Jo Guldi CC




​​i’m so good at problems
 
once on a dare, 
i put my body into bridge pose 
and let everyone in the room
kiss me 
 
there is a true story in my mouth
foaming up the mountain
knives in the kitchen
soft asleep 
 
i give up  
 
i hold a cup 
and the faucet mouth 
coughs out a river
healed with disinfectants
 
i increase the risk of 
malign growths 
by doing nearly 
anything 
 
there has to be a way 
to convince you
i don’t mean any harm
 
even when i say 
 
i don’t care





there is no fixing  


my front tooth is chipping away 
and i’m sure that means something 
is wrong inside of me 
manifesting itself 
were my tongue can 
trace it 
 
it takes more than guts to
ask for help in America 
it takes a sense of worthwhile 
that needs constant 
attention
 
i am laughing about 
mid-life like 
i’m sure that has come 
and gone by 
anxiety surfing 
the whole time 
 
when the singer asked what we thought 
at age 25 i thought
my father died 
at 49 
 
i thought 
it’s hard to think
beyond that 

rosily 

i make jokes about 
my body in mutiny 
my mind like 
 
whatever 

i don’t want to make myself
a little button crimped 
and pinned into 
holding it all 
together
 
together we can make a dent 
in a cop car 
if we stand in front of it
and brace for impact





draught 


when i am walking 
i am trying 
thinking hips first like
head a horse to 
a watering hose 
watch it lap 
happily 

i am thinking 
gushing crystal out

i am looking at a sun 
ribboned mirror thinking  
explosions 

summer is the favorite 
consenting brutality 
and if you succeed  
to lead your hips 
the men tell you your
legs deserve a mouth
with big dicks in it

they are 
trying to be sweet 
they say
a cackling 
spit glows and rotates
do you need a ride
do you need some help
do you got a man
do you have a means to 

when i am walking 
i am thinking 
how to be held 
against the giveaway 
of frame and 
what are the consequences of 
successful deceit 

i am a body for a dumpster 
i am a body made of confusion 
and my delusion is a glint blind
and mirrored antagonism 

when i am walking 
i am thinking 
of the spit glowing sweetly
and me on it 
for successfully leading 
with my hips 
and when i am sitting 
i am thinking 
of the hips that lead 
and the split of them 
gushing crystal out 
i am thinking 

hips first to lead a horse 
so thirsty it can’t think





the grass is green


i am wondering how long 
i can park a shitty camper in the alley 
before the city notices
knocks on the window 
tells me to leave 

my little piece of canned ham 
too fuzzy hot in the condo kitchen 
home is no where for long

how about that dream 
america, you look stupid 
new manifest destinies 
escape from society 
little queer wonderlands 

escape is not 
to move your sick 
into the country 
and let the earth 
hurt to heal you

escape is not 
turn back time 
and farm yourself 
to salvation 

the big rot sucks 
the life out and it 
follows you like a
child

in the time it takes to unlearn 
the landlord inside each of us has 
too much invested to
walk away

i’m not here to tell you
your visions of the future
are syndicated and crass
but i would like to know 
what you tell yourself

​

             Bart Everson CC



​
When Gillian’s Here

They’re loud tonight.
These voices that clamour.
Gillian’s here. 
Standing by the kitchen window with the sky behind her - as sullen and moody as she is, shot through with the deepest blue of the darkest night.
She’s been standing there for a while now, and she hasn’t said a word.
She’s running the tip of a finger over a burn on the side of her hand.
Just at the base of her thumb.
She’s done it getting a cake out of the oven. A week ago.
One she’d made. Which isn’t something you’d imagine she’d do.
But she did. She does. And it tasted good, but the scars still there, and in this cold winter, in this kitchen that’s stayed dark for too long, the scar turns purple, milky, and she worries at it,
Because she doesn’t want to look up.

​

​

Raised simultaneously by David Bowie and Virginia Woolf, Natascha Graham writes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, as well as writing for stage and screen. She lives with her wife in a house full of sunshine on the east coast of England. Her play, How She Kills, was performed by The Mercury Theatre in August 2020 and broadcast on BBC radio in September. My second play, Confessions: The Hours, has been performed by Thornhill Theatre London, and both have been selected by Pinewood Studios and Lift-Off Sessions as part of their First Time Filmmakers Festival 2020. Her poetry, fiction and non-fiction essays have been previously published by Acumen, Litro, Flash Fiction Magazine, The Gay and Lesbian Review, Yahoo News and The Mighty.
​

           Colby Stopa CC



While I Was Sleeping

I did not hear Kathryn screaming, 
six doors down and cold in her flannel nightdress, 
calling for help from her dewy backyard, 
her silver walker shining by the watchful eye of the moon. 
Long before the police came, I had already closed my windows, 
checked for strangers behind my shower curtain, 
retired behind the locked door of my room, 
and lay there, dreaming of my own sweet comfort, 
because that’s what I do while I am sleeping. 

