She has an MFA from Lesley University and taught for many years at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst. Visit her website at http://www.ddinafriedman.com. Find her on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/d.dina.friedman/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/ddinafriedman or on Instagram: @ddinafriedman

Cole Depuy

A Turing Test

Question 1: In what ways do you resemble your mother?

I shot the glass door she stood behind. A paintball gun. 14. Sunsets grow when days shorten. Her face 
fell jack-o-lantern. Glass being melted sand & all. She didn’t move. Our pinkies shrank when we 
climbed down from trees. I wiped the paint & it spread. 

Question 2: In what ways do you resemble your mother?

I like being loved. July fireworks smell like guns. Sitting on her lap on the bridge. People cheered. 
They drowned their young. I watched them panic in the river below. Her slender hand lifted my chin 
to the blue explosion. I worshiped Mother. It’s a god-eat-god world, she said. & God eats. 

Question 3: In what ways do you resemble your mother?

I ignored her for days. Eating the chicken she cooked. There are those who pull their teeth for pills. 
For attention. My only regret is I didn't suffer more. The snapping turtle she shooed away with a 
broom. I hear her crawling up my spine now. How I yelled at the empty bleachers for her to stop.

Question 4: In what ways do you resemble your mother?

She closed the bathroom door & turned the tub on scalding. The windows dripped & we waited. 
Gods being only true cannibals. We are still there. My head covered in damp towel. Sweet mist 
carving a swollen strait through lungs inflamed. She rubs my back. Watches water promise breath.

Cole Depuy is the winner of an Academy of American Poets University Prize (Binghamton University) & the Negative Capability Press Spring 2020 Poetry Contest. His poetry has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the I-70 Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, Summerset Review, Solstice, Rupture & other fine journals. He's Poetry Co-Editor for Harpur Palate & Binghamton Poetry Project Co-Director. Find him on Twitter: @cole_depuy

Ellen Stone

My life as a jelly jar

When I was newly formed, I gleamed
            cavorted with the air like some new foal
out in the field, not knowing how to gather yet.

I saw the berries, wild grapes and yearned to pluck
            but standing only yea high 
 I did not know what harvest was, nor needed it. 

As I grew old, I learned what being filled was like
            and that was all I craved – slick stew of fruit
its crimson purple hue, and me, subsumed.
 

As if ripeness began with me, that gloss. Now
            all I want to do is reap. Take
the sweet I muster, preserve it under quilted glass.

 
 But fervor in the kitchen morning, clatter.
            A day is filled with lushness – of girls,
saucy, jamming. Space and corners overflow.

 
To make and keep, make and keep, a mother’s 
            adage. Honeyed clamor, a tidy shelf.
Eye the ferment, sniff the mash, contain it.

Ellen Stone grew up above the north branch of the Susquehanna River in the Appalachian Mountains of rural Pennsylvania. She taught special education in K-12 public schools in Kansas and Michigan for over 30 years while raising three daughters with her husband. Ellen advises a poetry club at Community High School and co-hosts a monthly poetry series, Skazat! in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poems have appeared most recently in Anti-Heroin Chic, Great Lakes Review, Rust + Moth and River Mouth Review among other places. Ellen is the author of What Is in the Blood (Mayapple Press, 2020) and The Solid Living World (Michigan Writers’ Cooperative Press, 2013). Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart prize and Best of the Net. Contact Ellen at www.ellenstone.org.

Em Dial

Serenade with YouTube and Springtime

In an iPod touch engulfed in night

we only have a game of allocation:

K I S S

G I R L S

What small query will gift me the largest reaping?

How few syllables to conjure a mouth like mine

on a mouth like a mouth that maybe I might want?

