Poetry

Sophie Hall

Dollhouse

We collage pictures of the girl who died, imagining her small house.
We cut out parts of her small face. She could’ve lived in a dollhouse.

Little glitter clips grip dirty blonde strands. A gap-tooth blonde
against a rained-on county fair. No one knows what dollhouse

could’ve made her. We house our grief in her hair—blonde ink, printed,
near-translucent. Fuse family photos, remnants from the Hall house,

with sticky hands. The purple of our glue sticks brings out
the blue of a balloon. There’s my room in the Hall house

layered with blue putty and balloons with the air let out—
Mom flattening their empty shells behind my dollhouse

to my brother’s shared wall. I teach an art class with photos of it all: Dad’s
baseball dents in living room walls, my bookshelf-turned-dollhouse,

reconfigured by Mom, riddled with mold. We use them to collage. I collapse
when I recall all photos have my life behind them, my dilapidated dollhouse.

There are years I’ve lost, I know, and my own face. Here I am,
again, sharing disproportionate grief in someone else’s house.

A little girl in middle school math on movie day, oddly relaxed.
We were watching Goosebumps: Welcome to Dead House

and when one character protested their family move, in the car towards tragic
change, I announced: That’s me, I’d do the same. Guard our faulted house

and plaster us inside, unscathed. Classmates looked blank as fears leaked out,
hints of familial decay, my voice blackened by the rotting Hall house.

Sophie Hall writes about homes and fears, especially where the two overlap. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Peatsmoke, Yalobusha Review, Nat. Brut, and Ruby, among others—and her first chapbook is forthcoming from First Matter Press. These days, Sophie is most dedicated to her dream journal. Find her online at sophiehallwriter.com.

Rebecca Anderson

The World is Burning & I’m Writing Sex Poems

The gray-yellow cloud with its hand on Maine is Canada burning,
gesturing across hardwood forests to meet us, this promise that

we’ll all die someday; everything we love will be gone, but
I ignore it, close the windows & my eyes & picture you in bed,

white sheet over your body, lying on your back, awake, good morning,
as though your existence means I can still taste good on my lips,

as though your eyes whet me enough to cloister me from flames.
Did you hear my hand pause on the knob, unsure if I should

walk in, though you said: Come in, anytime you need? Today,
I’d redefine need, what I require while flames consume the Earth.

During the night, did your hands become poetry, the same way mine
rubbed visceral fictions on my clit? Unlocked door between us,

I imagined the adjectives you’d pick to describe yielding to apocalypse.
The world is burning & I’m writing sex poems.

The world is burning & I know this chapter well.
The world is in flames & I want to feel you before we’re all ash.

Rebecca Anderson is a writer, visual artist, and mental health clinician who works and writes from a small farm in central Maine. She is an MFA candidate at Mississippi University for Women's low-residency creative writing program where she is a poetry editor for Ponder Review. She was nominated for Best American Short Stories 2019 and has had recent work featured in Waxing & Waning, Bacopa Literary Review, and Jokes Review.

Olga Maslova

September Fireflies

at the border of Summer and Autumn
a lawless no man’s land 
tides of smoke chase each other 

smoke from the campfire 
shish kebabs, watermelon

smoke from the leaves 
burnt offerings to dead gods

the night laughs
waiting for the new tenant  

fireflies 
on expired visas 
linger at the party
till dawn

the hosts are already asleep
the legitimate guests
sleep in guest rooms
the less legitimate 
doze on couches 
or in the pool house 

there is no place for you
stateless citizen of the sky
dancing to the music 
only you can hear
until the border guard  
bounces you out of summer
like a shuttlecock 

sun-dappled maples, children 
in shorts and sandals, cicadas 
compete with a lawn mower:
all is quiet at the checkpoint

nothing betrays 
the collapse of the green empire

Olga Maslova is a Ukrainian-American writer and theatre designer. She is the librettist for several major vocal productions: the opera Black Square, the oratorio Last Day of an Eternal City, and Venetian Cycle, an art song cycle, all with music by composer Ilya Demutsky. Olga is a 2021/2022 Fulbright Fellow for a musical libretto Russian Draughts. Olga's poetry has been published in Plume Poetry, ONE ART, and Beyond Queer Words. Olga teaches in the Department of Theatre at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign

Kai-Lilly Karpman

The Arrest with Moon

At 12, I would have described myself as sexy.
I remember feeling better than the women he would call.

The night we got arrested, he called his adult girlfriend
to say good night. But I thought

I could endure him better than her. Better than anyone.
I didn’t mind his violence. I unlocked it and owned it.

That night, I swam naked in the ocean,
It was December and freezing. He held me in it.

The moon lit the tips of the waves, making them
look like snowcapped crests.

