​Cover art: "We All Come From Places That Are Hard To Talk About" by James Diaz




Editor's Remarks:

James Diaz



Poetry:

Pablo Otavalo
Kaitlin Neal
Samantha Hund
Inuya D'Vorah Schultz
Patricia Nellene Deal
B. Allegrini
Rick Christiansen
Michael Randolph Martin
Dennis Hinrichsen
Rebecca Aronson
Linda Parsons
Jennifer Maloney
Sarah Jane Gilliam
Terry Rae Hall
Jason Davidson
Dorotea Ceperic
Jennifer Badot
David Pitcher 
Jennifer Small
Meg Taylor
Max Heinegg
Rhonda Melanson
Suzanne Edison
Lana Hechtman Ayers
Tricia Marcella Cimera
Jessica Ballen
Bree Bailey 
Tara Ballard
Nora Rawn
Jill Cox
Sarah Thompson
Jean Voneman Mikhail
Michelle Holland
Chad Rutter
Roxanne Noor
Zachary C. Guerra 



Essays:

DJ Thorndale
Richard J. Goff
Madelyn May
Karen Sosnoski
Viola Lee
Kathy Curto
Sam Holmes
Bruce Bromley
Scott Bethay
Hillary Transue Moser



Fiction:

Chandler Gates
Steve Saulsbury



Artwork/Photography:

Ashley S. Schaaf
Katt
Field Report Photo
Julie McNeely-Kirwan
dang
Jennifer McKeen Rodrigues
Brian Padian



Review:

Nowhere I Have Ever Been by Lisa Cerbone

James Diaz



​Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Donnchadh H CC




      I've been carrying a lot of anger in me these days. The kind of anger that makes you bawl your eyes out. Makes your skin itch, your hearth throb. I'm angry at myself, I know. But it all gets externalized. It's a lot easier to see it when you can throw it out like a net over the world. But it's just me. It's just us. That kind of thing, you know it too, I imagine. Like Goldilocks, nothing inside us feels just right. Some of us really were left to it on our own too early, too long. And now nothing feels enough, or right. I got this huge emptiness in me, this craving for what can't but destroy. And it's  really hard to locate the light when you're busy snake-handling the dark. 

       Telling someone else about it is the only cure I know. Saying it out loud, all pride to the back. Picking up the phone instead of this or that. Trying to live right where my feet are at. It's so damn hard and so damn easy at the same time. I could complicate how to boil water. But beneath all of that anger and discomfort is a lot of grief. I struggle, every day, with not wanting to die. Of all the gifts of recovery I hear talked about in the rooms, the only one I want is the ability to get through a single day not wanting to leave the world too soon. I was talking with another addict recently and they told me "I call suicide my 'Big Relapse'". That so hit home with me. I used in many ways to avoid the final using. Because without the aid of something else, there it all just is. And I am left to deal with what I was never really taught how to deal with. But I have tools. They've been rusting on the shelf. But they are there. So where is my willingness? Sometimes you only come to it on your knees. Utterly defeated. I've entered so few doors without banging my head upon them first. 

         I remember someone saying that creative people have a hard time titrating sensory inputs. We take everything in. And the world gets so loud that it makes sense that we would just want to turn. the. volume. down. sometimes. And so many of us do that self-destructively. How do you take so much in and find softer ways to navigate the gulch? Not all of us have meetings to go to, or friends to turn to, or a therapist we can afford. Sometimes all we have is pen and paper. Putting it down helps. Again and again. What happened then. What happens now. 

        What happens now?

      It's easy to disappear. To convince yourself that you don't matter. That it's all been for nothing. But you do matter, and it is all for something. It's not what we're given, but what we do with what we've been given. Turning pain into a song, or a poem, a photograph. Mapping out the moods that swell inside us like dark crashing waves and being able to look at all that, and then back at ourselves, and say, hmm, maybe I am long for the world. Even with all this hurt and rage, key and cage, I can be a person among people, and I can tender the tide. Just one more human along for the wild ride.

        The world don't stop for none of us. Pain is pain. What happened happened. There is a choice to make. Art tells us as much. Every creative act involves a choice. A beginning, a middle, and an end. What life takes, it gives. If we've ears for it. That kinda song. I know what happens when certain things are taken from us. When our innocence is stolen, our joy crushed underfoot, our wonder and awe taken up by fear and the expectancy of bad stuff always happening in place of good stuff.

