jxj CC




segmentations on desire

2000 april, sunday. ammonia flutters. acid gutters. antagonizing the air in your mouth—no not the heaves, i mean the controlled synchs that forcibly gushes from between your tongue and lips. bulldog and piss. bildungsroman like youth decays. can opener. cunt. Cassius. donkeys. dicks to fight off racism. dear sylvia. deleted or deluded. erratic illusions. either way, me, you, and the scraping of skin. flicker. fright. fanged. girlhood we never maimed. gesticulating hands, the shiver of saints. hook. hack. harpischord of guilt. incident, 2012. indent. infrequent. irreversible. jarred utterances. kundiman kay lolo. lipstick stains on cigarette butts. lacrossing the rays; no foots, no face littering the field only vomit and nails. maria leaving. narcolepsy. nape of my neck, a carving of names. nooks. occult. Orpheus’s grief. on paper. parrot feathers. quaker man. quilt. quote. queering the cathedral. reckless resenting along the sharp bends of antonio. siphoning tears. sacrilege. sin. sylvia’s words occupying the bedroom floor. taunts of parenting tactically tucked behind my ears. unrelenting. unnatural. virilic tendencies. vermillion red on my cheek. wilted and washed and nothing but more. xenophobic whirls. yonders. yearn her. zigzagging across the freeway. zoomed towards the penultimate—us, dawn, starving

                                                                                                                     [outside, my stomach loose and pried open, 
                                                                                                                     begging for a glint].

​



dispatches from a minor etch

And like all the mistiness of my youth,
we were cradled by the comfort
only we could give--
 
Rubbing the powder on our gums,
eulogizing our swollen metaphors,
 
minds meandering into the forgotten
valleys of this cosmic wasteland:
 
               (a)   Like how our feeble bones trapeze
               into wistful whirls against infinite
 
               summers. Your quivering kisses still hanging
               like a web of stars above my skin. 
 
               (b)   How your hands smothered this
               delicate somberness, tracing sandy fingers,
 
               swelling against your stained flesh—my back now 
               painted with loose images of your distant cosmos. 
            
               (c) Forget our moonlit faces glaring under the sheets.
               Rebellious fucks. All homely and unsightly.
 
Remember how you carefully embossed 
your sweeping touches across my sunken body?
 
Remember how these breasts only existed 
like footnotes to your grief?

​


Nikka Galang is a Sydney-based poet born in Pampanga, Philippines.
​

     Tripp CC




The Meeting Chair Asks if Anyone Wants to Share on The Daily Reflection About Rock Bottom 


One spoke of how she was nicknamed Homicide

One of hospital seafoam green and breathing tubes

One of an ivy-colored suicide vest in jail

One of forgetting to pick his mother up for dialysis for the third time

One of begging in underpasses with cardboard signs

One of a strangled cat on the lawn

One of the shattering bay windows he threw his daughter through

One of the endless shakings of her brother’s head

One of selling her body on a stained mattress in a tent

One of jumping out of his mother’s car window on the way to rehab,

telling the people who first reached him on the highway

that this time for sure he’d quit.





The Meeting Chair Asks for a Moment of Silence to Pray to Our Higher Power


make me 
an upwelling      
in the Atlantic,

the force 
of a humpback’s 
breath.

make me 
the left hand 
of wind, 

brushing Enso circles
into clouds.

make me 
slants of light
through stained glass,

landing on 
dustless oak pews.

make me,
a star chart 
in a Neolithic cave,

the round swirling
of dust and gas

torn from Earth
to become 
the moon.

​
​

William Varner’s poems have been published in Cimarron Review, The Cincinnati Review, Green Mountains Review, Harpur Palate, New Ohio Review, Poet Lore, Pinch Journal, Vallum, and elsewhere. He’s been a finalist for the Erskine J. Prize from Smartish Pace and the Maine Literary Award. His chapbook, Leaving Erebus, won the Keystone Series Chapbook Award from Seven Kitchens Press. 

    Damian Munoz CC




Winter’s edge
​
Wintering with my wounds
brings a bitter
bluster of reality
buffering my spirit.
Memory is charged:
not to take me
back
to old grievances and bad habits
where daily doses of self-destruction nibble on me
quietly, with confidence.

