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ISSUE 26      August 2022.           

POETRY

Judy Ireland, Meryl Stratford, Michael Mackin O'Mara, Lenny DellaRocca, editors

If you are a poet, prophet, peace-loving artist, if you are tolerant, traditional or anarchistic, haiku or epic, and points in between; if your poems sing, shout, whisper, dance, scratch, tickle, trot or crawl;  if you value the humane treatment of every creature and the planet on which we dwell, SoFloPoJo seeks your best work.

JUST SAY GAY
Poetry, Prose, Pictures & Rants in Response to Florida Governor Ron DeSatnis' Homophobia

Fadrian Bartley.    Robert Carr.    Acadia Currah.    Nathaniel Farcas.    Robin Gow.    A.E. Hines.    SG Huerta.    Paige Justice.    Bryan Monte.    Kyrsta Moorehouse.    Dion O'Reilly.    Carrie Magness Radna.    Gregg Shapiro.    Laurie Rachkus Uttich

Fadrian Bartley

No Skin is Too Thick

Let us hold men in our hands
to feel their rough edges between our fingers,
and massages their temper before we misunderstood.
let us have them sit on balconies and submit to our attention
and call those moment the vibes,
so their inner voice will speak through cigarettes and the smells
of intoxicated pores through thick skins.
let us speak to them in silence,
since they already know the meaning of that word,
but not in the shape and form of poetry.
let them know that giant cannot crush the rain with bare hands,
or sweep away the river with their lashes.
let them know that it is ok to empty the soul in front of the universe for all to see,
and release the clog tunnel in their veins.
let them know that petals bleed when no one is looking,
but birds and butterfly will know.


Fadrian Bartley is a Jamaican writer. And is the author of “family curses” his poetry is available in a few online web
magazines which included, IHRAF- international human rights art festival. Mixedmag.com, Pif-magazine, Aphelion,
and platforms such as allpoetry.com. Fadrian has a NVQJ diploma in customer relations, and his writing focuses on life, nature,
​and people’s personality. His inspiration comes from within and continuously opening new pages to begin new chapter.

Robert Carr

A Day Without Trousers


To be something pretty, to scratch 
the clothes you think I am, drop pants and wrap 
in Sri Lankan sarongs I ordered on Amazon. 

To step proudly in my prissy garden, 
obsessed with floral perfections, 

petaled geometries, squeal in heat when groundhogs 
strip leaves from the coneflower. 
To holler – The flowers! and mean every tooth, 

spit back at neighbors who roll their eyes. 
To catch and release the most beastly things, 

to bawl on the lawn, curse my failed Hav-a-Hart 
Trap, attend to the dramas of wishbone 
and cantaloupe bait. Husband, I dream 

furry rodents choking in midnight, perennial 
soil transformed to tombstone. Echinacea, 

for headaches, for pain, the salmons, 
some yellows, the reds.  I know grief is tiresome – 
You slam doors; drive off to buy poison. 

In your eyes, I’m without a stomach 
for bullets or the balls to drown vermin.

Diminishing dreams, you taunt my waking 
screams, the sound made by whistle pigs. 
Let’s have a day without trousers, 

roll sheets of fabric low on our hips, bare chested, 
dissolve in bright color. How lovely, together, 

to shamelessly mince among half-eaten flowers.


Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, published in 2016 by Indolent Books and The Unbuttoned Eye, a full-length 2019
collection from 3: A Taos Press. Among other publications his poetry appears in Crab Orchard Review, Lana Turner Journal,
the Maine Review, the Massachusetts Review and Shenandoah. Selected by the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance, he is the recipient
​of a 2022 artist residency at Monson Arts. Additional information can be found at robertcarr.org

Acadia Currah     Vancouver, British Columbia

Little League


            Butterflies and a daisy with all the petals meticulously picked off. A game of “Does she
love me, does she love me not” whispered into the grass. And you ask it not to tell anyone. 
            It doesn’t answer. But that’s okay. It’s grass. 
            You water that spot on the lawn every day anyway, in case it ever feels unforgiving. 
            And you’ll sit your heart down at the kitchen table, sigh and say “I’m not mad, I’m just
disappointed” 
            The first time you kissed a girl, you looked over your shoulder the whole way home,
desire as heavy as the devil on your back. And when you got home, you scrubbed your lips raw,
thinking someone might see the shadow of another girl's lips on yours. 
                                               And know. 
            You know how to be a girl, with keychain wolverine claws and lipstick coffee cups. You
know how to cross your legs and put a pillow over your stomach on the couch. You know how to
be touched like a girl, hard and heavy and mean. 
            Her hands are gripping your collar, burying her shame-flushed face in your lips. 
    And you wish you knew how to be a boy, easy confidence and pressing into hips, pushing
back short hair and leaning against a wall. 
            But you don’t. 
            So you improvise. 
            And when you were about thirteen, you went to your friend's baseball game after school.
And tried, honestly, to keep your eyes trained on the dirt-knees players. But despite your efforts,
you find yourself drawn to the fathers, clutching wife-purses, faces red-hot yelling at pee-wee
boys circling the pitch. A groan of disappointment, yelling at the referee, shoving popcorn in
mouth like a starved animal. 
            And you’re shadowboxing in the East Side Mario’s bathroom. He is nice, all “Get
whatever you want.” and “Tell me about your family”. But your heart, regrown like a deformed
lizard tail, a starfish leg, cannot. He will touch your hand across the table and you want to saw it
off with your butterknife and give it to him, say “Here, take it.”
            Just take it. 
And you have your hands on the sink, looking into your own mascara eyes in the mirror. 
Come on. Let him pay, put his hand on the small of your back and move it to your leg in
the passenger seat. 
            And you think, so much of love with him and him and him would be about allowance, let
him touch you, let him look at you. You’ll let him push your hair behind your ear, and whisper
you look beautiful. 
            And you’ll nod, and you’ll want to want. 
            Leave the bathroom. 
            “Game face.” 
            And later you’ll walk down your suburban street on a hot day to a church of which you
do not know the denomination. And it doesn’t matter anyway. You’ll let the carpet-burn your
knees and you’ll ask to love like a woman, silent and starving. 
            And Father, he’ll sigh like you’ve struck out, put down his foam finger and prescribe you
multivitamin hail mary’s. He will tell you to plant your desire in the backyard, bury it and trim its
branches. 
            Nothing grows. 
            There’s a girl, reaching over you to grab her bag “Do you mind?” 
            “Yeah, no problem.” 
            And the second time you kiss a girl, she whispers “This is nothing” over and over again. 
            This is nothing, this is nothing. 
            And it isn’t. 
            It doesn’t have to be, she can press her warm mouth to yours in the fluorescent light that
​feels like dark. And you can burn like the rosary beads that press into your chest, picture them
scattering on the linoleum if you pull too hard.
            She’ll smack your hand away from hers like a child reaching for the cookie jar.
            You don’t try again. 
            And she has a boyfriend. He has big enough hands to love her. 
            You understand, your chewed-nail fingers are only for catching on nylons while a movie
plays in class. Only to squeeze like a stress ball when she gets a bad test score. 
            His are to hold her waist, spin her around under streetlights, to hold her face while he
devours her, wholly.
            You aren’t hungry, not like he is. 
            You cannot love loud like a boy, cannot even fathom how. 
            The first lesbian movie you ever saw featured two women kissing behind a pillar,
pressing desperately, quietly, into one another. Loving good and hidden like they should. 
            When you were twelve they taught you about love being sacrifice, how Jesus sacrificed
himself on the cross as an ultimate show of love for humanity. And you think about how you
could love your husband, how you must love him if it’d pain you to be with him, to sacrifice
your happiness for a man you haven’t met being the idyllic, sacrificial version of love. 
            And there are fourteen stations of the cross, all of which are printed in high definition on
the walls of your middle school. And every single one makes you think, why? Why didn’t he put
it down, and run as far away from Golgotha as possible, and stop telling people he was the
messiah?
            “Do you like anyone in our class?” 
            “Oh-, Josh A, I guess”
            You understand, later. 
            The first time a boy loves you, you don’t know until much later. He tells you “I was so
crazy about you! Couldn’t you tell?” and recalls throwing his jacket over a puddle like the male
lead in a vaguely sexist movie. 
            “I was so obvious back then”
            And you meet a girl at a party complaining about downing her second drink, you
volunteer,too quickly, to get her another one “Are you cold? I can make tea” 
            She looks at you, like she’s seeing past something “I’m okay.” 
            The third time you kiss a girl, your mouth tastes like lukewarm raspberry vodka, and
she’s leaning into you. 
            She’s smiling, pecking vanilla lip gloss onto your mouth. 
            You hadn’t realized how dry your lips had been before. 
            “This is nothing” 
            “What did you just say?” 
            And you’re fun at parties until you’re just a dyke. You can smear your lipstick and giggle
while boys are watching and return to a boyfriend-lap perch without raising alarm. Without
explanation. 
            “You don’t-like me, right?” 
            You put down your cross, big and heavy as a baseball-bat. “Of course not.” 
            The last time you are in a confession booth ever, you are apologizing. And you hear your
mothers voice in your head, when she’d find you eating all the advent calendar chocolate on the
second of december, “Are you sorry you did it or sorry you got caught?” 
            And you aren’t sure. 
            You make a home in the term bisexual, finding comfort in it’s ability to tell a half truth
about you. You wear attraction to men like a too-big sweater you get for a childhood birthday. 
            “She’ll grow into it”
            You don’t. 
            But it works, for a while.
            And he’s looking at you across the table “Aren’t you going to finish your breadsticks?”
You nod, “Right, yeah.” 
            But you don’t let him pay, and you go home early. 
         And you could allow him to love you, open car doors and look up from under your
eyelashes. 
            And you thought, maybe, if you just stayed long enough, gave it enough time,  you could
train yourself to love him, and him, and him. Practice tricks in the backyard, put yourself on a
leash. 
            And there, tied to an oak tree, you begin to wonder how to love without training, without
trepidation and meticulously maintained composure. 
            The fourth time you kiss a girl, her mouth tastes like spit. Her hands, a little bigger than
yours, clutch your hips like a lifeline. And there’s a livewire between you, connecting frayed
t-shirts and ill-fitting jeans. 
            And you think, to love her would be about wanting. You grab her shoulders like a
steering wheel. 
            “Thank you.”
            She laughs a little. “You’re welcome?” 
            And you kiss her again. 
            Again and again and again. 
            And you love like a girl, low and hazy and sparking. 
            You know, that this feeling indicates a failure to hold a man like this, like you want to
brand him with your fingerprints And you feel, a little bit, like a child, being called “it” in a
playground game of tag.
            “I wasn’t playing anyway.” 
            You let the grass go dead, you’ve never had a green thumb.
            The voice is there again. 
            “Are you sorry you did it, or are you sorry you got caught?” 
            And you know, definitively. 
            “Neither.” 


Acadia Currah (She/They) is an essayist and poet residing in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Their work explores her relationship with gender, sexuality, and religion. She is a leather-jacket-latte-toting lesbian,
​her work seeks to reach those who most need to hear it. Their work has appeared in The Spotlong Review and Defunkt Magazine.