Amateur or Hardcore are declarations

Boys kiss:             a coarse plea

Two six-packs on a couch— a ravaged way to find a mirror

I need you to know— I never touched any part of myself

besides my sternum and never wanted to

I got caught only on my own smooth        only on my

ache for a muscle and a camera wanting me

Girls kissing: I pray in brevy          I shorten my lonely

to the length of a forearm reaching

under a waistband            I imagine the camera

continues past the dark at 1:36

Follow the link for more    & beyond the black:

full bloom          bulbs birthing tender stalks

erupting at their ends into daffodils the precise

shape of my fist meeting                 the flat of my chest

Em Dial is a queer, Black, Taiwanese, Japanese, and White, chronically ill poet, grower, and educator born and raised on Ohlone land in the Bay Area of California, currently living in T'karonto (Toronto, Ontario). They are a Kundiman Fellow and recipient of the 2020 PEN Canada New Voices Award and the 2019 Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award. Find them on Instagram: @em_dial or Twitter: @em__dial

Melanie Robinson

doe foot

 boys think I’m cute
when I don’t have any fight left
 

don’t touch me just tell me
I’m beautiful over & over 
 

until you can’t stand me
my mom

used to rub her feet together
while laying on her stomach

 
a sound like sandpaper
against rough sawn hickory

As a poet, writer, educator and owner of a small content writing business, every aspect of Melanie’s work—both creative and professional—is steeped in a reverence for communication. She holds an MFA in poetry from Texas State University and was the 2019-2020 Poet in Resident at the Clark House in Smithville, Texas. She was the recipient of a Damsite Residency in New Mexico and has been published by Rust + Moth, Radar, Barren Magazine, Burning House Press, The Boiler, Black Bough Poetry, and University of Hell Press. She was also a commissioned, featured artist for Luminaria: San Antonio Arts Festival in 2017.

Chiagoziem Jideofor

Made of

the year is ’97 and we are home
living too closely
borrowing sweetness 
and sounds from neighbours
effusive groundnut soup on Tuesdays. 
Papa Aje on Sundays recycling 
the billion years of the cool stars. the All Stars. the Archibogs. the Blue Spots. 
the soundmakers. the Cubanos. the Guinea Mambo Orchestra. freedom high-life. 
while we took turns to nail our gbam gbam and denge poses
inside, my mother’s loud exorcism of Rev. Patty’s voice stays 
within, we all hold memories of dancing to one lovable song—
below, go go below
following the voice of a masked singer
arching our full backs for the sweetest of tunes. 

█████simple narratives 
memories ███ 
███ living and building █████
a compound of families ███████idle eyes  
and wolfish uncles ███young ████sad music 
██████danger 
██████intentions 
█ baring all ██
babies in a bath███ 
███mothers██ knew ████
█████████understood harm 
█████pelting █████ girls 
the different music it saves for when things go wrong.  

██████continues 
for grown ███craving ██████
thriving as angels and faceless miracles 
music ██████
stirring ██beliefs █████
and remain made of████ 
 

[insert a lovable memory of dancing to a favourite song]

Chiagoziem Confidence Jideofor is queer, artsy and Nigerian. She is currently a first year MFA candidate in the Creative Writing program at The University of Alabama. Her poems have appeared or are scheduled to appear in Reunion: The Dallas Review, the Minnesota Review, Rigorous, Versification, Ghost Heart, and so on. Also a self-taught illustrator, she has worked on several book covers and is currently an in-house digital artist at Arts Lounge Literary Magazine and Cooking Pot Publishing.

Patrick Wilcox

Someone Could Get Hurt

There is a poem                I can’t write
because the story inside the poem
doesn’t belong to me. As a kid I would take

 
matchbooks          that didn’t belong to me
and tell my sister, when accused,
I was innocent. To give the poem

 
I can’t write words          would make the story
inside the poem real and I’m afraid
 making the story real would kill

 
my sister. I don’t           want to kill
my sister. I don’t want to kill
   my brother. I don’t know why

 
I care more          about fire than the warning words
my sister gave me. The space
between not knowing and knowing

 
is as wide         as a match. My brother
is seared into that space. As a kid
I would light a match and let it burn

 
until I could no longer          hold it. I am holding
this poem in my mind
   soaked in kerosene. I don’t want

 
to kill my sister. Don’t          make me kill
my brother. As I die I’ll give this poem
   words without wanting to

 
and the story          inside the poem
will exit my body like innocence
   from a blackening match head.

