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Full index of authors and artwork available at end.
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I S S U E 01 Summer 2015
Kate Singer Amber Rounds Justin Pelletier Rebecca Hanssens-Reed Lea Sorano Kate Litterer Madison Palffy Ashley Barton Courtney Brooke Hall Caroline Belle Stewart Guest Editors Kate Lindroos Elmira Elvazova Glynnis Eldridge
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M I ST R E S S I S S U E 01
Kate Singer The fence of the absolute no We had gone there for something to see, the horses nearby whose only schedule was to grind their food. When it looked at me——what was it? I wanted to say it was angry or pissed at our intrusion into the morning, but who can tell what horses feel. So I found a coaxing voice from a recent repertoire: “Say hello: hello.” I am here in greeting, to bridge the ontologies with dumb manners, melancholy victories added up from the least distance. The equine message only sends from nose to nose, or maybe, I was hoping, from nose to hand, if were we even permitted to touch through such small vanities of intimacy. The second point to be gained was forgiveness. Not unusual my asking, but here articulated by an electric fence. Was it finally the universe speaking not in a mismashed, untranslated dance but finally in sickly, dental clarity, up my arm and out my mouth——
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Amber Rounds Muse I was starving last winter. Merciless January drifted within up through the cracks, into the flat. It gnawed furrows deep in my skin. I was starving. You found me a woman alone, unable to raise myself to the cot too weak to pull the blanket over my body. London is a city of liars and tigers: coal rain falls over their eyes an obsidian mask hiding one from the next. “Art,” you told me, “art will save us.” Art chose you and you put me in the trees draped in white hunger hidden under layers of lace. The soot is still there caked on my thighs, ingrained in my scalp.
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Umber spatters on your trousers, you threw down your brush, spent all our money on potions, papers, and glass, “The machine will save us.� It made you rich but it trapped me, still starving in a gilded frame. You moved into the darkroom, an artist, a scientist, a modern man staring through the magic mirror into the bottomless void you left the dark laughing having conquered your art.
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Some Guidelines for Rebirth Child of crocus and iris: preserve not the husk but the sap. The wheel has come to completion and begins anew. With fresh eyes, you drag off the last of the spider webs that choked your vision. You know it is only a matter of time before the wheel descends again, but you will hold fast the plateau for as long as you are able. Set the spell in your bones by walking to nowhere. Circular paths are highly recommended. Go barefoot to alleviate the symptoms of winter paranoia. Bathe frequently. Eat the small fresh things. Notice their sap. Be cautious with the wind: it can provoke madness if not tempered with sunshine and solitude. Savor simplicity. You are young again, no matter your age. Kiss the beloved as if for the first time, greet the beloved as if for the last time. Find peace in your own reflection. She has been with you for all these years, although you forget to see the tranquility in her form. Bring fire into your blood: drink, dance, love. Feel your own pulse: how the body cries out for movement and touch. Wait until Solstice to make any binding commitments. Your skin is still tender, prone to burning. Your eyes have not adjusted to the light. Allow yourself full delight of the senses: do not question the outcome, yet. 8
Justin Pelletier SOME GEOGRAPHIES Hiker on ridge digs vista dug by glacier, plucks wedgie of yoga pants from fissure of buttock.
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HOW TO WALK ACROSS THE QUAD Go to the gym or dining commons Cross with Stinky Rick, but know this: you are alone Walk to destination without destination in mind One hand in pocket with other, slice the air Regard those that rush with due derision Unleash embodied op-ed of searing indifference For extra point, kick present moment over public safety Cock your head to set this campus aright When talking up a girl, squint—— she is a source of light
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CALCULUS one of mankind’s greatest accomplishments and yet——
and yet——
two chicks going at it on a picnic table
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THESE ARE A FEW OF MY FAVORITE THINGS sports
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Rebecca Hanssens-Reed A Romance I’ve been getting a lot of jealous letters from my ex boyfriends lately. The bank is upset and says “you owe me” and the hospital, the bank’s friend I had a fling with, is still bitter and says “no, you owe me” and the telephone company feels it’s being left out and says “remember, you still owe me” and the electricity says “you’ve owed me for a long time now” and my high school wants to know what I’ve been up to these days. The mailman shrugs his shoulders and says “I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news.” So to cheer up the mailman and I play scrabble and drink gin and we get so drunk we run and grab the kitchen knife to open all the angry letters and we read them over and over, saying “this doesn’t even make sense” so we stab them to death, and they bleed thousands of tiny self-addressed envelopes which we throw up in the air like confetti as we laugh maniacally. Then we fawn over all the children’s postcards written to their grandmothers, and soon we feel ambitious and start digging through his mailbag to find the last love letter to ever be written and I pull it out and it’s written on an old pillowcase and it says “Oh darling you are the Anne Geddes Collection on the coffee table of my soul” and then we stare into each other’s eyes and say “I know, I know, I know, I know” and we fall asleep with our cheeks touching and in the morning he stands up abruptly, avoiding eye contact, and says “I’ve got to deliver this” and disappears. I spend the rest of the afternoon sobbing on the piles of envelopes and confetti until it becomes papier mache and I build myself a cocoon and crawl inside.
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Ugly Chair Last night Billy threw a chair at the wall. He pulled it out from beneath him and it flew across the room like a giant clay pigeon, though neither of us had a rifle on hand. The wall gave in, soft and sorry. Somewhere in my brain I remembered a poem I wrote as a child with my father about birds shitting everywhere, I’m not sure why. I love it when birds do bird doo, I thought. There was drywall spattered everywhere like bird shit or blood or sand. Then the chair became legs and arms and unkempt hair and started rocking back and forth and crying. I didn’t know what to do so first I kissed the chair, “I’m sorry,” I said, and it tasted like raw fork, and then I stood there swallowing hard boiled eggs still in their shell until Billy insisted on getting into bed and pretending to sleep, and the drywall stuck to the skin on his arms and back and sparkled like glitter. The hole yawned in the wall, not because it was tired, but because it was nervous. I tried to burrow into my pillow until it swallowed me. In the morning I drew a bullseye around the hole in the wall, and one around my mouth, so he wouldn’t forget. Things stayed decidedly the same.
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Somewhere That Serves Craft Toast If my mother bought me a floral crop top and pepper spray for Christmas, what kind of woman does that make me? If I am concentrating on not corking the bottle while you say things like we are all emotionally fragile, how are we to measure feelings of fraudulence? Our ideas of ourselves folded in on one another like a fan. If my love came in any form it would come as the collection agency’s calls I keep dodging. Convinced they have the wrong number, no matter how many times they call specifically asking for my full name and what I owe them. What they are asking for is reasonable and yet it scares me. And so it’s clear I was never deserving of your patience. I tried to write you love letters on pieces of stale bread and stick them in the toaster so as to bring them back to life. This could be the reason I heard you saying who even eats toast anymore. I have no reason to start packing, but I’m taking everything down off the walls so I can stare plainly at what contains me. Tonight I will wear my years like a sequin dress and dazzle someone. Eat spoonfuls of grapefruit seeds so something sweet and bulbous might grow inside me. So what am I really worshiping? Tonight I will be as many forms of monsters as glasses of wine I drink. Most likely, many.
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Lea Soranno In My Head at 2AM I can’t tell if I had been asleep, or stuck in that between place where thoughts transform into something visual without actually becoming dreams. I know that I am awake now. The light from the streetlamp brighter than usual, a light inappropriate for the middle of the night. An artificial dusk. There is the feeling that dusk provides for singular events. That feeling, while holding all of my attention – drawing from several of my senses – pulls me to memory. The crow I had seen earlier that day. It landed on an aluminum roof, talons clacking loudly as it walked back and forth, a slow-paced tap dance. But this sweet scene tangles with something bitter. I watched through younger eyes, my thoughts drawn to another moment that had occurred, light slips through tree branches and catches on rooftop corners. I wonder if every moment really happened in half dark, or if, over time, I have placed a shadow filter over my recollections. Am I pulling from so much because it has become everything wrongly cast?
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I lie awake. Memories move from my mind into my body. My muscles tense. It is so much easier to think of everything at once than to think of nothing at all. A place built upon feelings alone, where new memories never form.
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Kate Litterer There is a fine line it’s just you and your dignity it is too easy to snuff your boundaries frogs have film on their eyes to see under water every cervix was a birthright it’s funny that I survived I turned in to a hibernating baby animal while I sloughed sweat cracked once my ex boyfriend woke me up in the middle of the night with his hand over my mouth and his dick ready at me he turned my birthright to pleasure into a science project like a dick rammed in 20
way too fast and our body shocks like you’re going to vomit but instead your spirit biles up and your blood changes PH when your body plays dead your eyes acid roil, fingernails evolve to diamond points, skin pucks like a venom frog’s, but your lungs they aware breathe water you little soldier you venom sister and all the windy wailing coerces your brain to lay still remember what you heard about bear attacks and what to do when your car spins out 21
on ice you die you are dead you coerce your body to change wind doesn’t blow your hair anymore you died and rose again so pain can fuck itself take your foot off the gas play dead hold your breath coerce your body you are dead and living a relic a goddess it is dead now it is dead so you will be alive a river of acid a stone coated version of yourself 22
your hyman in hell your skin pricking wolf fur bloodied now you will be dead if you want to live
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Dear Cytherea, the Squirting Queen when you were little did you do a squawking dance is it a secret are your eyes really red birds in your hammered sockets did your body seize the second time you made yourself come quiet except your own fast little breaths not the first the first was mewing did your lip zipper break let out the dark honey sounds when you streamed come like beads at a parade does it feel like kneeling on rice or pillows 24
Madison Palffy signs of accidents but not the thing what do i do with myself is a question. wish i were hunted. wish i were in pain. no reason but myself. how to not sink into a stupor? how to not waste minutes? how to think of time altogether differently. what i want is pure experience and she is just decoration. unravel the red doors scattered throughout the room. i came here not knowing, names flying around. nothing sticking. a sickness for many months (do not even know where i am) and then the island for those with the scar. large pools i think i drop my names into. heavy island time filled with the ghost hands. could not see for the mist of them laced back to back. an aura of damage hangs about you now. one eye looks left one eye looks right a hologram until you disappear. i could have left you there and been a comfort. surrounded by accident beads. one into two into three. i swear i am more than this. you know about my emptiness it’s a shared thing. turned black turned large turned back turned bone in my hand. rings of remembrance. downing ships. lightning hair. all of her was unstrung. only thing clinging. miraculous lactation. joan of arc eyes. i am slowly making my armor. stalking you in my armor. peeled mouther. you are so heavy in the way you say my name. absence of my name on the shield. i am longing for the pendant of myself.