Nathaniel Farcas     Florida

Loves me not 


He loves him, he does,
and this is a frequent cause of the wars waged inside his own head. 
At the very least he knows he doesn’t love him in the way he should, the way a better man than
him might--
this helps him settle his mind,
helps him forget at least 
for awhile. 
He’s been finished with love for a long time now;
he knows he can’t go back and the last thing he wants is to try. 
The idea of it makes him feel something he won’t admit is fear. 
But he loves him.
Only sometimes, and certainly not most of the time. He doesn’t love the machine he barks orders 
at.
When he’s blinded by anger,
ripping at matted hair,
throwing that scarred and broken body down onto the rocks, 
he sees nothing worth loving in those gaunt cheeks and empty eyes. 
He doesn’t love him when he falls, when he bleeds,
when he falters
or stutters 
or trips up--
nor does he love him when he performs perfectly.
Whatever he feels towards that blind obedience isn’t love;
feels when he hits him or grabs him or takes what he wants from him and gets no response isn’t 
love, 
and he knows that. But he loves him. 
whatever he 
It’s in the late nights when they’re alone together, when he’s had too much to drink and his head 
is spinning and his tongue is loose and consequences seem like a faraway dream,
when he spills his guts out into the world and there’s only one person to listen. 
He sees something then.
Perhaps it’s the alcohol blurring his vision,
perhaps it’s wishful thinking--
just him longing for someone to hear him,
to understand how desperately his chest aches, to know the depths of his suffering—or perhaps 
the eyes that meet his across the table are softer than usual. 
Sometimes he dares to believe that might be the case. Things are always back to normal by 
morning anyway. 
But he loves him.
In those rare moments he loves him, and though it’s a sick twisted hopeless love it’s love 
nonetheless, no matter how much he hates that, no matter if it makes him sick to his stomach. 
Perhaps even rarer are the times he’ll catch a tender look,
a favor completed he hadn’t asked for—in those moments he feels the 
rusted gears of his heart start to creak and turn and shriek like a wounded beast. 
Once when he’d been sick, lying in a feverish haze, he could’ve sworn that when someone had 
pulled the covers up over him as he lay shivering in bed and placed their hand on his cheek, he’d 
felt cool metal against his skin. 
His heart had screamed louder then and the gears spun faster than ever. He knows, always, these 
moments will mean nothing by the next day. But he loves him. 
In some fucked up way,
which he thinks might be the most he’s capable of, 
he loves him. 
And sometimes,
when he sees himself side-by-side with him,
when he looks down at his own bloodied hands and knows they’ll never shake as badly
as the
hands that 
clean up afterwards,
when he meets those dark eyes and sees some deep gentle sorrow— 
sometimes he can’t help but wonder which of them is more human, him or his broken old 
machine. 



Stories You Wouldn’t Tell 

1.
You and I never meet. We are both gone
by next year. 

2.
You and I meet this time.
We speak briefly. I toy with the idea
of digging around inside your ribcage for something. Your brittle bones crack when my
​fingernails touch them, and we pass pleasantries from hand to hand until they slip through our
fingers. 

3.
You and I fall in love this time. You jump, or maybe I do.
I like this version least of all. 

4.
You and I fall in love this time.
I stay and stay and stay while you rip me apart, shoveling handfuls of me into the earth.
A bowl of pomegranate seeds glitters in the sun, red and sticky and sweet. Your lips are
stained with it and when you smile they crack.
I don’t know how this one ends. 

5.
You and I fall in love, every time.
Your skin still tastes like vanilla rather than copper and your knuckles are still smooth. We find
each other and I kiss your eyelids and your lips aren’t scarred and the sun rises every morning,
red and ripe, 
like you could bite into it. 

6.
You and I, in another life,
in any other life, in every other life. You and I. You and I. You and I. 

7.
You and I fall in and out of love.
I meet a boy whose hands are like hot coals, like whiskey in my chest. No one else is you. I don’t
want them to be. 

8.
I don’t remember if your eyes shone like
beetle shells or coins, or if your breath was like fire. I don’t remember how it felt to ache for you.
I don’t think there’s anything left for you and I. 

9.
It was nice while it lasted, though, wasn’t it? 


Nathaniel Farcas is a 19-year-old award-winning short story author and has been writing poetry since the age of six. 
​He is a proud member of the LGBTQIA community and his work explores the joy and heartbreak that live within his community. 
He currently resides in Florida.

Robin Gow

I Dream the Hospital of Transgender Doctors


Has my doctor always been kind? She says she’s prescribing me 
whatever body I need. Then, at today’s visit she asks three times 
“Do you have any other questions or concerns?” 
My tongue becomes a bicycle avalanche.
I want to ask in return, “Do you ever feel like this?
Do cis people feel like this?” Small on the altars
of our medicine? Always trying to nest in my body? 
I am concerned I am too old to be looking for new ways to change 
as if one might create me. I want to ask, “How can I learn to
breathe silver?” and “Can you tell me why at night 
my blood turns indigo?” No. This would be too much to admit.
When I say all my doctors have been cisgender, 
I mean they have all been too certain.
I want a hospital where my doctor is as catastrophic as me—so queer 
they’re no longer doctors. They’ll wear pink dresses and tweed jackets. 
Mustaches and lipstick. They’ll use a poem as a stethoscope.
There will be a hall of x-rays to make our bones lucid and an IV
of nothing but light. We will be mended but never fixed.
There will be no cures or antidotes. 
I want to say Tell me doctor, will we already be dead or just not yet here? 
Today, I tell her I want a thicker needle 
to draw my testosterone up from the vial but I don’t say
“Why does this have to come in a vial?” 
Sometimes to be queer is to long for everything 
that is not yet possible. Who else is going to hold onto purple? 
Who else is going to learn to breathe silver? 
In The Hospital of Transgender Doctors
we often forget we are transgender, not out of fear or shame 
but out transcendence—a glow without invented words.
So transgender we surprise ourselves each moment--
a body without systems to name it.
We perform surgery with notebook paper. Write prayers
to our divine and insert them in each other’s throats like resting birds. 
No one is in critical condition but also everyone is. 
There is a gallery of precipices we gaze into
and there is nothing to be prevented. No one is clean and 
no one is saved and everyone stands in a past and a future bedroom. 
My doctor reviews the appointment. Plans for STD tests
and a flu shot. I lie to my doctor when she asks for a third time, 
if “Do you have any questions or concerns?” I say, “No, I don’t.”


Robin Gow is an autistic transgender and queer poet from rural Pennsylvania.
​They are the author of several poetry collections, an essay collection, and the YA novel in verse, A Million Quiet Revolutions. ​

AE Hines     Medellin, Colombia

Postcards from the Dead 


Ten years later, my killers 
    interviewed from their cells 
will say: Matthew Shepard 

needed killing. Ten years after that, 
    my people lay my ashes 
to rest in the shining capitol, 

under the stone ceiling
    of a vaulted cathedral, far 
from the fence in that naked winter field, 

from the icy prison of Wyoming.
    My killers thought I’d be forgotten 
when they offered me a ride, then 

bound my hands and placed
    that filthy bag over my head. 
But for ten years, for thirty, far longer 

than I was alive, our people remember 
    my name. It blooms 
from their lips like a cold prairie rose. 


AE Hines is the author of Any Dumb Animal, his debut poetry collection released from Main Street Rag in 2021.
His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, The Montreal Poetry Prize Anthology, Rhino, Ninth Letter, 
The Missouri Review, I-70 Review, Sycamore Review, and Tar River Poetry, among other places. Originally from
​North Carolina, he lived for many years in Portland, Oregon, and now resides part-time in Medellín, Colombia. www.aehines.net

SG Huerta

Last Night You Said I Should Write More Queer Love Poems


But I just can’t stop watching Selling Sunset,
my TV right past my laptop, this blank Google 
Doc that’s been staring me down. Davina (or
was it Heather?) just ordered a macadamia 
milk latte, but I doubt it tops the H-E-B
coffee we take turns making each other
in the early mornings. 
                                         Lately, this is my only exposure
to straight culture, to (rich and mostly) white people,
to everything we aren’t and would never
want to be. The soundtrack is so consistently
bad– lyrics full of the unearned, unadulterated
confidence of #girlbosses. Would you believe
I didn’t know what a brokerage was until 
two days ago? When I watch Amanza struggle
to remember the number of bathrooms 
in the mansion she’s showing, I can’t help 
but envision our dream home. Some must-
haves: at least one skylight, space for the cats, 
shelves on shelves for the books you keep buying 
me. Let’s take a shot of less-than-top-shelf
vodka every time an agent’s main motivation 
is money, get too drunk to care about these strangers,
and lay in bed together, my head on your chest,
my heart completely yours.


Mortality, Gender, and Other Anxieties That Are Not Unique to Me


Bury me in my cherry red Doc Martens. Gender is a performance & my legs refuse to break.
Bury me with an iced oat milk latte. Bury me far away from my father. Gender is a performance
& I’m stuck backstage. Bury the cis girl I was before you bury the sort-of guy I am. Gender is
lineated poetry & I can’t stop writing prosaic stanzas. Bury me. Gender is. So on & so forth.
​Bury my gender? Is that anything? Tell me it’s (I am) something.


SG Huerta is a Chicane writer from Dallas. They are the author of the chapbook 
The Things We Bring with Us: Travel Poems (Headmistress Press, 2021), and their work has appeared in 
Split Lip Magazine, Infrarrealista Review, Variant Lit, and elsewhere. They live in Texas with their partner and
​ two cats. Find them at sghuertawriting.com or on Twitter @sg_poetry.

