Timo Newton-Syms CC




​    I recently watched a heartbreaking film called "Her Name Was Jo." It centers around a 10 year old girl who lives with her step father, too far gone into the throes of addiction to care for her. Her birth mother has died and she sleeps at night with her arms wrapped around her mom's sweater. By day, while other children are at school, she survives by catching her own fish and scrapping metal. Within the first 15 minutes of the film (by which time one has hardly caught one's breath) her step dad overdoses and she's forced to flee when police arrive, out on the road, accompanied by her 10 year old friend, in search of her birth father.

    Throughout the film, one is almost convinced one is watching a person who has lived sixty years in 10, and any child who has known trauma and environments of addiction recognizes the imposing weight of what feels, to a child, like the whole damn mean and angry world clawing right through one's chest. But what did me in is a scene toward the end, when the man she's tracked down, after a brutalizing travel across the country, turns out not to be her father. Jo, and the friend she's travelled with, are standing outside an orphanage in L.A. that Jo is going to be staying in, and her friend tells her: "You may not have a home, but you can be a home." That line just about wrecked me. 

    Jo, who has seen and suffered far too much already in her short life, steps into her strange new world and sees a little five year old boy sitting all alone in the common room, weeping uncontrollably, with his head in his hands. She walks up to him, and she puts her arms around him. And so the film ends, and a life begins, one hopes.

    "You may not have a home, but you can be a home."

    Feels very pertinent to what we're doing here. To what I'm doing here. We assemble, us once-children of the impossible country, our families along the way. We see suffering and we extend ourselves. We don't know what will fix it (probably nothing ever will) but we do know that a hand on a shoulder, when the world as we know it so far is breaking apart inside us, can catch us before we fall into total oblivion. Can be just enough to keep us on our feet. As a late dear friend of mine once told me as we talked through a rough night on the phone: "It helps just to talk like this." I hadn't really known what to say, he was in so much pain, and I had a foreboding sense that too much had already gone too wrong for him for things to turn around. What use was I in all that pain, I thought to myself. And then he tells me, just doing this thing right here helps.

    I can tell you that art has been in my life such a presence as this. Reading a line in a Jorie Graham poem once in my early 20's when I was deeply suicidal: "Are you sure you want to kill yourself / do you not / maybe / just want to sleep it off again / this time?" was such a palpable presence that I can tell you it actually saved my life. So yes, I do believe unreservedly that what we do with our words matters to someone out there more than we can possibly know. 

    "We may not have a home, but we can be a home."

    It has often been noted that unhoused people are often the most generous when they see someone else in need (seeing a child sleeping on the sidewalk without a coat, they give them their own, in the dead of winter.) Something there is in our suffering that cannot not extend itself towards it. Not always. We can become the things done to us all too easily. Or we can choose the other path, the pain-path, where nothing in us ever totally mends but for the reaching we do every day towards the deep abiding good in us and in each other. 

    While not all of the work we carry here centers around such total soul-shatter as far too many of us have known in our lives, (being a part of the rich tapestry of the human experience, it includes of necessity also such things as joy, love, laughter, music, friendship, good meals, long walks in deep woods,) much of it is work done in the darker regions of our lives. As an editor (not the word I would choose for what I am doing here, I prefer witness, listener, friend) this work is also my work. I have spent the better part of my life trying to get whole with pen and paper. I've tried other methods also, one's that almost unmade me, and then softened me, brought me here, to you and you and you. 

    "We may not have had a home then, but we can be a home now." 

    Much in our lives is not of our own choosing, but there are moments where the effort we make to undarken our path can become, through the years, a kind of intention towards the world. It's what I've always loved most about communes and activist movements: they might not be perfect, but they're trying towards something that I think the world wants very much to beat out of us: that we are nothing without each other, that what we have to offer, no one else can quite bring into the world in the same way as we can, and that that work extends to the whole world. And  most of all, that we can never care enough. 