My father used to take me to the mountains. He made me
wear sunglasses, warning me with stories of people going snowblind.

I took the glasses off when he wasn’t looking, dazzled
by brightness. I loved when everything was edged with blues and white.

This is the same way I ended up in the sea with that man.
But I’ll admit, I'm bluffing a bit. I was scared. I asked to go home.

I have a Mother, I told him. She will worry.
He said he’d drive us off a cliff if I talked like that again.

When the cops first shone their flashlights through the window,
it looked like two moons had appeared in the same sky,

each battling for the tide. One, the speckled moon I saw as a child
that I knew to be the sacred God of Animals and Love. The second,

the pure moon which became my God. The moon of Men and Violence.
When I stuffed my training bra into my shoe,

the cops laughed. They laughed at my braces, too.
They told me if I wanted to act tough they’d treat me tough.

Go fuck yourself, pigs, I said. The sea was riled with wind.
When I looked at him, I saw he was scared. Realized

I’d only endured a boy, not a small God like I thought.
Not a mountain of snow or moon.

Boys were everywhere.
Anyone could have a boy like that,

and I’ve had many more since I’m sorry to say.
In the cop’s car, morning happened.

I saw the coastline finally muted,
quelled by the hand of the sun.

Then, a door to home opened:
my mother.

Kai-Lilly Karpman is a writer, educator, and translator from Los Angeles, California. She studied at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and holds an MFA from Columbia University. She has been previously published in Plume, Image Magazine, Beyond Words, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Columbia University 2022 teaching fellowship, the Columbia University Word for Word travel and research grant, and was a 2023 finalist for the Ashland Poetry Press’s Broadside Poetry Competition. Her lyrics have appeared in “ The Marvels” by Marvel Studio’s soundtrack and elsewhere. Kai-Lilly values the marriage between literature's intuitive, unnameable power and the formal techniques that support its emergence. Her subject matter is almost always the effects of patriarchy.

nat raum

self-portrait as a minivan on fire

not like bruce springsteen, not like
the controlled chaos of bonfire

in my parents’ backyard, but churlish,
recalcitrant as a child sans sucker. i could

devour the whole of a honda odyssey’s
engine without flinching, so i do,

& i am no longer on fire; i am the blaze,
wiry frame inextricable from the melee.

i am the heat tumbling through air in tornados
like an apocalypse b-movie, scorching

the surface of the world that bore me. i am
this specific kind of ruinous & ravaging—

the type to burn before a what was that?
could even pass my lips. yes, i am

the inferno which bricks cars & razes cities
like a plow through autumn wheat. impulsive

flame sizzles in the sunset & i end in ash, seared
husk of a gold minivan on the highway.

nat raum (b. 1996) is a queer disabled artist and writer based on unceded Piscataway land in Baltimore. They’re the editor-in-chief of fifth wheel press and the author of you stupid slut, the abyss is staring back, random access memory, and several others. Find them online: natraum.com/links

Lou Terlikowski

Aunt Kay Called the House Again

When we turn up her gravel drive,
she’s smack in the doorway,
backlit by CSI, one long, tan tit
hanging out her silk robe, cupping
something in her hands—so many
gold rings clanging as she shivers.
These bugs crawled out my ears, come straight
from my head. She holds her hands up
to the light. We can only eye
the fistful of scabs she’s clutching
and try to muster whatever
empathy stayed all these years now,
nurse her with Marlboros, soft palm
her bugs into a Ziplock like
we might send them off to a lab
and find her itching just a dream—
find her life beginning again.
Someone’s comin’ for me tonight
and no one cares, she screams, wide mouthed.
But her fear is as unfounded as it is wild.
It’s only our tires that press into the mud
of her wet lawn, our hands pinning her
to the tub, washing off dried blood
and the high. When we leave her,
we know she will be entirely alone—
not come crawling with parasitic worms
or picked up by men in black coats.
She will be only a woman
we loved enough once to love still.

Lou Terlikowski is an Appalachian writer with an affinity for campy horror and puzzles. She earned her MFA at the University of Oregon and her work can be found at Psychopomp, Screen Door Review, and Blue Earth Review.