Paige Justice


The Closet


            A girl is playing hide-and-seek with her siblings. She hides in the deepest, darkest
crevasse; deep enough so they cannot find her by just opening the door. Time isn’t real in the
closet. At first, she is happy--look how well I’ve done! she thinks. 
            As time goes on she sits in the darkness, waits in the darkness, becomes a part of the
darkness; her siblings never find her. 
            She soon starts to think that maybe they didn’t want to find her; didn’t want her to ruin
their fun; didn’t want to be seen with her, or the other kids would make fun of them, too; they
didn’t want her. 
            The girl crawls towards the door, her hand outstretched; all she finds is cold, smooth
sheetrock greeting her. She paws around, growing more frantic with each passing moment. She is
sure the door is there, knows it is there; how else could she have gotten here?
            Maybe this is a dream.
She presses her back against the wall, drawing her knees to her chest. She can’t see, but
she presses the tips of her fingers against her thigh, one by one, until she comes to a stop at the
tenth. 
            Not a dream, she confirms.
            She can’t see, but she begins to hear a commotion. Three sets of feet thump against the
solid oak floors, all coming to a sudden halt followed by the slam of a door.
            Who could be with them? she asks herself. It was just the three of them playing. Had her
aunt stopped by, and brought her son?
            “Oh, I cannot wait to tell mom about this,” she hears her older brother say.
            “Looks like you’re going to be going back to therapy,” her sister taunts.
            Before she can question who it is, who they are making their latest victim of bullying, she
hears a voice. Her chest tightens. 
            “It wasn’t me!” the voice detests. She hears the guilt in the voice.   
            She hears herself.
            This can’t be real, she whispers. Small beads of sweat begin to form on her upper lip. She
hears the voice speak again.
            “Just don’t tell her,” the voice pleas, “I’ll do whatever you want.”
            She wants it to stop. She wants the darkness to end. She kicks the wall with the flat of her
foot, putting all eighty-five pounds of force behind it. She screams for her life, to be found, for
all of this to stop.
            The walls don’t budge. No one can hear her. She is alone.
            She is trapped in the closet.
                                                                                              *
            Time isn’t real in the closet. She isn’t sure how long she’s been here, how long it has been
like this. She thinks that maybe it has been years now.
            She hears everything. She hears the girls at school with their mocking words, their
accusations of her being a predator.
            She hears the voice that sounds like hers. She hears the voice that doesn’t acknowledge
her screams for freedom, her pleas to see the light of day. She hears the voice of the liar, who
responds that those girls are “just bitches with nothing better to do” when her mother questions
why she’s heard talk around town that her daughter is a predator looking to corrupt other girls
with the “sickness” she has.
            The closet is smaller now. She takes up more space. She isn’t sure if so much time has
passed that she is growing, or if the walls are closing in with every lie the voice tells. She thinks
that it’s probably both.
            She makes a bet with herself about which will happen first: she will finally find a way out
of this place—find the door, make her own damn door—or there will be too many lies, no way
out, and she will be nothing more than a mixture of blood and brains left canvasing the walls of
this goddamn closet.
            Her bet is on the latter.
                                                                                                 *
            The girl is now a woman. 
            For the first time in a decade, she thinks, she begins to see light. There is nothing but
blinding, illuminating whiteness. 
            The time has come, she thinks. She has finally died. This is the light they had taught her
about in church, the one that she was supposed to follow to take her to her eternal destination.
            She hears nothing but the screams and sobs of her mother, the sound of sheetrock
shattering against her father’s fists.
            She is confused. She wonders why they aren’t happy to see her, to see their real daughter
—not the imposter who has been living as her for the past ten years.
            She begs them to listen. She tells them about how she has been trapped in a closet for the
past ten years, about how someone had locked her in there and took her place, about how she had
wanted to tell them the truth even then but she herself didn’t have the words for it, that she didn’t
understand it, that she still doesn’t.
            They tell her she is sick. They tell her she is crazy. They tell her they are going to get her
help, so they can get their daughter back.
            Her eyes adjust. Everything looks just as she remembers it. 
            She looks in the mirror. She doesn’t know the woman staring back at her.
                                                                                                     *
            The woman leaves before her parents can ship her off to be tortured, to be changed, to be
confined in that closet forever. 
            She struggles, at first. She has no money, no car, no place to sleep. She has no friends, no
family, no one to call for help.
            She finds shelter in old sheds, alley ways, and occasionally under the stars in a hammock
when the weather allows it. She has nothing, but she has never been happier—happy to be free,
to not lie, to be seen for who she really is.
            She’s good at hiding it, her homelessness, just as she has always been good at hiding
things. She keeps herself well-groomed, and has enough outfits, that people at work don’t even
question the possibility of her unfortunate reality.
            Eventually, the woman makes friends. She doesn’t lie to them about who she is, or what
she’s been through, but she doesn’t talk about the closet. Part of her is still afraid that maybe,
somehow, she will be forced back to that place. The other part of her is afraid that maybe her
parents were right, that she is sick, she is crazy.
            She meets a woman, and she learns what it means to fall in love and to be loved for who
you truly are. At first, she is scared. She has never done this. She has been taught that it is wrong
to do this, that people who did things such as this are sick.
            She learns that all of the things she was taught as a child are a lie. She knows, first-hand,
that there is nothing more beautiful than a love like this, than the love that two women can share.
            The woman whispers soothing mantras and caresses her cheek every night when she
inevitably kicks and screams herself awake, when the memories of the darkness, the
confinement, consume her dreams.
                                                                                                    *
            The woman has a family of her own now and has made a beautiful life for herself. She
has been with her wife for nine years. She hasn’t heard from her family in ten.
            She has a daughter and a son, twins. They have never met their grandma and grandpa, or
aunt and uncle. She hopes that they never do. She will make sure they never do.
            She works to help children who are going through the same thing that she did. She runs a
homeless shelter for LGBTQ+ youth and works as a counselor. She helps them process the
trauma from all of the years that they were trapped in the closet, too.
                                                                                                   *
            The woman’s children ask her, beg her, to play hide-and-seek. She can’t say no.
Inevitably, no matter how hard she tries to avoid it, it is her turn to hide.
            She scurries through the house, growing more frantic as each space she finds becomes
smaller than that last, no place large enough to harbor her. She stands, staring. The closet is her
only option.
            She hasn’t been in a closet since she was a girl, since she got trapped last time. Her
therapist told her that she needed to do this, to expose herself to her fears, years ago. 
            She never listened.
            The woman hears small footsteps approaching and takes a deep breath. Her shaking hand
grasps the knob, and she finds herself in the deepest, darkest crevasse. 
            At first, she remains calm. The ticking of her watch allows her to keep track of time. Ten
minutes isn’t too long. 
            The kids are young. She isn’t worried that they haven’t found her yet.
            Her kids love her. Her wife loves her. They want her. She knows they will not leave her
here, alone. They will not allow her to be replaced by an imposter.
            Maybe they thought they weren’t allowed in here, the woman assures herself. Standing
up, she steps forward and reaches towards the door. Her throat begins to burn, as her heart
attempts to claw its way out of her body.
     Not again, the woman declares, I’m not getting stuck here again.
                                                                                                  *
            Time isn’t real in the closet. She isn’t sure how long she’s been here, how long it has been
like this.
            She knows how to handle this now, though. She has spent enough time here, enough time
fearing being brought back here, that she knows she can find her way out.
            She doesn’t give up hope. She doesn’t stop fighting to get out. She doesn’t go unheard.
            She knows what she has to do.
            Her fists slam into the walls. She can taste the blood in her throat, and her voice is
indistinguishable. She doesn’t know how long she’s been yelling for help.
            Slowly, the door begins to creak open; a dark, slender figure towers over her. As her eyes
adjust, she sees her mother reaching towards her.
            “Honey, come out of the closet,” her mother sighs, “you were just having another
​nightmare.”


Paige Justice is a Professor and Academic & Student Success Director in Huntington, West Virginia.
Her creative writing examines the duality and conflict that arises via the intersection of Queer and Appalachian identities.
​Her essay "The Appalachian Black Sheep" is forthcoming in the anthology Riding Fences: Essays on Being LGBTQ+ in Rural Areas.

Bryan Monte

The Bonfire

                                          Magnus Hirschfeld (1865-1935); Brown University Library, 1985


I. 

Will I ever hear your name unless I say it?
You, the great-grandfather of my history--
doctor, confessor, writer, orator.
Your name is missing from the university library.
White hair and a mustache, hand resting on your chin
face framed by wire glasses and a cravat,
I study your picture from a book
found by accident in a second-hand store
as if it were a mirror
or a map of directions.

The year your friend visited Wilde in jail
you founded the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin
giving up your private practice for the problems of thousands
students in Charlottenburg, metal workers in Neuköln, prisoners in Tegel
free medical advice, lectures open to the public, marriage counseling.
For this they fined you again and again.
For 36 years you fought with charts, talks, films, books and exhibits,
a witness to the sexual diversity of humanity:


II. 

The city’s libraries are to be cleansed of books of un-German spirit… 
Students of the Gymnastik Academy are to start with the Institute of Sexual Science.

   The Berliner Morgenpost, May 6, 1933

The rumble of lorries came early in the morning
rattling windows like a sudden storm, the pounding
spreading from the front door down the corridor
from room to room, students demanding keys
to offices, records, libraries they could ransack
pouring inkwells over files, throwing books, charts,
card catalogues to the bonfire below
a brass band playing drinking songs
burning pages and ashes floating
back up through the windows.

In a torchlight parade a few days later
they carried your bust on a pike down the street
to the Operplatz:
[no stanza break]
Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust
Wilde, Carpenter, Gide and Marx
two truckloads, ten thousand of your irreplaceable volumes
fed to the flames, students and soldiers singing
at this, their destruction of understanding.


III.

I thumb through the university’s card catalogue once again,
this high-rise cemetery, this file of the dead and the living
numbed by your conspicuous absence
and the presence of those you opposed
still quoted in Canada’s and Great Britain’s parliaments
fifty years after your death
my magazines turned back 
at both borders the bookstores warning:
Please do not list the name of your press
on your mailing envelopes as Customs
seizes all gay material as pornographic.
Blackened by the ashes of the world’s greatest crematoria
I sift through the layers of crumbling books
searching for the lost civilizations 
of the 19th and 20th centuries.


Bryan R. Monte placed second in the Hippocrates Open Poetry and Medicine Competition
and was a finalist for the Gival Press Oscar Wilde Award in 2021. His poetry has appeared recently
in Arlington Literary Journal, Irreantum, Italian-Americana, and Kaleidoscope Magazine (USD), 
and in Voices from the Fierce Intangible World, SoFloPoJo’s first print anthology, and The 2021 and
2022 Hippocrates Prize  anthologies. His poetry book, On the Level: Poems on Living with Multiple Sclerosis,
​will be published by Circling Rivers in November 2022.

Kyrsta Morehouse     Los Angels, CA


Come Home With Me 


When I say I want to take you home, I don't mean
to where I rest my head now, I mean to where the seeds 

of my first trauma were planted. Let me be your tour guide 
of the nest that I leapt from the first second I was able 

to - praying I had enough strength to fly on my own. I want to kiss 
you in every closet I have ever come out of. I want to walk you past 

the locker I spent four years wanting to crawl inside 
of. I want us to dance through the apple orchards 

and sing to the trees that grew up alongside me. I want to hold 
your hand in front of the church that believes God loves everyone 

except those with rainbows in their bloodstreams. I want 
to watch you shake the hand of the woman who sewed 

me together in her stomach for nine months. I want to fill
our mouths with soft-serve by the lake, loving you in the first 

place a boy proclaimed he liked me. I want to see main
street through your eyes and hear the hum of my sleepy town 

through your ears. I want to sketch your perfect smile on a take-out 
napkin and tape it to the wall of the one art gallery in town, attaching 

a post-it note at the corner labeling it: Priceless! The truth
is I’m trying to figure out who I am now and where I am going, 

but I can show you for certain where I have been. I can show
you the houses I grew up in, the theater that became my second home, 

and the mailbox that almost became my headstone the night my tire blew 
me across their lawn. Let's lay beneath the old oak tree 

in my mothers front yard as I read you entries from my middle school diary. 
I’ll serenade you with the song that played during my first 


kiss as I whisper My god, I love you into the dandelion I slip behind your ear; 
make a wish my darling, wish this moment will never fade away. 


Kyrsta Morehouse is a young bisexual poet. While her main career is as a celebrity makeup
artist in film/tv, she is quickly making a name for herself in the world of poetry. In 2019 she self-published
a chapbook of poetry and in 2021 has been published by AniHeroin Chic,  Honeyfire Lit, and Tealight Press.
​Find her on instagram @kyrstashae.​

Dion O’Reilly


I Knew Them Once 

                                                    Remains found in 1,000-year-old lavish burial in Finland may belong to nonbinary warrior
                                                                                                                                                                            Headline from ZME Science

There They were 
and I too—They and I—We were 
like pollywogs or puppies, waggly, just beginning,
our bones still bendy, and our minds, still 
as beings who knew nothing 
of naked or dressed, didn’t 
know girls didn’t show their little 
beady nipples to the air. They and I were so small, we still 
weren’t purely Boy or Girl, hardly different 
from bugs. We were like clouds, and clouds 
were a place we could live. 
They and I, big as the wooded hill 
we never got to the end of, but passed our time sitting 
in hollows, moss-quiet, or looking 
closely at minnows in Bell jars, the way the sun 
lit their flesh to silver when we let them 
go. Then, there were those clumped 
fungi, flesh colored and daisy-shaped, dry outside and damp 
within that we licked on the underside and never
took sick. As we got older, we laughed at our bare
bodies in the mirror—They and I—I of the V-shaped 
mons, and They of the lady waist 
and small penis almost like a pimple to be popped or a silly
handle-like nose—until They drifted away, mist 
in the window, and I woke up—someone saying,
I had to choose between a war-spun 
daddy or a Cher-faced mom. 
I stood looking at myself, without my fearsome 
friend, until I thought I saw Them, 
their forever-eyes lit in our secret 
Oneness, and all the world telling me: I was split-
half of two. This was growing up.
This was the first goodbye.