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go back to the hunger. empty bowls placed in front of a sick dog. i wandered on the water’s edge waiting for a sign to drink. i heard something in the night i never thought i would hear again. i made a pact to become rock. swore oaths to oaks. and there is a cold white one in the middle of the stream and i am checking on you all the time. young girl bodies growing in the land of ferns. short tree covered mountains are actually the oldest. i left my little thing in the low ceilinged place. earlier i was in the land of no boundaries no sound. a russian cargo ship filled with frozen chickens slowly passes me on my raft of old basketballs. i have to work on this backwards, not allowed to see the front til i am finished. when i am dying i think i see a horse in it. get this shit stained dog away from me it had no choice but to wipe its ass on the rug.
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Ashley Barton Figure Drawing The room empty, speech dulled, distant under the door creeping dinner smells. Fan humming, breathing. A bowed mirror whispers, calls. Screams. You are not hungry. You don’t need it. Sterile flickering, fluorescent. Detecting intermittent shame. Me, her, whoever is reflected, derided, shifting, distorting, distended. Look! At this empty room.
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Courtney Brooke Hall Absolute I am the broken wing of a midnight moth Burnt and ragged from the flame. In that moment I cut the darkness. Fluttering, parsing time, a delicate confusion. Every blade of mid-summer grass hints of gravity, as my formation, in spiraling arches, tree bark to moon beams, a minuet with the shadows. I am a wound that bleeds eternity Blistered and scorched by beauty. I have pierced the night. I live on, I am absolute.
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Caroline Belle Stewart I DIDN’T KNOW I COULD BE COOL LIKE MARIANNE FAITHFULL I wanted to be cool but only cool like Mick Jagger who is a very famous man Marianne is also famous but her personal life eclipsed her actual life and her voice turned to gravel in the forest on the mountain where Marianne hides the wind in a cave I sigh oh mirror on a mountain swan to behold from the era of the tragic eyelash in this corrupt forest I could read Huysmans and Genet because Marianne did but instead I read what Mick Jagger read and cry for the gloomy acorn 33
that waits knowing every woman is born with a daughter inside and everyone else comes out a star I say it and the whole forest blinks the trees regard me nervously and the mushrooms scowl the flowers shut and the swans tuck beneath the shadow of an eagle who remembers my mother wanted to be Mick Jagger too but we have reached a new era for Marianne Faithfull the lord of this forest has sewn a map 34
into each eagle with instructions for my daughter that are the opposite of my regrets that say what to do with cool men and cool things by men so when the eagle’s sewn-on head falls off the forest will shimmer with the names of women
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PEOPLE ARE FALLING IN LOVE WITH SKELETONS AND IT’S EASY TO SEE WHY my skeleton doesn’t have a penis or a heart and all the cool animals come hissing out his sockets like comets out of suns in the sweltering afternoon humans with soft brushes kneel over my skeleton in the desert lamenting that their love is only science but at night my skeleton walks with me and plucks mint in the moonlight and gathers feathers to thread through my fingers his ribs don’t make a sound we eat fries on a bench by the road and I drop 36
him gently in his pit just a little rattle so the snakes can go home these names we call each other you wonder why I haven’t thanked you for this birdhouse that tilts in the wind
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ISSUE 02 Winter 2016
Laura A. Warman Jennifer Lynn Krohn Megan Cowen Aepril Schaile Colleen Louise Barry Anne Britting Oleson J.S.Watts Sonya Vatomsky Ayla-Monic McKay Sarah Ann Winn
Guest Editor Kate Litterer
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Laura A. Warman Im on a date The first date We just met each other We see Mission Impossible She loves Tom Cruise She thinks he is a great actor By the end I Agree Tom Cruise is a Great Actor We kiss We sleep in her condo I leave I tell her I am leaving to The Airport I am not coming back for months and she says she is a witch, I will not leave today I arrive to the airport and the flight is cancelled the next is not till Saturday It’s not the sacred but when I connect I make them stay
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Jennifer Lynn Krohn The Mysteries and Rites of Hestia In his record of the gods, the scholar pauses when he comes to Hestia. There is not much for him to record: the first devoured by Cronus the last vomited out virgin housewife custodian of the gods’ hearth silent dutiful a domestic ideal for women to aspire to. He thinks—more a footnote than a deity. His stomach grumbles, and he lays down his quill. When he steps into the kitchen, the women’s laugher stops— only the fire and the boiling pots continue their chatter. As the women slice and butter his bread, as they cut his meat, he doesn’t inquire into their conversation—such gossip would lower his lofty thoughts. As soon as he leaves the room, his wife, his daughters, his mother, his poor unmarried sister, his servant return to their gossip: the woman in the house down the street 44
the bruises the missing teeth the miscarriage how one can turn from the hearth (for only a second) and a stray spark burns down the house. At least she got the children out, the scholar’s mother says, pity about the husband.
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The Anatomy of a Witch I pay the grave robbers though I abhor their necessity, the dirt underneath their fingernails, the wink one gives as he mutters She’s a looker tonight. But a doctor must explore flesh, travel the twisted roads of veins, discover the borders between organs to understand the living’s ills. The corpse on my table reminds me of when my father took me to see the burning of the witch. Her head was shaved, her shift smeared with manure, her face a bouquet: old yellow bruises and the newer blue-black. She didn’t flinch, even when a rock smashed into her head. She refused to feed those flames her screams. That superstition, is why I reach for my scalpel. It must be cut off like a gangrenous limb.
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I never knew what madness the townsfolk mistook for witchcraft. Did the grief of a child not born cause her to fall on the floor, a heap of withering limbs and curses? Did some fever leave her with visions of Lucifer pulling her nightgown over her shoulders? I pause in my cutting to study the most likely culprit, the uterus. Necessary for life— a demonic creature, the fallopian tubes limbs which allow it to crawl about the abdomen, into the chest, wrap itself about the heart and squeeze. No doubt this organ was the demon that caused the witch to claw through cemetery soil and collect the infant’s spleen, the prostitute’s liver, to pluck the hanged man’s swollen fingers and toes like peapods.
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Oh, if I could make the town see, it was not a matter of devilry but that of anatomy, they would have shown mercy, took the poor hysteric somewhere where she couldn’t harm herself or others. Unfortunately, superstition runs deep, and even I am forced to shadows and reduced to cutting open some old whore.
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Megan Cowen In which the female specimen tells us everything makes her afraid There are no unfit accidents after the first flood, drunk with silk-song. Somewhere a hush seemed to fall in like a church, an other-wordly, ringing thing you would recognize. It will let you watch the whisking, maybe. A strange throat backed into a jeweled face just before your second birthday, I said to my daughter. Purple Macaws and my Indian boy were all about that, only brighter. I spied a plush gray tone too commonplace to kill, but I will, even if I have to cross five hundred foxes to the north and manage to get through all right. 50
Perhaps you liked the idea of sifting through the half-light about us all the time— I have never decided, even after one song. Just think, a few paces ahead of me she put her foot on the quiet body, said she was very sorry. And I was sorry too, to have lived all winter when I should have been flying against the window of a parked car
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A full thirty minutes after capture the female specimen has expired it takes about three minutes to appear in the blood several hours to return in snakes and males that lose a fight with another male losing an interaction is exposing a cage for a moment in body temperature such tests tell us that other animals fear the chances as much as they do captivity wild finches sit quietly in a hide watching through pink and grey parrots as they drop in a puff shrieked into trees I could still hear in pain my witness stepped out landed on top I know it didn’t lay still waiting to die with resolution in sight its eyes like a traffic accident fifteen minutes after it’s eaten its fill 52
The female specimen visits a fortune teller who, for an additional $20, can tell her the rest of her life It’s like the fear of slipping on an old tradition, of pedaling into the bloodstream with easy music. I can’t hear you. Come to my dressing room, pickpocket who draws so well—close-ups of eyes muddied heels and hands. Drop the wolf skin and make a dash as if you’ve cheated us. In this version of life all the plants bear fruit as promised. But why do it at all? Two girls on a train are accepting the moment just before the tunnel, memorizing what is precious and what is threatened and what is very close. The message is, by nature, a total let-down and the girls take in a lot of air, debut as headless spaces behind a smoke screen. It’s shaky.
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It’s bananas. It is happy baggage over a bright yellow bruise milk-stained twitching in a white field.
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Aepril Schaile Intimate (Self Portrait as Lilith) Intimate, like creation. As close as the encasement of the womb, or the slide of one body into another. Or out. As close as the slow baring of bones to the earth, beneath the apple tree. My sigh in your ear. The sinuous orgasm of a serpent; wet and undulating squeezing and contracting along the length and curve of me. Naked, fragile, leafess in my veracity; my many true stories and faces, interpenetrating, reticulated. I dine on verisimilitudes. Wrap my body, my legs, my mouth around them. Squeeze them to death and swallow them whole. My pythonic, sybil-self; knowing not always who I’ve challenged, what proud authority. Knowing not who I’ve disabused of a finite Garden. Knowing not what avenging agent will cast me out, decapitate me, or rape me.
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Or, restrict me for selfish, small worship. Eyed. Consumed. I am blind. I go on more ancient senses. But I am a vision. Look away. Lest you be drawn into me with the knowledge of little deaths, and Death. I am a void, and I multiply rapidly, for this is my vengeance. For each fury that is murdered, a triple She emerges. With a spontaneous fire. Erupting, volcanic blood slithering, liquid, down the mountain. From an open, spitting oven. The scorching cunt of the Great Lady. Burning a molten snake-path of shame and power. Flooding your town. Intimate, like destruction. Like the left-behind dinner plates on a family table. Like it was only one hour ago. The ash-ages-preserved meal, waiting still. Embracing bodies mummifed, clasping entwined. Oh, the terror that must have been. And the love that must have bloomed right then.
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Colleen Louise Barry
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Anne Britting Oleson Earth Day, One Year Later
(for M.W.)
Uncertain April afternoon: swallows at least know to build nests in the moulding beneath the eaves, staving off the false labor of season. I want to think we’re safe now from the tangle of birth-life-death in early spring——but who can tell? Perhaps the yard maples can, strewing feathery red flowers on greening grass, gift to the earth which throws back wormy scents of warmth and wet. These broad trunks have lived here longest, their roots burrow deepest: perhaps they know best when to send sap reaching toward a particular slant of sun, a particular bell-like blue of sky.
