 the landscape of a dream it is a simple story – the aftermath of a hurricane. you are up all night. putting up the walls, but when the sun rises one is left with water soaked sticks and sand. that. house. crashes. without. borders. the purpose of telling one’s story is the unearthing of the bodies that pile up. i will let you feed me grapes and nectarines and jam and figs and tea and bread and slabs of butter and eggs and lamb and soup and candies and mash and teeth and water and leaves and bones and hats hung on walls and snow and dirt and veins and paper and smoke and clay and ink lines and strings and sorry and guilt and sullen and dissonance and arctic and treatments and tissues and please.  E.A. Midnight specializes in multi-modal cross-genre hybridities. As a person living with mental difference, she is a vocal advocate for challenging the boxes creative artists are put in. She received the 2017 PEN North American/Goddard Scholarship Award, and holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College. She is currently serving as the Assistant Editor for the literary project, The Champagne Room. Her manuscript, landscape of the interior, was longlisted for the Dzanc Books 2021 Nonfiction Prize. A full list of her published work can be found on her website, www.eamidnight.com. E.A. Midnight resides in the Colorado wilds.
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1/30/2022 4 Comments Poetry by Dan Carey renee. CC
To the Cousins I Barely Know Some of you have done time, some have disappeared into and out of bars; some succeeded in leaving our family somewhere between Bridgewater and Percocet. Cousins, you grow like galaxies, when I think of how many planets you could be. In our family, blood takes the form of a tree, or it loiters, shapeless as dust that molds into the stars. Dad didn’t talk much back then, so how could I know another of you won a few bareknuckle fights, got jumped and was left for dead, while your sister knocked down Max’s door with a baseball bat? In the space between us, bones break, and I have stories only; nothing when we meet at funerals. Instead of talk, we breathe a silence of cracked ribs, in a strange cage. Dan Carey is a poet from Massachusetts, currently living in San Francisco. His work has appeared in Dropout Literary Magazine. He hopes his poems about addiction and mental illness will connect people with similar experiences, as well as create a platform for those to better understand themselves and the various diseases that afflict many people. 1/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Angelica Whitehorne David Prasad CC
Your Best American Girl Corn in the teeth, butter on the chin, American. Driving past fields and fields of green, soiled and toiled, all the buried bodies making my nutrients underneath. Ice in my glass clinks, soda pop, sugar tongue, bullets in my gun clink, release, this is my wounding legacy. American beauty, shaved clean and propped up pretty, wrapped in plastic and fool’s gold, first picked off the shelf, always. My spittle bold, my bruises blue and patriotic, my flag of surrender built into my skin. What other violences have they let me purchase with an Amex or a blown kiss? Print out my photograph and put it in your wallet, and when you run your thumb over my face, don’t feel guilty for remembering me two dimensionally. What can a girl hope to be besides a flat piece sticking out a man’s back pocket? I was made to be owned, I was made to be replicated, I was made to be disbursed. The next time you go to pay, instead of cash, put my face on the counter and see what I am worth. *Titled after a song by Mitski. Angelica is a writer from Buffalo, New York who has published or forthcoming work in Westwind Poetry, Mantis, The Laurel Review, The Cardiff Review, North Dakota Quarterly, and Hooligan Magazine, among others. Besides being a devastated poet, Angelica is a Marketing Content Writer for a green energy loan company. She is also currently writing her first novel, so wish her luck. 1/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Giovanna Lomanto renee. CC