Dion O'Reilly’s debut book, Ghost Dogs, was shortlisted for several prizes including
The Catamaran Prize and The Eric Hoffer Award. Her work appears in The Sun, Rattle, 
Cincinnati Review, Narrative, and The Slowdown, among others. Her second book 
Sadness of the Apex Predator was chosen for the Portage Poetry Series out of University of Wisconsin's
Cornerstone Press. She facilitates workshops with poets from all over the US and hosts a poetry
​podcast at The Hive Poetry Collective. Learn more at dionoreilly.wordpress.co

Carrie Magness Radna     Manhattan, NY


Nikki (no. 89 of Women’s names sensual series)

I took my main squeeze 
to my high school before my cousin’s wedding.

All the old pictures of me playing basketball 
was before I transitioned,

when I acted like a tough guy with wild eyebrows,
so they couldn’t see the real woman underneath--

even 20 years later, it’s quite a 
surprise to meet my old form again.

My partner understands: she just wants 
to make out with me by the bleachers.
​

Carrie Magness Radna is a cataloger at the New York Public Library, an Associate Editor of 
Brownstone Poets Anthology (2022-), a singer and a poet who loves traveling.
Her poems have appeared in Muddy River Poetry Review, Jerry Jazz Musician, Cajun Mutt Press, 
Alien Buddha Press, Rye Whiskey Review, First Literary Review-East, et al. Her poetry collections are
1. Hurricanes never apologize (Luchador Press, 2019) and 2. In the blue hour (Nirala Publications, 2021).
​Born in Norman, Oklahoma, she lives in Manhattan.

Gregg Shapiro


Ken-undrum

When Earring Magic Ken was put on display 
in his shocking pink box, almost 30 years ago 
at FAO Schwarz and Toys “R” Us, he flew off
the shelves as if he had fairy wings. Adorned 

with the promised plastic silver hoop of his name 
in his left ear, blonde highlights, whitened teeth, 
tanned skin, strong jawline, and tweaker’s pupils. 
The tight-fitting lilac mesh shirt emphasized 
his chiseled pecs; even minus nipples there was 
potential for arousal in the right (or left) hands. 

Bulging biceps strained the fabric of the rolled-up 
short sleeves, and his six-pack abs earned Ken 
shirt-lifter cred. The purple pleather vest was 
a questionable style choice, something you might 

see on someone from Northwest Indiana strutting 
down Halsted Street in skintight pants, desperately 
trying to fit in, but standing out like a genital-less 
plastic, injection-molded doll. The baggy black 
jeans, polished black shoes (not boots!), reminders 
of the era’s fashion confusion. Ken wore the ultimate 

accessory around his thick neck. At the base of 
the “silver” chain, a polished cock ring, untarnished 
by lube and bodily fluids, got the attention of gay 
men in every urban, suburban, and exurban location. 

Flocking to the toy sections of WalMarts and Targets, 
departments they’d only visited when doing guncle 
duty, shopping for birthday and Christmas presents 
for nieces and nephews. Snatching multiple armfuls 
of gay Kens, making sure the doll was the best-selling 
version in its 60-year history. Unbeknownst to Mattel, 

the real magic occurred when the doll became a necessary
distraction from hours spent at the bedsides of friends 
and lovers in hospital AIDS wards, attending funerals 
and memorial services, burying countless loved ones.


Gregg Shapiro is the author of eight books including the poetry chapbook
Fear of Muses (Souvenir Spoon Books, 2022). An entertainment journalist, whose
​interviews and reviews run in a variety of regional LGBTQ+ and mainstream publications
and websites, Shapiro lives in South Florida with his husband Rick and their dog Coco.

Laurie Rachkus Uttich


To The Student I’ll Meet in 10 Years Who Grew Up with the Don’t Say Gay Bill


Honey, I know you don’t need to be saved. I know
you found your place and your pen and here you

are learning to lift your words and shape them
into a spear that just might silence someone else’s 

tongue, but can I drape my weight over your shoulders? 
Can I pull your third-grade self into my chest? Can I

place my privileged person into a story Florida won’t
let you be named in? Let me bookmark the space

between who you were born to be and who some
man you grew up believing thinks you should be. Let 

my paper-thin hands hold open a door that exhales 
into a room you can rest in. Baby, you’re beautiful.

I know you haven’t heard it enough. But I can see 
you, a crystal that lifts its head to the light, and every

sharp cut of stone slides to its knees and readies
itself to reflect the wonder of you are and who you’re

on your way to becoming. Listen, I don’t know how 
to climb a wall Florida keeps building. I don’t know 

how to slip into that self of yours so many seem hell-
bent on silencing.  And I can say gay and I can say gay 

and I can say gay, and, honey, I will, I will--Jesus,
I promise you I will—but can your baby-self hear me? 

Can the kid you left behind, the one holding a purple 
crayon in a wooden, attached seat, in the middle 

of a Florida suburb, lean into the beauty of your 
birthright? Baby, please. Staple your words to my back. 

I know they’re only yours to shed. But let me carry
them. Let me share them. Let me call you my own.


Laurie Rachkus Uttich is the author of Somewhere, a Woman
Lowers the Hem of Her Skirt (Riot In Your Throat). Her prose and poetry
have been published in Brevity; Creative Nonfiction; Fourth Genre; JuxtaProse;
The Missouri Review: Poem of the Week; Poets and Writers; Rattle; River Teeth; 
Ruminate; Split Lip Magazine; The Sun; Superstition Review; Sweet: A Literary 
Confection; and others. She teaches at the University of Central Florida and
​frequently attempts to sneak her 60-pound dog into the classroom.

ERIN ADKINS      PRUDENCE ARCENEAUX    NISHA ATALIE     CYNTHIS ATKINS     ERIC BRAUDE     STEVE BRISIDINE    SHAWN BROPHY     JOSEPH BYRD     DAVID CAZDEN     KEN CRAFT     JOSE HERNANDEZ DIAZ     E.J. EVANS    STEPHEN GIBSON     ERICA GOSS      LANCE C. GUTIERREZ     DON HOGLE     PATRICK HORNER     DAVID KENNEDY     PARKER LOGAN  MICHAEL MINASSIAN     KERRY MUIR     STEVE NICKMAN     MADARI PENDÀS     HL R     DOUG RAMSPECK     SARAH SNYDER    ALISON STONE     JOHN WOTJOWICZ

Erin Akins     Austin, TX

Erin Akins (she/her) is a Writer and Literature PhD student living in Austin, Texas.

Sowing

I want to turn my hands
into gardens. I was raised
on soil and the fear of 
God, but my bones weren’t 
made for all of this gravity. 
Nothing has grown in ages.
I don’t know how to love
myself, really love myself, 
like how the moon falls 
around the earth with 
so much faith. I wish 
I could fall like the moon. 
It feels more like tumbling, like 
a loosed leaf negotiating wind.
We can still see where our 
bodies struck the soil. Nothing 
has grown in ages, but 
there is so much hope 
in seeding; I want to turn 
my hands into gardens.

Prudence Arceneaux     Texas

C. Prudence Arceneaux, a native Texan, is a poet who teaches English and Creative Writing at Austin Community College, in Austin, TX. Her work has appeared in various journals, including Limestone, New Texas, Hazmat Review, Texas Observer, Whiskey Island Magazine, African Voices and Inkwell. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry-- DIRT (awarded the 2018 Jean Pedrick Prize) and LIBERTY.

The President did not want to see anything “difficult” at the National Museum of African American History and Culture August 2019


Bring that boy, David, here. Tell him to put on some clothes; he’s just too stupid. When he gets here, hang him from the rafter, iron hooks, just so, an inch from sure footing. After a day of that, put him in the sugar shack with Venus. I DON’T CARE WHICH ONE! But either without arms will put up less of a fight. Bring that here, HERE, here; I need that Klimt to lick the heel of boot. Make him leeeeeeeeeean down; I only want to see the top of his hair. I see your face, boy, she gets this fist in her forehead. It’s too loud in here, these other foreign boys--de Kooning, Maderson, de Stael—clashing and shouting. Put them in the back corner, near the drying racks, leave them until the yellow runs like piss down their sturdy frames, ‘til they know to quiet down. Strip the Picassos and weave me a shade, and a mat, same for the dogs. put a roll of those in the outhouse. And did you cut those boys from their supper? You told them what I said would happen if they did it again? Hang a boy on each fence post; it’s what they’re most afraid of. That aimless boy over there is not thinking. Put a fire under him; maybe it’ll make him into something useful. But that smug ass Mona girl? Get her from the shack, her sweat should make it easy to wipe her down, get the clothes off her, make her shine. How else are we to know what she’s worth if we can’t see her breasts?

Nisha Atalie     Chicago, IL

Nisha Atalie is a mixed poet from the Pacific Northwest. She is a poetry editor at MASKS and her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Poem-a-Day, CALYX, Blood Orange Review, The Hunger, and elsewhere. She received the 2021 Eileen Lannan Poetry Prize. 

Season of the Virus 

Let’s retreat, bury ourselves                                                                                                          
inside the brick. This place could be

our shallow creek, our phantom 
season. Fall asleep with me in the soft 

folds of the apartment. The water boils. 
A train goes by. The moon swells. 

From the window, the tree tops go all the way up. 

I had to throw away many of the days. 
They’d molded, started smelling of vinegar. 

We’re ghosts, radiant ones. 

Come, check the mirror. 
See what we look like. 
​

Cynthia Atkins     Lexington, VA

Cynthia Atkins (She, Her) is the author of Psyche’s Weathers, In the Event of Full Disclosure (CW Books), and Still-Life with God (Saint Julian Press 2020), and a chapbook forthcoming from Harbor Editions, 2022.  Her work has appeared in many journals, including Alaska Quarterly Review, BOMB, Cider Press Review, Diode, Green Mountains Review, Indianapolis Review, Los Angeles Review, Rust + Moth, North American Review, Permafrost, SoFloPoJo, SWWIM, Thrush, Tinderbox, and Verse Daily. More info at: www.cynthiaatkins.com

Instructions For Looking in The Mirror

I have to be naked, by that I don’t mean unclothed, 
but raw, stripped bare to the filaments and rafters--

My head is a sky-laundromat of folded clouds,
creases as chiaroscuro. I need my body to find

it’s nakedness like the maiden in fairytales
getting her garment pinned by two mourning doves.

My flesh is an eco-system, feeding on detail, it works
to be in mint condition, to remember 

every flower I ever picked. Process? —I need to feel 
a little sexy, even in the din and dust 

of my sweatpants, slip-shod with teeth
unbrushed, because the words trawl to stick to the resin--

My pen aims to climb a noun and hear its bounty of sounds.
An adverb that will leap me into my childhood, where a witch

spelled me with glyphs and houses made of peppermint, 
promises not kept.  Because God is such a liar--

I believe in aspirin; it knows where to go--
I need to feel longing like a train leaving a station. 

Scribbling words to wash my own mouth out 
with soap, unclad in a chasm of moon-tides and unrest 

to see where the unholy goes.

Eric Braude     Andover, MA

Eric Braude is a computer science professor who began poetry in earnest fifteen years ago. He grew up in South Africa. He wrote the frontmatter poem for a collection, Songs from the Castle's Remains, won a newspaper competition in the New England Merrimack region, and has published several poems in Poetica. Eric has attended several workshops, including those by Lucie Brock-Broido, Patrick Donnelly, and Joan Houlihan.