Patrick Wilcox is from Independence, Missouri, a large suburb just outside Kansas City. He studied English and Creative writing at the University of Central Missouri where he also was an Assistant Editor for Pleiades and Editor-in-Chief of Arcade. He is a three-time recipient of the David Baker Award for Poetry and 2020 honorable mention of Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Poetry. His work has appeared in Maudlin House, Quarter After Eight, Bangalore, and MacGuffin. He currently teaches English Language Arts at William Chrisman High School.

Katherine Gaffney

Mother Craft

Too much a woman you are hidden in a cow — Experimental Animals, Thalia Field

I am the mother of mistaken identity. 
The lady who puts salt
in her coffee, the consequence of play’s accident.
She says, You are an ostrich—
 

clumsy and oversized. And I say, yes, yes I am.
Because though it hurts me, I know it hurts her
more. After all, I want to be 
 

the Ice Maiden buried with six horses
casually asleep in a headdress,
my body peat-packed. Or the girl,
just 14, laid to rest with 40 bronze arrowheads.
But right now, I’m reading.
 

Yes, read a book called How to Be Happy
Though Married. Really I’ve just read
the title, but the title tells me
that marriage is much like a Moretta

—those dark ovular masks,
Venetian women wore to appear
more visible. No, wore is too passive a verb
and visible a contradiction. Clenched
is more accurate for there were no laces 
 

to keep the mask on their faces, but a button 
women slid between their teeth 
and bit — making them a silent beauty. 
Their bodies rendered merely visible,

would be most faithful.

Katherine Gaffney completed her MFA at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is currently working on her PhD at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, Harpur Palate, Mississippi Review, Meridian, and elsewhere. Her first chapbook, Once Read as Ruin, was published by Finishing Line Press. Find her on Instagram: @sailing_over_a_cardboard_sea

Leah White

what there is space for

that classic shot after an explosion: one person blinking dumbly & walking –– just walking out 
of it. i feel iconically blank. too much has happened & recalibration is a distant horn.
 

 
or a falling dream. not down. as if the floor tipped horizontally into an eternal castle, never 
hitting the wall but plunging & plunging into endless room.
 

 
all i have patience for is wine in the yard. dancing & dancing into trance, patio iced latte, rolling 
in grass, touching irresistibly, touching & touching ––
 

 
i’m supposed to be done writing about grief, these poems about my dead mother & dead birds & 
dead friend & dying cat & the brown patch in my yard, but they keep coming out. 
 

 
so i dream my brother’s wedding. he throws me over his shoulder & carries me to the stage 
where fake lifeguards save me in front of everyone before the vows.
 

 
no diagnostics, just walking out. no workout schedule, no job hunting, not eating the mediocre 
curry to avoid waste. just us doing dumb mcconaughey accents in bed saying green light, GO, 
over & over. 
 
just wailing as i speed on my bicycle. face glitter & suspenders. a coconut popsicle. standing in 
sprinklers. putting mouths wherever they can fit. ian’s last summer rewind playlist, in its basic 
glory. & touching touching, masturbating to all those sweetest things past.

Leah White holds an MFA in poetry from CU Boulder. She teaches for the English department at CU Boulder and does multimedia work with film photography and dance. Her poetry most recently appears in Permafrost Magazine, among other places.

Gordon Taylor

Morphine

Stay ahead of pain,
            the anesthetist says— expert 
                        at endurance.

            I wonder if we die 
 
when it catches up to us.