in this universe, i cross my fingers. it's the closest thing to genuflecting. sometimes a pinky promise is the eucharist and sometimes a handshake is giving peace and sometimes i am not touching anyone and i am not connected to my body and that's okay too. in this universe, my body and i are friends because i don't make her do such strange things for such strange men, nor do i run from my own strange habits to appease their strange pleasures. i am strange. my body is also still strange. the crossed fingers work with her friend the long index toe. eyebrow arch has been really looking at lip scar and is content. holy matrimony abound. in this universe, my strangeness is not thought of as tall can half empty, but rather is incredibly revered by the beer drinkers. when i look at a bar, i think that all of them would love to take me home. i think that i don't have to go home with anyone. i smile with confidence and don't assume intention. i cross my fingers. anorexia they do not tell you the secrets of the body when you receive one they do not tell you that the fore arm goes into the elbow or that the men in your life will take your body and and and the body is the vehicle and they will take your body but you might not make one and and and the probability is that they do not tell you about the fact that when you are starving you are staving off the certainty letter written again to my body some days are shadowed curves, full glasses of blurred color and packed joints of lightning pulse. some days my lover tells me about my body and i believe his generosity. some days i think about how his predecessors once called my body a plateau, turned on its uranus axis. i think i am away from it. some days are those vertical drops, those direct garbage chutes. i take a hit of vaporized indigo and inhale my lover, tell him how all of the letters i have written are black and white ink, no soft periwinkle or deep navy to keep company the page. i tell him my muted acceptance of the ways i let the terrain drive the motor. the mouth. he stops me. tells me to talk to myself again, talk to you again, come to some conclusion where we forget everything, every skipped meal, and every oversaturated step feels like forgiveness but spurns the thought of never meeting Doris, the nurse who brought her nail polish and a face mask; Kam, the nurse who risked her job to make sure that i had pumpkin body butter on my off days. some days are handle pulls of highlighted highballs, those drinks you forget are an uneven mixture of deadly and drowning. some days my lover tells me that he will be gentle when i am not. my body writes back with thanks. my mouth. every skipped meal. every last plate i cleaned in its presence. my lover smiles when i lick the spoon of brownie batter. he squeezes my leg when i scoop the crumbs. i laugh, wholeheartedly, feeling more technicolor. Giovanna Lomanto is a Bay Area poet and teaching artist with a passion for investigating self-liberation through the arts. An alumnus of U.C. Berkeley and a current MFA candidate at NYU's low-residency program, she finds power in education, and therefore holds a passion for delivering that same power to youth—in classrooms, workshops, and mentorships. Her work has been featured on KALW, the Worth-Ryder Art Gallery, the Flor y Canto Literary Festival, Box, and the Elevation Review. She is the author of two poetry collections: no body in particular (Scrambler Books, 2019) and jupiter fell out the sky last night (Bound to Brew, 2021). You can follow her on Instagram @giovanna_lomanto for updates on future projects. She currently resides in Oakland, CA with her friends, most notably her lionhead bunny Maggie. 1/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Rebecca Gomezrueda renee. CC The caterpillar experiences total liquefaction when girls turn eighteen they pick at themselves until they ooze trying to find a second skin or the remains of a chrysalis something to shed, something to break through proof that the transformation wasn’t all in our heads when I was eighteen what I wanted was to drive men into the ground stakes to hold me up, to push me towards the sun Lilith’s phototactic child wanting all of it because she was horrified to find that she wanted none of it girls are liquid at that age I fear we remain so until we know what we want and can admit to what we don’t I will start by saying I would be happy if you never touched me again I will start by saying I never felt solid under your hands I will start by saying no  Rebecca Gomezrueda is a Philadelphia area writer. Her short stories and poems have appeared in journals such as The Drabblecast, Sledgehammer Lit, The Orchards Poetry Journal, and Trouvaille Review among others. She is also the playwright of The Clinic, a short play that premiered in the 2019 Philadelpha Fringe Festival with Lone Brick Theatre Company.
