Victor U CC




      The words don't always settle in the right places. That's what comes to me now as I struggle to find a way to begin these remarks. It's important to try and say something. To find words. To be found by words. Whatever I would say some other way waits for some other day. What I can say is that the time I've spent with each of your words has been a gift to me these past couple of months. Hard months. Hard words. A gift. I am unashamed to say that I was brought to tears more than a few times as I read and read and read. A kind contributor tells me they have found here a place where art becomes true sustenance. That's precisely how I feel about the work you all share with us. Funny, sometimes the words do settle in the right places, just not necessarily mine. All these words here are right where they're supposed to be, I believe. And I don't mean that in some grandiose way, but in the way so many used to tell me that I was right where I was supposed to be in something. When I felt like I was doing my life wrong, or felt unforgivable/unlovable, or like I couldn't move or like I might scream: "right where you're supposed to be, kid." I may or may not have told a few of those people to "fuck off," and they may or may not have smiled knowingly at me. Had patience with me. Showed me something monumental. We're supposed to struggle with it, I understand this now. Well, no, I don't really understand it. But I'm trying. Trying to stay with the thorn that won't come out. The thorn I am. My life. Life. 

       But now imagine a world without any place to put it all down. We don't have to imagine too hard, many of us. As Marilyn Charles writes: "Most of us have been told too often, particularly as children but also as adults, that we did not really see what we thought we saw; hear what we heard; feel what we felt. [Our reality doubles.] We have an inner conviction that tends to be hidden as a way of safeguarding it." And we wait and wait until someone, somewhere can hear our story, our inner knowing of what we saw, heard, felt. It's important to carve those spaces out of the wide expanse of uncaring/unfeeling/unresponsive/recklessness that is much of the world. To try and be something more for each other than we can put words to. No wonder I can't always, or very often at all, find my words. I think it's the moments when people have sat in silence with me that I have felt most heard. We don't know what to say or what to do. And we try and say something. 

       It's a little embarrassing to admit that at 42 I still haven't much of a clue who it is I am. I'm still becoming a person in many ways. I was broken down as a person in my family of origin and I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to put myself back into some kind of order that makes sense, that feels like me. I think one of the things that has most altered the course of my life is the fact that in hell there were people who brought me water. Brought me hope. A silent sitting-with. A being there. Not giving up on who I might become, they hung in with who I was. And that meant everything to me. I don't know how most of us ever come to terms with the god awful things that happened to us in our lives. Maybe we don't. Ever. Maybe all we can do is keep telling our stories, to someone, somewhere. Find our way to those places where words are sustenance. Some stories bear repeating. Over and over again. 

         Right where we're supposed to be, huh. For a moment, anyway. A True North. I've always loved that phrase. Today I read in Gretel Ehrlich's The Future of Ice that "The Japanese word oku means not only "north" but also "deep," "inner," "the heart of a mountain," "to penetrate to the depth of something or someone," "the bottom of one's heart," and "the end of one's mind." The words don't always settle in the right places. We do the best we can with what we've got. It helps to know others feel it too. We're charting dark waters here. Telling the hardest of stories so that we might survive them. So that we might survive ourselves. As a sign I once saw in rehab read: "we don't believe in using pretty words to describe the ugly things that happened to us." Oh, there's beauty too. And we don't always have to look as hard for it as we think. But we must talk about all of the rest of it also. It's how we survive. Heart of a mountain. The bottom of one's heart. The end of one's mind.

Till next time, friends. Keep searching for your words. And hold on. Hold on. Hold on.
​
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic

          

Andra Mihali CC




NUESTRA SEÑORA DE GUADALUPE
​
Our Lady is a brown-skinned girl
who lives in the projects, top floor, no elevator,
no A/C in the summer, patchy heat
in the winter. Her grandmother raised her
on adobo and rice and laughter and hugs
and a knowledge of dignity
in a world full of shame.

Our Lady is a black girl with black hair,
smarter than most kids on her block,
best dancer at community center Zumba,
fascinated by lava lamps, grossed out
by the smell of her brother’s joints, 
feisty enough to scold him for second-hand smoke,
kind to the kid eating alone in the lunch room.

Our Lady is the single mom who knows
what it’s like to be a pregnant teen, 
scared, working two jobs, all eyes judging,
so many doors closing, choosing between
a jug of milk and a commuter card, going 
to night school to keep going, keep going, 
all her strength needed to stay on track.