                        A button is pressed
every seven minutes     like a laser beam fired in a video 
            game. A measured quantity 
 
outwitting
                                                                        overdose
 
                                    Morphine,
nothing is happening. I still remember 
            everything. An internal poem, 
                                    the Markov 
                        text generator, refrains 
            and refrains
 
            
Life contains 
                                                            beds.
                        Here, lying in many at once. 
 
the last, in which I woke 
                        gasping for air and called
an ambulance.
 
                        A frozen one 
I slept in for seven years, barely touching 
                                    my husband
            parallel lines
                                                weak magnets
            
We lived in an apartment building 
                        with no thirteenth floor
as though skipping a number
                                    might eradicate 
                                                            chance
 
                        we were on a bridge surrounded by a steel 
cradle                                       a net to cure the urge to jump
           

 we pointed below to an autumn valley
                        of hammered gold                   trees 
and a freeway
            of         accidents
            
                                    cracked taillights
                        smoking engines                                  
                                    
Hope is the best drug — my mother insisted
                        her own cancer
            never won — secret antidote
                                                                        denial
 
                                                I hallucinate an octopus 
                                    in a convalescent home
                        speed writing a novel about a human 
regrowing limbs. 
 
                                                            It’s a side effect 
 
                                                And there is this bed too — 
                        with a view—up—to a tangle 
of oxygen and venous lines, 
 
                                    Stay ahead of memory 
                                                 
                                                            a haze of spring midges
 
                        
Keep 
 
                                                pressing the button— repeat
 
                        this bed is not your grave 
 
filled
                                                with handfuls of sand              draped
 

                                                                        with a blanket of trumpet lilies

Gordon Taylor (he/him) is a queer poet who walks an ever-swaying wire of technology, health care and poetry. A recent Pushcart Prize nominee, his poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Grain, Rattle, Event, Banshee, Descant and Plenitude. In his spare time Gordon is a volunteer reader for Five South Magazine. Find him on Instagram: @cuddlyshark

Hope Houston

Sunday Drive

An apparition peers through the back of an ambulette.
Adorned in blue scrubs and blue gloves, she performs
behind the salt-streaked glass. Her rituals plentiful:
IVs, syringes, pharmaceutical Hoodoo, paddles over 
heart to jump, to shock, to start. I break behind her

ride’s light, follow at a safe distance, glide with her
into the twilight that drifts in streams over our shared
asphalt. The EMT soon drops her tools, spreads arms
backlit by forward cabin, presses palms into ambulette
walls. She balances her body to the bumps of the street.

Her body a cross, she crowns the motionless man, frames 
his dusk-mottled face, watches over his pressed lids like
angels bow heads at the baby Christ’s birth in Bethlehem. 
We rise and fall with another pothole in the road, lock 
eyes for a moment because we both know we know

that, as rugged clouds burst from behind the passing 
big box store, tonight no one is sleeping.

Hope (she/they) is a fat, disabled writer from Cleveland, Ohio. She loves playing a good game of pinball, collecting terrible Super Nintendo games, being a certified cat mom, and planting flowers for the birds and bees. In 2020, Hope received her MFA in Writing from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada, where she was co-editor of the River Volta Review of Books (RVRB). A guest lecturer of fantasy fiction for the Saskatoon Public Library, Hope's thesis project was a middle grade, epic dark fantasy novel exploring grief as a spatial process. She has work forthcoming in Washington Square Review, and her prose has appeared in Mystery Tribune and the RVRB. Follow Hope on Twitter: @HopeWritesStuff.