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Farm Christmas Once again safely ensconced in the yellow room for Christmas, I look out through frosted storm windows at the orchard on the hillside, bare gnarled branches bowed toward the frozen ground. It has begun to snow: heavy flakes falling purposefully to silver over the waves of dead grass. The world tonight is turning slowly to the new year, and at the window I watch a haloed moon rise, and think of you with a quiet joy that lives and glows like the star of wonder, radiating from beneath my ribs. If there are angels out there in this cold December evening, they sing to the converted—and to that fox, flashing among the bony arms of sleeping apple trees, white-tipped tail aloft, a solitary flame.
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J.S.Watts The Witch of Walkern Two crows led me here, squabbling over a mud splashed stem of straw. One flying up and high. The other, flapping empty wings, flew down this country lane to merge with the dusk, leaving me between hedgerows smoldering with rose-hips. A hart darting eastwards across a shallow stream then I saw her, the old woman, retracing the wing beats of the crow, straw in hand, muttering as she came, she would have justice one way or some other. A cunning woman, she thought herself. Suddenly darting forward like a feral thing to jab my arm with a crooked pin and capered off laughing into the gathered night, leaving me to walk into Walkern, my herd of cats following each with a judgment cake of feathers in his raw mouth.
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Sonya Vatomsky Every time I hiccup I miss you with a knife Is it folklore when I pull dill from my garden, use a wooden spoon to stir a stew you’ve never heard of? How many ladles till I’m a woman, a domestic love poem, lipstick on its rim like some kind of overlapping tree ring: thick black for the year it did nothing but rain, purple for the tomato crops eaten by squirrels, red the night smoke stung your eyes and I am so feminine, they were convinced. Clouds drag moisture from me as I sleep, cycle it through air as ulnar nerves ache and pinkies grow numb on the keyboard and the Last Supper was not about food so what am I? Vine-ripened tomatoes, outside somewhere. I was going to graduate university, go back to Europe and jump in a lake, like jump in a lake permanently, like drown. Instead I got engaged, another kind of dying. In Lakeland there is no future tense, one pronoun for people. My tongue doesn’t dry up, my insides and outsides align and I am this but ten years faster. Someone serves me baked mushrooms on white fish; the pan old tinfoil. Who flies and who tethers? I almost jump but everyone else has gone, left me the string. I hold it for a few years. I am good at holding, until I’m not.
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We meet on rain-slicked streets and my veins run red with wine, vibrate. I mistake the buzz for flying. Your open mouth a room I run into, take my shoes off, leave blue hair in the drain. We always eat and never cook, science fiction an inevitable future, the past a wives’ tale, the present a direct address to a relationship in my life other than mind-reader. I am so feminine, with my thirty lipsticks and bag of bones in the freezer; I have poisoned the protagonist with my rustic Chekhov’s Gun. Listen – sirens sing out anxious EBM then pass our block. In another story you would wake in the dark, sweating.
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Hazel and Honeysuckle I meant it as an antidote but fumbled the dosage with my tea-leaf tongue, my moods swung seasick. The sun set red on my mouth through the porthole, a thirty-day hyper-correction – no, not black, no, not grey. Nor that not-quite-dead flesh-tone, my shit-eating grin. My padlock flushed poppy-mouth, Snow-White’s-apple mouth, kinda mouth to make yours move and make me sleep when I had been feeling so good – had meant blood-mouth, meant meat-mouth. Meant a soup of my bones, undeniable essence: hot, boiling reveal. Meant pour over, climb under, meant a skin-stripping rain-mouth. Meant reign. Like intent, like with teeth, like fey glamour glimpsed through heart-beating curtains, there, say it: I frighten. Look – the deed for this attic, look – my own long name on it. I’m not that kind of madwoman, if you know what I mean.
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Ayla-Monic McKay Snake When we met, her hair was dark with strawberry blonde roots.. #032 Chocolate Bark against pale skin. Striking. She wore it down and tucked behind her right ear, exposing a sharp cheekbone, a wide, severe jawline. She smiled without showing her teeth. She would one day swallow me whole. Two years later she traded #032 Chocolate Bark for #109 Shadowfax, a half shave, a perm. The perm hid the strawberry blonde roots that always foiled her attempts at a striking hair colour, exposing that part of her that she didn’t want to see in the mirror. She had a habit of playing with my own messy tangle of brown curls. She would review all the edgy haircuts I could try. Haircuts like the ones worn by the lesbian comedians she made me watch with her every week. Six months after switching to #109 Shadowfax, she ditched the perm and let the half shave grow in. “It’s just too much work,” she explained when she came back from the stylist with a pixie cut and freshly dyed roots. *** When we met, she was on a heavy black eyeliner kick. It looked a bit raccoonish, to be honest, but she made it work with those bright green irises and withering glare. She could destroy a man at fifty yards, just by raising one perfectly 74
drawn-on eyebrow and narrowing those dark-rimmed eyes just so. Her disdain was palpable, the damage tangible. When she looked at me, though, her eyes would transform. When our eyes met, she was inside me. She wrapped herself around my heart, squeezing just enough to prevent my escape, her tongue running the length of my spine, tasting every vertebrae, every disc. Eventually, she switched to a more subtle brown eyeliner, long before the #109 Shadowfax revolution. She kept the perfect eyebrows, and the killer glare seemed somehow even more deadly. I was only on the receiving end of it once, and I prayed for days for her to look at me in her other way again, to crawl back inside me and squeeze my heart with her long, smooth body. *** She eventually gave up #109 Shadowfax, too, and allowed her strawberry blonde to grow back in. She let it grow long again, framing her face, lending colour to her translucent skin, a coral undertone that blushed across those cheekbones. It fell across her narrow shoulders and down her long, slender back, until it finally reached her slim hips. When she stretched out on the bed, she elongated herself, reaching above her head, wrapping her legs around each other, creating one sinewy trunk. Her hair 75
splayed out across her back, pink on white, warning colours if I ever saw them. She ran a brush through it every morning, stroking the smooth locks with horse hair until they shone and she gleamed. I would sit on the bed and feel her wrap around my heart as she examined her hairline, her skin, drew a manicured nail along her sharp cheekbones. Then our eyes would meet in the mirror and I could feel her tongue flicking down my spine. *** Sunlight streamed through the window. She was curled up next to me, on top of the covers, resting against my bulk, basking in the warm pool of sunlight. My heart constricted. She had always been beautiful. Each consecutive change brought out more of whatever it was that made her seem to transcend her human form. She loved change. Her most recent transformation was her most beautiful yet, accentuating her long, slim body and her compact, strong muscles. Her green eyes were more striking than ever. She could still drop a man at fifty yards, and she didn’t have to raise an eyebrow to do it anymore. It was a privilege to have been alongside her for each iteration of herself. Her eyes cracked opened, two slits, when I shifted to 76
curl around her body. She uncurled herself and slid over me, resting her head between my breasts. The sunlight beamed across her back and I ran my fingertips down along her spine, gently. She was warm and smooth and I shuddered as she slowly wrapped her body around mine.
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Sarah Ann Winn The Kitchen Witch at Imbolc I brush the heel of my hand with salt. The ring in the sky where someone set a coffee mug, dried in a ghost crescent. With toothpaste, I unmarked the sky, I didn’t coast. The cure, the heat, my own doing, undoing, I made a bed for Brigid. I left my clothes on the floor, my favorite shirt, Let the buttons hold fast. Spring cleaning - check does the dust fall in constellated ways? I brush the heel of my hand, the cure, the heat my own doing, undoing. I wear my best cardigan when I carry her out to check for snow, for housekeeping matters, if you make it.
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Dress Form, Large The alternative was to use a dummy, mute and bulky, add the pad, graft — with a laugh — a covering, to assay the place where the button gaps, a flat refusal to lay passive, weight means art refuses to attend. At the cocktail party for plus sizes, the waiters roll their eyes when asked for water. We wave to be seen, to have all the options open, to be refilled, all we need is the check. We are designed to catch your eye. One has to work to look away from the multitudes of our measure.
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ISSUE 03 Summer 2016
Erin White em kaldenbaugh Sydney McNeill A.J. Huffman Hannah Bernhard Guest Editors Tania Rios Nellie Prior
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Erin White Something to Cry About My sleep therapist recommends restructuring dreams So that the outcomes don’t Come out. My husband doesn’t leave me For a woman who supports his athletic pursuits; There is no skinned gorilla Washed ashore outside our dreamhome. Real or un-, hideous thoughts at times Prevail in me. I saved the keys to our torn-down Building to give me something to cry about. I went there one night and the walls were all over the floor. I sat in the dusty bathtub, going, Oh Daddy, Daddy, I’m too old and no longer pretty enough To be acting this way. The moon in black sky— I felt it Tucking the tide over my child body.
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em kaldenbaugh Cry So Long My Cheeks Pickle We were just talking about me! I used to be cops on horseback but now I am the lake, reflecting a cloudless sky. No wait, guys, I’m stuck inside a goddamn word cloud. Be specific, are we where we were? Filling our noses with glitter, making ourselves sneeze from a really high place—— succumbing to our love of the mall or the inevitable big crunch of the Universe. Will the occupant of the inappropriately placed pup tent please report to customer services? I used to be a teacup but now I think there’s a British man in the ceiling, can you lift the tile? Guys, I’m literally eating my way out of a snowstorm in Ikea. What quest is being alive again? Ugly versions of all my friends, which of me is crying in here again? I can’t help it you won’t be a koala forever, I used to be a koala forever, but now I am the size of my thoughts vs. the shape of my skull, it’s an avalanche inside an Ikea, but guys, I used to be frozen weird stuff too. Now I’m on a case by quesadilla basis. I’m born but I’m still dough, I’m full of gas and wants. According to Meyers-Briggs I’m dead, but now I am.
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Feeling Confident About the Egg I opened up the refrigerator—— the inevitable heat death of the Universe I look again—— bezoar, cochineal, dragon’s-blood, amber, gum copal, nutmeg, quicksilver, pineapples, jalap, mechoacan, wines—— There is always Dew in my fridge and the algorithm tells me I’m a kook—— I luv being told. Tell me more about this “human condition”? Dad asks child, “Dude, do you need to potty?” This fridge contains spoilers: I get to be the baby this time! I get by with little knowledge of special relativity. I get a new name—— My name is Lenny Rose. Please give me one moment to review your information. Oh, my accent? It is Sotheby’s.