          I also don't know anything really. I know I'm human. I know I'm imperfect. I know I have a shot at this thing called life if I keep on doing the work. If I keep on sitting with the grief that rides just beneath the tides of anger and tend to it like a garden. 

         I'm a curious bastard, like Steve Earle Says. I wanna know why I'm still here after all that. I want to make it mean something. My life. This song. And I want to share it with others. I can't change what happened to me. But I can change what happens next. And knowing I'm not alone, (we're not alone) something works through something to reach us in our most unreachable places. I guess they call it grace. I just call it holding on. To the pen and the paper. To the hands of fellow travelers. Walking the road because the road keeps on going and so must we all. Until the very end. Don't make it come too soon. There's room enough for you in the world. It won't be easy. So write that story a little bit harder if you have to. You have to. 

           Until next time, friends. Buckle up, hold on.

James Diaz
Editor-in-chief
Anti-Heroin Chic


​Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Nicolas Bffd CC




Before We Were The Land's


My brother says You can’t eat poetry

as his worn boot presses the shovel’s edge 

into the dry earth. He digs out the stump

of an American oak whose roots are broad 

but shallow. Look at the birds in the trees, 

how they sing without worry. My brother 

sighs: he knows they are songs of hunger.

The last stay last, and the dead stay dead. 

The buzz saw snarled and rattled in the yard

under a silent god. Tomorrow in chains,

sold for a mark on your hand of a Cross 

and still, show up to work. The shovel’s edge,

the dry earth. We drown in different seas,

restless. His worries pour out like water.





Scorched Earth, Illinois

The town once hummed, pneumatic
hammers beat the slag out of iron, chimneys
billowed like chain-smokers mid-shift, dreaming
of somewhere else, where the sun set
the other way around, where their asthmatic 
children could breathe. And those were
the halcyon days. Now it's empty parking lots, 

boarded strip malls, and the Stop-n-Shop
with that giant wooden bird the high school built 
to commemorate the bicentennial. So when 
a bear sanctuary opened up on what used to be
a pig farm, some thought maybe it'll draw 
'em in off the highway. And every few weeks 

the bears would escape, and soon be spotted 
by the dumpsters of the Waffle House. It startled
people at first, but they got used to that too. And 
the bears never seemed to wander far, they 
just milled around town, never even headed 
for the woods. They would knock down a few 
garbage cans and just wait to be brought back 
to their pens. As though whatever was once wild

in them was gone. There was talk of changing 
the varsity mascot to the Grizzlies, but when 
the Millers' son went missing, they all had
the same fear. How foolish they had been, 
to trust a good thing. Then they found the body

under an overpass. Painkillers, the sheriff said. 
And Mrs. Miller stopped going to church. And talk
started up again about closing the sanctuary. 
And they started locking up the dumpsters. And 
Mr. Miller bought a rifle, because he loved his son. 

​


Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry, Jet Fuel Review, Structo Magazine, No Tender Fences: An Anthology of Immigrant & First-Generation American Poetry, and other publications. We must find what we revere in each other.



Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Ari He CC




building a cantina in an off-ramp 

the rattlesnakes round our throats
dance 
to what would be 
moonlight on      the larch trees

you fly a kite of phoenix                  into the stars
firing up 
the aurora 
so the jumping shrews and prairie 
dogs
have new green to follow on the snow 

so the     chrome 
of the car 
cat eyes around 
us
something to       pull         toward
while our teeth turn soft 
in conversation 

I 
melt into the gray slush of early 
winter 
coming on to 
September with                 impatience 

your seats are    warm
so you find me a 
cold room in the dirt
to home                our confessions 
alongside the pasta sauce 

the broken brush is privy 
to fears only animals have the      guts       to have 
bear-scented from             the 
madroño berries in your pocket 
and bleeding blackberries 
in mine

they have fermented 
with the lint 
becoming             sour         wine 
we store it next to the pasta sauce 

hidden in the maracas of                  rattlesnakes 
are the ghosts of our grand/mothers
they         
unfurl at our feast 
and learn to         become 
a looser 
necklace

​

Kaitlin Neal is a queer poet based in Edmonton, Alberta. Their work explores their own experiences with identity, belonging, connection and mental illness. Kaitlin’s poetry has been featured in several magazines, including Shadow and Sax, Feral, and Rawhead, with more forthcoming. They are currently working on their first chapbook, scheduled for 2026 with Shadow and Sax Press. More of their work can be found on Instagram: @kaitlinnneal



​Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

Ari He CC





Queen Pincushion

it’s me, Queen Pincushion
take one, leave one

Martyr of the Liminal Pizza Joint Parking Lot
Archnemesis of the Desperate Weather Man

you might remember me
from my award-winning role 
as your feminine doormat
and apologetic muse

I’m back again for another round
my most intimate parts on display.