Two days later, while I napped in the afternoon heat 
with Oprah on, they came again, the police 
with their shiny weapons drawn against the pain 
of our houses. They called for Sheila, across the street 
with her beautiful, dark-stained garage door and trellis roses. 
Come out, they said, don’t do it. 

I woke up then and wished those police would poke 
their long nightsticks into the deepest closets of all our houses, 
that they would upturn beds and dusty bookcases and accuse 
all the sick and crazed and suicidal among us, 
cleansing our houses each by each until they found him, 
in that corner house just out of sight of my own, 
the man I call uncle who once molested me, my fifth grade friend, 
my little cousins since then for twenty years, 
while I’ve feigned safety, while I’ve feigned comfort, 
while I’ve been sleeping.

​​

Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a Ph.D. in 20th Century American Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington. She is currently Professor of English at Ohio University Southern, where she teaches courses in composition, American literature, and creative writing. Her chapbook What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To appears from Finishing Line Press (2016), and poems have appeared, or are forthcoming, in Rattle, Slant, Spillway, Chiron Review, Verse Virtual and many other journals. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length collection. She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online: https://sheilanagigblog.com/ and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.
​

             ​Colby Stopa CC



Food Bank

After a summer of living in his car, 
after the DUI, the stint in Tent City,
decades of denial, fits of angry texts, 
shakes and sweats over a barbecue grill,
a broken window. After near-death drug 
deals, lying passed out in a fellow junkie’s house, 
his sister sobbing into her phone, me behind 
a bathroom door in another state trying to calm her. 
After years of 12-step meetings (mine), tying my life 
to mantras like let go or be dragged, letting grief
be a marinade to soften me ala some paraphrased Rumi poem. 
After praying to my dead friend Jamelle, asking her to look 
for him, look after him, wherever he was. After searching 
strangers’ faces for his for over a year, he resurfaces, 
altered. After he found in a black sack in his dad’s garage, 
the book, Message to a Troubled World, written by my great 
grandmother, channeled through an Ouija board in the 1940s. 
After he could quote passages from the book like scripture. 
After the methadone clinic. After looking for a church. 
After handing water bottles to those holding cardboard signs 
at street corners. After scavenging backpacks from bulk trash, 
gifting them to those he met along the canals, those who carried 
their belongings in plastic bags, he now stands in a place where 
he tells me he’s never been this happy, serving others, the answer, 
a place where he finally feels he fits— in a room stacked with milk
crates and boxes with graphics of bananas, metal shelves piled high 
with iceberg, red bell peppers, striped melons, cukes and squash, 
row upon row of Kashi, Kraft mac and cheese, Campbell’s cans, jars 
of Skippy and grape jam, the crew of volunteers clad in khaki pants 
and Pure Heart t-shirts, their arms and legs in wheel-like motion, food to box, 
box to the next arms in a line that forms outside the door. My son grinning, 
his open hand sweeping the room, pointing to produce, day-old pastries, dairy, 
meat, eggs in the walk-in fridge, beams of Tuesday sunlight scattering through 
the glass, falling on all in the scene, his face and eyes wide, effervescent, lit.
​
​

            Jo Guldi CC



​
when my imaginary therapist asks me how I’m feeling

I say mostly just disappointed           in baseball players who banged
on trash can lids         in neighbors for using so much fertilizer            in the blue-green algae
blooming in the lake         in the way my body is spreading out in all directions              in the way
that marriages can sometimes end not happily ever after      in the way that surgeons minimize
after effects          in the way doctors don’t believe women        in how insurance works       in the
way that multiple people keep calling my mother claiming to be her grandson in urgent need of
money          in the way they wait for her to guess his name         in the way that someone stole all
the mailman’s Christmas tips          in how everyone bought the books but no one read them        in
how all those red flags are still flying on the streets of this old town           in how more than 70
million people how           I need you to look me in the eye and explain it to me




The Physical Properties of Some Milk Chocolate Candies

I want to tell you something about m&ms
not just where they melt and where they don’t, 
but other things like how much space they take 
up on my tongue. Or how much time it takes 
to finish off one family size bag 
in a pandemic. Lately it seems like 
so many things surrounding me are all
a scam. Insurance, passwords, teeth cleanings 
at the dentist. How many times can one man 
win the state of Georgia?  I admit sometimes 
they change their colors depending on the 
season, but believe me m&ms will never 
leave you empty handed. Honestly, we were 
never that great to begin with.
​

                 Jo Guldi CC



​Mirror’s Water

I am the reflection of my mother in the stagnant water.
Who said I am my mother? Me. But I am not her.
I could never be her reflection: 
I am the water. 

