​David Jones 大卫 琼斯 CC



"Come on over and cry in my kitchen."
-Gretel Ehrlich


                God, I love that line. It's spoken to the author, Gretel, who is in some deep and abiding grief, over the phone one morning, by a woman juggling five ornery kids and a temperamental husband, in the unforgiving, apocalyptic terrain of Wyoming. I've known such people who have made time for me when it perhaps made no sense at all for them to do so, given their own dire circumstances. Maybe you have too. Those kinds of things are the reason many of us made it this far. 

Such a sentiment still exists here, in this small digital space - even if we most certainly cannot cry in each others kitchens anytime soon. While many of us are currently sheltering in place, there are that many more who have no place at all to attach the word shelter to, let alone the word home. For some communities, an already too deep precarity of life is driven ever deeper, not to mention "life" (already so reduced) for those in prison and in mental institutions. Why should it have taken a pandemic to own up to our relational existence? That I am me through you and you are you through me. One thing I've noticed, not a single news report on indigenous communities (their needs, their struggle) during this time, even less on the homeless. Why is that? Are some lives more grievable than others?

Jabulile Mickle-Molefe's poem for hobbes, explores this contradiction embodied in our institutions when she writes of; "the heroin addictions devouring the midwest like a crave case," while throughout the 1970's, 80's and 90's, black and brown communities did not hear their addiction stories told in as sympathetic and humanizing a light as many in our current Opioid crises do. Whose voices, whose stories actually get heard and whose get forgotten, purposefully washed away? We do not know how many indigenous woman have died because our institutions do not care when they go missing, and they go missing at an alarming rate, never to be seen again. What kind of world is that? Where some lives aren't even grieved properly, aren't even considered losses? One we have grown far too accustomed to. Even now, in this pandemic, some stories, it seems, get told at the expense of others.

Here we explore those lives lived (pushed) on the margin, no safe place to call home or shelter or "please god, just let me rest here a while." Our hearts, as always, are geared towards those who are on the floor. Eros Salvatore, Gene Lynn and Addy Miller tell harrowing but ultimately hopeful stories (one survives) of the hell that is addiction. Tetman Callis and Caroline Piermattei write of working-poor-class characters whose lives are just one paycheck away from having nothing at all. These are harsh, bare boned landscapes, the new American normal, it would seem. 

​In 'A World Away', Bonnie E. Carlson writes heartrendingly of a teen in foster care as she visits her mother in prison with her case manager, and later, back at her foster parents, contemplating if it's even safe enough to have hope in her newfound environment where adults, for the first time, seem to actually believe in her. Carla Sameth writes of one family just looking for a rehab to check into on a bad and end-of-the-rope kinda night, and told; no room at the inn. It's easier for some than it is for others to get the help that they need. That's as true now, during this pandemic, as it is in a million other ways. Nicole Goodwin narrates her childhood memories in Brooklyn, filled mostly with that youthful joy- until a dead body, fallen from a car one summer becomes, not just the end of innocence, but the way things are for everyone that she knows from that time and place, many of whom, sadly, will not make it. Goodwin's haunting tale reminding me of a story my father once told me about his own childhood in Brooklyn; seven years old, playing marbles, and a man is suddenly stabbed right in front of him. Where do you file that away? How it must ever more shape the world that we just learn to get used to.

Friends, I sincerely hope you never get used to living in such a world. That you kick that habit, cry that trauma, and shout the name of that injustice. Shout so loud the world has no choice but to listen. Put the pain in the poem and the poem in the palm of our hands.

Come on over and cry in our kitchen. 

​
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic


*Special thanks to my wonderful co-editors, Jenny Robbins, for her deeply felt and inspiring selection of essays, and to Dana Espinosa for the astounding poems that she's assembled. And to Eros Salvatore, who took time to narrate their story, 'Heroin, My Only Friend' for us, in our ever expanding audio soundcloud. 