    Leo Buscaglia was a well known psychologist in the 90's and an unreserved advocate of what he called "The Politics of Love." I spent many a night as a high schooler listening to a lecture tape of his by the same name while my parents yelled and screamed and broke dishes all through the night, many times until the cops were called. His passionate pleas to soften, to love each other more, to be warriors of kindness in a world that's prime motive seemed to be to convince us that we were nothing but damaged and damaging beings, spoke deeply to me. Something in teenage me refused to believe the world. Something in me still. I can think of no better way to end what I am trying to say than by just quoting him on this:

     “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.”

    Friends, we give to you our small act of caring. It's but a drop in a big sea of confusion, pain, and uncertainty. But a little bit of caring goes such a long way. Thank you for visiting us as this new season rolls in. Extend your hands, your ears, your hearts, your coats as you are able to. I can tell you it makes a real difference. Just talking, like this. 

Warmly,
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic
​

     Danielle Henry CC




To the Younger Self


In the cold night sky of the mind I find you 
looking: Who is going to stop him? Eventually
you thought it would have to be a man. I can 
tell you now: no one ever did. You clambered

through each aperture you found. Discovered
who you are on your own. Got a dog who’d kill 
for you. But no one saved your life, not even 
you. Keep looking, and you will find sonatas 

that electrify the roots of your hair. A sun dog 
to sparkle at noon, shy ephemerals of spring,
and a handful of humans steeped in homemade
brews of kindness to walk with as you grow 

into your own brilliant workshop where 
you will craft your very own armor and tea. 





The Therapist Thinks I’m Pretty


I held myself together fairly well in the drab 

health department room warmed by posters 

and plants. Business-like, she asked when I 

remembered a significant shift in mood. 

Twelve years before: Thirteen. Eyes on her 

clipboard: Did anything unusual happen then? 

I disclosed an assault. Her pen froze, her eyes met

mine. After four sessions she gave her first opinion: 

I think you’ll have to take responsibility for having 

been pretty.  How to explain I’d never been pretty, 

didn’t know how to be? At puberty, feet calloused 

from walking the pasture, I’d call the cows, check 

the slatted bridge I had to cross for the copperhead 

who sunned himself there, throw dirt clods until he 

muscled himself beneath the slats where I imagined 

him waiting, mouth open, each time I walked across. 

I can almost hear her ask me: Why didn’t you wear shoes? 


​


Spring Break, 1984


I open my eyes to the hungry 

cat, the quiet of a neighborhood 

once everyone’s at work. My hair 

sticky because I’d thrown up 

in my sleep, vintage housedress 

twisted at my waist. I shower. 

Coffee, cigarettes. More 

coffee. Noon: I’m stumbling 

through tall grass by Highway 

54 again, my habit for the week, 

the convenience store clerk kind 

enough not to meet my eyes.



​

Ann Long lives in Warren County, Virginia, where the Blue Ridge mountains meet the Shenandoah River. They grew up in North Carolina and have worked as a labor/community organizer and grant writer. They recently completed their first poetry collection via the mentorship program at The Loft Literary Arts Center in Minneapolis, MN. 
​

     Dane CC


​

Tweezing the Wood Tick

I can separate like oil and water
the body daddy takes apart with his eyes sometimes
is a stringy cut of steak
Walmart New York strip
I push my voice out
when I ask to go to Doctor Vickie instead 
mommy doesn’t even hear
but that’s not me that’s asking
you understand
I can separate spoiled flesh from 
my warm and scarlet soul
purple pansy kitten
roses velvet grand old oaks
gray horse nuzzling my neck
feather-light and it sparkles!
I can separate 
mommy’s worried frown
daddy's scowling breath is hot on someone else’s hip
the brand new pubes aren’t mine
that he is seeing
harsh light on the bed
polka dot panties down around the knees
daddy tweezes the wood tick
from someone else’s secret place
they play operation and 
I separate
I watch them from the ceiling
pale rose cotton puffs
Lucky Charms in milk
sly Arctic fox I am
invisible apart
a free creature fluttering
through virgin snow

​


Sophie Farthing (she/her) is an emerging queer writer living in South Carolina. Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in outlets such as Beyond Queer Words, Impostor Journal, orangepeel Magazine, and Querencia Press.

     liebeslakritze CC




Hemophilia


There is an alternate painting of Venus that bleeds in the way little girls leak.