I had a dream about a wedding. All that they ever
told me was that I would never go anywhere.
That I was too infatuated with gold, 
that I was not good. 

In my dream, I was walking down the aisle.
But the prince was absent. 

Who needs a prince when a woman can rescue
herself from the wedding, eat the cake,
run off with the dowry. 

There is a pain in my heart that is not the pain
in her heart. Useless to compare really,
there is her pain, and there is mine.

What is mine is not hers. 
She is not even my mother.

My mother, the perfect picture of a fifties wife,
always swept something under the vacuum cleaner,
would do laundry by hand, and would not
make a fuss, she’d do it for me. 

She loved me.
And I her. 

When the betrayal happened, I was young. 
She spun the story like Rapunzel. 

I was forevermore wary 
of women like her, taking shape, taking
my form in front of my eyes and convoluting it.

They’d dress me up as their favorite dummy,
and they’d exact their revenge of their very own
voodoo doll.

It wasn’t by coincidence that my mothers all look alike. 
They all stare at me with that sad look
of pity. As if they knew, as if they always
knew, that I have always known
them for who they are. 

For they are who they are: women
like me. We women who get caught up
in stories of each other, then prick blood
from each other’s webbed fingers in search
of the prince.

You who do not believe in stories, not even 
in mine, you who would like to believe evil 
is still in the grey, tell me what happened
with my guts, my blood, and my glory?

I think, you would say softly, if you were here,
it has turned into a soiled wedding dress 
you don’t deserve to bear.

In the dream, the wedding dress evaporates into a million
dark mouths to kiss my everlasting dream
to be something like a mother. 

Hollow and hallowed, the dream in the shape of a mother. 

Forget the princely counterpart, you beg of me, the one 
that was only ever sometimes mine.

It is me, in the mirror, smiling sinisterly at me. You, 
there, in the mirror, tell me what I did wrong.
                                                            Everything.
My mother, the first abandonment,
has shiny curls she could still twist in my back.

The loss, our loss, a displacement and a cavity.

My mother and me, in the mirror staring back
with something I am trying to unravel myself:

I was born formless but of form, my origin
is my beginning to transform, but every 
cupped water is the water molding itself
to my hands. Shift the form, and I shift
the water. Shift the water, and I 
change form.
​


​
Iha

We were made from the banana tree,
look at your palms, iha,
you who’ve grown in this city of eyes
like the pineapple, feel
what it feels to be alive,
peeling fruits for every ounce of juice
you have in you,
how it will never satisfy, or be satisfied,
or how a plant like you needs water only
as much as they have, 
not more, not less, but an empty sky
held up by your sewing, by your tending
the garden with care,
who taught you how to dance like that,
who taught you to impress
with a tambourine, your aunt Judalyn’s
time on the stage about to be over, 
and soon, you will rise
like the dough with which we make
bread that will never go stale,
have no fear, under the guidance of the Maestro,
your fate will be sealed.

​

             Jo Guldi CC



​ 
Town Drunk


It appeared to everyone in town
Garnet lived solely on cheap lager.
Only the few who glimpsed
inside the drafty, two-room dwelling
he kept with an ancient, toothless mother,
knew protein came from snared rabbits
transformed into soup.

In this way, country alcoholics
have it better than counterparts
forever sauced in the city--
rodents are much more desirable there,
especially if boiled
on a wood stove with carrots, celery--
a dash of salt and pepper.

Against the odds, Garnet remained
upright on two legs, and two wheels,
performed odd jobs for liquor store liquidity;
cycled converted railway beds,
chainsaw on parcel carrier
precariously balanced
with case of Schooner in front basket.

Imagine a scarecrow
whose stuffing is removed
by fearless crows for their nest;
flannel shirt, olive drab pants hang
loose on a T frame,
one hand manages the handlebars,
one tips back refreshments.

A sweetness pervaded
Garnet’s yeasty persona.
True—others took pity,
hired the villager most famous
for his incredible capacity,
paid him to mow a lawn, or limb a tree.
Even in this febrile state,
he remained committed to an ailing mother,
elderly home-bound friends like my grandparents,
with whom he gossiped and played cribbage.

When you passed him on your bike
he always smiled in recognition,
yelled, Howdy!
through sawdust-sprinkled beard,
transcending his bleary-eyed appearance.