                       Oceans Springs

                    Bettys Creek

                         Cecilia

                   ​ Solidago on the Shore

                   Oceans Springs

                   ​Bettys Creek at Dusk

                                                      Oceans Springs

                         Messengers 

​
​

Elli Perry is a musician, visual artist, herbalist, and activist. Her career as a singer-songwriter has spanned twenty years, while her work in the visual arts has indiscriminately spanned mediums. Whether painting and drawing, tinkering with old film cameras, or compulsively knitting and embroidering, she is most content while making- the what is often not particularly relevant. As an herbalist, she works passionately in the field of health justice activism, seeking to support medically underserved communities and individuals. She lives sheltered in place with her husband in the northern Chihuahuan Desert, on the border of Mexico and Far West Texas. 

​
Cory Marshall Spangler is an American author and photographer.  His work has been published in AGITATE: Film Photo Broadsheet.  He publishes his own handmade periodicals of experimental documentary photography and narrative: Native Stranger Periodical.  He and his wife live sheltered in place in the West Texas desert.

                         Jarrett CC


​

Prayer to Man 


the dust groans like day-old snow packed by boots,
the same desert roads
each day, in the hour
between the evening
and the dusk. in every one of the sunsets:
it starts in my arms and my teeth.
I feel how I did during fevers as a boy,
when I could touch things that were not there
with my body,
as if all of it was me, being
played with by drastic hands.
the earth slips. skies change purple.
without a thought
my body grasps
the immensity of how small,
the smallest bone in it, is.
and on my shadow on every rock
in the fading light, I read
the ABCs of my insignificance.
what small frame and small head does this?
bending like a torn black ribbon of rubber
there over the fossilized ammonite shells.
I am not fighting fit at all,
for any fight but a fighting, fighting
for grace for death,
which is to suffer, to suffer
cosmically. dear man,
unless you be a god or better,
then be as the sun.
go down beyond me,
arms turning to sand,
​gradually in the dark.

​


Cory Marshall Spangler is an American author and photographer.  His work has been published in AGITATE: Film Photo Broadsheet.  He publishes his own handmade periodicals of experimental documentary photography and narrative: Native Stranger Periodical.  He and his wife live sheltered in place in the West Texas desert.

                   rruilisboa CC



​eviction

she tried to kick them out--
flooded their homes,
burned the forests and wooden structures 
to the ground,
pulled up their foundations
and flung them into the sky
with fierce winds
and violent tornadoes.

she raised the waves up
from the ocean floors
and tried to wash the stain off.
she vomited up the plastic garbage
onto the shores,
sent them the swollen bellied whales and birds
who'd died from a diet of plastic
bags and fishing lines and bottles.

she shook her head
to try to shake them out of her hair.
she had even spewed forth
fiery lava from her lower depths
to burn away the blight
that now covered her. 

and still they were relentless.
and still they hurt her.
and the fires ate many of them
and the winds tossed many of them to their deaths
and the waters drowned many more,
but still they were relentless.

so she sent a plague
upon them
that they would breathe in
that would take the oldest first,
that would take the most vulnerable
already struggling to continue on.
she sent a virus.
she had read war of the worlds
and knew even the martians
could be felled by something
as small as a germ, a cold,
and she smiled to think 
that they had given her the very plan
that spelled their demise.





​a few of my things

there were things i held close to my heart,
things very few others also cherished
or even knew about then.

my nina simone album, the poems
of langston hughes, the painting in the met
by bastien-lepage,
the apple tree outside my bedroom window,
the swans who sailed by in summer
in the little stream
out back.

in my childhood bedroom, i placed 
some mexican jumping beans
with other treasures in a small wooden box
and placed the box inside the sliding door 
on one side of the headboard.
once, a kind grown-up expressed interest in the contents
of my hidden box — i must have confided to her--
and she looked at every item with my eyes, in joy.
i wish i could remember her name.

my friends from school (elementary,
high school, and college) 
are still in my heart, and i in theirs,
even though we live far from each other.
i am glad i still remember their names,
each one of them a bright coin 
in a crystal box tucked behind a small sliding door.

​

                  ​Colin Poellot CC



7,067 (New York, day 80) 


Over seven thousand people 
lost 
in the last 80 days. 

But only you died. 