I stood in the Met watching her naked body. Spread in the white room, grayed fathers eased beside me, their callous knuckles soft along sloped shoulders of even softer daughters. 


We turn to the ruptured goddess hung, sweet with swan skin and open at the stomach. A birth of a woman knowing no cocooning shell or divine cloth to blanket the bareness. Red by her water, 


Vultures pry battered rabbit meat, staining her pearled, provoked body in a bloody wash—and I thought, the torn carcasses of woodland animals are of her, and she is of them, and they 


Remind me of the twelve-year-old shuffling, still in her mother’s clothes. When we are coated in purity, of protected things—quiet in the ugly natural order. I wanted to make her strong, tell 


Her who would take it all. Of the eager men dragging. Of the rooms of splotched politicians thieving our blessings. Of my own father, who said the


Overturning of Roe V. Wade is what this country needs. How to stare into a wounded thing of the past and forever. 


You will never love me as I have loved myself.

​



For My Mother


It is not in my nature now to sleep belly-up 
nuzzled by the warmth of your legs, times
when dark bedrooms, their black palettes 
whirling, tweaked my brain to forge horror
and you, lay reading books of young girls 
crossing kingdoms, snow-horned beasts
by their side—do I remind you 
of the frayed patients assigned to your cases,
troubled social work in the city, as you tread
into my twenty-year-old bed 
touching my back, now
laying on piles of silent I love yous, now
I am sorry your hands have felt more of me
than mine of you.

​



Candy
​

That night we drove to the only parking lot in Connecticut with blue lights, a Wholefoods had ordered the wrong bulbs, spreading iridescence over their concrete. A girl in my front seat huddles, her head shaved for the first time, murmuring I don’t feel pretty. She had been the type of beautiful to keep a town excited. Buzzed off her hair in our college dorm room, sticking safety pins through her nose. In the cool fluoride blue I watched her remind me. Tell me of the drugs she could buy walking in each direction. Tell me what she’d like. Tell me of the men on the streets. The patterns of a person that trace onto people. The moment an uncle overstepped. Girlfriends of the past. What a young boy said in AA. I’d like to remember us bedroom dancing to Le Tigre, maybe. Watching her learn to move her body to music, the base of instincts, clean. The blue headscarf draping to her waist the first day of school, thinking, who wears that? But I remember us, here. Eating each other.



​
Born and raised in New York, Charlotte Ungar is currently an undergraduate English major concentrating in creative writing at the University of Connecticut.

     Heath Cajandig CC




Triangulation


Three of anything is a signal
twice a coincidence and so
the stolen girl ravels the pink thread
into three threads, barely a whisper
on the wooded path where we are searching.
The girl isn’t stolen but lost, Gretel’s
shadow sister, she’s the one who’d never
push an old woman into fire.
She’d offer her own finger, her longest toe,
or peel the thickest muscle from her chest so that 
should she live, she’ll walk the world with heart 
unguarded, a bony crate of tenderness.
So that’s two sisters and a witch.
They say there’s a brother, plumping up 
for the oven. Or hiding his feathered arm, 
to save her from burning. If you can believe that. 
Men write their own stories. 
Bring your bones closer and I’ll teach you how
to muffle a cry for help by crying louder. How
to put out fires, by which I mean stories.

​



Seine


When she went, I unheard the world
nodded at mouths and their kindnesses
dulled by six feet of water and its silence
until gasping, I surface, 
and sound, like a gunshot of sorrow, came back. 

Let me never swim that water again.

Then came the season of coughing, of calling out bodies. 
I was that glad she was long ago among the missing,
that he, in his grief, followed soon after.