Bolzano, Northern Italy

There’s always someone willing
to drive you around memorials, 
but we’re here for Ötzi, Copper Age man
flash-frozen on the Alps; for fountains

fashioned from gurgling frogs. 
The station's brown columns herald 
Brenner Pass into Austria. Tourists 
mug in the sun. Beneath hotel canopy,

we sample mezzelune, Tyrolese 
formaggio. We lap the pool
in dappled solitude.
Behind the stucco wall 

hum Malian refugees.
But we're on vacation, relishing
evening concerts in marble piazzas.
A road sign as we exit town spells

the city's other name, Bozen. This
I recognize: transit camps, hotels
hosting logistics officers, piazzas
as holding pens, trains.

Steve Brisendine     Mission, KS

​Steve Brisendine is a writer, poet, occasional artist and recovering journalist living and working in Mission, Kansas. His first collection, The Words We Do Not Have (Spartan Press, 2021) has been nominated for the Thorpe Menn Literary Excellence Award. He is also the author of Salt Holds No Secret But This (Spartan Press, 2022). His work has appeared in Flint Hills Review, Connecticut River Review, Modern Haiku and other publications and anthologies.

Non/Native

I am a son of Kansas –
but not a son of the Kansa;
they live in Oklahoma now,
People of the South Wind blown
even farther south by a pale
    storm out of the East.

(The Iowa live in Kansas now;
I am not their son, either.)

I am a long child of that inexorable, 
industrious storm, rising from 
lakes and lochs, lacs and loughs,

leaping an ocean and gathering
    strength on the near shore.

Our mouths, surplus to requirement
in our old lands, landed ravenous.

We tamed the tallgrass,
the wooded hollow; we feasted 
on cleared meadows, on the bison, 
on hopes and homes of those 
    here before us.

(Let none call us ungracious; we
have set them in memory in our
place names, in choosing mascots
    for our home teams.)

The messy work was done long
before my time; I have carried arms
on the prairie, yes, but only for
cottontails, jackrabbits, bobwhites.

I am a son of Kansas –
but not a son of the Kansa;
they live in Oklahoma now,
and my life goes comfortably
on in a Brown v Board suburb,

where the local team has changed
its name from Indians to Bison, to
much applause from us to ourselves.

Devon Brock     South Dakota

Devon Brock is a line cook and poet living in South Dakota with his wife and dog. His poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Atlanta Review, William & Mary Review, Passengers Journal and La Piccioletta Barca among others.

Steam

The board sways as my mother’s iron
skates in whirls, exhales in huffs
like a child teased and alone
on a frozen lake, her blades keen
as her creases—her angers starched,
folded, stacked, as if in the rock
of her shoulder and the lean grace
of her wrist, some perfection
can be made of solitude
and the glaze of cotton
scoured with shouts of steam.​

Shawn  Brophy     Wisconsin

Shawn Brophy is a hospital clerk and sometime voice actor who lives in southeast Wisconsin. He studied poetry and the works of Weldon Kees with the late Donald Justice. Be advised: small magazines sometimes publish Shawn, then disappear.

House, Tree, Person

The house the child draws is always on fire.
The roof roils in red and orange crayon flames.
A stick figure leans from an upstairs window, reaching.
Another stands in the street below, distraught.

How does she do that? 
Convey “distraught” with a stick figure?
From eight colors and two stick figures
Comes a fugue, a tableau of anguish.

The tree is green and unscathed
In the lower right-hand corner.
It’s the rallying spot 
No one in the stick family will reach tonight.
​

First View of Mount Fuji

There is a great wave
Poised to strike
From a Japanese woodblock print.

The wave has been drawn back like a clenched fist
Since Basho in the forest 
First sensed tension in the deer he couldn’t see.

The wave swells like a great resentment.
It is poised to strike 
From a copy of a woodblock print.

That copy hangs on the wall of a diner in Iowa.
Outside of the diner it is snowing
Flakes as big as cherry blossoms.

Deer lay in the beds of pickups
Collecting snow, their eyes open.
The wave is a cocked pistol, inches from my head.

In the foreground of the print is a smaller wave
Shaped like Mt. Fuji.
In the background stands Fuji itself.

Through a green sheet of glass
I see a grain elevator in the distance.
A pyramid of silos, it backs into the storm

And becomes Mt. Fuji.
The great wave hangs like a veiled threat.
An eight-man boat founders in its trough.

Basho senses deer nearby
And as he rides across the Mogami River
A snowflake melts in his horse’s ear.

Joseph Byrd     Oregon

Joseph Byrd’s work has appeared in The Plentitudes, DIAGRAM, Aji, The Ravens Perch, and forthcoming work in shufPoetry and PROEM. He was in the 2021 StoryBoard Chicago cohort with Kaveh Akbar, and was an Associate Artist in Poetry under Joy Harjo at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.  He lives in Oregon, twenty minutes away from Multnomah Falls.

Faith, (      ), and love

Nothing seems to get me there without an overdose of balloonery (my 
heart had to go to pop school), and nothing gets me going like when those three
cardinals get
shoved down my throat, the ones singing
faith, fuck, and love 
(I skipped class whenever they taught hope)

                                   One 4th of fucking July (substitute you-know-what for that naughty modifier), I
                laughed my way with Aunt Gale to that old, iron-windowed grocery on the corner of
                Francisquito and Sunset, hauling a watermelon home in my 4th-grade spaghetti arms, my
                broken aunt giggling alongside as we talked and tripped over spent sparklers on the cooking California
                sidewalk, skipping consonants altogether as
                                   gall became all         never, ever
and there between the vowels that moan us all into being, I heard it        the way that my
marrow makes good on why it is where it is         held and holied by what frames        and He’s got
the whole watermelon world in his fucking hands started to land on the moon of my mind
                and I ran back inside grandma’s house, shouting
                Please trust this container, this unconditional costume called What the Hell!
                                   Please know that no streets really go ONE WAY (lies are everywhere)! 
                                                         Please fingerpaint “Hope is here!” with watermelon sauce on every available 
                                                                             paper plate! On every human condition everywhere!    

He’s a juiced genius, I heard my relatives say        or maybe other things    
                but I heard what can happen 
        
when mercy rises like rain    
when down becomes up    
when getting there is knowing what here is    
(I am now magisterially ashamed of the first line of this poem)    
I know I have found myself to be right where I thought I’d never be    
having formerly thunked my way into life 
(oh you tantalizing, TWO-WAY street) when all the while, I was
living my way into this thing called thinking     
which is not like 
thinking at all, oh 
hope, you 
fucker, you
four-letter word

Teach me more, please

Hiking Mt. Tabor with you

When the slope-breasted
tank-topped
tongue-arrested woman said 
Can you
show me where the 
lava cone is?
I saw you know in your 
wish-bone brain
what can be told, and when.
And I knew then, in my fist-borne mind, that
I could say to
you that it’s true that
Ursula K. Leguin said
I function only by falling in love.  
I said this to you as we 
neared the end, and as you, my friend
assuaged my bird-nest fear of coming too near, when you said
I’m no good at small talk either, helping me confess, without having to pray things, that 
I, in fact, only function when I say things like
pus, umbilical cords, hard-rock festoonings, slave monuments, insult artists, mental balloonings
and as you turned to return to your car, I asked without speaking
                What country is this we share?  I do well with Afghanistan, finding mountains under my 
                   heart, and men who can’t speak anything but heaven
                 And when you pause between a word and your breath, that’s where the leaven shows up
                  I like our bread
                  I felt you fall in love with our gait, as dog hair hung from your black-blue tee
                    and I wanted the holes in your well-gauged ears to be retrograded into me
                    into my little, sixth-grade heart, place of original panic, though I fear
                    nothing in your presence, punk of music and of fuse, kind to all things manic
                  I like all the words I forget to use with you
                  I like cracking open our playlist, hearing you say “I do” when I ask if you
                     bottle the wine that’s offered at the altar of your smile
                  For when you say suicide and mommy, I know from whence you speak    
                   Oh nests of broken bird wings    in the harem of your beanie
                   Oh sweet mosses of shoelaces lost while running through the shadows you share so freely   
                      with me in speech and in stride
                   Oh beauty of your bared straining arm, veined and wide
                   Oh talking unrestrained, oh listening that gives
                   Oh you who have shown me where and in whom the lava cone lives

Just one reason

If you are a Buddhist schoolmarm
I am a book shot through with emptiness
If you are a Jewess
I hold an awful play by Christopher Marlowe that drips what I love
If you are an egg
I have a saucepan dedicated to searing you
If you are an empty hobo hat
I am this city’s brains gone dumb on politics
If you talk with your mouth full
I am the doggy bag you can spit into, and you may
wear me like a silk tie
I will drag my undersides along your overcoat and all will whisper Hot Creature 
If you are my dead mother
I am mourners in an onion field, ashes in our oven-hot eyes as we all dance piggy-backed
and if you are a castrato
I will sing Handel from heaven, and drop hot halos on you
When all of our nimbleness says adieu
there will be subway trains on taffy tracks that beep our names in sugar toots
If you are a dark angel
I will wear sunglasses, and if the 
town tips over into a crimey hell hole of tavern shootings
I will wear my pillowcase with its pillow intact and
all the people will see all of the 
robustly vulnerable men who 
love lifting me up and over their heads, crying
If we were a dais, would you stand upon us? and I will say
Aren’t we all of us already just that?  Aren’t we all of us ashamed of our
shoes, how they stop us from footing what has long needed the 
bubbling springs of I Feel You Here and Now—?

Take me to the tickly time when your
lips will miss what no target has ever offered:
my molten seal, my crunch-wrap soul, my Honduran beach-heat, my steadfast love that endures
forever

If I were a psalm, you would
sing me, but only until your
mouth fell to the floor, a
blackened onion ring of
abandonment, an
hors d’oeuvre of
dumb desire
If I were with you
I would heave Frida Kahlo onto my
basement wall, and she would thank me as she
slowly slid down the cinder block, her
seeping fluids painting a 
portrait of what this poet is like when you refuse to
teach to play to bless to shoot because I need to have a
reason 
just one
to help me understand where you have
gone

David Cazden     Danville, Ky

David Cazden's work has appeared in Passages North, Nimrod, Crab Creek Review, and most recently Still: The Journal.  David used to be the poetry editor of the magazine, Miller's Pond, and he lives in Danville, Kentucky. ​

In The 70s

No one was shot in school,
instead we died on the road.
At first, a sudden skid
we couldn't pull out of,
then a fusion of metal--
chrome with red paint,
Ford with Chevy, and a nova
of glass, the scent
of booze evaporating
like a wraith to the afterlife.
If you didn't flip a car,
you might flip from drugs.
Once I took acid
and for a week, every surface
was embellished in reptile scales--
cars slithered, engines hissed,
lizards curled in the sheets.
I slept in thistles
until it wore off
like house paint.
Layers of myself
peeled away, tumbling
with fall leaves--
russet-gold, yellow-gold--
over the roads and through
winter's coat. In the 70s
Mom stopped driving,
never leaving the house
that swaddled us.
Her m.s. was worse,
our food, odorless, tasting
of overcast skies.
Time unpeeled--
Frozen pears
dropped from the branches,
my bother left home
and Dad fell on the stairs
like fruit in autumn.
When I too left,
acorns tumbled from limbs, whole
forests tucked in their endosperms.
Russet hulls
cracked on the sidewalks,
crumbling and bending
with the world
under my feet.