1/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor renee. CC
Don’t Send Me Flowers Unless I Can Plant Them Because I’ve killed at least two side table cacti in the past five years, but I’m still craving the presence of photosynthesis so I keep buying houseplants. Not bouquets or plucked bundles of spray-painted roses. No. Fuck that. I only seek roots that bloom like little rivers. Philodendrons & spider plants. Deep heather. I miss it, you know. Seeing things in color. The world of gardening claims many blue flowers are imposters. Just an oceany purple. But that Delta Marina pansy: real blue. Cry in front of your refrigerator blue. Sturdy-necked & upright in the screaming wind blue, their petaled heads never sinking or gnawed by rabbits, hungry for sunlight to cradle. Give me that ultramarine apathy. That skymouth. That thriving. Let me learn how to happily exist in a world so sun-starved & rainless. Hannah Cajandig-Taylor (she/her) is a poet and flash writer residing in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. She's the author of ROMANTIC PORTRAIT OF A NATURAL DISASTER (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and has published work in Gigantic Sequins, Milk Candy Review, and Trampset, among others. She's been nominated for some stuff, but most recently had a piece in Wigleaf's Top 50 of 2021. She thinks that grapes taste better frozen and has strong feelings about umbrellas. Find her on twitter @hannahcajandigt.  James Diaz: Can you walk us through Lotus and The Apocalypse? How did this one reveal itself to you? Austin Davis: I started writing the poems in LOTUS around 2 years ago. The majority of these poems were written during the pandemic, when I was fighting a difficult battle with my mental health. For a while, I was flirting with self destruction. I wasn’t sleeping much. I was self medicating. I wasn’t eating a lot. It kind of felt like each morning I was reborn on the side of a mountain. I knew I had to keep climbing up. I knew that eventually there’d be a little cliff to rest on. But I’d always slip. I was too exhausted to reach for a rock, so I would free fall until the next morning. Life felt like this circle, and each night the circle was closing in on me, getting tighter and tighter. I run a homeless outreach program and I was putting myself in all these dangerous situations. I was reversing overdoses, breaking up fights, protecting women from assaults, - all sorts of shit. I still do this work, but with boundaries now. Everything was out of balance and I started to think a lot about my own death. How would I feel if I knew I’d die tomorrow? Who would I cry about? What would I fear? What are the memories that warm my body when I’m shivering and help me see my feet when I’m stumbling through the dark? Writing LOTUS was hard. I had to confront a lot of my fears and insecurities, but in doing so, I grew from them and made it out alive on the other side. All I want with this book is for it to help anyone out there who is feeling alone, scared, or in a downward spiral. Life can get crazy hard. But we have each other. And together, we can make it through the night and find the sunrise. LOTUS is about being honest with yourself about the parts of yourself that need work. Humanity is constantly evolving and as humans we are forever changing. At the end of the day, all we can do is put in the work to grow into someone we’re beyond proud of. JD: Love is central here. Having someone to accompany you on the rough and crumbling road of a fastly diminishing and ending world. Longing, desire, memory, pain. It's already a lot to deal with. Life. Ending or not, is a heavy thing to move through. But not being alone in it seems central. Do you feel like relationships, in any and many forms, are the glue of hope? Talk to us about hope and not being alone in it. AD: Love is everything, James. A lot of what I write boils down to love, in one way or another. To be honest, I think I’m scared of a lot of shit in this world, and having people around me that love me and that I love is really beautiful and beyond valuable. JD: There's a line I particularly love, where you write that "Some houses are built with the wrong bricks." It sure feels like much of our world qualifies as such a house. How do we replace these bad bricks? Is there time even? Where do we start? AD: That’s a question I’ve wrestled with before for sure. If our world is a house, our individual communities are the bricks that hold it together. I think we start on a micro level. Show your loved ones that you love them. Hold the door for someone at the grocery store. Listen to how someone is feeling. Little acts of love are like ripples on the ocean of life. Eventually you might just create a wave. JD: How do you define poetry and the poet? I often feel it is different for each person, not a static or fixed concept, to do or be poetry. What is the unique feel of this poetic ride, for you? Is it a separate thing or the whole thing for you, in everyone and everywhere, an ember waiting for wind? AD: I think that everyone can and should try to write a poem. Write what you think a poem is. Then write something that’s the opposite of that. Being a poet is like being a detective. We’re all just trying to understand an aspect of existence. We take these clues that the world gives us and we try to make sense of them. Maybe we want to know what the point of life is, or what love is, or why we feel so depressed, but I think being a poet is asking these questions and attempting to work through them in our writing. JD: Any new projects in the works for this year you'd like to tell people about? (Feel free to promote anything you want to promote here Austin: website links for any and all your projects, etc.) AD: Thank you, James!! My main project this year is LOTUS & THE APOCALYPSE, which is up for pre-order now! LOTUS will be out everywhere on March 1st. Besides that, I’ve been working on a book of poetry about homelessness for a while. I would love to record another EP or spoken word album too. We’ll see where this life takes me, I suppose! 1/30/2022 1 Comment Poetry by Amy Rose Lafty renee. CC