Mina Khan

해녀 (“diving women”)

how tiring it is to be
without use             there are mothers
of Jeju who have gone     obsolete   age, industry
but they are still honored    with statues, newspaper articles, they are
women over eighty with the widest lungs    skin with the heft to endure
the most frigid waters in just     a cotton jumper    hands
to sealife’s liquid bodies     how deeply we yearn
for touch     when I stand at the shore     clams huddle 
towards the warmth of a recent footstep
then are taken back       where salt crashes over
the shell       is not a casket         the shell
is repurposed    as dust      repurposes my bedroom  
when I was young       I thought the way 
to die was one’s own hand     the daughters
of diving women     tire   of training not to drown   
I wish I wanted   more    
from you

and I lived there

and I lived there 

on the ride over, someone tells me about crime rates.
not much has changed.

the bedroom plants have yellowed, 

and the mattress is missing its sheets.
there’s a van that offers a cheap car wash,
and in the summer, the hydrant showers   
passing cars.
outside my childhood home, 
there are vehicles, always                      
parked, always still.   

and in the backyard, there are peppers
that contort
around 
the mouth 
of a wire fence         me and my mother
took pleasure in studying 
how far a pepper can push itself, and still–

I am always
more like her. 
standing in my own kitchen
on the same plastic stool.
shaking my hips
and humming so loudly. starting stories
in the middle

Mina Khan is an award-winning poet from New York, currently based in Chicago. Her work discusses her Korean-Pakistani heritage, violence, tenderness, and the everyday. She was awarded an honorary mention by the American Academy of Poets and authored the chapbook MON-monuments, monarchs & monsters (Sputnik & Fizzle, 2020.) She holds an MFA from Columbia University, and has been featured in Pigeon Pages, The Margins, Epiphany Magazine, and more.

David Howard

Peccantem Me Quotidie (1603)

—after Craig Finlay, listening to Don Carlo Gesualdo

1  

Water-
falling leaves. A silver birch
         stirs. And the child
         inside me. 

Dressed for another
century, I bend to caress
         this river: it absorbs
         me. Going

after the half-known I
swallow
           my shadow.

2

The suicide’s apologetic
smile, her lover
         a literary device, a relative
         clause in the complex sentence of 

her will, his intent
eyes clear as the watercourse
         that washed her clean
         away, a withered leaf.

New Zealander David Howard is the author of Rāwaho (Cold Hub Press, 2022) and the editor of A Place To Go On From: the Collected Poems of Iain Lonie (Otago University Press, 2015). In a past life David acted as Tour Supervisor (SFX) for both Metallica and Janet Jackson. He also worked in the Czech Republic (2016) and Russia (2019) on UNESCO City of Literature residencies. David divides each year between Dunedin New Zealand and Pazin, Croatia.

MK Francisco

LIFECYCLE // AUTOCOMPLETE

An earth inside the earth. // Wild rabbits The night inside the night. // Coyotes trot
thriving in engineered burrows under the zig-zag side streets at double speed, yellow- 
city pluck their own fur for nesting green eyeshine reflecting motion triggered
depressions. Dust bathing newborns the size lights. // A person buried inside a person. // 
of a fist. // Threadlike mycelial networks The human in a blue sleeping bag under the
consume a dying ironwood tree. // freeway overpass sleeps alone, so tired they 
Decomposition taking place in decade-long can no longer speak. // Dreaming they can 
stages. A molecular disassembler pieced and float three inches above the sidewalk, 
patterned. // Masses of branching white rot stretched out, lifting themselves to fly with
fungi eat plastics and heavy metals, drip great effort. // Imagined running from
feeding sapling roots. // Beside the melting someone in a spore-soaked middle night,
ice sheets: a wandering polar axis shifts the hiding in the common ivy. // Easily reacting.
earth’s tilt, iridescent rain trash Thin skinned. Hang up my skin to dry. // 
and persistent groundwater flux. Counts the form as sleeping rough.

Under blue LED streetlights, sidewalk minerals ricochet against nocturnal animals. // Skin easily 
tearing under a chain link fence. // Racoons orbit yard waste containers, gnawing through 
industrial plastic. Impossible to ignore this stage of hunger. Found somewhere to hide. // A 
rabbit’s dry carcass appears in a flattened c-shape on a curving path beside the ragweed and 
Scotch broom. Scraping your cheeks against the sidewalk cement. Adapting into something built 
on the fragile bones of anemic mammals.

MK Francisco lives in Seattle Washington. A graduate of the University of Washington MFA program, her work has appeared in Fence, 580 Split, Quarterly West and Inverted Syntax.

Jim Stewart

Private Key Follows

Sometimes people ask to see the whole thing. Usually
I know better. That’s why I know so many passwords —
so many dots in the box — and why I change them
so often, because I start typing in the username field
in front of the whole room like being naked in a dream.
There’s a trick for this, but sometimes the words
switch between in my head, battery staple for some
other words at the end and I’m left staring
at the keyboard like a toddler who can’t unbutton
his shirt, my secrets hidden even from me.
It’s okay to tell you this, the schema is not meant
to be a secret. Shannon long ago calculated
the probabilities. There is information in these words.
Expensive lock, old bike always worked for me.
Usually, I’m more trouble than it’s worth.