Matthew Lippman

Twinkies

I watched a video of a black bear
fall 49 feet out of a tree.
Earlier, I thought about becoming a criminal.
Not a bad one,
just a guy who stole Matchbox Cars from toy stores.
The text on the screen said that the animal control people
had not expected the tranquilizer to kick in so fast
and that is why they neglected to put a net
or mattress
or ocean below the bear
to break its fall.
I knew that was bullshit,
those men in their green vests and beards and guns.
Everything is a gun in this country
even your cellphone. Mine too.
We hold it up to the world and shoot.
It’s bad stuff like when the bear hit the concrete sidewalk bad stuff.
When I saw this, I felt my own bones break.
All of them
and I wanted to beat those men up,
with baseball bats and barbed wire--
that kind of assault and battery criminal. 
But this whole thing of black bears falling out of trees is my fault, your fault,
everyone’s fault.
He wouldn’t have been stuck up there in the first place
if not for our power plants and greasy Chevrolets and the toxic shit they put in Twinkies.
Remember Twinkies?
I miss Twinkies.
I want to be a Twinkie thief,
walk into a bodega, grab a handful of 2-packs
then go store them in my basement
so when the animal control people come with their nuclear bombs
to bomb the bears out of the trees
at least the Twinkies will have been stockpiled
and I’ll be able to feed the furry beasts
who might have gotten trapped in dumpsters
while running from the radiation.

Matthew Lippman’s collection Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020) is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. His next collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On, will be published by Four Way Books in 2024.

Kelly R. Samuels

Breakneck, Brokeneck

Forestry: tree whose main stem has been snapped by the wind

 

You wouldn’t say it was the wind, but me— 

            who could not be anything resembling forgiving. 
 
Synonym of pliable: late Middle English, from French, from 
plier—to bend.
 
Of all the lessons learned: how the tree draws from the roots
 
                        and so how dry before severance?
 
The smoke from the fires along the coast was carried all the way
            
here. Hazy, golden light we called beautiful 
                and then felt shame for saying. 
 
He admitted they should have done more 
to manage the understory. They should have cleared 
when they could, and now—.

Kelly R. Samuels is the author of the full-length collection All the Time in the World (Kelsay Books, 2021) and two chapbooks: Words Some of Us Rarely Use and Zeena/Zenobia Speaks. She is a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee with work appearing in The Massachusetts Review, RHINO, The Vassar Review, Court Green, and The Pinch. She lives in the Upper Midwest. Find her on Instagram: @kellyrsamuels

Caitie Young

BUILD A MACHINE THAT DOESN’T NEED YOU

the title is advice from costar app 

at night you breathe beside me             beneath
a blanket                      you ask me if you’re —
you are crying                              and turn over
into the air, the blanket with         the bad parts
still attached to the whole                          you, 
and then you tell me you                           were 
a bird                         when you were dreaming
and of course                          it was        a bird 
because you know                        how to build 
a good body                              with your mind 
because you know           it would be too much
to do it the right way, with scissors    and glue;
to calculate                               with ten fingers 
and both eyes                                          closed 
how much lidocaine                             to numb 
the part of you without                           a body 
so it happens behind your eyes              a thing 
so temporal                                   it’s edible —
beneath the blanket your breathing            stills
with an anvil on your pelvis         and i tell you
it should not be so hard             to cut them off;
what is this body                         but a machine 
to be oiled to get rusty and               everything
new to become old and die?                you wish 
you were a bird, or                       you wish you 
could have had wings            instead of breasts,
or you wish                     at least that you could 
tear yourself apart                         enough to be 
entirely different when put back           together.

Caitie Young (they), is a queer, nonbinary poet and fiction writer in Kent, Ohio. Their work is concerned with LGBTQ+ issues, tomatoes, and generational trauma. Cait's work has appeared in or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Scapegoat, the Elevation Review, the Santa Fe Writer's Project, and elsewhere. They are currently studying creative writing in the Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts program (NEOMFA).

Justin Lacour

Saturday, 10:07 a.m

Let it no longer be just
mid-morning at the strip mall.
 

Instead, let it be the hour 
when the hypnodomme 
drops off clothes at Goodwill
and then tweets about it,
 

when the bread seems to
float above the table for
a moment before people eat,
 

when I walk into a column
of air like a thousand wings
flapping at once, and tell no one.