Our Lady is the user who feels like she failed
the unemployed girl beaten up behind closed doors,
the sex worker putting herself through school,
and the sex worker who doesn’t want to be one,
the domestic helper assaulted by rich bosses,
the mani/pedicurist who only cries at night, 
the model who makes herself throw up every day.

​Our Lady is the queen of heaven and earth
or deserves to be, if people could only see her
as she really is; she crushes the serpent
under her heel, binds wounds, heals ills,
knows every sorrow, is worthy of love;
she is the undoer of knots, mediatrix
of all graces, star of the sea, cause of our joy.





Isabel Cristina Legarda was born in the Philippines and spent her early childhood there before moving to the U.S. She is now a practicing physician in Boston. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in in America, Ruminate, The New York Quarterly, Smartish Pace, FOLIO, The Good Life Review, ­and others. 
​

Flickr CC




Use This Poem to Dry Your Eyes

Use this poem like a junk drawer,
clamour of fragment-           ed pieces—half-used index
cards, one-year-old receipts, seven different brands
of pens, unused record store gift card for the turn-            table
your mother doesn't know you             've donated to Goodwill
—yet still enough room to tuck you               r
            pain away.             Use this poem
as a lover—daisy-chain fragile, nocturnal neon, on-all-fours
feral. Use this poem to kindle cimmerian corners,           juice
summer apples for mulled cider, burn tongue
on the pine needle           memory of hot cocoa with froth
and the big marshmallows.            Use this poem like a rabbit's
foot—mass manufactured & magenta-dyed,          more afterthought
than amulet,            dumb luck on your worst day.

​


Kait Quinn (she/her) was born with salt in her wounds. She flushes the sting of living by writing poetry. She is the author of four poetry collections, and her work has appeared in Reed Magazine, Watershed Review, Chestnut Review, and elsewhere. She received first place in the League of MN Poets’ 2022 John Calvin Rezmerski Memorial Grand Prize. She enjoys repetition, coffee shops, and vegan breakfast foods. Kait lives in Minneapolis with her partner, their regal cat, and their very polite Aussie mix. Find her at kaitquinn.com.

Michiel Jelijs CC



​
When I hear that my sister did not attend my father’s funeral

I know she has become a weather pattern,
an atmospheric river sweeping over California
turning freeways into lakes, overpasses into waterfalls,
fields into seas. She carries everything away
with a liquid wave of her arm—barking dogs
and mewling cats thrash in her turbulent waters,
crash into teapots and flashlights, plastic garbage bins
and bicycles. Her mouth is a grotto sucking
and spewing a toppled birch tree, a flag ripped
from its post, a jump rope, a rusty barbeque.
She swallows schoolyards and backyards, strawberry 
fields and football fields, parking lots and graveyards. 
No one can see her cry because she is Gulliver, her head
crowned with thunderclouds. All we hear is terror.
All we smell is death.



​
​Elya Braden is a writer and mixed-media artist living in Ventura County, CA, and is Assistant Editor of Gyroscope Review. She is the author of the chapbooks, Open The Fist (2020) and The Sight of Invisible Longing, a semi-finalist in Finishing Line Press’s New Women’s Voices Competition (forthcoming 2023). Her work has been published in Calyx, Prometheus Dreaming, Rattle Poets Respond, Sequestrum, Sheila-Na-Gig Online, The Coachella Review and elsewhere. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poets. www.elyabraden.com.

Matt Casagrande CC




June 21st, 2023


tonight is the longest night 
i have to think about everything
i don’t want to think about:
              my body, a rotting log
              the city, a failing machine
              the past four years, a bruise
                              over my breastbone.

choose your battles
choose less battles
choose even less battles

i’m sorry it’s just that
i don’t want to be angry
anymore. i want to look everyone
in the eye and feel okay about it,
like my guts aren’t grinding against each other,
like i don’t want to scrape the inside of my skull 
clean with my own nails i’m sorry. 

outside the bar, 
outside the art gallery that still
gathers my ghost inside its walls, 
the lights sag over the streets   
and the sun 
                is still setting
                is still setting
                is still setting
for what feels like hours.

my god (and i mean the marsh
and the cranes crying out in the 
tall grass and the first fire fly
i’ve seen all June, i mean 
a cigarette shared from a friend
on my front porch) 
my god my god how 
can i yearn all through the night 
when even this night is too long,
and how can i not when there
is so much to yearn for?