My command on memory
of harm
requires a longhouse
of mulching
protecting me from being
frozen
in despair
(long enough
to ride my wounds
into pools of possibility
instead of fine palaces erected by pain.)





Winter’s fold around me

Trauma takes us all
into a torrential
triangle
where two sides so clearly intersect.
I search for that other side,
a third space
in the thickness of searing reminders
roving
freely,
fearlessly about me
fronting my soul
into a duality of bitterness split by rage.
I just have to wait,
hold onto myself
long enough
to find
that mysterious angle at which
the hurting
bends
into a place that neither houses death nor promises happy endings.

​Never just Winter nor Spring,
I calculate my steps
curiously
ready to stray
into thick hallow
buried just deep enough.





Winter’s bend 

Morning’s glory radiantly parades
its claim on us
without care to who we are or
what we have done.
Look at what the universe has done
with the ashes burnt,
spewed across the earth in fury,
blasts of chaotic beginnings
where life was battered,
toxic at first--
until that noxious base transgressed
into something utterly
unimaginable.
We all are rooted in that memory
of transgression.
Reminding us to resist building an easy entrance into damage,
to know our wholeness
has always carried powerful forces of destruction
scandalously beautiful
built upon
ancient foundations
mixed in this
glory.
​




Dr. Jane Grovijahn is a trauma theologian who sacrificed for too long at the altar of damage done. It was her wounds that propelled her into graduate school; once she realized that and decided to really explore their power, she was finally connected to her deepest authenticity and power.

She does theology from a place of pain and possibility (is female in social imaginary of misogyny, is queer in place of Christian nationalism that denies her sacred birthright, is sexual abuse survivor in world that normalizes gender-based violences directed especially at female+ persons). She knows well the holiness of how to navigate a body dredged by others.
​
Restless within tombs of other’s making, she now resides in sturdy structures of delight built from those places within us often hardest to relish but bursting with unpredictable pleasures. Here the power of wounds continues to surprise her with its call to community, rising into collective, riotous rites of repair.

    Billy Bergen CC




Prayer for the Beautiful Ones
“Whatever I’ve been through in my life cannot compare to the gift of life." Dorianne Laux 

In a country of war, flowers flourish. 
You must flourish too. 

Do you know why we exist?
To laugh, play, and love like children.

Remember, bullies and racists have small balls
for brains. Live to spite them. 

Oh, Beautiful One, you are a firefly in the dark summer night. 
Without you, the world dims. 

My Butterfly in Waiting, remember the flowers,
How they gravitate towards the sun.                 

Open the window, let sunlight kiss your face, 
Let it caress your true form. 

Feel bliss on your golden wings.




*If you or someone you know is feeling desperate, alone, or hopeless call 1-800-273-TALK (8255).

​


​
BUNKONG TUON is a Cambodian American writer, Pushcart Prize–winning poet, and professor who teaches at Union College in Schenectady, in NY. His work has appeared in World Literature Today, Copper Nickel, New York Quarterly, Massachusetts Review, diode poetry, Verse Daily, among others. His Greatest Hits chapbook, What Is Left, was published by Jacar Press in March 2024. His debut novel, Koan Khmer (Northwestern/Curbstone Press), will be published in August 2024. He is poetry editor of Cultural Daily.

     Erich Ferdinand CC




​flip-phone 

today we talked about your beautiful garden which feeds your stir fry habit and the beans you prepare in the crockpot for the weeks ahead. it’s the simplicity i long for and when i hear your life through the flip phone pressed against your ear, i don’t feel like i’m disappearing. you tell me about your walk by the water and the time the deer ate your sweet potato vine and every single vegetable. you say it with a gentle laugh, more than happy to provide for local wildlife and there’s joy in your hands in the soil - as if they were eating directly from your open palms. and i can imagine the wonder in your bones, the delight in your eyes at their leftovers. i wish for the world to inherit this gentleness. 




Michelle Williams lives in Texas but misses the trees in Virginia. She has work upcoming in Overtly Lit, listens to music constantly, and currently works as a fraud investigator. @michellewpoetry on twitter.