Justin Lacour lives in New Orleans and edits Trampoline: A Journal of Poetry. His chapbook, My Heart is Shaped Like a Bed: 46 Sonnets, was recently published by Fjords Books.

Mollie O'Leary

Strawberries

for my siblings 

In August, I discovered tiny white
strawberries, studded with green gills,
a hint of pink on their fragile skin.

They sprouted over where we tossed
the grass clippings into a yellow heap,
another summer’s useless harvest. 

The berries were young, the same way
we were young then. I wanted to keep them 
from being buried by so many blades

of grass, each small strip grown sharp
under the quiet ire of all those suburban
summers. When we had to wake early

and shovel mulch, I stared at the steam
rising from the pile as it panted there like
an open mouth. Pushing my wheelbarrow

past the patch of berries, I knelt 
to spread the scorched dirt over
last season’s spent flower beds.

How many summers did we wait
for something to change, only to find
the same truckload of shit delivered

in front of the house? Every year
the daffodils and tulips sprang out
of the ground like little petaled

performers. We had the most
beautiful yard and everyone knew.
I kept the strawberries to myself.

Mollie O’Leary is a poet from Massachusetts. She holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Kenyon College and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington, Seattle. Her work has appeared in Frontier Poetry, Poetry Online, DIALOGIST, and elsewhere. She reads for GASHER journal. Find more of her work at mollieoleary.com or on Twitter and Instagram: @molliepoleary

Kes Maro

For Profit.

let’s try this again / ritual in repetition against reason / romanticize productivity / i call you / and i beg for permission to bleed / say thank you / thank you

this is freedom.
this is your
Manifest Destiny.
this is the dream.
the promise. it
is divine nectar.
you are free. you
are free. you are
free.

spill your guts red white and blue / medicine kneels to money / beg for permission to pay a doctor to prescribe drugs to make me // beg better // for permission to be in pain / and i sit in the hospital and they lose my blood / and i sit in the hospital and they lose my blood / and i sit in the hospital and they lose my blood / i beg for water / i am billed for fifteen hundred dollars i do not have

       
th s fre  om.
 his  ur
Manifest Destiny.
t  s the dre m
t e pr m se. it
 divine n ct r.
u  r  fre   y u
ar  free u  are
f ee
this is the best
healthcare in the world.

ritual in repetition / i call you like i don’t know the cost of calling / you’re too young for my diseases / you’re too young to be sick / have you tried abilify? / the pharmacy has me sit down / checks my ID / asks why i need it / says they don’t have it / i see it behind the counter / asks why i need it / i come back tomorrow / i pay full price / i am insured
             

best
hea   ca n th  w rld.

ritual in repetition / fed up i imagine that i could beg the corporate entity with more personhood protections than me for permission to die // but i know they’ll send my mother the bill

Kes Maro (they/he) is a writer and visual artist based in Lowell, MA. Their work has appeared in the SVA Visual Opinion and The Reed Journal of Existentialism. They received a BFA in Interrelated Media with a minor in Creative Writing from MassArt in 2022. When they’re not writing, they bird watch with their cat Sage. You can find them on Instagram @kes.maro.

Laura Grace Weldon

Such Redwing Blackbirds

are rare, I hear, although year after year
we spot them at our feeders. Black speckled
white, black with white-striped wings,
black with red shoulders and pale tails.
Surely we’re seeing generations of the same
family line – uniquely vibrant typos 
in the usual genetic script.

 
Our daughter defines the word leucistic
for us, shows us pictures on her phone,
rolls her eyes at the way we forget till
the term finally sticks in our minds
and she, complex variant in a quirky family,
settles her vexed feathers back into the glow
I’ve seen around her ever since she hatched.

Laura Grace Weldon lives on a ramshackle farm where she grows ridiculous ideas. She served as Ohio’s 2019 Poet of the Year and is the author of four books. Laura works as a book editor, teaches writing workshops, and maxes out her library card each week. Find her on Instagram: @earnestdrollery