Across the shallow estuary I wade 
with my four siblings, the row of us like searchers
seining water for a child 
whose body will not be found. 
This is a memory of what didn’t happen--

a scrap of dream. How in dreaming
you’re always the dream’s child.
The dream child wandering 
from the house we let go too easily, 
room after room where I listen 
and cannot call out.

​



Janet McAdams is a writer, editor, and translator. Her first book, The Island of Lost Luggage, received an American Book Award. Her other poetry collections include Feral, the chapbook Seven Boxes for the Country After, and Buffalo in Six Directions / Búfalo en seis direciones, a bilingual edition of her new and selected poems, recently published in Mexico City and Patagonia. She lives in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.
​

    Dane CC




Ungodly Hour


Before we died,
I let candles burn 
all night, til wax
drippings pooled like
bloodspill on the floor.
I held a handful 
of eyelashes—all 
my wishes—and
threw them like
seeds over a fallow 
field. I thought of the 
way water looks
on dragonfly wings--
like icicles
melting under
January half-suns. 
We lapped up the 
sound of things,
swallowed our choler, 
ate apples, and sang
songs: we used our
throats. Before we died,
we dove into candle
flame, curled our
bodies together
tighter than a
butterfly’s tongue, 
and let light slip 
stealthy between
the spiral.





                                                                                                     The Brain and the Liver
                                                                                                         after Emily Dickinson


                                                            I placed my Brain in a jar of embalming fluid, held it up to the
                                                            light—it glimmered and sparked like ash falling from a cigarette in
                                                            the darkness. Burned orange and impermanent and real as tulip
                                                            petals in spring. Round and round it spun, like a glowing carousel,
                                                            or two people, kissing. 


                                                            The only time I ever craved liver, a woman once said to me, was
                                                             when I was pregnant with my first child. She was a woman with
                                                             two livers inside of her, yearning after livertaste. And why is it, that
                                                             we so desire to consume what already resides within us?


                                                             I took out a hot butter knife, dipped it in the jar, and slathered my
                                                             toast with Brain.


                                                              Because We love the Wound, Dickinson writes.


                                                              I placed my Liver in front of a telescope—and hoped to see
                                                              another planet. Instead, I found only stars that looked like
​                                                              pomegranate pearls, little strangers, bloody and wet and sweet. 


                                                              I fell asleep looking at liversky—I was so hungry.


                                                              The wind wrestled 
                                                              with horses running through 
                                                              prairie grass. Made a sound 
                                                              speaking lonesome, telling me 
                                                              to place the firmament 
                                                              on my tongue, and swallow.

​
​
​

Maren Loveland is from Atlanta, Georgia. She is currently a PhD candidate in English at Vanderbilt University studying the politics and aesthetics of water.

    Adrian Scottow CC




no

for the first time in my life, i told you no. the word fell out of my mouth. heavy, startling & like an anchor thrown into rough seas. i didn’t recognize my own voice. then the words you aren’t the daughter i wanted noosed around my neck. choke. i fell asleep to the echo as it bounced off my walls all night. you aren’t the daughter i wanted. & suddenly, i was done with desire. it’s needy grip ruining everything i was. the next night, i cried myself into countless liquor bottles. i kissed a boy to feel something. i traded glances with strangers just to see myself through another’s eyes. was i truly disgusting? i thought so. my legs became only blood as i fell onto the walls, the couch, the floor. i scraped my knee & felt nothing. i giggled my way onto the darkened sidewalk. i watched the cars dance down the street. & i wanted to dance too so i looked to the boy walking me home & declared that i was going to kill myself. what else is there to do when your entire being is denied by its first home. so, my legs ran before my mind could blink. & before the pavement, i felt my wrist being pulled back to the safety of the curb. the boy looked at me like i was so fucking fragile & i wanted to be. then he carried me home as my tears left a trail from that spot. the next morning, i followed my tears back. the dirt flinched when i sat down & all the cars ran away from me.