The only death 
is the death 
of your voice 
snagged on my name as though 
it were a broken thing, the only end, 
the ends of your fingers bumping down 
my spine, counting the beads 
of my bones 
like an abacus, totting up 
their worth. 
That is the count 
that counted, 
that stop, 
what stops it all. Only you

the singleness of you 
in this spinning world 
the still point of reference, 
stilled. 

The gone smile. 
The never-again broken tooth. 
The lost, stupid, made-up songs 
that threw me to the floor, dying. 
You killed me. 

Here is the death 
that really happened— 
the only death, 
a single death, 
your death-- 

seven thousand sixty-seven times. 

​


Jennifer Maloney is the current president of Just Poets, Inc., a 15-year-old poetry organization based in Rochester, NY. Please find her work in Aaduna.org, Memoryhouse Magazine, Ghost City Review, Celebratingchange.blog, and several other places. Jennifer's sober birthday is March 21, often the first day of Spring, which she finds very appropriate. She has 22 years, one day at a time, and she remains grateful.

                      lauren rushing CC




remember the time I found my neighbor’s severed toe in our shared driveway?
​

it was, like, one year and change after my dad died
and one year and change before my mom’s boyfriend sexually abused me
the lawn mower sliced it off and spit it out
then the ambulance parked over it
as ambulances apparently do
so I didn’t find it until later that day
when I was walking down the drive to get the mail
and the tar had melted onto it a little and I brushed off the ants
because for some reason I thought it was still salvageable

but that day I was a little unsympathetic
because I remember thinking what a wimp when he screamed
from the ground about his toe having been chopped off
and the blood was seeping through the dish rag someone brought over
and he said he was feeling too weak to apply pressure
so his (now ex-)wife had to do it

this was a couple years before he called my mother in the middle of the night
when he saw me standing on the edge of my roof
this was a few years before I decided he was probably a pedophile
who had abused his step daughters (hence the divorce)
but back then I thought a lot of men were pedophiles…………and I was usually right.

​

​

I Think I have a Poor Sense of Humor


And I’m trying very hard
Not to let this laughter
Rattle my skeleton
Ha!   Ha! Ha!
I said to you once
“Laughing at myself is like laughing into a vacuum.”
Ha haaaaaa……………………………………………….

I heard a child in a fast food restaurant say
That he didn’t want to get more dead
And neither do I
When I look back on my life
I see that I started getting dead
Around the age of three
In the bathtub where
I can only see myself and someone else from above

When I look back on my life 
It is a pretty picture with the eyes scratched out
By several fingernails

By the way
This laughter is still clanging up and down my skeleton
Like a marble in a bathtub pipe
In the pipe of my throat
It sits somewhere in the seat of my chest
And swings its mallet, Jack-Torrance-style, against
The industrial-sized freezer of my heart

Laughter makes me get smushed by anvils
It makes me chase not one but two roadrunners
While anvils crush me along the way

I’m laughing as I write this poem and
It’s hilarious
It’s hilarious how poor my sense of humor is.
A man who knew me when I was a little kid almost died
In a motorcycle accident
And I laughed so hard my insides hurt
Trust me, you’d laugh too if you knew what he did to me
Because context is everything
I’m giggling like a kid in a church trying to be quiet
And failing miserably
I’m the kind of person who chuckles in their sleep
And wakes up with their memory wiped clean
I’m the kind of person who would drop
Absurdist and meaningless punchlines on a crowd of strangers and
Feel very bad about the ensuing silence
But I’m just trying to be happy here
I’m just trying to relieve some tension
And emotional baggage
I’m just trying to make my life as spa-forward as possible
These cucumbers on my eyes are beginning to
Feel more and more like coins
But I aim to relax as much as I can
If I try hard enough
Maybe I’ll die smiling.