      Pete Birkinshaw CC




Not gay as in happy but queer as in

after I fall, this is what happens: I’m on my back 
at the asphalt’s edge, so close to the grass,
like a blocked beach whose water I can’t touch. 
I can’t move, so they move to me. My wife paces
by my feet, back and forth between fear and force,
her voice quavering evidence to the dispatcher. 
My friend takes my head in her lap, so gently 
I think my skull is floating, moves her fingers 
over my scalp like a baker kneading alone 
at 4 am, all rhythmic certainty and quiet focus. 
The sky flushes bruise-blue. Someone swats 
a mosquito away from me before it can land. 
I’m scared.  An acquaintance approaches, says, 
I got you, buddy, what do you need and I say, 
Tell me about your dates again, didn’t you say 
you had some dates this week and then they’re 
with me on the ground, phone in hand, and we’re 
kids stretched out on the sand and I think I’ve 
never seen such beautiful thumbnailed faces before. 
OOOOOOH and oh no oh no oh no and 
COME ON NOW and why can’t I move and 
LOOK! AT! THEM! and what is happening to me 
and then the sirens come. A delirious cackle tears 
through me and becomes a howl as I’m lifted 
into what comes next. Fingertips still in my hair. As in,
I am dough in my people’s hands until it’s time to rise.





Morphology

Apple sits solid in a sunlit bowl,
swirls liquid in a golden glass.

Same substance, but one contains itself
calmly in your palm and the other is a crack 

away from running sticky rivers over your wrist.
One protects its sweet tenderness with roughage, 

lets tough fibrous casing hold it together. The other 
casts defenses aside, leaves its sugar open 

to the sky, invites you in. But then, so does the first,
doesn’t it? The skin asks to be bitten. The solid sphere

and the filled glass both crave your hand.
And what of your hand that lifts both fruit and juice

to your waiting mouth?
And what of your mouth?





Oh, to unzip this skin

and walk awhile without it.
I’d fold it neatly 
at the foot of the bed 
and step outside.
Brick on muscle,
pavement on bone.
It’d be sharp, even searing,
but I think I’d like it— 
all that feeling.
Goldfinches at the feeder
of my lungs.
Hummingbirds sipping
my synovial fluid.
The trouble would be
zipping back up.
What to do with the debris
lodged in the once unexposed
parts of me?

​


Jess Kadish's poetry has also appeared in Kissing Dynamite and Hooligan. She’s a member of Chicago’s 2nd Story collective, where she writes, curates, and directs personal narrative performance. You can hear some of her stories on their podcast. She started writing when she should have been paying attention in class and still writes most freely when she's supposed to be paying attention to something else.

     Damian Munoz CC




THE FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME


My body comes back to me on a train

in a car with twenty-eight exits, arrows

through windows on the sign, my body

spic and span, I’m told, blessed and bathed

in the blood of christ. Oh, I’m precedented.

No possession, Poseidon. After death:

gender, a welcome vertigo, proof


​
that something real is real – the flutter,

the feather, the blue. The mask tied behind 

the neck, I-L-I-A-D in big block letters

on the sleeve, rust red spine. Ambient velvet, 

this body, a loden armchair cushion, air-

brakes past the doorway – the street’s

season hums in the ribs, my ribs



bathed, they say, and blessed. A hand 

becomes a hand, a hold of heft and desire

held, tucked away in a white wood box

its edges set with a trim of obsidian.

The sole custodian, my body, I never 

knew the river the whale the storm

the sea. I needed a better word for linger.



I kept trying to heal with one hand

what the other injured; I keep trying

to predict where Venus will rise. 

Touch their talismans, they say, 

my body the fir tree the weather.

Real glass runs, a teacher told me,

I’ve seen the drip in the pane.


​
They bathe me, my body, a strophe
​
bent before a blade.  I wash it

and ask:  when is it going to rain. 

​


Timothy Ashley Leo is an editor for DIALOGIST. His work appears in Annulet, The Cincinnati Review, Denver Quarterly, Lana Turner, Nat. Brut and elsewhere. He lives in Chicago. timothyleo.com/work

     Jochen Spieker CC




END AND BEGINNING
​
There are so many things
So many, and so little time, 
A time I’d rather use wisely, 
Not building up a fantasy. 

Oh! Dear you, dear me
It’s not half of what I make it,
And yet there is a sense of panic,
Of obligation, of emergency. 

Surrender, yes, surrender
To life, to rain, 
To a world of pain. 

Surrender, oh, yes, surrender
To love, to tears, 
To a life of fears. 

It’s grey and dark
It’s menacing, the thunder, 
And the mountains of wonder. 

