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9/28/2020 1 Comment Featured Poet: Keagan Wheat We congregate title from Oliver Baez Bendof's "We Congregate" 2019 Hill the shape of those massive slides at fairgrounds. Aden, in heels and mesh, pushes my pace. The sun falling below the horizon casts a magenta net hovering above our destination. I rest my head on CJ’s new suit jacket. They’ve been holding my hand, explaining their day finally getting a suit especially fitted for themself. Their smile conveys their joy beyond the beauty of the suit. Chrissie stands leaned against a wooden post. She bragged about the suit earlier, but stands aside as CJ keeps talking through their smile. Don’t Forget Monday: I am reminded of the biological you, the way you produce a hormone that I combat with alcohol, testosterone, needles, dinosaur bandaids. Tuesday: I get called your name, Felicia. Wednesday: your chest needs to be bound, to be controlled, to be hurt, as it hurts me. Thursday: I am told that I can’t sit that way with a dick. You fail me with nothing in these pants. I can’t measure up. Friday: I shave the fuzz you have on your face. A man walks by with A full beard. Did you see him? Saturday: she her you ma’am miss Lady, you could be so pretty if you got rid of me. Sunday: you start church in a pink and purple plaid shirt that constricts my breathing your dad thinks you look nice. I have left everyone’s mind. Trans Pup Walks in crop top jersey and nerf football. He makes himself laugh (very loudly), giddy around his big soft cuddly family. Offers cuddling like a glass of water, we need it more than we take it. He recognizes tears about to run and brings attention to your erasure. He bounds through reclaimed boyhood, in every conceivable way, becoming any friend’s Your Biggest Fan. XOXO  Keagan Wheat (he/him) writes poetry focused on FTM identity and his congenital heart disease. His work can be found in Glass Mountain 24, Shards 4 & 7, and Sink Hollow 8. He lives in Houston, Texas collecting odd facts about dinosaurs and listening to way too many hours of podcasts.
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9/28/2020 1 Comment Poetry by Maggie Sawkins Striders You kneel on the bank to cup the water because you want to forget but you could swallow half the river and not still the stories in your head. All night it runs through you churning the random possessions of the dead. In fits, you imagine the last steps of those who loved you how they ambled in the pitch of night towards what they hoped was halfway-home. You tilt your face and there on the river’s a swallow dipping its beak to scoop up striders scuttering across the surface of water. There’s a terrible thirst to be found in everything.  Maggie Sawkins lives in Portsmouth and delivers creative writing projects in community and health care settings. Her live literature production ‘Zones of Avoidance’, inspired by her personal and professional involvement with addiction, won the 2013 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. Maggie is the founder and organiser of Tongues&Grooves in the Community. www.hookedonwords.me
9/28/2020 2 Comments Poetry by Lauren Tivey Alexander Rabb CC Storage Spaces I overhear an old-timer defending my forklift skills to his buddies huddling in the receiving department, fists in pockets, frayed baseball caps framing flat eyes. They dip Copenhagen, while waiting for me to make a mistake. The forks screech on the way out, close against the skid slats, 30 feet up. The men chew and chew. I stop, lower and tip forward a fraction, and the forks slide free with calculated precision. My red manicure’s smeared with grease, sweat pearled on my neck. There’s an exact moment, when I get it just right, between the 3” of wood — an inch above, an inch below, forks hovering in the limbo of a spare inch — a sweet spot, safe. This is important: I can breathe now. Pallet placed, I pull out slow, bring the arms back, oiled chains rolling down-shaft, my steel descending, an extension of concentration, will. The men disperse, show over. I want to tell them that this isn’t about men versus women, no sex-war; it’s about the work of a rigorous, terrified mind, of fitting difficult packages into neat places, so they may be governed. I want to tell them it’s about controlled emotion, a way to sort the dangerous and the heavy, those shrink-wrapped pallets of pain, a way to parcel a scarred, battered heart, but I won’t, because they’re hard men who already understand this is never uttered. They know these storage spaces well: all the insults ever received, stacked on shelves; aisles of divorce; supermarkets of childhood suffering; entire warehouses of fear, dark and sealed. Everything in its place. They may even understand there’s nowhere on earth big enough to store the death of a child. I take that horror, bit by bit, on covered skids, 4’ x 4’, every damn day, and raise it to a shelf, lay it on steel racks, and go back for more, hoping it never falls. I want to tell them that women can close themselves off, too, that this isn’t tied to gender. I want to tell them I know this is hard work.  Lauren Tivey is the author of four chapbooks, most recently Moroccan Holiday, winner of The Poetry Box Chapbook Prize 2019, The Breakdown Atlas & Other Poems, Her Blood Runs Through Me, and Dance of the Fire Horse. Tivey is a Pushcart Prize nominee (2016, 2019); her work has appeared in Connotation Press, The Coachella Review, and Split Lip Magazine, among dozens of other publications. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Flagler College, in St. Augustine, Florida.