nine years later 

now, he lives in the town i was born in, halfway across the country from where 
he turned his body into a whip. am i a monster for looking at the
memories & letting forgiveness boil out of the sides of my mouth? 

if i close my eyes, i swear i can still feel the cloth of his couch grazing my skin. 
can still envision a map of his childhood home, every cupboard, every utensil & drawer. 
still remember how to reverse out of his driveway to avoid hitting my bumper on the concrete.

what a shitty poet i must be, dancing around the truth like a ballerina prepping for the final act.
let me say it straight, my high school sweetheart raped me the day before he left me. 
love sick lunatic. i am fucking infected. it’s all playing out again. 

the cloth of his couch was his accomplice, strapped me down equally as his hands. 
upstairs, his mother was in the kitchen putting the dishes away. 
she couldn’t hear the crime scene in the basement over the clatter of forks & knives. 

the sahara desert was once completely underwater.  i too, beg my atoms to dry in the sun 
& breathe air again. yet still my body is a possessed museum to when our love was good. 
the poem he wrote about me, how i would reach from the passenger side to fix his glasses,

when he said he loved me, i felt infinite.            i still feel infinite. still. still. i laid there so still.





curse of curves
after kathleen sheeder bonanno

you could say i was plagued by A-cups. 
double zero jeans, extra small everything. 
all the girls in seventh grade paraded their 
new bodies around like curves equaled currency. 
like all we could ever aspire to be were
victoria’s secret angels & playboy bunnies.

with foam in my mouth, i envied them. 
studied them. prayed for at least B-cups. 
looked in every mirror longingly
as i cradled my breasts in my hands. 
i wanted to be the reason boys looked twice. 
wanted to know what it felt like to be touched -

until i was touched & touched & touched. 
now, i want to beckon my old body back.
to hide in the thinness i once crucified. 
before, sexual assault wasn’t a word in my
vocabulary. now, it is a memory that 
comes to me in the thickness of midnight.

it is why i flinch at the gynecologist. 
the reason him & i do not speak anymore. 
the revolting gift of betrayal that licks my
earlobe & whispers, this is all you are now. 
this is all you are allowed to write about.
let me consume you, i want to eat you whole. 





child, 
after rachel mckibbens

child, you were carved from my mistakes, baptized in my love
& brought to life by the worried arms that i cradle you with.             forgive me. 

                                                            i have to admit it, when i think of you 
                                     i cannot deny the fear that hides in the flesh you will lay in.
                                   i do not want to make the mistakes of the mothers before me. 
                                                 but, what if i don’t beckon to your cries in time?
                what if you reach for me & i am not close enough to hear your hushed breaths? 

child, you have always been my beginning & ending. when i was birthed, 
you were the smallest particle in me.
& when i wanted to end my life, you weren’t a thought in my mind.                 forgive me. 

                                         one day, i will take you to the sidewalk that bruised my 
                                     shins instead of my entire body. we will sit on the concrete 
                                 & i will explain to you what it was like to once not see a future. 
                                        & how i fought with bloody fists to be here in this skin. 
                                                i will look at you & say i am so happy i am alive.
                                                          my pulse will sing with every syllable.

child, i was flawed by nurture. i have made wrong decisions 
& trusted everyone but myself. i come to you now, on my knees
waiting to be salvaged by your laugh.                forgive me. 

                                                          i have waited for you since i was small. 
                              there were nights when my only lighthouse was the thought of you. 
                              there were moments when i whispered to the emptiness of my room
                                                                                 that i will be better. 
                                                     & haunting thoughts of but, what if you’re not? 

:::

let the hurt roll in like fog, masking me away from 
reality if it brings me to you. 
 
let the loneliness take me hostage again & again 
if it brings me to you. 

let the rolling hills of my mood sweep me into incredible highs
& suffocating lows if it brings me to you.

let the all the wrong words slip from my tongue 
if it brings me to you.

but most importantly, let my maker brand me with 
her fire if it brings me to you. 

:::

child, i am all that is left.            forgive me.