It’s a storm, a tornado,
Grounds you don’t even want to know.
There’s adversity, hunger, 
Uncertainty and danger. 

It goes up and down
Bruises you,
Throws you onto the ground. 

The trials are endless
Just look at me, my face, 
Sweating, breathless, 
Crawling on uneven ground, 
And in my pocket, 
Not a single pound. 

Suddenly, there it is
The beauty, the light, the sun,
Someone is calling you “Hun”.

Because that’s the thing:
As long as you keep going, 
There will be an end,
And a new beginning. 

​


​
Ange is a 37-year-old woman who grew up in Burgundy, France. She fell in love with writing when she was 6 and with English when she was 16. It’s been a very complicated and tumultuous love story ever since. 
She studied English Literature and Culture for a year and left to be an au pair in Canada before finishing it. Sitting on a bench and taking notes was not for her, neither was doing what she was told or ‘supposed to do’. 
She lived in France and Poland, and travelled to the US, Mexico and Canada, falling madly in love with New York in 2014. She travelled to discover the world, experience new cultures, meet people, and find a place where she felt she belonged. If you dig deeper, however, and were to find yourself talking to her on a rainy Sunday evening, with the fire on and a glass of Chablis, you’d hear her tell you that she travelled because she was running away. She ran away, a lot, because she was bored, scared or broken-hearted. 
Ange moved to Ireland almost 9 years ago: she stayed for a woman and left 6 years later, because of that same woman. She travelled to Australia, Japan, France, Germany, Denmark and Poland, and then came back to the place she had been calling home for 7 years: Ireland. She came back, moved back to her small village in West Cork, and sat down to write some of the poetry she shared with you. She then proceeded to write a book, which she is currently working to get published.

​

    Lewin Bormann CC




The crossing

“You hold onto your pain like it means something, like it’s worth something. Let me tell you
                                                              it’s not worth shit. Let it go”.
                                                          Nathaniel Fisher, Six Feet Under


I sat in the silence and the silence sat in me. Exposing great,
gaping black holes, that bled emptiness, leaked pain. 

Last night was the long, dark, tea-time of the soul*.
Ever get dumped by a roller? Smashed. Lost. Tossed 
like a rag doll. Eating sand, no up or down. My turbulent
overwhelm Will Not Kill Me. Pain doesn’t kill you. 

I sat in the silence and the silence sat in me. The solitude
was raw, was empty, then not. It was filled. With me. 
Inky black night sky, pitted with stars. Leaking radiance. 
Eventually the holes were filled with liquid silence.
Not too hard to bear, after all. Not empty, but full of life. 
My soulfire.

I surf in my awareness. The eye of the storm, my observing I/eye. 
I sit in the silence and the silence sits in me. 
And I learn. And relearn. 
To be awake.


*Douglas Adams

​


Darlene Corry is currently doing a Creative Writing MA at the Seamus Heaney Centre. She’s been writing as a way to express and contain herself since she was a child. And has no plans to stop, ever. She is an Australian who has made her home in Northern Ireland, and now lives by the sea with two gorgeous dogs, a beautiful, grumpy cat and the most wonderful lover.

     Minka CC




Virtuosic 


When I was born, 
my mother cried. 
I cried back, 
her best
supporting actress.
Theatrics were easy,
and I was thirsty 
for experience,
felt my way bare-
handed along 
the unsound back-
stage of childhood
where I sat ready, 
like a difference,
to be discovered.




​
Saints of Slight Power 


Poor girls have a leg up 
on holiness. The exchange 
rate for pain works in our favor. 
We see the kind-eyed 
Mary statue’s neck
pulse when we pray 
for the dolorous souls 
in purgatory, that suburb 
where time disappears
like the bodies 
of unwanted children, 
gone before they knew it. 
Hallowed be our names,
making margarine sandwiches 
lucky with catsup, stuffing 
our wonder-less bras 
with tissues, hurling 
our bodies like ashtrays 
toward men who would break 
them. We see God’s drop 
of blood and raise him 
one. ​



​

Amy Thatcher is a native Philadelphian where she works as a public librarian. Her poems have been published in Guesthouse, Bear Review, Rhino, SWWIM, Palette Poetry, The Shore, Crab Creek Review, and others. Her work has been nominated for Best New Poets 2024 and is forthcoming in The Journal and Denver Quarterly.