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Cruel and Unusual Nourishment A buried cake, a chalice on a plinth among flowers, explicating guff like umm your abundance is showing. How many irreconcilable narratives can a body tell? Glib and pebbled, I am pinned to eternity and sick of this myth, can we create a new one? Casting that obligatory magic into the vegetable internet of information overload, through a doughnut hole without disturbing the honeyglaze. Like nature is a collage of evolution’s scraps and there’s only room for one of us in this petri dish so hide me inside a horse and put me on a doorstep please, a neighbor can be anyone, including me—— a thinking cup left of grape in the discs and the menu reads cruel and unusual nourishment, market price. Awaken yourself to your truest foam: foamless, seltzeresque, oak moss vapor, bread for tears, thinking like a forehead is dull a cartoon, bends with French actors. Today feels so Sunday, I was and I wilt. I woke up in a perfect soft boiled egg. When I get a new name what will happen to the old talk? Be specific. I’m very tired today.
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Sydney McNeill goddess season rosy-cheeked and cut throat, arranged carefully under spring skies, dehydrated foliage and frantic limbs our euphoria is at the bottom of the bottle in prairie winds less harsh and flesh less purple our cue to claw up through the depths where they all thought we went to die
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vacancy sky opens, empties. park a cube van outside a travelodge smack dab in the middle of the fraser valley. a fugitive in a storm near a mountain. make a career out of pleading no contest. door opens when you put a key in it. it’s a freedom that takes some adjusting.
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A.J. Huffman Restricted Access lips become lines legs cross something given has been taken away words tickle tease turn to pleas echo as hollow responding silence smothers a blanket removed exposure often equals division
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Hannah Bernhard Ephemera (n): things that exist or are used or enjoyed for only a short time 1 Less than there or there in a time-lock or there to be forgotten and later found in the suitcase, under piles of itself, holding on to its blued meaning A valentine among poster cut-outs, never meant to be unearthed plucked out dusted for oil of I once loved you or I wish you had moved with me or I know you won’t throw me out 2 Are tears ephemera, drying up as they do after every crooked bone, shorn heart? Is my heart ephemera, willing to serve a second purpose, or a first purpose in a second body, indicated only by that unassuming red blot on my driver’s license? The body must be ephemera——object incapable of holding onto itself, constantly spilling out into the world, condensing and evaporating. Constantly drying up and breaking down. 3 Decomposition is acknowledging that you will never be a time-capsule 95
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ISSUE 04 Winter 2017
Scherezade Siobhan Alina Pleskova Erin Taylor Rae Liberto Stephanie Valente Alexis Sikorski Muse Giacalone Stephanie Sauer Kristin Chang Jessie Janeshek
Guest Editors Casey RenĂŠe Lopez Katerina Black Francesca Kritikos
Scherezade Siobhan from Bombay, Uncut Padre, In a dream your white shirt hangs on the arm of a nilgiri fir. It is both: a ghost & a flag. You descend into my premonitions like a cinnabar moth. Your wings maculated, mapped - freshly uncocooned. I study the brevity of your dimensions, your scale of survival. Stroke you to a thin tremble. Angle you in an artful entomology. I carom your sacred winging. Slowly pin you down by the disappearance of your unfathered peripheries. x you are in a field of bees, trying to not flatten the toyish lampwork of their bodies i was asleep when the cold light prospered your tongue to a pantheon of ravishment the first thing i do when i wake up is listen through the perforations of these ghostdrums how a body mimics the accidental entropy of each temple it was once reincarnated from & i know your throat is wet with the rain -song of another misplaced country a fruit greening its white rind - the pearl of csaba, or a slow deer blurred into the sleep of a distant prayer 101
Alina Pleskova MAGPIE Alone now but like, radically Turns out no such creature steals shiny objects for a nest I spent a while verifying this: folklore so rarely runs parallel to reality & the afternoon plainly wasted already No afterglow & no one left on the to-do list Same reflexive satisfaction as after a bland meal uuu What wants are left? said new someone & I sped through every welt, every well-worn route to sunrise, every kink indulged until fringe turned its own vanilla, 102
every throat-pulse caught & held throbbing, some name escaped as hiss mine accented as a languid stretch: Ahhhh leeena on a bus with summer cunt post-fuck stench summoning every stillness where the shudder should’ve been & every cheery shower whistle after uuu Gala says of her girlfriend, I summoned her now I deal with her Devotion like the best curse you can hope to suffer Once, we held out for months waiting to learn who was crueler 103
& I wanted you to win; call it a masochism loop or caged bird blues or as a favorite ex put it, People can tolerate infinite damage of this variety uuu What’s left to want if the door is always left unlatched? Hey yea still up, come press here— It’s never enough but at luckiest, the white light holds for an instant
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SATURN RETURN Everyone hurries a touch in the moody weather while I reach peak Aquarius: calmer in risk’s orbit, ruthlessly down for whatever, even or especially if it stings Good morning, universe, with yr sudden biting air— My erotic imagination remains on sabbatical despite many blessings in the house of novel apparatus & the alleged libido spike tied to this astrological transit as consolation for its relentless cataclysms I tried to look moved when you showed me a vibrator that doubles as an alarm clock though most days, I wake trembling around the edges & think, What rot awaits? which cancels out both my OPTIMUM CHILL banner & the energy-cleansing effects of a Himalayan salt lamp my mother gave me because she suspects I’ll never produce grandchildren This may be true, since our economic system is structurally rigged to fuck the working class & for this, my dirty chakras aren’t to blame 105
uuu Based on break room discourse, the approaching cuffing season isn’t nearly as kinky as it sounds, & hinges on a crude sense of urgency Back in my reality, some friends avoid saying partner as it indicates a hierarchy & this harshes the egalitarian vibe I don’t seem to fall into either camp: power dynamics maintain their hobbyist appeal while having a primary partner sublimates me into a gentler form To demonstrate why this is important, I gesture now at the unstable world uuu More than 100,000 want to go to Mars & not return reads the headline
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Well, I’ll wait right here & bore a path into the center of the earth using just my anxiety or carry out the neoliberal conspiracy of self-care: Rumours on repeat & a man-repellant shade of lipstick named dirty money— smudge-proof for all those late late-capitalist nights spent tidying this condition to let someone in After returning from a wedding, I dart around him for days, just in case nesting is a communicable state or desire molds to its closest container When he sends a fresh batch of dick pics, my equilibrium returns in the stillness of remembering we’re all just dopamine vampires trying to skirt the mortal coil
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Bleak humor suits my soviet blood & everything does feel fine when Rachel says Do you know anybody who is okay right now with the question mark deliberately left out Reclaiming my life meant divesting explains an article about hoarding As if I get to choose how long her muted perfume clings, or apply logic like a compress to the forehead The difficulty of divesting isn’t in the discarding— it’s in knowing what to keep But I recall our particulars all wrong which is to say incandescently 108
which is to say I romanticize the lack of understanding that keeps predictability or comfort from permeating “our thing” Nothing’s nailed down in this liminal space of torpor & grope Limp parts left out in case of mood lifts Drape swell & recede Hoarse mouth suckling a shoulder Language held taut & this oracular heart of mine resigned to hit snooze again So much for yr fixed sign & a wobbled laugh on delay
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NOW THAT I AM IN REYKJAVIK AND CAN THINK After the ring road followed wide & serpentine for hours, headlong run through knee-level mud, now agape in a lava field where Joe & Ryan pick crowberries for jam, chattering in the secret dialect lovers take on after enough years together, I think of you & The Ethical Slut, 2nd edition, chapter 7: “Abundance”, wherein the authors lay out their argument against a starvation economy approach to love, how it’s not this finite resource, so shake off yr cultural programming & the desire to possess— instead, get better at scheduling, an art I can’t execute with any finesse & that’s partly why I’m here without you or any of the others, though one of yr curls held fast all this way, until it lifted off & landed in the cushioned moss, which grows so slowly with an idea of order I totally admire but cannot fathom. uuu Here as home as anywhere, I’m a Laelaps in runny nylons roaming from mouth to mouth, secrets left intact
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in the babble before I return to mortal with wholesome hemline, then the harbor solo to gape dumb at the midnight sunset & wonder if one can bore into another with such precision that the hunger is perfect & all you sense, even in summer, these long stretches with no darkness as a comfort to settle you, so every big idea dilutes into a buoyant postcard signed Yours as in sending love from this smoky cove flush with episodic arguments in favor of constant motion, each gorgeous detail the only one of its kind & the mind’s dazed shutter relentless to capture this sublimity, this proof we should be tender, given our undoing breezes in just the same uuu
As muscle memory is made stubborn, so it can reprogram: like the trick where I pinch longing mid-shudder, save it for another time, get the shower good & scalding, head out divine & untethered into the endless day 111
Erin Taylor the first week thank you for buying me the plan b pill as i laughed. the bus ride felt like a century long & the man in the pharmacia asked if it was for you, you jokingly said yes. you tell me my laugh is nervous but i know it is full of shame & i taste it in my mouth. i taste shame in my mouth & feel it in bruises men & women give me when i am most vulnerable. i see my father in me every time i notice a woman’s ass & every time my jaw locks i carry myself like a gun waiting to go off. & felt nothing
i have shot men that looked like you
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not making sense with my own trauma, making love with my own trauma a year of humming the same tune under my breath you taste like beginnings and ends a year of cafes coated in smog coated in forgetfulness [i could never forget] the year rushes before me, night walks night walks night walks holding hands with you in the dark a year of humming the same tune the same tune that tastes like you in my Mouth i might have carried you heavier in my heart mi corazon than i dared to admit at the time.
i can’t take myself seriously
the whole year is darkness with my face
with my
face.
i am having flashbacks in class. my back hurts my back hurts in the morning light. i am grief with a face mourning myself my mouth is made of ash
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bible belt carry on walking through the prado in the afternoon thinking “how many paintings are of men drinking from the virgin mary’s tit?” i spotted at least five, mary squirting into a saint’s mouth that saint sighing loving it. i try to imagine being so holy that my milk is seen in the same light as a blessing medicine a protection. there is a statue of two lovers embracing, stone that holds longing in the same way i hold longing. i watch that statue for thirty minutes waiting for one of the figures to change their mind in the same way we changed our minds but neither move. the next room has thirty paintings of Jesus’ thighs strong enough to carry himself humanity 114
& his father, we are all carrying images of our fathers & every father expects us to martyr ourselves in their image, i will not martyr myself for anyone.