​

                   ​Sergio CC



poem for hobbes 


i have always loved
to watch a white man hustle, all penny rich and
time poor, like she when he’s
coming home for supper and won’t be pleased
if she burns the grits, like my
mom pulling the laundry home on its string before
sundown, or
like their last shot at liberty
will puff away with the train
if they’re two minutes behind schedule 

but there’s no escaping coercion;
a fearful yes is still affirmation
a reluctant slave is a slave is a slave is a slave
named toby, rachel, named leah called sally, called
hobbes. 

who contests their autonomy these days?
the rushing white men.
the virtue
signalers?
the heroin addictions devouring the midwest like a crave case, or
is it the natural world imploding around them
the plummeting market
their women publishing exposés on their impotence,
on the coercion they enact on their others 

and where are they scrambling to get anyway? 

a slave is a slave is a slave is a slave
even the ones who call themselves master
i have always loved to watch a white man
hustle 

rush
like an ant to a mound
of pixy dust spilt at the feet of a pitiless child
rush
​like an ant to its slaughter

​

                       lillie kate CC



innocence 

and in this house 
i was sexually assaulted
for the first time 
but i didn’t know 
how to tell my parents
so the boy continued
to come over 
to play (with me)

and in this house
my mom got cancer 
then got depressed
then tried to kill herself 
but i didn’t know
how to be there for her
so i shut myself up
in my room to escape

and in this house 
i heard a splash at night
but i didn’t know
what it was
so when i found his body 
facedown in the pool 
bloated and purple
i threw up 

and in this house 
i realized that i had lost
my innocence 
but i didn’t know 
or want to believe it
so i told myself to hold on
to my childhood 
for just a little longer 

​

                     Elo Vazquez CC



Second Chances


I want to knit swatches of 
Egyptian cotton, wrap your 
scars in shades of sky; fill the 
furrow of your brow with sheer 
layers of gloss from kisses.
                Over years.
Peace made through surrender, still
loss. Holes may close as well as
fill. Then what space is left? 
                Things unloosed:
dulcet rifts or discordant 
riffs, bedrock. 
If salt water cured ailments
of memory I would weep
over cup, offer it as
though from Lourdes with prayers for
comfort. This is what they mean
                 by second chances;
To put the blood back 
                  in the stone.

​



A Few of My Favorite Lost Things


Hard to recall bits of beauty that scatter,
and hide from the wind made from the rush
to move on. Tough to even know bits of glitter
from light, although I’m not sure it matters.

Wrapped in missing I find too much gone in
folds that double and triple about my shoulders –
a prayer shawl, a shroud, a superhero cape. 
My power is to smile

while I remember:
-the scent sweet of ginger-sweat and nicotine
soaked in a forehead I want lips upon, because 
it’s home and ought to have been enough. 

-a name of staccato syllables rich in consonants that blend 
sexy in print, all the lines and curves dancing side-by-side
-a wink from across a room -landscapes of profiles
-a rich voice that sounds of music, whether in speech or song.

Such things are to die or live for. Or to scatter back 
on the breeze. Let them hide within slivers of tree bark, 
under the shadows of dreams, behind the next man who smiles 
for me, or let them evaporate to the clouds then rain down.





Unbearable Lightness


                                                                                          “Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must 
                                                                                                                    expect someday to suffer vertigo.”
                                                                                                                                                            Milan Kundera
                                                                                                                   The Unbearable Lightness of Being


Tethered to nothing, we inhale deep enough to ache in hopes
that the weight of air will anchor us. When that fails, for ballast 

we conjure memories of lost teddy bears, chipped teeth, the one
that got away, and what we wanted to be when we grew up.

We cling to the heft of agenda books and plans - fragility
that crumbles easily and drifts off as dust. 

The list of things we believe to hold us breaks our hearts when
they dissolve, like playing house.

There ought be a word for psychosomatic hope. The air
is full of things blown away from us -- receipts of appliances we

wanted to return, trash from the car floor, diplomas never 
hung on walls, romance, hobbies we wanted to be our lives.

We anchor ourselves in burdens, lost causes, anything in shadows
of love, to keep from floating away, hearts and stomachs empty.

​

​
Kristin Kowalski Ferragut has been a featured poet at local readings including Words Out Loud at Glen Echo, Evil Grin in Annapolis, DiVerse Gaithersburg Poetry, and Third Thursday Poetry Reading in Takoma Park. Kristin participates in local poetry and prose writing workshops and open mics, in addition to reading, hiking, teaching, playing guitar, and enjoying time with her children. Her work has appeared in Beltway Quarterly, Nightingale and Sparrow, Bourgeon, and Mojave He[Art] Review among others.