​
​
Katy Haas is a queer non-binary poet, collage artist, and Furby enthusiast from mid-Michigan. Their work can be found in Reckon Review, HAD, Stanchion, and elsewhere. Their debut poetry chapbook the algorithm knows i never stopped loving you (Bullshit Lit) is rumored to be about their white noise machine. Follow them on Twitter's death throes (@katyydidnt) & Insta (@mouthshroom).

Matt Casagrande CC



​
Healing My Inner (Feral) Child

I miss being uncomely like there’s no tomorrow
Sand gathers beneath my fingertips
Hair caked with pizza grease
Please, let me wallow in my putridity
Mirrors crack when I wink
And I trot away yowling on all fours

When I was a child I spent most of my free time
Pretending I was never human at all
I didn’t speak, I growled, whimpered
Snorted in discomfort –  
I was obviously bullied mercilessly
But still I cherish that little soul 
For being so listlessly brave
To be so unbearably strange

Now in the adult world of taxes and obligations
My chaos needs to be controlled
Tempered by exercise, enough sleep
I lose my shit over discounted bagged salads
(And I still take pride in that fact)
But every so often I find an old hum within me
The absurd returns home and curls in my sternum
And I find the time to scream


​
Natalie Wollenzien is a fiction and poetry writer living in Louisville, Kentucky. She works at Sarabande Books as the publishing and communications assistant, and is running the Zine Lunch! series presented by Sarabande Writing Labs. She has poetry out in The San Antonio Review.

Carl Wycoff CC




Thorns

I never had to beg
For a pony. The horses just
Were—muscled motion,
Familiar as milkweed
Seeds. My mother
Had epilepsy and my father
Thought that should make
Us all as angry as he was,
Poor delicate out of control
Tyrant with his fists
Clenched tight. We lived
So easily then but no one
Knew it, the 1970s full
Of fear as any decade.
I knew raspberry thorns
And barn smell, freedom
On bike and horseback
And sneakered foot,
Place as solid as ice
In the water buckets come
Winter. And then they sold
The horses—I had not known
You could sell family--
And we moved to town.
That must be when I stopped
Trusting I would be loved forever.

​

​
John Kucera was educated at Carlow University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in New Reader Magazine, The Sandy River Review, Connections Magazine and Friends Journal. He lives in Arizona, where he writes and teaches.
​

Dan Keck CC




unconditional 

the people I love best
seize the moment
value spontaneity over ceremony
turn catastrophe into laughter 
and laugh from the belly

they tell the truth most of the time
hold my hand when it hurts
wait patiently for a new beginning

the people I love best
smile through angst 
share hope with the forlorn 
shrug at mistakes
and get up

they gain weight, lose face
go bankrupt and begin again
they smile under their umbrellas
and sob for no reason

the people I love best 
share their fragile stories
over and over and over
then  listen to mine 
until I’m done

they’re selfish with veggies
and generous with chocolate
they don't slap my hand when I reach 
for their obsession 

they get it and they give it away


​

Bev Fesharaki is an educator and poet.  Her sobriety—impossible, easy, difficult or illusive has changed her life for the better.  She hopes to share her celebration and empathy through her poems.

Krystian Olszanski CC




We Could Break Forever

I scan our shared spaces for the cylindrical mouths 
singing their grotesque white god song about dis-
membered fetuses and unidentifiable grade schoolers. 
But I will not turn my poems to ash for gunshot 
choruses while our kids turn to stone in dark classrooms 
or forget that beauty matters: the rippling sheen of a horse’s 
muscled haunch or my daughter pointing at the bluest fish 
jumping out of the pinkest water in a painting. I know how 
easily we could break forever. Keep playing at ghosts in malls, 
theaters, grocery stores. Become a fucking nest of apparitions. 
For so goddam long, we’ve recklessly othered and forgotten 
the true skin of terrorism, which has always been the color of 
privilege. We have to fly down from the moon now. Flock 
back to this gutted country. Show up with our throats shining.



​
Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Waxwing, McNeese Review, Superstition Review, and Whale Road Review, among others. Originally from rural southeast Texas, she edits and lives in Fort Collins, CO, and was the city’s 2018-2020 poet laureate.