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Rae Liberto Liminal The frying pan is in the bathtub again. My brain only works while laying on my right side. The sky’s been getting in my eyes and afternoon looks like late morning here. The timelessness is sickening. I keep track of the days by counting my dirty socks. I put them in the bathtub too. There is a drought here so I wash my plums in the bathtub, also the water is brackish from laundering. It’s Thursday afternoon. There is dryness here and my skin is a thirsty desert. I use black bath water to mop the floor. This is a city surrounded by water and cloud smoke but there is not rain and they say it’s a drought. Every neighborhood is a different shade of beige. I see a metallic purple bra strap slide down her rail arms. She is impossibly slippery and sheer like lace and ice. The sun is out today and the whole place is pale. She crosses her arms and returns the strap to her shoulder like she was cold, like I wouldn’t see. 116
All the Wrong Vowels I ashed the joint I found on her coffee table on the lighter I also found on her coffee table before I slipped both into my coat pocket. I like using ash as a verb. I wonder if I should start using grass as a verb, or an adjective. I feel grassy, or hold my coat while I grass. I balance myself with one pinky finger on the banister of the stairs. I am grassed and feeling capable. Hold my coat while I back flip. She likes my hair, the dyke behind the bar. She pours me whiskey. She brings me fernet. She gives me $5 for the jukebox. She says, fernet about it. I put on Janet Jackson’s Greatest Hits. I write in my notebook the lyrics to What Have You Done for Me Lately. I use all the wrong vowels. I think I wrote a poem.
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Stephanie Valente Cosmic Witch my mouth strips crystals and bites the air, in long planks i exist as a plaything because i want to.
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PSYCHIC READING when i walk around 5th street & find a lone apartment with sighing threadbare curtains hanging over a drippy pink red neon sign: PSYCHIC READING i beg — who still pays cheap rent in NY? who left for LA? is it worth it? with palm tree kisses & star signed asphalt i hold my book closer to my chest the faded neon washes my face & tells me of daughters i’d like to believe that the universe is working in our favor to show us wondrous things i palm a half-ripped twenty on a formica table.
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Alexis Sikorski The Lightbulb Conspiracy we were astronauts and beekeepers; archaeologists and mechanics; overseas teachers getting drunk off communion wine in a theocratic country with no believers. I was the blowhole in a whale and the trash heap at sea I was a groundbreaking invention hidden under planned obsolescence you were the vitamin C I took daily and the cold I caught anyway you were a ferris wheel showing a child the world at the top we were forks coming off of screaming rivers and diving into sidewalks holding handprints that weren’t ours throwing rotten eggs into ditches because what else would we do with them and what else was there to do? I filled a cracked bucket with jell-o and left it on your porch because I knew you’d know what I meant you painted a face around the hole I punched through the wall because you knew I’d send a picture to my mom we recited mournful monologues on the bruises in our bananas we played pianos with our toes we pinched the sun between our fingers we were lost. we weren’t alone.
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Muse Giacalone Le Sein Two crosses stuck on breasts that bounce up, Then down, Faster, And so suddenly, Shiver. Two crosses stuck on breasts that bounce up, It’s the sweat that makes them stick, Like toes in hot weather; Nasty. Two crosses stuck on breasts that bounce up, When mid-day heat seeps through clothes And our faith becomes exhausted. Two crosses stuck on breasts that bounce up: The pores sizzle.
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The Red Party We are two on a couch, in a full house. The wallpaper is red and velvet. There are slurs of red light Shaking out of a projector. People move in waves. They sway, so slow, then crash up Against themselves And their eyes burn white With pleasure. Around us, it smells of loud skies, Burnt wood and Red. I break our silence: ‘Are you bleeding?’ Because, yes, A camelia is trembling on your lip. It seeps Right out of you. ‘You are bleeding!’
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The camelia wets and smudges your cheek. It crawls down your chin And then, Lets itself drip. There is a pause, a hum, Before I lift a hand to hold, In a red grasp, Your neck. The blood on the crease of your lip Blooms When we lean inward And fall Onto each other. The red spreads To my lip. We meet, a second time. You say, in a breath : ‘J’ai mal..’ You are in pain. The cut is deeper. The camelia is flaming, I think I can see it Beginning to burst.
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We are fighting to stop the redness From leaking out of your lips. I take a napkin and wipe your mouth, Then mine. I swallowed the camelia up With a swipe.
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Across a Canvas I creep, Then wait Upon the bed, as bait, And keep hands about the knee Like a person in a painting Positioned, A statue, Too patient And so, damned Impatient. He creeps, Underneath Grabs and tugs and slaps Until muffled things emerge From the black rubber Between our lips. It continues and we scream now Like we are having A very, Ugly, tantrum.
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We creep, And howl, like big dogs unleashed Into fields of meat. So when the final crashing call Dies There seems to be a pair of eyes, Behind my eyes, That play, like a film still as it twitches, The sex, Across a canvas.
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Stephanie Sauer
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Kristin Chang in pine bluff, arkansas a woman with a dogshaped shadow lets her organs out for a walk around the block my brother completes his engineering degree, still hasn’t figured out that people die in patterns don’t blame the weapon, blame the war my dad says, dangling from my mother’s lips like a fishhook. I tell the neighborhood dog I’ll eat him alive. I tell the corner chink not to trust what is in our bodies. I want tigerteeth and a visible history I want to believe in alien life. my dad played baseball until 1982 the year it rains live mice. the year a flood climbs the house like a fever the year vincent chin takes four days to die my mother forgets her chinese name: littlest wind 134
my dad wanted to be a cop but they thought he was vietcong told him to lick all the bulletholes off the dummy, called it target practice. in texas, my dad buys two guns, holds them until they are hands. says, don’t blame the weapon blame the war. says, please tell me what the difference is
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as an azn grl i can confirm im ur fantasy u, 2, can b post-bdy!! let the camera suc u outta ur skin like a seed u, 2, can lern 2 touch urselff in a movie theater 2 the pace of scarlett johansson shooting a taiwanese man for not speaking english in tht movie Lucy: deadeadead deadeadeadead deadead thank all the ppl who have left u for teaching u object prmanence for teaching u ur not rrrrrlllllllllyyyyyy azn if u don’t watch anime & can drive stick the secret to my hotness is tht my father was a fire until i sat on him sure ill strip snap the skin off my bones & hang it up like the laundry my grandpa wrked in a laundry like me, he just wanted a g d he could swallow. at night, 136
i empty my eyes like pockets. i moan lone moon loon myself like this thighs open & a planet slipsss out on this planet no one will b ashamed, we will all have breath tht smells like surgery! & a hstry of heart disease! i will have health insurance tht comes with superpowers like a belly thts really a car bomb or a mouth thts also an elevator button g O but really i’m harmless, i’m azn grls can trace their bloodlines back to gods & flowers but my mother was a house tht burned empty & the smoke thin as a cats ear call ur mother who tells u yet another story bout being chairman mao’s 137
mistress, the man who pruned away her legs like branches bough to the ground grl, & remember the flood tht brimmed ur ribcage like a fishbowl, u, 2, can b post-bdy!! the trick is to b nothing left to savage, i am all salvage, breasts billowing in the bathtub like plastic bags, driftwood limbs cutting the water like a throat
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Jessie Janeshek Tablerock Noir Pregnancy fire/pregnancy spire you say a soft restart barrels and religion down bridal falls no notification disease named after me no right way to capture how sexless it felt my wet, swollen crotch. I’m limboing under the dying prom dresses a nosy white car a Marilyn Monroe neck a good sweat and peroxide when everyone talks of her jawbone, her insides air-smell like cicadas and dying trying not to hate the dark roots of late summer but I have too much ego. Once when I killed my pretend sister the air smelled like the moon one-of-a-kind. The air swelled like Howard the Duck and binoculars a cocoon a phonecall from Spokane. We did not have facebook to falsify. My grandmother shimmied brushed her long wig octopus bush and no kids. I’m not sure I knew I’d grow my own bush they’d tear up the yard walk three across the black asphalt. I couldn’t cry with the sun in my eyes a 30-second close up of my young hips and plastic Niagara Falls wallet. Tell the kids in the pool you’re from Pittsburgh and we fell to a place without souls or clothes an empty sink, ferns, pink barbiturates. 140
Supernoir, Chord Town It’s comfortable to keep surrounding these memories like meat (how many grisly girl shots must we take of ourselves how many mirrors?) Too nervous to eat now that we’ve been intimate dipping our feet in the black river even our crowns made of crow or metal we give our nude lipsticks away. My love lived when crime paid climbed the red water tank licked the payphone a cigarette skip-meal we called it play a right to survival all your favorite songs or a blue puff of hair broken-legged on the trampoline. We finish the rum above the garage in our blue and white gingham so desperate for blonding (don’t let this mislead you) our ankles too fat for their bracelets. His Swiss-dotted babies were platinum a man proud of his dumb swatch of property.
The theatrical version chopped all our sex from the dark railway car. Sweet hunger. Sexy cenotaph, I’m almost always smiling. I fall into the tomb of the evening brown lipstick winged eyeliner singing all my old songs a freak accident in the heat. 141
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ISSUE 05 Summer 2017
Chrissy Martin Emily Corwin Kailey Tedesco Hilary Vaughn Dobel Gabrielle Hogan Jacq Greyja K.T. Billey Amber Galeo Marina Blitshteyn Amelia Box
Guest Editors Ashley Miranda Erin Moon White
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Chrissy Martin Instructions For Absolution I eat my heart out like good food. Lick the sticky wrappers of cinnamon buns, Boil to a syrup juice from just-ripe kiwis, Drink through a red striped straw And wash down the fuzzy bits of peel. They rub the bumps of my throat Raw like the skin on my mother’s legs. The rubbing together trying to keep warm, The boniness of her shins catching one another, The skin tearing on the floor she sleeps on. I sit warm in my home scrubbing circles In the hardwood with lemon pledge, Cleaner burning the cracks in my knees. Stop just before the shine. The more time I spend with something the more it becomes a mirror. Once, the two of us lined ice cubes on a plate, Draped them with a long piece of dental floss, 146
And sprinkled with salt to stick. Watered to a fog, Our new diamonds. I picked the whole thing up Carefully and tied it around my mother’s neck, A collar of goose bumps from the cold. I tried to make it glitter with clumps of sugar, But it melted too quick against the thick bones of her chest.