Ken Craft     Wells, ME

Ken Craft lives in Wells, Maine. His poems have appeared in Spillway, Pedestal Magazine, The Writer's Almanac, and numerous other journals and e-zines. He is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Reincarnation & Other Stimulants (Kelsay Books, 2021).

Abandoned Station

Before nature had its way, the towering Shell sign’s canary-colored call lured motorists off I-95
with regularity. Before weeds fingered their way through fissures in the station’s asphalt, this
wasn’t any old gas station, but one near a restaurant, a refueling stop for both man and car. Rest
stops had meaning back then, especially when your father was driving the family from New
England to Miami. When Dad pulled up to these pumps, Gram told my brothers and me to “go
make bubbles” and be quick about it. The rest piled out straight away, but me, I lingered. Lying
on the wagon’s front bench, I watched the gas attendant’s methodic wash of the front windshield:
the streak of suds, the squeak of rubber, the careful lifting of wipers, as if he were cleaning a
holy relic, not a piece of Detroit glass. It was sleepy-nice to see, that, but when the attendant
walked back to top off the tank, I jumped out, too, and by the time I returned, I’d learned the rest
stop’s familiar and its strange. The heady smell of gas. The sticky sound of my sneakers from
dried pee on the floor beneath the urinal. They had strange, “Y’all come back, y’hear?” foods
like “grits” and “chitterlings,” too, but I recall grilled cheese with pickles, shoestring fries, a
Coke to go. And, for dessert, per Mom’s good-cop grace, a candy of my choice. I carried the
cardboard tray into all that outside yellow, all that sunshine and Shell. To me, Shell’s logo was
the pinkie-promise of Miami Beach to come. And why not? Happiness seemed simple enough
back then. All it took was an empty bladder, a full tank, the hum of the Buick’s engine and
Goodrich tires on the highway. Somehow it seemed all for me. Me slow-pulling strings of warm
cheese. Me mining Jujubes from my teeth. Me blinking in and out of sleep as sun and shadow
striped the reed of my body, dreaming that gas stops would always be fun, fast food would
always taste good, and weeds would never finger their way through my family, leaving us
​untouched for endless roads, shiny new stations, and Miami vacations. Before nature had its way.

Jose Hernandez Diaz

Jose Hernandez Diaz is a 2017 NEA Poetry Fellow. He is the author of The Fire Eater (Texas Review Press, 2020). His work appears in The American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Conduit, Crazyhorse, Georgia Review, Huizache, Iowa Review, The Journal, Los Angeles Review, The Missouri Review, Northwest Review, Poetry, Southeast Review, The Southern Review, Witness Magazine, The Yale Review, and in The Best American Nonrequired Reading Anthology 2011. He teaches creative writing online and edits for Frontier Poetry.

First Impressions of Hell 

The afterlife is exactly what I feared the most. Being naked in front of a crowd while I’m on fire.
At first, I start weeping like a baby. I want my mother. I can barely crawl. I feel I can’t endure
this hell much longer. Then, as if in the middle of a novel, I begin to have an epiphany: there’s
nothing to be ashamed of. We all look basically the same. Also, fire, once you get used to it, is
essentially the same as water. Pain and pleasure, synonymous. It’s just a matter of perspective. I
light a cigarette, from the hellish flames, and take it easy the rest of the afternoon. After all, I no
​longer have to go to work. Jokes on them.

Portrait of the Artist as a Brown Man


A few years ago, I was in the same library,
In the same quiet, upper-middle-class town

I didn’t live in. I’d just finished writing 
A prose poem that would eventually

Get published in The Nation. Writer’s high.
Then, a white lady came up to me

And asked about the trash. I was confused,
Until I realized she thought I was a janitor,

Because of my Brown skin.

E. J.  Evans    Cazenovia, NY

E. J. Evans is a poet and musician living in Cazenovia, NY. Evans is the author of Ghost Houses (Clare Songbirds Publishing), Conversations With the Horizon (Box Turtle Press), and the chapbook First Snow Coming (Kattywompus Press).

Maqualidora

What I remember is that they showed me everything
I met the men in charge
they were from up north
conspicuous with their sharp dark suits and neat haircuts
I heard their mocking jokes
about the Mexican women we passed on the road
they took me into the huge factory like a cathedral of noise
I saw the rows on rows of machines 
and the hundreds of women
working on the factory floor their downcast faces 
intent and focused in patient resolve
later when the men took me back across the river 
to my hotel I dozed in my room and imagined 
the factory building and its high fence
out there in the night surrounded 
by endless desert and dark hills
and watched over by generations of spirits

Stephen Gibson

Stephen Gibson is the author of eight poetry collections: Frida Kahlo in Fort Lauderdale (2020 Able Muse Press book prize finalist, forthcoming); Self-Portrait in a Door-Length Mirror (2017 Miller Williams Prize winner, University of Arkansas Press); The Garden of Earthly Delights Book of Ghazals (Texas Review Press); Rorschach Art Too (2014 Donald Justice Prize winner, Story Line Press; 2021, Story Line Press Legacy Title, Red Hen Press), Paradise (Miller Williams finalist, University of Arkansas Press), and others.

On Woman Washing Herself in a Small Tub at Art Palm Beach

Degas used wine bottle corks in the head, chest,
and stomach of Little Dancer to fill in her cavities,
paintbrushes as armatures, and filled in the rest
with anything from his studio floor he might see
like old cloth or paper: it was like building a nest
inside of her, he said, like a songbird in the tree.
This wax’s model was no songbird, and, at best,
despite precautions, contracted venereal disease,
being a brothel whore, from one of her “guests.”
Some biographers attribute the artist’s misogyny
to contracting VD when he was young—a guess,
since there’s little evidence. But with Gauguin, he
is known to have contracted syphilis back in Paris,
which he passed on to his teen mistresses in Tahiti.

Erica Goss     Eugene, OR

Erica Goss won the 2019 Zocalo Poetry Prize. Her poetry collection, Night Court, won the 2017 Lyrebird Award from Glass Lyre Press. Recent and upcoming publications include Oregon Humanities, Creative Nonfiction, North Dakota Quarterly, Spillway, A-Minor, Redactions, Consequence, The Sunlight Press, The Pedestal, San Pedro River Review, and Critical Read. Erica lives in Eugene, Oregon, where she teaches, writes and edits the newsletter Sticks & Stones.

Mercy

Two small owls arrive the day 
after the death of an old friend. 
They say birds visit those 
who’ve lost a loved one. Where 
were you, I ask the owls, when 
my father died? Or my daughter, 
never born? Through the window 
their golden eyes shimmer, radiant, 
penetrating. They don’t blink. It hits me, 
how young they are. I might be 
the first person they’ve seen, and they 
look a little hesitant, as if unsure how, 
exactly, to proceed. Still, they persist, 
these two little owls, sitting
patiently on the rhododendron branch,
long enough for me to leave the room
and fetch my camera. Fluffing
their ash-and-frost feathers, 
they watch me with the deep
curiosity of children. I snap a photo.
When they fly away, their purpose at
my window, whatever it was, finished,
I feel a little odd, as if I’ve
wandered into a town square just after
a parade went by, the last float rumbling
into the distance. Over and over,
I look at my photograph, note
the symmetry of the owls’ faces, 
their steady, unblinking gazes. 
To this day, I don’t know which 
surprises me most—how much I needed 
to see them, or how they possibly 
could have known.

Lance C Gutierrez     Madrid, Spain

LC Gutierrez is a product of many places in the South and the Caribbean, as well as writing and comparative literature programs at Louisiana State and Tulane University. An erstwhile academic, he now writes, teaches and plays trombone in Madrid, Spain. His poetry is most recently published or forthcoming in Autofocus Lit Mag, Notre Dame Review, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal. to edit.

Signs

How could we not count this as center?
Summer gathering our kin, in
from Colorado or California:
that small diaspora of escapees who, 
like my mother, snapped right back into
that gentle Acadiana creole, 
the rounded flower of the vowels. 
Gone the gutturals and the raspy nasals,
sloughed off centuries from Continental French.
Zoned in a hand-carved rocker
her face taking the same soft contours
as her sisters’; the same patient spaces
between their speech beseeching the old 
cuckoo clock to slow-peck out the seconds, 
punctuating the endless presence of that 
‘there.’ Pecking away the bridge between
her Rolex and their Timex. Synched for the day.

No signs designed for us. We learned 
the muddy ripples in the gully meant something 
live, but only after our five uncles
barrel-chested and beer-bellied, thick 
forearms dripping, hoisted a turtle like a trophy, 
plucked from its nest. How were we to know, 
the hooting Cajun trills were celebrating 
soon-to-be soup? Until it steamed in bowls before 
us, magical as their muscles, wartime tattoos 
of battleships and bare-bellied hula girls.
Sawed off truck drivers, carpenters, roughnecks.
How were we to trace that heritage of brylcreemed
Elvis hair and thick sideburns to our plaid
Bermuda shorts and leather loafers?
My brothers and I, wide-eyed in the country.

No signs but for the patent present ones. Posting
miles to Opelousas. Lafayette. Carencro,
Rayne and Sunset. Rusted RC Cola tin on 
the side of a general store. Mississippi 
river bridge from Baton Rouge, “to grandmother’s
house we’d go.” A riverboat-ride distance, passing
Cancer Alley and ghost plantations splintered 
with the slave shacks we hadn’t yet learnt about.

Were we to know that boiling plentitude
of tables spread red with crawfish
in the shielding shade of oaks, the gris-gris
of the line hung with drying red peppers, 
against the garlic-gray cypress porch,
and gold spun from grandma’s gnarled fingers
(the perfect pralines and fresh baked buns),
barbecue fire, accordion chords of summer,
our seeming eternal return, wasn’t a promise?
Too young to taste the stove-top coffee,
filtered through a stocking, precious in a demitasse,
it still seeped into our psyches, a house of scents
and senses. We were wholly steeped in that 
presence. Did we not know this as love?

Whence did we wade into the slow grief 
of decades? As hapless and blind as those hogs 
that came to slaughter, feasted on potato peels, 
corn cobs and all the waste of our wealth 
that slushed in slop buckets. The call now virtual
and the response hollow: punch in the name 
of the place in Google and land a different 
town across the state. Or finally find it 
on the map and the name lies like the gray bones 
of nothing across a line of state highway. 
A mocking photo appears of the roadway shoulder: 
a place you might stop to piss unobserved.

Search the names of the divorced. Correlate 
birth and death dates and the survivors
mentioned in the funeral home obituaries, 
framed by a twilight bayou background.
An uncle who carved you toothpicks; 
his son a diabetic, alcoholic amputee.
A cousin on a list of sex offenders: 
we would sit with him on the train tracks, 
we were five smiling boys
our legs dangling over the muddy gully,
our sweaty, bare arms rubbed against his.
And we would choose to stay like that forever,
hurling ragged rocks at the signs.

Don Hogle     Manhattan, NY

​Don Hogle's poetry has appeared in Apalachee Review, Atlanta Review, Carolina Quarterly, Chautauqua, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Penn Review, and South Florida Poetry Journal among others. Awards include an Honorable Mention for the 2018 E. E. Cummings Prize from the New England Poetry Club. His debut chapbook, Madagascar, was published in 2020 by Sevens Kitchens Press. He lives in Manhattan. www.donhoglepoet.com

Questions of Attraction 


Was it that your initials were sewn 
on the cuffs of your shirts? 

Was it that S wasn’t for Steven 
or anything like a middle name, 

but a family name, a word that means 
able to bend with ease or grace? 