​



Aly Acevedo is a Kansas City-based poet. She has been previously published by Glass Kite Anthology, ink & marrow and The World Poetry Movement. When she is not writing she is playing with her cats, creating through photography/videography, or crafting the perfect playlist. Aly is currently working on her first manuscript.
​

     Danielle Henry CC




Wings

A thin, translucent paper sheet separates 
my mother from metal and plastic, that cold 
blue-grey bed, color of a cerulean warbler. It becomes
a nest, built from bits of trees, other mothers. All the life
it held. They don’t tell us about the body,
how it dies, slowly, unsatisfyingly: the trailing off 
of words, everything a comma. 

This is not to say the sentence doesn’t end.

They don’t tell us it’s disgusting: blood, vomit,
the skin piss-yellow. Maybe it eases the ending,
like silence breeds silence. We hold her rancid breath 
for seven days. I sing to her. She tells me to stop.
I try birdsongs next: nightingale, blackbird, green
finch. Open the window, Anna. Painted shut,
the sky, gray as ever out there.

This is not to say the light won’t get in.

I keep a few strands of her hair
in a plastic baggie by my pillow. I monitor
my lover’s stomach while he sleeps, obsessing 
over the rise and fall of life. It does rise;
it does fall. They don’t tell us about relief, only 
guilt and jaws clenched. They don’t tell us 
how to become flight. But, we do. We do. 

This is to say I will.

Just as we are made full in bellies, warm,
we will become ourselves again, after this sentence
ends, the next will begin, and it will run
and run and run, until we are tired, until the egg
grows feathers, becomes lungs, outlives death.
That is my joy. This is my flight.
My mother; my wings.





Consolidation

Crawling outside myself, contracting 
my tymbal, singing that cicada chirp, 
I sprawled out, fell 
                                      through a crack 
between cobble            stones, down
to the basement where you still lived, 
spray painting the beaten door. 
Was I sister or mother to you? Child?

Protection wears many faces. Dreams
reinforce memory. My therapist says 
anger is necessary. You would not 
have done that to a child. Remember.

But, I have only two hands. Each morning,
I set anger down to pick up grief,
heavy and palatable. Longing for 
what is lost, people get that, but to stop 
dreaming, stop falling through dampness 
and instead emerge with new skin and 
a new, happy, forgetful life… No,
there are many secrets to be kept
because the child in me wants to love you.

But, I only have two hands. They used to dig
furiously under that basement in my mind,
hoping that you did nothing wrong,
that it was a song by someone else.
I used to wonder if the search itself
could save me, who I’d been writing towards,
where it had all gone. But back then, 
all I knew was to defend you
when I just needed to forgive you.





400-Meter Dash

running so fast I think she’s gonna chip the asphalt
my sister is this close
to God in summer’s belly

Kick it, Audy!

sweating in sync, mom running alongside the track
she used to be a sprinter
family of runners, that’s the poem
she’s shouting,

Kick it, Audy!

i learned it, too, ten years old
anything mom held in her mouth
i wanted to taste

Kick it, Audy!

something bright and surprising, like 
biting into an orange slice
our screaming white, stringy, stuck in our teeth
nothing worse than being 16 and too loved

KICK IT, AUDY!

i used to devour sleep, wet and thick
trying to regurgitate the morning we all piled into bed 
after Jimmy died
the three of us untied and re-tied at our palms
then just the two, a hand each with mom 
on the other side

i wish i could marry grief
would make an awful lover, but i could claim daddy issues

Try not to make jokes tonight, Anna.

mom said that after Aud threw a plastic pumpkin 
at my head on thanksgiving
it was funny then but it’s less funny here
where i know her better

a mother herself now, but wasn’t she always?
her girl named after mom and Jimmy, after death
but in protest because my sister, she’s a runner
before she carried Isla, she knew my weight
bulletproof baby carrier on her tummy
keeping secrets was her superpower
what a sad thing to say of a child

i still see that girl, those quick, thin legs of hers
just behind the eyes, she is small
frightened, still keeled over before the race
i put a hand on her back, her ribs like plexiglass
bending with her heavy breaths
my fingers say, Thank you, and I’m sorry

before there was me, an open door
mother and daughter, both kids
how could they have known better?
how could i have saved them?

her polyester uniform of blue and yellow
that deep, dense gold
it remembers my palms 
and i hope it sees me
hears me

KICK IT, AUDY!!!!!