9/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Miah Clark Alexander Rabb CC Y3ST3RDAY a journal a sharp breath / a nose bleed / your eyes water and wipe what drips / "this happens a lot" / it shouldn't / your nails are longer than mine lately / and painted white, only on the underside / i only said yes because you asked so nicely / nice guy / i don't know if you remember / night guy / you said one is enough to start with / but we'll just see where the night takes us / night guy / you taught me not to fear snowstorms / or a beating heart / bigger pupils / big guy / skyscraper / i think in that moment i was shrinking / when the breathing returns to normal / when the dark circles set in / i see we are both shrinking / so small / so afraid / i thought you might kill me / i thought i might i let you / and look now / how we have both died / side by side i watch as you wipe your own nose and pat dry your own eyelashes and cough up your own blood - point your finger to the white spots - cough up your bad night or good telling me how it doesn't make a difference once you've reached this point - i'm trying to learn from you  Miah Clark is a young queer poet currently studying English and Creative Writing at the University of Iowa and working towards the publication of her first collection of poetry. Other works of hers have been published by Elementia Literary Magazine, Poets Globe & Poets Tribe, Stonefruit Magazine, Haloscope Magazine, and can be found on her poetry specific Instagram, @miahwrites.
9/28/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Rachel Chen Chiara Cremaschi CC Sleight of hand I've been looping Pink Floyd to drown out the dark. Waging a war with three-pronged trident to find wall socket, forgetting to add water. Letting the burnt bitter linger and leaving these hotel curtains all the way open. (Drawing them closed: burying a body and pulling the shroud over bloodless feet.) Time rushes at me in great globules through a sieve-- the present moment nearly here and then gone. A game of cards you lose before riffling through the trick deck—mud & bad hair cuts & clean sheets & spam calls & strawberries & triggers & burnt toast & birthdays & kids & taxis & Tuesdays & nails & leftovers & dandelions-- your hand a fish out of water, a trick of light, straining, straining, coming up empty.  Rachel Chen studies neuroscience and creative writing at the University of Rochester. Her work has been recognized nationally by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and received the American Voices Medal in 2019. She drinks excessive quantities of lukewarm tea.
9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Brittany Coffman Mitchell Hopkins CC the looking church It is raining and there is a phoenix on the street corner selling tickets To a show no one will ever see his red plumage scattered at his feet While his neighbor the hound avoids his own tawny complexion in The mirror a group of ibex run past with branches cradled over their Heads startling twenty-three conspiracy pigeons and one assassin cat The badger behind the wheel of an expensive beetle with silver horns Locked together with a short orange giraffe suffering from a mad god Complex she won’t ever make the front page run by some sort of scarab Cult and their fascination with spiders and their snatched snip politics Printed off the hides of the pups who lived in that alley once upon a time It is raining and there is a peacock carrying too many feathers in her arms To the office where she is devoured by asking blue eyes and unwanted Claws in another block a fox slipping an emerald into her coat pocket She’ll sell it to that jackrabbit the white one covered in gold body glitter Living above a deli with druggie bluegills and their grey water cameras The lonely black bear sitting on that empty stoop his ears cropped to Perfection once upon a time but now limp like the old sloth too slow for Change who was gobbled up by that tricky adder in the city’s basement While the weasels stood on their hind legs and watched with petty grins As a sparrow pushed a stroller past a group of smoking leather stallions It is raining and the flamingos go to school with their ballet shoes they all Look the same at least in a cluster the neon panther hurrying them along While a raven flies overhead her talons filled with love notes from her Lover a pretty quetzal more queer than she is cousins with the lion who Rents downtown in a flat made of skin and stolen yellow beehives. (In) Over My Head don’t listen to a word I say it cantbreathecantbreathe doesn’t seem don't believe me / malignant like the t r u t h self - my mind - destruct is truth a thing I want it to be or is that just me m ind reading? remind me.