Or was it the tales of visiting your uncle 
in the lush, Costa Rican jungle? 

We were just two boys, meeting 
randomly in a freshman dorm, 

and maybe love waits patiently, 
like a jaguar in the jungle, 

for just such an accident, to spring.

Patrick Horner     Copenhagen, Denmark

Patrick Horner is a Canadian poet and engineer living in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he works to develop new water treatment technology. He co-wrote and co-produced “Waste Dump,” a serial radio play, and his poetry and fiction have been published on Wax, Dandelion, Broken Pencil, and more. His first book of poetry, Refugia, will be published by the University of Calgary Press in the fall of 2022.

Frenzy

In the schoolyard after school the children tear each other limb from limb, running after and away from
each other, screaming and laughing, throwing parts of each other into the air.  Pulling the skin from each
​other’s faces.  Soon there is no one left.  The asphalt covered in arms and hands and ears and eyeballs
​blinking looking up at the grey clouds hiding the blue sky

Locked In

The lovers lock themselves in an empty room with one window and one door.  They take off all their
clothes and play hide and seek for years.  Outside the window the city rests on the edge of the sea.  The
lovers survive by eating each other’s flesh.  Passing themselves back and forth, seasoning each other with
​laughter.

Singing Wind

The wind blows between the buildings like a woman singing underwater.  Rain dances back and forth as it
​falls through the dark sky.

David Kennedy     Sydney, Australia

​David J. Kennedy is a poet and non-fiction author from Sydney, Australia. Themes of aging, wonder, and mortality feature prominently in his writing, and he has work forthcoming in Words & Whispers, Jupiter Review, and Boats Against The Current Poetry Magazine. Twitter: @DavidJKennedy_

Postcards from America

When I was four, you sent postcards from America
describing octagon-shaped barns in Milwaukee;

built at the turn of the century and designed
to withstand high winds and snow.

“Love, Daddy,” you wrote.

Blanche Scott’s resolve shone like a beacon 
from postage stamps that remind me of the girl I love.

Across the Pacific, I woke to the descending whistle
of the satin bowerbird, as you penned bedtime stories

of cable cars that pirouette on the corner
of Powell and Market.

You saw the world in all its splendor
and turned it into word toys I could play with.

“Write to me, and let me know 
of all the things you’ve been doing.”

I’ve been meaning to reply — I sift through time, 
searching for the language of an apt response,

but you’re still seven seas away, and the light is poor
in the shadow of expectation.

I have a son now, Daddy. He is seven, and late at night
when the rain is torrential, he calls it ‘sleeping music.’

He is curious, stubborn, and brave, and puts questions
that wrinkle the mind and rouse the soul:

Do the numbers keep going? Who created God?
And do bushfires mean we’ll all be extinct like the T-Rex?

“What then?”

He’s besotted with the moon and files trading cards
with military precision. Says “I love you,”

before politely insisting I leave the room. I see our reflection
in him — at peace with the adequacy of silence,

drawn to soothing solitude, and prone to turn inward
when noise drowns out existence.

Parker  Logan     Baton Rouge, LA

Originally from Orlando, Florida, Parker Logan is graduate of FSU and is currently pursuing an MFA LSU. He lives in Baton Rouge with his friends and flowers, and is growing Watermelons in his garden. ​

Leaving Baton Rouge 

Louisiana doesn’t just soak up the water,
but bodies, too, a whole vault of skeletons
as big as the distance from Shreveport to New Orleans,
a closet of full wounds, snaps, blisters, and bones,
a thousand voices speaking up to our attics.
They’re whispering around Matty’s tea kettle,
and barking though her dog, Jemma Lou, chanting,
and on new moons, the people, here, write checks to burn them. They manifest their fortunes
with fire, 
their power though ashes, their daiquiris filled with liquor, liquor, and large buckets of alcohol.
At 12:30 on Wednesdays, there’s a poetry-writing coven
that’s been hex-ing their landlords for practice.
Take me back to Florida, American Airlines,
because there’s a funk in this air
that’s got me all the way fucked up--
put me on a jet plane. I miss the stormy beaches
and those mud-trucking rednecks, and, shit,
I even miss Tallahassee that evil man, Ron Desantis.
At least there, I know which wars I’m fighting.
Here, strangers can spell your last name
and tell you where you got your shoes.
The people are so nice, here,
you don’t even notice how fast
you’re being consumed. 

Michael Minassian

Michael Minassian is a Contributing Editor for Verse-Virtual, an online poetry journal. His chapbooks include poetry: The Arboriculturist and photography: Around the Bend. His poetry collections Time is Not a River, Morning Calm, and A Matter of Timing are all available on Amazon. A new chapbook, Jack Pays a Visit, is due out in Spring 2022. For more information: https://michaelminassian.com

Kemet

I wake up in the morning,
covered in gold foil,
convinced I’m in ancient Egypt--

Outside my window, a naked man
with the head of a white ibis 
is mowing the lawn.

While I watch, he removes
each of his eyes, rinses them
with the garden hose,
then puts them back in their sockets.

Later, I drive to the beach;
Ft. Lauderdale looks 
like the Pharaoh’s nightmare--
in place of bikini bars
there’s an unfinished pyramid
and mummies stacked 
up on the sand.

The palm trees look the same,
except for the archers
hiding in the fronds--
arrows whizz by my head.

A woman joins me;
she looks vaguely familiar,
and tells me we’ve been here before--
clouds cluster above us 
like backward spinning clocks.

We hold hands--
our watches, hot, like fresh
baked bread, the smell of time
on our wrists.

Kerry Muir  ​

Kerry Muir's work has appeared in Kenyon Review online, crazyhorse, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Her award-winning plays, "The Night Buster Keaton Dreamed Me," and "Befriending Bertha/Conociendo a Bertha" (a one-act for children) were  published in dual language (Spanish-English) editions by NoPassport Press as part of their Dreaming the Americas series, curated by Obie Award-winning playwright, Caridad Svich. Visit her online at: https://kerry-muir-5gnx.squarespace.com. 

& Sometimes A Baby

& sometimes a baby washes to shore in  
a carbuncle of leaves, and sticks around for three 
twigs, or maybe four. & sometimes a baby flies to the moon and swims among the stars, but then 
comes crashing down to earth, and flies
with stars no more. & sometimes
a baby hooks a riptide. while in search of a lake, but when it finally appears, the lake comes much 
too late.
Long ago, the zebra
was Berkeley, and the dentist was 1968, and we were rowdy, tumbleweed-wildebeests, snug
in our circus hooligan-caravan. We were loud and clamorous pirates, and had chicken pox all the 
time. We were bon voyage-punk rockers, we— 
               We were. That’s all. 
Do you—? Remember? 
                             The tiger’s cage? 
               In the grocery on Euclid 
               Avenue, just off Hearst? 
It was so shiny, the tiger’s cage, 
               so very race car--
                             I mean, what kid wouldn’t want 
                             to run like Nebraska,
                             and push it like a dumpling? 
Do you—? Remember?
                —how, 
                without babushkas or even 
                the slightest ticket-taker,
                we rolled that tiger’s cage fast, 
                then faster, 
                then even faster still, 
& we leaped aboard 
                the speeding rigor mortis 
you on one side 
                                              me on the other 
both of us clinging to the the grille, 
                                        until our hair and nails glowed? 
Do you—? Remember?
                                How we zipped past the Lion’s 
                                den, then ripped loose 
                                from Mountain Time? 
           We were black market 
                                auctioneers, flying past Werner
                                Herzog! We were spring-laden gangplanks, we were 
                                Mormon Tabernacle 
choirs, flying past a chorus 
line of debutantes, lounging 
in quilted smoking jackets, 
and marzipan pajamas! 

For once—just once!—I had 
a bit of Roman Polanski 
in my carburetor (usually
I was a goody-goody and 
a Puritan cocksucker), but
that day, you and I were both 
supermodel-snake charmers! 
We were glitz and glamour!
We were the good life in Ohio! 
We were a couple of Geronimos 
in search of a fender-bender! 

We were a baby in a leafy carbuncle! 
Laughing at the piano, and
the handsome, fleet-footed cholos! But then— 

            when in hell did it appear? 
            why didn’t we see it coming? 

—a towering pyramid
of silver-finned Ganymedes, stacked right up to the ceiling, and I— 
I lost my tomato. 
            I let go. Not you,
            never you: No: You
            were a genie snug
            in a bottle, a Canadian 
            Mountie riding side-saddle, you 
            were the neon letters flashing 
            over a Texas shooting gallery— 
You were a jaunty horoscope-eggshell! 
Hell-bent on the Golden Age,
eyes on the Spanish horizon!
You weren’t some crawdaddy- 
rumrunner Bellagio, scurrying 
back in your shell—not you! 
Never you! Not your style— 
no. Not your style at all! 

Unfortunately, it was mine— 
                                                                                    I jumped 
                and without my weight to counter yours, 
                the tiger cage tipped 
                and spilled 

pure science followed.
The guitar went blind, as did 

                                              the dulcimer. 

Goddamit to hell, old egghead. 
goddamit, my trusty banana, 
here's the Ugly-doll truth: I saved 
my turtledove 
at the expense of your muchacho. 

So here I am to say:
I’m sorry, old pirate.
I’m sorry, cup of tea. I’m sorry,
fellow pickle jar on the Titanic.
I’m sorry, Bohemian Rhapsody
in A minor: I had it good, and you had it bad, and nothing will ever change that, no 
matter how many wooden
ladders we toss
into the sky.
You washed ashore in a carbuncle of leaves, 
then stuck around for three twigs, or maybe four— 
but the worst part of the whole thing is 
you washed out to sea in a riptide of 
light, and baby, we 
​
              hardly knew ye. 

​Steve Nickman     Brookline, MA

Steve Nickman's poetry collection, To Sleep with Bears (WordTech), is forthcoming in 2022. He is a psychiatrist who works mainly with kids, teenagers and young adults. Steve's poetry has recently appeared in Pleiades, Nimrod, Summerset Review, Tar River Review, Tule Review, and JuxtaProse. He lives in Brookline, Massachusetts and is a member of Poemworks: The Workshop for Publishing Poets.

Eggplant

At five I was fearless for my mother’s sake. 
It was just she and I in Manhattan
while my father was away at war.
Around the corner in Vitale’s grocery on Columbus
eggplants loomed vast and purple in a row
above the innocent summer squash,
plus a carton of them on the floor in plain sight.
I recoiled: People don’t eat anything that big. 
They might come out at night with teeth,
or else they had to be grenades or bombs.
I was Terry in “Terry and the Pirates”.
I got my mother out of there in time.
She never knew what I had saved us from.



​

Ian Powell-Palm   Belgrade, MT

Ian Powell-Palm is a writer, poet, and musician currently living in Belgrade, Montana. His work attempts to interrogate familial trauma, sexual identity, and the resurrection of the dead. You can read more of his poetry on Facebook at 'Powell-Palm Poetry'.

Montana
                
“I have no way, and therefore want no eyes”

                                -Gloucester 

                            “Speed is killing Montana’s drivers” 

                                -Billings Gazette 

           
White crosses: scattered across the highway:  

Like puncture wounds in God’s vision: driving this state:  

Is like uprooting a graveyard: like turning away from:

The woman cradling her daughter’s body: all teeth and broken wing: 

as she tears her from the car: as she turns into another syllable: 

God can no longer pronounce: gripping her tongue: my mother carves its meat   

Into a violin:  Sonata’s through her sobs for the children: these highways have changed: 

Tell them that in the corners: Of this beauty lurks the bones of Toyotas: mothers with 

Metal wings and children they will never meet: Tell them that my family lines these mountains: 

their crosses spitting out directions to nowhere. 