Anna Leonard is a poet and musician currently based in Richmond, VA. Her poems can be found in Emerge Literary Journal, Eunoia Review, The Rising Phoenix Review, and Ghost City Press. Her music can be found on all streaming platforms, but she shares music and poetry more casually on Instagram: @annale0nard

        liebeslakritze CC





the song stuck in my head
​
what i’m singing today:                                 in the days     before radio

how did people get songs stuck     in their heads?                             and i pass the joint 

to my friend                         who exhales     a story           of ancient Greece     

before the old tales          were nailed down         words crucified        

to the page         great epics           sung      to unknown tunes

the Iliad                hummed to oneself         over the washing

the Odyssey        crooned to the heartbeat              of ships’ oars     

that’s how           they made it all     this way            those stories                        borne

on the tide of song                                                            (as i spit tangerine seeds 

into the ashtray)                as the heroes        made landfall

from the horizon               no           built the horizon themselves 

that word            horizon                  stuck in my head              all week

through the window         on the bus to work          city roaring past

i can’t see it any more       no          horizon                   just the great gray 

stagger of skyscrapers                    and wanting        fills me up             so human 

it hurts                    when the bus                   rattles past 

the school             the fire station                 the parking garage

but in the afternoon         when i do it all again      backwards

i sing to myself                    the closeness of home                  the friends 

still smoking          on the porch still              sunlit    still hope

not yet drained                  from the day                        and i imagine myself  

a child                       long ago            some ancient       seaside town

a wind clear           as prophecy    punctuated           with gulls            and glory

and stories                          stuck in the net                   of my mind

ready                        to be pulled     into the future





Fire 

after the fire
the house felt
insubstantial,

no corner a match 
for that hunger. 
what stuck most

were the burning 
remains of books 
blown right down 

into the valley. but
we were lucky that year. 
no match yet set to pages

of bedrock. only
the misfortune
of the downwind. 

you come of age in smoke 
and you learn quick 
to breathe through it.

each inhale proof that the earth 
still wants you alive, never mind 
all the evidence to the contrary. 

I remember 
the burning words, 
how warm the page

struck my outstretched hand 
even after flight. 
how I caught its paper edges, careful 

as with a living thing. 
and read the words written 
and unwritten there.

​



Spectator


After Lehua M. Taitano


oh          these boneheads                            these boneheads 


                                               on the couch      we eat honey yogurt       with almond granola


cat wailing          in the driveway                owl in the eaves                fugitive cricket in the kitchen


                                to who to listen                 to who                   to listen?


have you been watching the polls?                                            what strain of privilege makes that bullshit


                                                                                                                                                   go away?


it’s pointless       you tell me           revelation stale                             in your mouth


               we’re voiceless                    I don’t say    


                                  I think it’s good practice                                           to shut up sometimes        


                                                are you prepared 


                                                                 for the falling                                  apart?                     mentally?    


                                                                                                                                                                physically?


the boneheads are so everywhere           their bone heads clunk together


                 i hear a train       not the one that               mouthless          swallowed up my ancestors    


                                                  whistling              like there’s no blood                                    on its tracks


i step on a nail                    i get a tetanus shot                          fuck the system: doctors’ orders    


                                                                                                                                                                    given without a mouth


can i make a weapon      from the iron        in my blood?     something to consider


                I get a spam call                with my hometown area code        


                                                                                                                    without a mouth               i answer


i’ve finished the yogurt                  you’ve reposted the hospital       bombed                into funeral home


              i step outside                        to catch my breath            owl                       in a net                   cat


in a trap             i exhale                     my skull               rolling                      down the road                  laughing


                                                                                                                                                                       without a mouth

​
​


Esmé Kaplan-Kinsey is a California transplant studying creative writing in Portland, Oregon. Their work appears or is forthcoming in publications such as Beaver Magazine, Anthropocene Poetry, Gone Lawn, and Hooghly Review, and has been recognized by the National YoungArts Foundation and the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards. They are a mediocre guitarist, an awe-inspiring procrastinator, and a truly terrible swimmer.