Why I hate the phrase mani-pedi after Natalie Diaz It’s the mid 90’s and I am one teal wind- breaker away from the crowd that promises me I can be more than drunk dad, sad mom, one-bedroom apartment. Not that the girls I want to be actually talk to me, but they flash their clean white Reeboks at cheer practice, line their monied wrists with leopard scrunchies, slide Lauryn Hill into their discmen -- priceless clues that tell me what to do to be worthy of their clear malt liquor Fridays and note-passing Mondays. I register their mid-math test nail tapping as morse code for meet us at the nail bar, and because adolescent me, raised-on-welfare me, doesn’t know the difference between salons and survival, I look my mom in her nickel eyes and tell her I won’t spend her “last ten dollars” on anything but lunch. But I run straight for that new swirl technique, you know, the one where they dip one nail in three different colors: pink, yellow, neon green. I choose silver for the other nine, thinking the whole time that my mom won’t let me starve till three. But my crumbless spot in the cafeteria on Tuesday, and my grumbling stomach in Accounting on Thursday, teaches me that even a mother is no match for hunger. So now, when my friends ask me, saves-every-last- penny me, to join them for mani-pedis, I hate how they chop off the ends of the words, like they can afford to be so cool. Amy Rose Lafty is a poet, momma, former educator, and baker. She earned her Master of Arts from The Bread Loaf School of English and lives in Delaware County with her husband and two wildly energetic children. Her work can be found in Horse Egg Literary. Find her @arlpoetry on Instagram. 1/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Nicole Callräm renee. CC shatter because I feel altogether too much, dive nightly in-to glacial lakes of disappointment—observe truth rise-- pair of inky loons I confuse heartbreak with breathing and am easily seduced by all that lies beyond the reach of my fingertips speaking more plainly, I want what, I mean who, I can’t have now the gift age brings is deep doubt, I think—expansive—as the way moonglow glints over broken glass, vulnerable as a smile you cover yet slips silent from liquid eyes do we ever reach a clarity of being? I mean, will “I” become “persimmon” or “penumbra” or whatever clouds speak on mountaintops because the valleys no longer love verse? I have tired of all these things-- am drawn to what turns me away and away shattered is a beautiful dialect of alone Golden shovel from Louise Glück’s “The Red Poppy”  Nicole Callräm (she/her/她) is a nomadic bureaucrat and disciple of existence in all her life-affirming and confusing manifestations. She adores rideshare bikes, red wine, and Osmanthus flowers (preferably a mix of the three...all at once). Nicole has been published in Full House Literary, Nude Studio, Kissing Dynamite, and Rat's Ass Review. You can find her on Twitter at @Yim
1/30/2022 0 Comments Poetry by Lois Hambleton renee. CC
Arcimboldo kid On following my friend into the woods last day we’d ever spend at school. I found her where we always played, the earth had sprouted up a carpet there with lichens, ferns, the shady parts. What’s up? I said, you didn’t wait. Her face had aged, her skin, a table top we’d made from crates. Our Arcimboldo portrait hall was now her flesh the fruit, the oaken things. The veg that once restored her nose and eyes. She cried and drenched the armchairs glued with leaves and cones. I whispered - Its ok, we’ll still be friends. We won’t, she said, and pulled my cheeks between her hands - Come on, I’ll race you to the very edge, she said. Her manner, then, her warmth more frightening than ivy growth that now replaced her golden hair. A house of leaves we’d spun made knives from birch and plates from bark. And acorn cups had soothed her baby brother, when he wept. She’d curve an angel clear across his trembling back. I’d see her silent as the birds when gunshot shrieks across the trees and if I thought of her at all it’s when I saw her mother screech and sprawl across a car park in her truck. An armoured thing that took great chunks from supermarket walls. A former lecturer at South & City College Birmingham UK, Lois has work included in two addiction anthologies - A Wild and Precious Life (Unbound) & Despite Knowing (Fore Street Press). Her daughter’s recovery from alcoholism has been documented in an ongoing series of poems - Bottle Girl @ recovery. She has also been published with Poetry Bus Magazine, Indigo Dreams, Culture Matters Co-Operative Ltd, Creative Ink, The Madrigal Press, Transcendent Zero Press & Last Stanza Poetry Journal. |
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