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The Gospel Of Helping It goes without saying that I am a servant to this ground. I tithe to a church that makes me bow at my God’s feet, wash my men’s. An excellent wife is the crown of her husband, but she who shames him is like rottenness in his bones. Bowed at the foot of my bed, I lay down the Bible and reach for the other books squirrelled underneath. I read about bomb dogs, and I like the idea of them. How, to keep the dogs from being discouraged, their handlers plant bullet shells for them to find. Tell them how great of a job they’re doing. Horses, the book says, want to be broken and I have to wonder who was polled for this. Online, someone posts a picture of a dog on a hiking trail wearing a backpack, smiling. It is not good for the man to be alone; I will make him a helper suitable for him. Some comments say dogs feel helpful when being given something to carry, it gives them a sense of purpose. This delights me. This hurts my heart, this ugliness of helping. Some comments say that dogs can’t smile and I like this even less. The dog in the picture carries Slim Jims and trail mix, Gatorade bottles on each side like rockets that might propel it up the mountain. Might leave the owner stomach empty and slippery with sweat, a rot setting into the bones of his tired feet.
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Emily Corwin lachrymose oh my god I am over the mobile data limit. oh my god serotonin reuptake inhibitor. oh my god spine brightening in the strawberry field. my god I lay deep everywhere ever. my god take me to your mansion now. my god a woman messages me to say that I seem “sweet” and would I like “some extra cash for school or vacation?” my god I want a floret growing rapid from my every orifice. my goodness you know how much I love him. my goodness there are men outside my home with power tools. my goodness all of my life I thought the expression: “it was a scorcher out there today” was really: “it was a scorchard out there today”—like an orchard set aflame, the pulp crisping ashen. my goodness me the emotional torment. my goodness me this millennium. good gracious me this pesticide, dirty chai, cat skull, cake wife, eye gunk, homicide. good gracious me how are you, little bean? good gracious I remove the plump oil pores from me like surgery. good gracious as a girl, I came home declaring that in the movie, “Bambi’s mommy got dead.” oh my good graces I am noxious as climbing nightshade. oh my god my body in affliction, 150
in affection. oh my god you can’t vanish on me now, into the ether, chilling my optical nerve and nerve cords, discordant. oh my god this microbe that takes me, ferments into an awful dread. my god the world is not doing so very well. my god I want to eat noodles and stay awake. my god this dark music awaiting.
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Kailey Tedesco Beautiful & It Is Everything Remember the first time you heard of the woman who licks up entrails of static? Television eyes roll from the loud snows & she eats in synthesis, but not digestion. Her long legs & long hair coil together like a fungus – it is a beauty you flagellate to in your blue gown & dark lips. It is meals served in rotted meringue, roaring & staining the gown & chaise. Lie there as you remember her body & her grave. The body is the holy spirit & mother & maiden, the body is filled with opiates that taste so much like delicious blades. It is a beauty that threads salted circles through the dead – It preserves, but it hurts.
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Hilary Vaughn Dobel Stay with the Body It’s only when you’ve learned what wants changing that you learn to fear you cannot change it: there, dragging its feet and sulking beneath the Tree of Things You Never Practiced, is what you’ve missed— there, the way to take another at their word; there, the arm around a shoulder; the graceful exit. So you prod the places in yourself like seams of broken bones where you are brittle, bitter, prone to strain, the water you cannot name falling through you. After so many days of rousing, breathing, your life has borne you here, tenderly, and will not leave you—a sleeping passenger it dare not wake, a footsore thing too wild to stay 154
but sick with running and nothing to be done for it.
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Gabrielle Hogan portrait of the madonna in school cafeteria how she hangs in the balance between divine incarnation & a bowl of soggy tater tots. our mother, who art here with us, a mournful almost-deity ensconced in puke-anointed brick. i find myself tracing the grooves in her dress with my kiss—gratitude for carrying the christ child in the jelly of her womb. though she is sapphired in these pale blues befitting a holy mother, though her collar stained with wine-flush glows, this worship seems unbelievably hollow—exalted among uniformed children who don’t even care about the stickiness of their hands. i wonder if she ever thought when the archangel inseminated her in his own blessed way, that this is how they would thank her. i wonder if she was promised fanfare & silks & a temple to lay in when she wanted sleep & nothing more—i wonder if this is why she said yes. because of a promise he
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never meant to keep. if man is indeed made in god’s image, should she be surprised to find herself as object, catacomb for man’s birthright to a woman’s body—should she be surprised that between her legs is the glory of god, but that the only way to find it is to stay virgin? eve’s hunger for something more was what struck her down in the end & birthed from a simple no did lilith become queen of the demons. but yet he took so much from faithful sarai, didn’t even let her keep her name, & she told him yes. did god tell our holy mother he loved her before or after she said thy will be done? my hands forgive hers for lingering in deathless prayer on the brick wall & i think it’s what your god won’t tell you that should be the stuff of bibles.
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Jacq Greyja
158
K.T. Billey RESTING BITCH FACE DAUGHTER OF THOR (I) “Did anyone ever tell you you’re angry when you’re beautiful?” Q to Captain Kathryn Janeway
In 1906 an ox was slaughtered at a country fair. Francis Galton observed a contest to guess its weight—the average more accurate than most individuals, a tendency to truth called wisdom of the crowd—Galton was knighted for statistics, a laundry list. A century later four men followed me off a train, bidding into the sun set. 85. 125. 110, give or take. Girl you deaf? How much to break that pelvis? Bodies at rest will stay at rest. Bodies in motion will pussyfoot three extra blocks to avoid going home, though they did get within five pounds of accuracy. Galton also coined nature versus nurture, my calibrated jaw deterrent, a marionette with a name that translates to face, as in nerve, the feminine form of expensive—the price we put on charity, the pink tax. Casualidad, and Latin for love.
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into twins. Extra extra. The crux of wisdom The Icelandic word for sheep is kind. One of a, the gang bang that would snap my Rorschach hips of the crowd: the collective must be diverse and independently deciding. Borg means city so I probe the wormhole—what’s in a name when I am the tongue in the tongue and cheek, a linguistic accident going through customs, declaring myself and all my pre-existing conditions worth a lick. Forty winks worth of salt in the quantum salad. Mjölnir: my darling price: an IUD for the ages.
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Amber Galeo CANVAS AND MIRROR
after Evie Shockley
Self-portrait with bronze medal, with babies breath, with compunction, with complimentary gift basket. Self-portrait as architect of yes courting architect of no, with clear confusion, with rabbit warren. Self-portrait with red fox Monday, with blue fox Tuesday, with diurnal craze. Self-portrait in mixed light, with voluptuaries, with glitter fluttering my solar plexus, with three bodies in one. Self-portrait overdoing it all. Self-portrait as already home, as Budweiser with Roseanne, with wood-paneled room, without irony. Self-portrait with tremor, with spilled box of arrowheads on the corkboard past. Self-portrait with old personage, without regrets, with tumescent spring, with longing. Self-portrait as bold with longing, with own arm throwing Faulkner across the room.
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Self-portrait reading women instead. Self-portrait with ghosts in the new estate, with singing, with horror films, with tequila anesthetic. Self-portrait collecting years with the sea in fresh memory and brackish spirit. Self-portrait disappeared as salt, but with this index.
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ON NOT NEEDING TOWERS TO ERECT HATE Last night I hated you in your peasant clothes And bathroom haircut
eating whipped brie and blueberries
with the verve of a dead battery. I needed you awake
or covered in snow, shuffling
the way you do from kitchen to bedroom With cold water in a tumbler.
To love that about you
but hate the edges of your mouth caterwauling In the neighborhood past bedtime the volumes I’ll dare to say. While the bloody halfmoon
resting above Lover, you fell asleep set under my eye.
164
Marina Blitshteyn sit down at a typewriter and bleed
after Hemingway
there’s nothing to it. i write the truest thing i ever knew. like clockwork each ping of a key rings true. clicks in. one month it went for weeks, on and off, a leaky faucet. another it only trickled out. i hid it from my mother. the first time it happened i learned shame, read it in the women’s eyes. i learned avoidance from my father, who let me sit on his lap before. by now i’ve prayed so long that it keeps coming, rusting the toilet bowl. i’ve prayed for mercy and i have it. and now i want that accident. i want to know what it’s like to have my guts pulled out. 166
i’m playing with fire. see men only tease those bulls, or ride them like little masters. women see their insides all the time and it’s alright.
167
the artist’s red period everything’s coming up roses a bowl full of berries that stain on the page
proof positive orange
a spoof of a life a stall to be occupied a test to be taken and tossed right out everything’s out damn spot guilt-ridden a contest of who’s on first to blame even this screen here frying my sockets even my mother’s clean sheets to soil what a mess
the artist
her choices
when she was a girl that fear kept her up she hid it in pockets an eye for an i
that bent out of shape
a trough of o’s
when u were a kid you just knew some day you’d mother another filled the right spreadsheets x’ed on a map and hunted it
the artist kept 168
mostly to herself and away from spoiled lions what a palette to tarnish a polish with no sheen a testament to no court the evening is green
who’s counting it’s a still life a skill
to populate this world with beauty she’s been trying
she knows
you’ve got to believe me
doctor she knows what
she’s doing
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Amelia Box
170
m
Po s t I s s u e
2018 - 2019
Chella Courington Francesca Kritikos Andy Stallings Thursday Simpson Lauren Bender Jesse Rice-Evans Denise Jarrott Frankie Baker Christina Svenson ChloĂŠ S. Vaughan Carolyn Guinzio Juleen Eun Sun Johnson gin hart
Guest Editors Giulia Bencivenga Meghann Boltz Jacq Greyja em kaldenbaugh Naomi Morris Daisy Thomas
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Chella Courington Sacred Heart Lucas calls me sweetmeat. Sister Maria stuffs his mouth with cloth & warns me Don’t let him touch you. Chirst wants you spotless. When we are alone, she speaks softly You can be Isaac’s lamb. I hold out for stigmata. Sister Maria says they often came to good girls who do not let boys feel their privates. She catches me looking at Lucas again & makes me kneel on top of rice—digging into flesh, scouring every cell. No more nasty girl. Arms lift me up. She kisses my knees blood smeared on her lips.