At Dusk

there is a pianist playing Rachmaninoff 
while the white-coats rush to elevators
and drawn faces haunt the corridor

there is a little girl twirling 
beneath the spray of a garden hose
in the city at dusk

there is burning smoke
carried south over the lake
to scorch my lungs

there is a poem here somewhere.
I’ve asked the sparrows
and I’ve asked the moon

but there is only the brittle shell of grace

hands reaching for hands. 
over and over again.





Indeterminate Future

we argued for twenty minutes
about the futility of 
art – and – poetry – and – song

you said;
everything Great is already written
the masterwork done

you persisted;
we are homeless
living in the ashes of Before.

maybe you’re right.

maybe in five, ten, fifteen years
we’ll only remember the ache in our bellies

but not how to feed it.

​

Samantha Hund writes unsettling fiction, and poetry with teeth. Her work appears in Expat Press, Crowstep Journal, and Bottlecap Press. All rumors of vampirism are unsubstantiated. Find her at www.samanthahund.com and @sm_hund on twitter and instagram.


Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

David Antis CC




In this Enclave 

July is still an ice storm away and we are all on animal                         in this enclave              
               where I stand before the threshold, smoking heavy.                            On either
side of the wrought iron Ponsonby manor signage are gargoyles. 

Wind and rain have smoothed their wrinkles    they are babies. But they are blind from
decades of huffing gasoline                                                       they can’t see who comes in,
who goes out, who creeps in, who stays. 

The cold is biting, and the highway traffic emits a red fume. I feel for the grotesques, 

                                                       what a hell it is, to spend eternity with a view of the A-15.
 
The janitor then emerges from the front entrance and     

he chucks brown water on an already slippery footpath

rushing water sounds like entropy

              everything the ice has been hiding is unearthed—​

I smell chlorine and mildew and I stop breathing
 
because when he sees me, he stares and it is too late to play dead. He looks like a
starved lion, the way he is, hunched over the mop bucket.
You are the light, his voice begins and is carried to me by stale winds, trapped and
circling in the courtyard. The janitor begins to stalk, treading lamely in grey slush
towards me.    

               (I am not the light, I’m just something with a pulse.)
 
I am the warmest thing in this enclave, where the radiators never turned on,

where hot water won’t run again until the geese return. But it’s only been a few nights
since they’ve flown – July is still an ice storm and a death away.
  
The janitor is wearing hiking boots. Heavy and waterlogged, they remind me of dead
birds, washed up on some secret shore. 
 

He says something when he approaches, first his voice is soft – so soft the sound falls
and, on the ground, I watch a crosshatch scrape grow red on the knee of his whisper:

 
                                                He tells me             

something about FOX news and America

                                                                                  He says to me we are just babes

                                                                                  in Jesus’ farmland of a palm

             okay, okay,                     and he is far too close to me

and his breath feels hot, stale and sweet

                           and the tone is                    too loud and / the tar teeth and / the smell of hair
oh, oh                                                                                                                                 god, why is the hair wet
                                            I am stuck in subzero bondage, no breathing,

I am scared of his coke bottle glasses and beaten moon eyes  

this hypoxic daze tells me that       if there is a fanatical bomb inside of me
                                                      his breath will cut the wrong wire / if I inhale him into the
wrong lung, I might soon find myself up there with the gargoyles, staring out at the A-15:

He tells me 
                                          something about transcendence

                                          He says to me there is mercy in the sky–

                                          Have you seen the Spring chicks drown?

                                          If you lick the blue horizon, life might

                                          keep you for a while–
 
Don’t breathe, I think             go blue go blue go blue –     

the way I go blue when the winds are strong, and I am

watching the crack in my bedroom wall

                                                                     stretch its bolt with every windstorm…
 
Go blue, go blue, go blue…

I peer over the janitor’s head – beyond the gargoyles with their backs to us I see the

oratory’s cross

a chimera for this enclave,

is it too late to play dead?

If I do, how long do I stay down?

Do I wait until the first thaw?

Do I wait until the weeds take over the court?


I won’t make it ‘til then


                                                                                                   July is still an ice storm and a death
                                                                                                   away.
 