                                  2
    

80 down main street, the vodka bleeding 

    Threough both our hands 

She flips the car because the sirens 

    Have reached us too quickly 

And we can already hear the interstate calling 

    Our names, like children, 

Like it did my sister, my brother as his knees shattered 

    In Wisconsin, 23 and waiting, 

the pickup truck crashing through him 

    like a father 

and still you might ask, so what, kids die in metal jaws all across America 
    
But at least Montanans acknowledge it 

At least we fashion a cross from what’s left of our hands and mark 

    Where our bodies shattered. 

When the car flipped, my sister’s body tearing like a vision 

Across my eyes,

I bound my face in a white sheet, 

Let the men carry me back 

From sight 

back from the boy mangled on the stretcher 
    
Calling for his mother. 

His body, limp 

Like a prayer, 

    We all know we’ve heard before. 


                                  3

    
Listen: down that backroad of throat was a country: on the other side of language. 

I could see Marie’s body there, a slab of meat on the morgue’s metal: her breasts 

Two shut eyes, purpled with knots. I tried to scream: but my voice had been crushed 

Into music: That’s my city/What have you done to her?: I cried, but the women, 

And the men who had once been women, held me back  

All of us watching, silently, as the flames gnawed through 

Every living thing in sight. 


                                      4


That’s when I saw it. 

At the end of my family’s dying was a field. 

Beside its stream, mother and I prepared a fire 

For our daughter’s body, her cross clenched between us 

Like a chokehold. When father returns from tearing apart 

Every car he can get his hands on, his fingers shredded to bone, we will fashion 

a blanket from his hip and lay it down. A white sheet across 

our eyes, we will bring her back to the living, our daughter’s  

spirit breaking furiously into flesh. We will trace her rib, 

jutting and large, let its sharpness draw blood. 



We will touch our gutted eyes, wet with sun, 


With our daughter’s tears. All of us 

So lost in joy 

We will never acknowledge 

The reasons we 

can’t stop 

shaking 

Madari Pendás     Miami, FL

Madari Pendás is a Latin-American writer, translator and painter. She is the author of Crossing the Hyphen (Tolsun 2022). Her work has appeared in CRAFT, Pank Magazine, Sinister Wisdom, and more. Pendás has received awards from the Academy of American Poets, FIU, and two Pushcart nominations.

Tortilleras 

Cubans call queer women, tortilleras, 
Tortilla makers/lovers/experts. 

I can't place the first time I hear it,
But I remember the scorn, the spittle

A word where the teeth dig into the lips
Like white enamel gravestones.

I memorize this reaction, hoping
I never twist my mother's face up.

The Virgin Mary has appeared
As a burnt accent on tortillas,

Hands clasped, the downbeat of an applause,
Eyes turned away in modesty.

A holy visit, like Jesus visiting disciples
After his death. A tortilla, flat, pock-marked

Like a moon, foldable, a miracle gripped
Between burnt brown hands. 

I'm shoved away from my mother at the market
When I hugged her for too long,

People will think we're...you know,
I pray an apology as if I did know, 

As if I've always known,
It's sacrilegious to touch your saints.

Maybe she's known,
Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. 

My mother, head hung low, embarrassed/fleeing,
Crossed-arm, she moved to the papayas,

A word my people use for womens' genitals,
I don't eat any when she brings the sliced segments.

Before you were born I set you apart, 
My prayer hands close like a votive flame. 

The papaya's juices puddling underneath, the seeds like
The beads of a rosary clustered, waterfalling.

I eat of the fruit like that first woman, deceived, fallen,
Yet I close my eyes to enjoy the syrupy pulp,

Deviations are made in darkness,
My tongue traces its clefs and hills,

Its peaks and valleys, kissing
With gentle precision of that low cavern what is holiest,

Making a covenant with my body, 
Letting the saliva run down my lips and chin. 

HL R     North London, England

HLR (she/her) is a prize-winning poet, working-class writer, and professional editor from North London. She is a commended winner of The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition 2021. She also won The Desmond O'Grady International Poetry Competition 2021 and was long-listed for The Plough Prize 2022. She is the author of History of Present Complaint (Close to the Bone) and Portrait of the Poet as a Hot Mess (Ghost City Press). Twitter: @HLRwriter

Injuries You Cannot See #29

​
She has four dents            in her head:
when everyone was obsessed
    with that game Fruit Ninja,
she grabbed a carving knife
    from the kitchen drawer and tried
to split her skull apart like
    a watermelon,            desperate to
“get the badness out.” She didn’t
    achieve her goal of removing
her brain from her skull that day;
    the sharp knife cut her hair
wherever the blade landed,
    and she was left        with little tufts
sticking up    and out for months
    which made her feel silly
(her hair did, not the fact that she
    had casually attempted    a DIY lobotomy).

Charles Rafferty     Sandy Hook, CT

Charles Rafferty has a new collection of prose poems from BOA Editions – A Cluster of Noisy Planets. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Bennington Review, and The Southern Review.

A Practical Mortality

Anything can happen if I only hurry up. I pour a glass anyway. After all, the day I tried to tune the piano is the day I broke the piano, and it’s been a while since anyone thought up a new religion or a new sexual position. Luckily, I can always find a spider somewhere inside the house. It devours things I would otherwise be crushing with a tissue or a boot. So many decisions and I am certain of nothing — except that I’ve abandoned Infinite Jest and I really don’t feel bad.

Doug Ramspeck     Black Mountain, NC

Doug Ramspeck is the author of nine collections of poetry, one book of short stories, and a novella. Individual poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, Slate, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. He is a three-time recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.

Divination of Weeds

And the boy wears his father’s patience 
thin by forcing them deeper into the woods--

each new step a reluctant revelation.
And the boy points toward the abandoned bricks

hidden amid the scourge of weeds. And the father 
says it used to be a place of making and pronounces 

it “kill.” And the father shows the boy the shards
of clay bowls and saucers and cracked figurines 

lying wedged amid the mud, waiting with 
the forgetfulness of dropped leaves. And the father

says that someone there once summoned smoke 
to rise birdlike into air, lifting into a kind of buoyant

ghostliness. And that smoke might have been sorrow 
or gratitude or prayer. And the weeds around the boy 

and the father are peaceful as they bend to peer into
the maw. There is a loam smell there, a smoke smell. 

And the father reaches in and lifts out a small miracle
of pale bone. And fifty teeth gleam. And the boy’s

father holds the possum skull like a seer. Pitiless thing. 
Lost beauty from some abandoned country.
​

the river where the boy drowned grows forgetful

& believes only in its own meandering
& forgets that the sky is forever
an open grave     that the moon is a mouth
whispering to expel the stars   

& the boy is only an afterthought
or dream    a flotsam of son & brother 

& even the trees at the side of the river
hold their breaths     & even the mud
at the edge of the river is erased  
of deer tracks when it rains     

& no one can say where the water went 
that once held a boy in its moving arms
& no one can say what happened to the water
that clung to his body when he was dragged 
to the shore     

for water knows only to forget
& water is a manyness     

& rivers are exhalations
& what they remember is only 
how to move out always in the same direction  ​

Ghosts of the Apiary

I remember my father’s fingers
withdrawing the honeycomb from the hive,

remember hearing the bees buzzing
quietly with their resolute dreaming

while their tripartite bodies writhed.
And not one stung, the bees.

And the smoke silenced the air.
And the smoke boats drifted 

into years until the decades whispered:
Bees like old letters in a cardboard box.

Bees floating atop a brackish pond.
And the apiary moon lists tonight

outside this window, and the bee-stars
have not one hand to hold them.

​

Sarah Snyder     Vermont

Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019) with another book forthcoming in 2023. Poems have been nominated for Best of Net and a Pushcart Prize. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com

My Anatomy                                

Did I have two hearts— 
one for loving bad boys 
and one for loving the kind ones? 

Too many summer secrets 
with the bad ones when we jumped 
into random pools and I took off 
most of my clothes on a golf course 
at night, always at night with them 
that aching heart 
that couldn't get enough 
of a two-sudden love. 

These were not breakfast boys, 
no light-of-day, no, they stayed 
in the chambers of dark dream and distance,
exhausting that heart.

Thank god my other one 
finally found its thrum.

The sun does rise— 
how bright and warm 
and forgiving everything becomes 
in the morning light.

Alison Stone    Nyack, NY

Alison Stone has published seven full-length collections including Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020), Caught in the Myth (NYQ Books, 2019), Dazzle (Jacar Press, 2017), and They Sing at Midnight, which won the 2003 Many Mountains Moving Poetry Award; as well as three chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, Barrow Street, Poet Lore, and many other journals and anthologies. She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize and New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award.

Nonbinary


Asked first about a baby – boy or girl?
Dogs announce by how they pee, boy or girl.

Teachers don’t say, Hi, Blacks and whites, Sikhs and
Jews. Why the identity boy or girl?

Many languages label lawn mower,
car, volcano, sneaker, tree, boy or girl.

Tiresias’ body kept changing.
Each time, he felt, couldn’t see, boy or girl.

Buyers queue at the copping spot. Dealers
ask as they collect money, Boy or girl? -- 
 
Slang names assigning gender to pleasure.
Before human, do we see boy or girl?

Blood-streaked, she walks across the border, once
a nurse, now a refugee, boy or girl

wrapped in her arms. On the blurred ultrasound,
is that a penis or knee? Boy or girl?

Some mothers eat the placenta. Does it 
taste sweeter or more salty, boy or girl?

Folks with misspelled signs rage against they, claim
supremacy for he/she, boy or girl,

deny social constructs – Genitals are
destiny, a fait accompli. Boy or girl

decided by God. Some cultures have five
categories, some have three. Boy or girl
 
colors have changed. Once pink was saved for
sons. In some myths, the moon’s he. Boy or girl

boxes for everybody, but Bowie,
Boy George, and Grace Jones broke free. Boy or girl

styles have mingled. Long hair, a suit and tie,
eyeliner don’t guarantee boy or girl.

Stone isn’t alone adoring someone
born beyond the binary boy or girl.

John Wojtowicz

John Wojtowicz grew up working on his family’s azalea and rhododendron nursery in the backwoods of what Ginsberg dubbed “nowhere Zen New Jersey.” Currently, he pays the bills as a licensed clinical social worker and adjunct professor. He has been featured on Rowan University’s Writer’s Roundtable on 89.7 WGLS-FM and several of his poems were chosen to be exhibited in Princeton University's 2021 Unique Minds: Creative Voices art show at the Lewis Center for the Arts.  Check him out on the web at: www.johnwojtowicz.com

Lilacs & Rain 

Evening rain carries the scent 
of lilacs 
to my bedroom window 

which I think 
is better than smelling 
them directly because 

I’m laying on a memory 
foam mattress 
and because lilacs 

benefit from a good wafting. 
My wife is sleeping. 
Earlier, we made our version

of love — lots of cursing   
and consensual 
name-calling. Wilder lovers 

might’ve done it in the rain 
under the lilacs 
but I have a feeling 

that involves a lot of non-sexual
goosebumps, mud, 
getting poked with sticks.  

One of those experiences
better in a poem 
or a movie than in practice

like sex on the beach; if you must, 
my advice is bring 
a blanket or commandeer 

a lifeguard stand. I guess 
what I am trying
to say is that before 

wishing for chocolate syrup 
make sure you like
being sticky. I’m saying 

the wind is blowing 
all the wishes 
from the wishing flowers 

and tonight-- that is okay with me.