177
Francesca Kritikos Coyotes I’m driving alone, listening to Don’t Pass Me By. When it goes Waiting for your knock, dear / On my old front door / I don’t hear it / Does it mean you don’t love me anymore? I always thought it said Doesn’t mean you don’t love me anymore. This reveals an inclination for optimism or naivety, a fundamental lack of understanding of the way affection operates. Secretly, I always hoped that two illogical pieces could come together and make sense. Knowing I did a math problem incorrectly, I still expected to reach the correct answer. • Someone scratched Te amo in the bench my dog always pisses on when I walk him in the park. Love is a concept that takes effort to actualize. You have to scrape for it. It hurts, making nothing mean something. When I read about blood, I taste it. I think of steppedon veins, bursting like food coloring into milk. I think of my pneumonia medicine as a child, milky in color and tasting like sharp, fake strawberries. You have to gag for it. • My grandma told me once that if you dream about shit, it means money’s coming your way. I have no idea if this is common knowledge, but I assume it is. I feel justified in listening to the opposite of my gut, in anticipating the unlikely outcome. • 178
I do not want to be a figure of authority in my own life. I drive my car, walk alone at night, prepare and sometimes eat meals—I go through the motions of being a figure of authority in my own life. • I dream of a woman’s dead body in my bed. I move to the side a little, give her room, and go back to sleep. I wake up, and she is still there. A distinctly annoyed feeling: Now I have to get rid of the body. But not panic, or regret. I put her in the fridge. I can make out no features on her face. She is like a shadow. Later, I host a party. It is dark, like my dreams always are, and I am making small talk about my job, boyfriend. I think, in passing, I hope no one opens the fridge. • The coyotes aren’t afraid of us anymore. They come out in the park during the day now, don’t back off when approached. My neighbor’s dog ran after one. The coyote pretended to be scared and run away, but it was leading its prey back to the den. There, the pack will outnumber it. They are sensible creatures; animals are incapable of ignoring what they are designed to do, to my envy. I read in a book to stop doing things that are not to my advantage. I look around, make sure I’m not walking into the den. It’s very simple. I tap my blood for an instinct, something imprinted on a cellular level. I learn that it is to my advantage to assume that nothing is afraid of me. 179
Andy Stallings Paradise What isn’t hard to fathom?
Carrying a statue of the Buddha to storage, the crew stops
to rub its belly. Hay fever and coffee seemed most
prominent of all sensations, though we also found time
for walks among tide pools
and a Fourth of July parade.
It was recognizable as utopia, and exhibited the same fatal flaw of all utopias, the
exclusion of suffering. The lilacs blossomed,
the wine diminished, she fell asleep on the patio. Trains surprised me every day. When he sneezed, she
startled, and fell, and broke her arm. That simple thimble, dropped.
180
Paradise The book’s spine splintered but the phone kept ringing. A dismal walk on a distant
day. They moved in a direction chosen by accident, or rather, with absence of forethought, but a direction thereafter
carefully recorded. It was an elegy, but to whom. Gaps in the wood, in the words. I can’t think for you, or
even like you, unlike wave after wave of revelry from
the street. She woke, drank
from her water bottle, stepped down the ladder from her loft bed, ran to the door of her
bedroom and down the hall,
paused at the top of the stairs, and then descended all at
once, calling “Good morning, 181
Papa,� as she turned
the corner into the kitchen.
182
Paradise The afternoon passed, bugs
on a screen. Can’t make the sun more meaningful than
the sun, as children at play
in a gravel driveway accept without knowing the name. And what about roller
drawers, their squeaky
wheels. The sentence, illusion of depth. He tried one
marker at a time, removing the cap with a “click,”
making three or four lines or scribbles on the sheet
of paper, stopping to assess the action, then placing
the top back on with a second “click,” and setting the used marker down in its line on the table. That was
the Swedish northwest 183
in 1987. A scaffolding of insignificance. Although signification is endless,
every brain brimming with sensation.
184
Thursday Simpson A Better Life For Joseph Ratzinger He lived at home & his universities And when he decided To die, he went To a rural German stage And recited From memory The science Of his religion. He took an old Tape player From after the War And played a recording He made Of a country Church singing
186
Agnus Dei And he slit His wrists In front of His people.
187
Notes While Exiting Adulthood This morning I’m sad, I won’t be Fucking straight Girls anymore And I cancelled my Plans tonight Because it was Supposed to storm And my transmission Dies in the Rain but this Morning The sun is out. I like the Person I’ve been Having
188
Sex with But my first Wig is about To ship, A cool Wednesday Addams Top and also A Wednesday Addams girls Baseball tee To go with my New booty shorts. So before I reboot my dating & Fetlife profiles, I just want to Say at least One thing.
189
Guys are violent. David Wojnarowicz writes About this better Than anyone I know. I don’t think Men are supposed To be fathers. My point here Is that I wish The narrative Around nice Guys were A little different. Like instead of buying Their 1 for 1 Binary, Just call them what
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They are, Guys who can’t Handle Being rejected.
191
Lauren Bender And Train It to Forget Just open your mouth and say something but he was too corporate and couldn’t and lizards sneaking into the corner ficus the sales pitch was long over, but the methodology for successful winking later, crying, he found himself outspoken stale air, not unlike vampire breath, so into the shared executive bathroom spotlessness and scrubbed at each tooth examined himself at length for little gain he thought, and then he thought how grass dislodges, such a clean break let the earth release, the grass roots cut a path through the grip of the soil bleeding green against your skin welcoming you to your inhumanity
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meaningful fleas in his beard who was evolved enough to understand in front of an empty root beer can, sweet he took his toothbrush with its presidential tucked his cuffs I am a killer if you’re gentle if you feel it out then that ace fist of acquisition welcoming you to your choices
Strength, ill-defined Baby roses, undressing. I could drink from the curl of my hand floating each soft red top, so I learn to ignore the urge to crush life closed. When sick at thirteen I will shit myself in public and never tell you, shut myself in the nearest bathroom and wash my underwear, fingers slow with fever. No, I know this topography, where thorns split the stems, where the fence starts, and you struggle with your keys in porch-light shadow. Almost as if I’m still sweating it out, somewhere in bed, the dream that is real that is you taking care of me, without the fact of wet, soiled clothing stashed in an empty pouch of my backpack, zippered to non-existence. White blankets with lace trim and no scent. This is so typical, this absence. Your fever is the negative of mine. I am growing stronger, thinking of when I can return to our forbidden slanting roof where I belong, like King Jeremy the Wicked. I don’t try to see you clearly anymore. My nails are now drunk on tactile memory, twitching to grip the grit of black tile, as you step out. This day of recovery will pitch into the next, and all I want now is my share, to survive as long as you have, guarded against our wellness. 193
Jesse Rice-Evans Proof // Diagnosis of Exclusion: The Sellout Don’t forget that I am a garden, that I am an abundance of nerves, that I cannot make it to just about anything any more, how you’ll let me let it go, you’ll promise stuff you can’t make yourself believe without so much work, how work becomes an abundance, a tremor. Thanks for being here, thanks for showing up, thanks for forgetting the mean stuff I said to you online when I skipped my pain meds and lost the receipt for my kindness that I left and drained and left Sell me out: my puke as proof of my pain Sell me out: blood as proof of my pain Sell me out: tongue as proof of my pain Sell me out: abundance as proof of my pain Sell me out: dirt as proof of my pain Sell me out: end as proof of my pain Sell me out: restriction as proof of my pain Sell me out: recovery as proof of my pain Sell me out: I’ll erase you as proof of my pain Sell me out: crease as proof of my pain Sell me out: dimmed as proof of my pain 194
Sell me out: literal pain as proof of my pain Sell me out: leaving alone as proof of my pain When I ask the rheumatologist for a Lyme test, she says why as proof of my pain If we don’t have our phones to write poems on, what do we have left?
195
You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away
after Grey’s Anatomy S10E14
You betrayed me by even taking this call. I have wine I can use to entice you; like how after orientation, a whole afternoon crisping in plastic ergonomic seats, I am stumbling on threads of cement as I trudge up the crowded undulating stairway up from the train. I spend $5.50 on a bottle of terrible merlot, and my mouth is at the same time exhausted from grimacing, paying for it, how I clearly make excellent choices. At my PhD orientation, no one talks to me. If not now, when? I have loud hair, platform sandals, turquoise blazer, my new faux-leather skirt that everyone reads as metal, expensive, everyone swapping notes about private colleges, their recent moves into the boroughs from Connecticut, Rhode Island. I wear public school like a medal, albeit a silver one. A test, how much lo-wealth can I tolerate before I tremble myself loose like a tooth? gaunt if bubbling. I am failing, or at least floundering. I should know this, that I want to slip unnoticed into a space stern against me, despite my blood feeling at home at school, how my intelligence slid me into spaces my mood would never let me go, how I curb myself with propranolol.
196
Denise Jarrott BOBBY I’ll be the first to admit: my love for you is freakish. I want to have the most flawless baby skin, a hologram of your darkest fantasies lit off my cheekbone, a shadow government seething in my thigh gap. I want to call you bae. I want to call you boo. kiss me because I’m so into you that you see my image when you close your eyes. witness how my lipstick never fades. It’s made for stories that tell themselves on loop. I want a secret life where all I do is buy things that make my body feel more liquid. oh bobby how I miss you. I’ve been doing yoga in the mountains and drinking buckets of sunshine. I’ve been keeping track of my steps on my wrist o how you’d eat loaves of bread with your beautiful bare hands. no video would do.
198
BOY FLOWERS, A PROPOSAL Lately, I’ve been asking men in my life what is your favorite flower? my suggestion is that given enough funding, I would paint a bouquet for each of them. Here are a few I’d like to start with. If given enough funding, I will continue to paint bouquets for boys until I die. •
• • •
• •
Lilacs for Shay. There’s a picture of Shay after a funeral, it was one of those spring days where it feels like the entire city is emerging from a violent storm into the sunlight, which is a day I have not yet experienced. Shay is carrying lilacs and wearing a suit and I looked at it and imagined he felt a kind of joy. James gets pansies, though I’m not sure why. I guess he just likes small, bright things. Paul gets prairie flowers. The only flowers he said he would get a tattoo of. I imagine them to be black eyed-susans and bachelor’s buttons. /aster in the lapel like a bible salesman / Sunflowers for Idan. It is always the sunflower emoji he signs off with. He asks why he has to pick a favorite and was put off by my reasoning. Anyway, I am always asking him for things and here in return are some very tall things, taller than you or I. I’m a little apprehensive about asking my father, though I know his heart is a perfect biome for many kinds of flowers to grow. and Joshua, how I would have loved to have given you roses when we were together. I always thought you’d appreciate them more than I would, but I always demanded to be the recipient of all beautiful things. Perhaps that was my greatest sin against you. Anyway, I want you to have these now. Not that they absolve me of my sin, but because when you were young you learned to care for them, and I trust you to remember how.