Each Halloween, Dad drove us
to a real haunted house,
revealed his costumed kids
to sunken ghouls grinning
with glistening gums by the fire.

Was this ritual to honour their past
work relationship when they carpooled,
before Garnet’s ambition to drink
outweighed desire to work?
An unspoken thank-you
for entertaining his elderly parents?

They beckoned us forward
with shaking hands, one at a time.
Stuffed pillowcases equally
with entire contents of a box
snack-size potato chips,
knowing we would be the only spooks
to dare haunt their door that night.

I wondered how two adults can live
together in such cramped confines.
Answer: Garnie spent little time there
other than to cook, pass out,
and make sure
his mother still drew breath. 

​

           ​Douglas Arruda CC



Confession

We both hate when you have to cut my nails.
I’m trying to quit but my mouth is already sick
with the taste. I never meant for your wrists
to ache or to be the cause of your pain. Sometimes
I wish things never went my way. You wish
you can lend me your head. You don’t
understand why I’ve been trying to jump
out of your hands instead. I’m not good
when things make sense like our closeness
lying together in bed. And I know I once said
I was planning on a surrogate but when strangers
compliment our face, I forget. A river runs right
through our palms. The reader said the mouth
rests in our hearts. But you made yours so small
and I never grew any more after that. I wish
nothing was ever your fault but I don't know
how to give up. I want you to live until
the very end just like a little kid. Where
your body ends and where mine begins,
the thinnest lines wrinkle and stretch. Please
forgive me for all I did.
​



Alex N. is currently an undergraduate student in New York City. Their work tends to take the form of poetry, song, and/or horoscope. They can be reached through twitter or instagram, @mukbangbby.

             Bart Everson CC



ash tuesday
            a truncated sestina

cleansed at last of burial ash 
you return to tell of angels falling from the sky
the fire where you lost yourself as day turned to night
in brittle madness
streets brushed with unspeakable dust clouds   embers
burning the city silent 

how your subway car suddenly shuddered silent
the ground above heaving as towers fell to ash.
trapped below, none of you knew. only embers
of wild confusion igniting distrust.    even there, with no sky
you tasted the coming madness
humanity’s dark night.

you helped a pregnant woman to the street like night
joined the tide of muffled footsteps, silent
exodus across the bridge    toward what? this madness
knows no borders.   eyes burning with tears and ash
you walked blind   9am daylight wiped clean from the sky
dawn of a new era hissing like embers.

back turned on a vision once sought, embers
of love swath the night 
like neon in the sky 
rain down in silent
questions: what was true, what was ash.

            on the third anniversary of 9/11





body language

a tart wash of sun streams through the double paned glass
summer’s inconsolable push
like a child’s desire.    a pat   a hush   not nearly enough
to quell fear   want.   
empty echo     early morning reverie. 

‘neath a rising tide of silence   scratch of pen to paper: 
commiseration of ink and sweat about the cost of a single step. 
these vain attempts to dress wounded hours 
expose the frailty of language 
while regret eats through the day like acid. 

this acrid spell    burden of expectation scraped raw
each bend    stretch    a reminder 
simple poetry of sinew and tendon 
lost to the confused grip of past and present
the innate way fate twists meaning. 

what’s unwritten has different value   lessons 
embedded in cells like rings within mighty redwoods
hidden save for the cut of the logger’s saw
— but who could translate    wood to paper
strength to vulnerability

it’s all a foreign language now

​

​*body language first appeared in the 2008 Magee Park Poets Anthology, published by the Carlsbad City Library.

Originally from Southern California, Cheryl Latif emigrated to the Pacific Northwest in 2001 to live under a sky that speaks several languages. Her poetry was first published in Between Sheets, a Cal State Stanislaus literary magazine (1978). She didn’t submit again for some time. Now her work has appeared in a variety of local, regional and national publications such as New Millennium Writings, The Comstock Review, Spillway, How Luminous the Wildflowers, Magee Park Poets and more. 

While in San Diego, she curated/hosted a weekly poetry series in San Diego that featured poets from across the nation and across the pond. 

A copywriter by trade, she relishes fooling with words.

            ​Kaarina Dillabough CC



HOSPITAL VISIT IN WINTER

He told me that winter
was the time of death;
that ice pierced the heart
of every living thing
and snow pulled a shroud
over the barren earth.

But looking at him
lying in the hospital bed -
arms desiccated twigs
and skin that’s bruised
with leaden skies - I tell him
it’s the time of hibernation.

That trees will be born anew
and birds will cluster on boughs
to become silhouettes of leaves.
I don’t know if he can hear me
but I swear that meltwater
starts to trickle from his eyes.

​