Sometimes I go shopping for lies. Certain stores
have ones that fit me just right. A few buttons, long
sleeves, a collar, and I’m fit for work. Or take waist
sizes. A man told me they subtract a few inches
for flattery. I measured, and he’s right: a 32 no less
than 35 inches. How long have I fooled myself
this way? But the inside of my thigh still always
wears away the fabric against the side of the seat
when I pedal. It’s natural to take a pair of scissors
starting there, cut off the rest, fantasize wearing
those shorts out like a tourist MILF squatting
to stroke the bronze nutsack of the charging bull
at Bowling Green. But say I had no choice. Say
you made me reveal myself this way. You’d never
do such a thing, you say. Neither would I. But
someone has to put on the demon mask. All
I desire is sharp with edges of cruelty.

Sometimes there are stains. Bean dip or the last
couple of drops, and I don’t see until I leave
the house. Coffee is fine, and lube if it’s water-
based. I tried ironing once; I burned the table.
I used to wear my sleeves long enough to cover
my hands. Mom didn’t understand, but sewed
me a hoodie whose cuffs draped. After eleven pm
I was another kid, but always under the covers
before Dad came down the stairs. I didn’t mean
to be dishonest. But children must lie to protect
the innocence of adults. Of all the jobs
I could’ve picked. Now I have to block
their VPNs. Now I have three different
profiles on two apps. To think I bookmarked
those sites once. I thought then I chose a place
where doors didn’t have to be closed. Now,
sometimes I don’t even let the dog in. He wouldn’t
judge, but I see the questions in his eyes. Don’t
just forgive me if I showed you too much, even
if you asked. Don’t tell me you have monsters too,
if you can put them so easily into a poem.

Jim Stewart has been published in In Company, New Mexico Poets after 1970, Liminality, and the Moonstone Arts Center's Ekphrastic Poetry anthology. He co-edited and designed Saint Elizabeth Street magazine and hinenimagazine.com. He teaches programming and logic in New York.

Luís Costa

next of kin

when did I get a new tattoo,
has your skin always smelled
like fresh geraniums, oh wait,
do you truly think I can recall
the last time I ate a breakfast,
Saturday the post came early,
I’m rarely home, yes perhaps
drinking, or walking, thanks
for the inexplicable concern,
your t-shirt is ironed, did you
change your fabric softener,
I learned that Rachmaninov
prelude at last, your favourite
is still a little difficult for me,
I got a new shampoo but also
my emergency contact is now
blank, sadly no persimmons
in the tree this year, autumn
was cold, I painted the room
green, of course please do go,
you can watch me disappear
down Fentiman Road, your
future husband is putting up
a Christmas tree, why are you
such a beautiful piece of salt
inside my wounds, you have
snow on your lips, when did
I become a cat with vertigo.

Luís Costa (he/they) is a queer poet, whose debut book Two Dying Lovers Holding a Cat was published by Fourteen Poems in 2023. His poems have featured in Visual Verse, Stone of Madness, Queerlings, Inksounds, Farside Review and FEED. Long-listed for the Out-Spoken Poetry Prize in 2022, he holds a PhD from Goldsmiths and lives in London with his cat Pierożek. You can find him on Twitter @captainiberia

Gabrielle Fiedor

Robert

why are you still gone?
your mother is no longer scrubbing
the walls or hitting the dog
she has calmed down
so have I

her and I have sat down for 60 nights
and eaten warm foods
our legs and necks have grown
one time at the table I even touched
her hand
it felt like the surface of a coin

we are healed now

and how are you?
plucking woman pulp
to keep yourself fed?
good love is a foreign country
that starts with her
foot on your throat

we once watched a man

step in front of a train

you didn't even quiver.

I shouldn’t have been surprised you said

nothing when I left.

now in my dreams I see you
in the city, on the rotted orange steps
and if I squint hard there is a tear
falling from your eye,
fat as a grape.
The tear is always wet
like a stone next to the sea
and I can’t believe I never saw it before.

Gabrielle is a writer and a teacher living in Boston, MA. Her first poetry collection Knives Can be Soft was published in September of 2023 and is available from all major booksellers. She has also been published in The Sunlight Press, Beyond Words magazine, and the lesbian zine erotica Pulp Friction. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her essay “Summer of Words.” You can find her on Instagram at @braingarden_wordgarden.

Ivana Mestrovic

shelling peas

holding the full pod
damp between my thumbs
I curl my fingers into the ridge
and split the slick walls apart
popping out bitter peas

we were sticky and sweet
maybe that was enough

I don’t think he ever loved me

Ivana Mestrovic holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Yale University. She has worked in arts management for sculptor Mark di Suvero for over thirty years and runs his Spacetime Studio. Her work has been accepted for publication by Brief Wilderness, Cider Press Review, Doubly Mad, Euphony Journal, Evening Street Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Night Picnic Press, The Opiate, Oxidant Engine, Plainsongs, Slant and Visitant Lit.