199
Frankie Baker INEFFECTIVE CURES FOR THE COMMON COLD 3am reptilian brain 2 bumps of ketamine 2 fingers pressed against muscle mound thick as vocal fry i slide you on like a ring
200
LIKE RIDING IN THE CAR WITH THE TOP DOWN I’m trying out sunshine and ketamine for depression / The leaves here are waxy So sharp you could cut your palm / I’m carrying two plastic bags of fruit / They are so heavy they cut into my palm / I balance the bags on different parts of my hand Finger pad & second knuckle Pretty demon / At once feline, at once reptilian Everything you’ve ever feared Everyone who’s ever abandoned you A seagull is eating a plastic bag / A happy family is trying to stop it / Layla peels a mango / Feeds me slices soft as my insides / Happy muscle memory / Creeps up & out of the Uber / Proprioception synched with the screen I learned about millennial pink / I learned about the solar eclipse He pulls up Celine Dion’s first single I run my hands over my body / Over Layla’s shaved head I swallow it down/ All the gum in this gas station / Lists aspartame as a main ingredient
201
our skins were touching just like the words dysmorphia/dysphoria disembodied/disemboweled what beauty the pearly viscera / an accumulation the color of geraniums / no one else will understand and no one else will enable it / tab open to WebMd string of saliva / clogging up the drain i could’ve had the world by the guts / if i could’ve stretched my guts around the world / broken down and shit out / i dreamt of some kind of water lily that could cure lactose intolerance
202
laughing so hard a little choke a little crown of birdies around your head intention weighs hooks over us like interlocking fingers in a pinky promise i started to slip into it like satin, or the wet softness of arousal
203
SEXUALLY LIBERATED ONLINE/ CELIBATE IRL I want to fuck you with poetry / Live streaming Hand under elbow joins with the screen / Cutesy psychology She sends me a nude selfie / A lily flower tattoo on her ribs Someone asks / Could I ever fall in love with an AI As long as it seemed conscious / I say I’ve fallen in love with cis-men who seemed woke / So, probably She’s a libra and I read in some click bait / That libras want balance / Sext4Sext / Like the smell of your best friend’s house growing up / The one who read your diary / I’ll just sit on my hands / Wait for dissolution like an Alka-Seltzer tablet
204
Christina Svenson something holding something else will always win petulant, standing with legs half-open a sad attempt at the split sucking hard on my straw in-between rewards what a sweet farce like an old horse with braids or a nearly-thawed pot pie. the yolk of the matter is: she stuck to my mind like a star.
206
my convictions are a limp wrist wresting ice cubes from the tray braindead and splayed the air like licking metal me i am leaking and it sucks unsure about things like oysters for instance i’ve surely eaten hundreds and still don’t know i need it to be bright out though i have no intention of ever getting up i walk around the house tying bows on everything big bows on the lamp bases tiny bows on the leaves
207
convexed when we sleep I spoon you i wedge miniscule oranges between us until you notice, if we make juice we go to hell. we are two pieces of glass stuck inside red jell-o that your mom hands you after dinner. she wipes jell-o on her white apron. so anyway, we’re the glass in the jell-o we can never ever touch and you are a bigger shard than i am. or actually i am a tiny pearl stuck inside a child’s shoe except he thinks i am a rock because that’s what they taught him in school: that rocks live in shoes and not pearls.
208
Chloé S. Vaughan Step 1. You have such a strange idea of domination, the table, the sink, the motherHow much I want to move your tobacco slightly to the left is tied to how much I enjoy leaving coffee grounds in the washing bowl. Here’s a rose in a wine bottle: here’s the bed, the boast and the beautiful way you see yourself winning our little war11. The pyramid didn’t build itself, no mum picked up every brick and threw it in the recycling with metallic clang at ten in the morning when she finished work“Was he okay with you last night?// How much did he drink?” “Enough to make a home for some Pharaoh Queen and for her pet dog at least” 111. “It’s exhausting being exhausted, doing no work for more pay-” let’s stick to the millions, the millions in the grass/ the leaves/ the Indian stone/ the way it once was before it was all gone. Tell me, tell me again- I never tire of hearing about the good old days in the garden not like you- exhausted, bad back, tired of hiding away in the borrowed home of the present day.
210
1v. “Remember who reigns here, in this stolen throne by the backdoor, I smoke a veil across my face in purity and chastity, oh yes I am so heavenly I have an angel strapped to my back, and she wants me all ways. I have a tribe and a halo and a following of white vans and they need me.” always? v. We don’t see eye to eye, yours are phone level, closing all your apps, and mine are in Amherst in the 19th century, walking around, taking in the acorns. I am full with all the words you mispronounce and spread around, I am full and vomiting
out all of them, all of them. I am spreading around congratulations and miscommunication- all I can say is thank god this isn’t a fire drill.
211
Maybe, Baby I would have been correct in some ways balcony without your say.
and I wouldn’t have thrown myself off my
I would have lifted up the skirt and the underskirt and the underunderskirt to show you the helium balloon I have tucked there that’s ready to away.
sail
I would have painted my nails mushroom grey, and “vintage lilac” to match your parents’ partial state of decay (I shook their hands and took two wisened fingers with me //call me goddess //call me sanctity) I would have walked through the black mountains in flip flops and a tshirt that says coldness is for chumps with a picture of a puddle flipping off the sun. I would have walked through Copenhagen doing the same, but with underwear for posterity. I would have patted grave mud into bricks to build us a cosy home away from the city, and I would have forgot to make windows until it rained the house down and the entire thing became window. I would have been correct in some ways
but clearly I wasn’t correct in enough ways
to make you waive your morality but hey you’re basic clay//maybe, baby, vase.
212
you’re an earth sign you’re an unglazed
Carolyn Guinzio Until You Are All Out of Breath
214
Partial Signal Loss
Juleen Eun Sun Johnson Is This The Beginning Of A Dead-End Alley? See life shatter as a chandelier isolated, left in a discarded home. Love never guarantees order in the orderless, especially if alcohol is involved. before you reinvent yourself.
After the wreckage
What is it like to be
lonely? A white wall never says hello. I am the asshole who cannot drop anything. You tell me, No. I will try twice as hard.
Until, nothing happens or everything happens.
Take the dog out and kill it.
A shot to the head. A simple way to die.
Is this the beginning of a dead-end alley? A city never had the chance to make a sound. Is it the act of killing that makes drunk rage? Or is it the drunk that makes the killing and act of passion? The dead cannot share their stories.
You told me once. We all die alone.
217
gin hart sexii boy
venus as a beautiful
218
pony
cream gene it’s hard to take life everything takes life do you (get to) stop worrying it yah i’m ur steed weave ribbons will u gimme braid in my mane when i stamp my shod hoof i said sorry i drip of complicity
don’t mop i wanna it all
feel the time 219
flekkrflean net up the dug trench cit rug, spoonfed agrowl at flies in the buttermilk thy half wilt not kissed plys cadre so every bodydance the lock of rome is a tawdry lock
wrists clapped (stickum sallied)
of umpteen contiguous dials /one burrows glad in my stinking mouth
220
reach out and touch meat honk my nose bust my chin left a ripe one in the gallery o if i could muster a fuck! craps my wishful proboscis a mite forthwith birthing its thousand daughters birthing theirs
take me somewhere teach me things my slug belly in the taut future
wood en dice from the street in my mouth v hungry we together
there 221
halfbeak
razor me off, i’m in
the bag, v
raw
warm
222
Contributors Authors Frankie Baker, pp. 200-204 Colleen Louise Barry, pg. 41, pp. 58-64 Ashley Barton, pg. 29 Lauren Bender, pp. 192-193 Hannah Bernhard, pg. 95 K.T. Billey, pp. 160-161 Marina Blitshteyn, pp. 166-169 Amelia Box, pp. 170-171 Kristin Chang, pp. 134-138 Emily Corwin, pp. 150-151 Chella Courington, pg. 177 Megan Cowen, pp. 50-54 Hilary Vaughn Dobel, pp. 154-155 Amber Galeo, pp. 162-164 Jacq Greyja, pp. 158-159 Muse Giacalone, pp. 122-127 Carolyn Guinzio, pp. 214-215 Courtney Brooke Hall, pg. 31 Rebecca Hanssens-Reed, pp. 14-16 gin hart, pp. 218-222 Gabrielle Hogan, pp. 156-157
A.J. Huffman, pg. 93 Jessie Janeshek, pp. 140-141 Denise Jarrott, pp. 198-199 Juleen Eun Sun Johnson, pg. 217 em kaldenbaugh, pp. 86-88 Francesca Kritikos, pp. 178-179 Jennifer Lynn Krohn, pp. 44-48 Rae Liberto, pp. 116-117 Kate Litterer, pp. 20-24 Chrissy Martin, pp. 146-148 Ayla-Monic McKay, pp. 74-77 Sydney McNeill, pp. 90-91 Anne Britting Oleson, pp. 66-67 Madison Palffy, pp. 26-27 Justin Pelletier, pp. 10-13 Alina Pleskova, pp. 102-111 Jesse Rice-Evans, pp. 194-196 Amber Rounds, pp. 6-8 Stephanie Sauer, pp. 128-132 Aepril Schaile, pp. 56-57 Alexis Sikorski, pg. 121
Thursday Simpson, pp. 186-191 Kate Singer, pg. 5 Scherezade Siobhan, pg. 101 Lea Soranno, pp. 18-19 Andy Stallings, pp. 180-184 Caroline Belle Stewart, pp. 32-37 Christina Svenson, pp. 206-208 Erin Taylor, p. 112-115 Kailey Tedesco, pg. 153 Stephanie Valente, pp. 118-119 Sonya Vatomsky, pp. 70-72 Chloé S. Vaughan, pp. 210-212 Laura A. Warman, pg. 43 J.S.Watts, pg. 69 Erin Moon White, pg. 85 Sarah Ann Winn, pp. 78-79
Visuals “Untitled” by Bopha Bun, front cover “c/o My Patron Saint” by Rachel Statham, pg. 3 I Didn’t Know I Could Be Cool Like Marianne Faithfull by Rachel Statham and Caroline Belle Stewart, pg. 32
from Night Moves by Colleen Louise Barry, pg. 41 Night Moves by Colleen Louise Barry, pp. 58-64 ”Leucrota enters the solidago Serotina abyss” by Samantha Derendal, pg. 83 “My BB” by Rachel Statham, pg. 99 Four works by Stephanie Sauer, pp. 128-132 “Untitled” by Emily Ward, pg. 145 “BROWN AND PORCELAIN” by Jacq Greyja, pp. 158-159
“Thots” by Amelia Box, pp. 170-171 “Pidge Meade and the Anecdoche” by Samantha Derendal, pg. 175 “Until You Are All Out of Breath” & “Partial Signal Loss” by Carolyn Guinzio, pp. 214-215 “Industrial Taco Tomato” by Samantha Derendal, back cover
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Editor-in-Chief & Publisher Rachel Statham
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