N1 Visions – Brothers

surface in a lap pool
             teeth pockmarked &
             ragged & patterned green
             like cliff like oyster is this

what erosion looks like —​

             a spit-puddle, chlorine whirlpool
             licking the cheeks of a slack-jawed cave;
you tread that white water
             until they’re home safe, out of range
             from the hunger of the Rockies. 

Sounds like a storm growing,
             a truck coming up the gravel way,
             it’s coming for them, it’s coming
             for you, it’s gonna eat you all;
Too late for the language you need
to say,

please let them rest
they’re good boys, please
they’re good.

​
​

Inuya D’Vorah Schultz is a writer from Montreal/Tiohtià:ke.


Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

David Antis CC




​hook at the end of the line


it's all prayer, isn’t it?
standing on the banks of ourselves 

observing the water striders glide 
over the sunlit clouds

nearly obscuring the brilliance 
of our many selves 

swimming just beneath the surface-
perception our nourishment 

in this stream 
of endless revelation.

​




Her Wallet

                  medicare card
                  library card? 
                                   read books between each breath to mine when they were young
                                   read to them into high school 
                                   would read to them still, if they’d let me 
                                   i don’t recall mom going to the library 
                                                                                                    -i do recall her mentioning she didn’t enjoy reading to us
                  Citi Mastercard:
                  USAA member card: 
                                      drove to Asheville
                                      taught from the mountain until the morning they didn’t expect him to live to see the next
                                                      going through his desk: 
                                                                       found his father’s honorable discharge 
                                                                       never found dad’s honorable discharge
                                                                                         in the Army for only 2 years-he said mom didn’t want him in
                                                                                         Viet Nam 
                                                                        found fifty years of Father’s Day cards. 
                                                                        found a bill from Dr. Berkey stuck between letters from mom
                                                                                                       -years of counseling: 
                                                                                                                        individual
                                                                                                                        couples
                                                                                                                        group
                                                                         It hadn’t saved their marriage but did save their friendship 

                                                                                                        -figured if mom could forgive him so could i

                   Macy’s card:
                   Nordstrom card:
                   guest id: The Villages
                                                                                                        -my uncle’s had Alzheimer’s for years already

                    appointment card: Dr. Gardner’s office 
                                     name and number of a neurologist she’d seen two years earlier on the back;
                                     mom was fine!
                                                                                                         -she couldn’t recall the neurologists name 

                                     she drove.  an uneventful ride to Springfield. on the way home she ran through stop signs.
                                     a traffic light. i reminded her to stop at those big red signs!

                                                                                                          -she thought that was funny

                     Shane: a single picture of her youngest grandchild. 
                     Love you, Mom. Can’t wait to see you in July. Save this one for me.

                                                                                                                               -Finn 

                                     A note worn thin wrapped round a gift card to Coastal Flats. don’t know how many times
                                     we’d eaten there, from 2 to 20 depending on who was around. 

                                                                                                          -she always ordered the Filet Tips
                       In the clear plastic sleeve:
                                     driver’s license:
                                                      ivory skin
                                                      hazel eyes
                                                      wavy, short, dark hair
                                                      McDermott nose
                                                      organ donor

                        cupping the license in both hands and closing my eyes
                        i held her for a few breaths 
                        before pulling out my own wallet and placing her license behind my own 

                                                                                                             -where I go, she goes 

​


Patricia Nellene Deal (she/her) is a poet, writer, and educator in McLean, Virginia. Her poems have appeared in or are forthcoming in Ribbons, Ouch! Collective, Pan Haiku Review, #FemkuMag, and others. Find her on Instagram @patrici_nellene.


Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

David Antis CC




6:45 AM EASTERN STANDARD

there aren’t many days
longer 
than the first day you decide 
to quit 

or at least
the first day you decide
to try 
to quit

the brain will 
fire and fire and fire 
when you deprive it 
of anything 
it has gotten 
used to 

if there are days longer
than this day 
i don’t want to know 
them 

because a day longer than this
will make me reach 
for what i know 
and what i know 
is not worth reaching for 

there aren't many days 
longer 
than the first day you decide
to quit

unless 
of course
i wake up tomorrow 
to find out 
the longest day 

has begun again 






brothers

there are five of us
all boys
our mother loves us 
forever
more than i’ve loved anything 
for even a moment

if she were everyone’s mother
the world would be lighter
she could make it 
float 

so i guess our old man
gave us the hole 
inside our chest 
that we all seem to have

or as i grow 
alongside that hole 
i realize 
perhaps his old man 
gave it to him 

nonetheless 
it’s there 
gaping

two of us
filled that hole 
with booze and pills 

two of us 
filled that hole
with 80 hour work weeks
and top shelf things 

one of us 
writes this poem 
and thinks 

“maybe i won’t get high tonight” 

“what if everyone has this hole?”