      Michael Nugent CC




Inheritance

I’m on my tip-toes, pulling my brothers’ curtains closed. 
Wrench my blinds open to see the driveway. Beyond my windowsill’s 
dead dynasty of flies, I watch my parents’ bodies yanked 
by invisible strings. Spitting yells punctuated by sun. Crept my window 
open like they could hear me from their wasp nest,

but Dad is already in the car. And Mom is hung 
like a crooked family portrait on the handle, refusing to let go.
Like her father and grandfather, she wanted an early exit.
I’m skipping stairs. My bare feet hobble across the summer stove, 
loose rocks stuck into me. And Mom, roadkill, 

glistening ruby on melting tar. Perfume of Coors Light 
and hairspray tinged iron-sweet. I think, just for a second, 
if I escape inside nothing will have happened. 
But instead I push her body over to find a child crying. 
That’s when I become mother.

I’m too afraid to ask the question. 
She slices through her plan, her failed suicide attempt caught and foiled.
Dad absconded. My trembling hands above first aid kit,
I hear the noose of the bathroom door close, and the gasp of its lock.
I think that’s when the tears came. 

I’m beating the door raw and my phone started ringing 
and I couldn’t answer. Or maybe I did 
and it was an apology. My little brothers pacing 
the staircase, sirens shrieking.  
Please, please, healing is my inheritance.

​



Girl-halved

I loved her. Limp brown hair. Crooked nose. Snuck out to poetry 
slams & suddenly it was more than zipper-busted backpacks piled 

in the backseat. Subaru shipwrecked. Stranded. Watched breath cloud 
cold. Lamplit street. She sat center stage. Laid out repressed memories 

of a child. Fogged & unsure – but it was a man & he was a villain. 
Is that too cliche? My barren bedroom. Futon mattress on musty carpet.
 
Stray cat at eighteen. My mother tried her hand at dying. Bottles & blade 
at father’s gravestone. Didn’t know if I was supposed to leave 

the blood stains or what? But this wasn’t about me. I unfolded into 
what a mother must be – small, sad, false. Our girlhood was inventoried 

hysteria. Smoked out a soda can then. Cut my thumb on the aluminum. 
She licked it clean. Weed from her older brother caught lying 

about his age to girls. Prison, she told him. You’ll go to prison.
When my girlfriend told me she’d found god. (praise the lord! straight again! 

could no longer love me! & it was a miracle!) We talked for three days 
straight until saliva crusted the mouth. She took my head in her lap. 

Dried those tear ducts with a pink hairdryer held to the face. 
She will never love you like I do, she’d say. 

I hate it here too, she’d say. After first-boyfriend helped her curate a gift 
of herself. She sat me down on a flannel-sheeted bed. Held my hands 

in hers. Demanded I read her mind. I told her I couldn’t. She began crying 
I’ll let you remember her as nothing-kingdom as long as you trace the scars 

that made me half woman half windchime. Between us there's a thread 
pulled taut. Remember? She flattened against me that fragmented night. 

It smelt of river water. She performed pleasure like a forever-splinter.
So cruel, I hate her for it.




​McKenna Ashlyn (she/they) is a poet from Boise, Idaho currently residing in Chicago, Illinois. She received her BFA in Creative Writing at Boise State University. They have been published in The Afterpast Review, Free the Verse, Down in the Dirt Magazine, among others. You can find them @mckenna.ashlyn on Instagram.
​