“but then why do they seem okay?”

“they’re not okay”

“well, they seem okay”

“you seem okay” 

“hahahahahahahha”

*spark*

​


B. Allegrini lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with his partner and their two dogs. His work can be found primarily in the fireplaces of old lovers and random scrap paper used for bookmarks. B. enjoys slow mornings, thinking too much, unfinished projects, and all things outdoors. 


Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

David Antis CC




Stuffed Monkey 

Anchorage, 1962—snow in the gutters,
porch light flickering like a bad tooth.
Mother hands me a stuffed chimp, plastic face,
painted grin wide enough to hold my name.
I call him Fleabee.

He is the one thing that stays.
Through the evictions, the carport lockers
where winter folds itself into cardboard boxes,
where even memory turns to frost.
I hold him at night like a prayer,
like the last warm thing in a house
growing colder.

At eighteen, I hang him from the ceiling—​
a belt for a noose, a joke no one laughs at.
Call it growing up. Call it survival.
But I do not take him down.

At twenty, his body splits, stuffing spilling
like something gutted. I put him in the dumpster
& walk away without looking back.

But I feel him still--
stitched into the hollow of my chest,
his small voice pressed into the silence,
saying stay, saying this is how you keep going.





Salvage

At thirteen, I learned
you could smile like danger
and Catholic school girls
might take you home.

At fourteen
I could make a girl feel
like I needed saving—​
just long enough
to learn the rhythm of her house.

Her dad worked late.
I’d be back the next week,
window cracked,
liquor gone,
cartons of smokes
under my coat.

Premium beef
was a good haul—​
wrapped tight,
no serial number,
no middleman needed.

I once emptied a whole chest freezer,
two black garbage bags
dragged like bodies
through a back alley.
Four hundred bucks
in under an hour.

You move meat,
you make cash.
You move a stereo,
you get a file number
and a court date.

Never take the TV.
Too many questions.
You steal perishables—​
beef, booze—​
shit that vanishes
before anyone notices.
No one files a report
on a missing steak.

I learned to move
before the ice melted,
before someone checked the freezer.

We called it salvage—​
what we took. 
Like we were divers. 
Pulling gold from a wreck.
Clawing through a carcass
no one bothered to bury.

Stripping the fat from people
too stuffed to notice the loss.

We said it with a grin, 
like irony was a knife 
we kept tucked in a back pocket.




Rick Christiansen is the author of Bone Fragments (2024) and Not a Hero (2025). His work has received two 2025 Pushcart Prize nominations and he was a finalist for the RHINO Poetry 2025 Founders Prize. He has also been longlisted for a 2025 Rhysling Award (outcome pending). His poems explore survival, memory, class, and the residue of violence. He lives in Kansas City.


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Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.

David Antis CC




Narrow Path to Providence 


That winter, she says, I was just a young girl. A sudden 
blizzard froze the watermelon vine, The Dead One 
had planted outside my window with seedlings bought 
from the Lakeview Garden Center. That’s when it started—​
I began dreaming watermelon dreams under 
a watermelon window. I heard only watermelon 
music and only ate watermelon. I grew into 
a watermelon woman. I made a watermelon radio and 
every night I aimed its watermelon antenna 
Way Out There past my watermelon wall. I picked-up 
radio signals without having to fiddle with a watermelon 
dial. Frequencies from unnamed moons. Vibrations of spiral 
galaxies and the eighty-eighth constellation. Wave 
after wave, coming in loud and clear from the Great Distances — 
the cusp of Andromeda, a palm of seeds.

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Michael Randolph Martin is a poet, editor and filmmaker. He is the author of Extended Remarks (Portals Press, 2015), a recipient of a Magma Judge’s Prize, a finalist for RHINO’s Founder’s Prize and runner-up for Poetry International’s Cavafy Prize. New poems can be found in Ploughshares, Epoch, RHINO and The London Magazine, among others. He edited the anthology, Rules of the Game: The Best Sports Writing from Harper's Magazine (Franklin Square Press, 2010). His award winning poetry films have been screened in international festivals, including Buenos Aires International Film Festival and North Film Festival.


​
Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.