I’m trying I swear this may-be dying the words are blurry again d obsessive stop. r own ing I’m crying vulnerable up cantbreathe feelings make your mind over c h oking me here/ up whelmed keeping me here the mind’s make fear damage malignant ; contagious is this what I am un hinged is a dangerous thing to be figure out how to this mind viper Love&Resistance I’m looking at their faces. At their purely naked bodies and their ability to push and be pushed. I’m blown away. Rainbows didn’t exist then, but the presses did and they were hot and wild and they were lovely. I’m reading their words and holding them up to my own heart to see if they match; I will never be as brave. I came out to my dad we were sitting on the couch watching television. I’d written a lengthy paragraph in the notes app of my phone it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. They pushed and pushed and were pushed out of windows and onto the spikes of pitchforks and I didn’t know. I arrived too late to have known before. I’m looking into the faraway eyes of a likely-dead lesbian with a sign that reads: I am your worst fear. I am your best fantasy. She’s beautiful. I would have loved to meet her, to speak with her. I want to meet them all, every single one. They are all of them courageous and lovers and lovers always win. Even then. I felt foolish reading my dad the memo. like reciting modern Shakespeare something equally dramatic / I felt really just me trying to explain, to figure out how I should do this all I should have done was just say it. They were selling LGBTQ postcards in the gift shop. Though I could see a pair of rotten capital -ist hands all over of them, I bought four in black and white. In one, a class photo of transgender men and women. One of the women wears an apron and carries a rolling pin. My dad was quiet “okay.” what I expected from him the next morning he had “googled me” so he knew for sure what pansexuality meant when I was so afraid that I still didn’t. I’m looking into their faces, wondering what kind of people they were. I’m assuming they are all long gone now. Still they are bold and beautiful and I hope that they died in bed as someone loved and not at the end of a pitchfork or a burning pyre. I could probably find out their true fates but somehow that seems disrespectful to their memories. Or maybe they’d want me to know. Respect has to be earned. I was so scared it was fear. Fear that I was making this up (to belong) or trying to be something I wasn’t I stayed awake all night thinking and doing “research” trying to make sense of it I’d never thought about it I was ______ or this since the beginning sex wasn’t something I ever really thought about but love was and attraction I was learning fluid for me. That was a relief I didn’t know I needed the framework wasn’t so rigid I could be with X/Y/someone all of a sudden I could know that mattered to me.  Brittany Coffman is a 20-year-old poet and fiction writer based in New York. Her writing explores dark corners as a way to portray language. She enjoys creating weird and wonderful expressions of the mundane and fantasy.
9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by FJ Doucet Chiara Cremaschi CC Ode to My Mother's Overdose can i show you night's shape without exposing the black root of blame? no other way to tell this story. the child twisted by the woman's shame. her stillness: grotesque, open-mouthed on the living room sofa. no way, no mama! get up! i’ll be good now. please. my baby-self bargaining with God. just how long did I stand there shaking her arms? terror competed with awe in her loveliness. the poster-girl for heroin-chic modelling death. was an hour enough that she might at last wake? gasping, she sat up. but after thirty years, i still hear myself screaming through the throws of our same re-birth in terror. that night was the last of my childhood. ever since, I think I've always known what Leonard Cohen meant when he sang the holy dove. and still the cry that splits the starless night above-- the cold and then the broken hallelujah. In the Event I read about the maloxone kit. I read about it, I thought--I need to call Mum. I need to warn her. I need-- I will tell her in the event of an overdose. Get this thing, the kit. Open the box, the saving of your life. Inject grace and breath, until such time as you can put the needle down for good. I need to call her. But what’s this busy signal, the abrupt closure/ click of the line. The number you have dialed has not been assigned.  FJ Doucet's poetry has most recently been published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, Beliveau Review, Yolk, Martin Lake Journal, and Literary Mama, while her work in Prometheus Dreaming magazine was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her prose appears in the Retellings of the Inland Seas anthology from Candlemark and Gleam press, with more fiction forthcoming through Endless Ink Publishing House. She is a member of The Wild Nellies women's creative collective and the newest president of the Brooklin Poetry Society, just outside of Toronto, Canada.
9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Kristin Entler Matthew Paul Argall CC MRJ & KEW I tried not to ask about the steel molds we put in the oven this morning, the dough that needed to proof, about why you clenched keys in your fists in a doughnut shop down south, in your hometown, and why you purposefully mispronounced kolache, cool-ach-e. Until you let the diagnosis slip. It’s all hard on the kidneys this first year so we overflow with too much sugar and whiskey that you’ve flasked away. Instead, I asked if the initials on the picnic table across the street were yours: whether we should scratch them out or add mine, like this is all we’ll ever leave behind.  Kristin Entler is a disabled queer writer who grew up in rural Alabama. She received her M.A. in English from The University of Alabama at Birmingham but now lives in Arkansas where she’s working on her M.F.A. in Poetry at the University of Arkansas. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as The Bitter Southerner, Poetry South, and Gulf Stream Literary Magazine among others. When not working on her thesis, she is probably trying to train her service dog-to-be, Azzie.
9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Tiffany Lindfield Michel G. CC Grit Persistence pays off, they say, and you grit your teeth, thinking of it: Grit, that thing that is supposed to get your through the winter, to the other side but I wonder, what if the other side is just more of the same ole’ thing? The same ole’ shit. How long can I persist? Have you felt that way? Not everyone has. Some really haven’t. I’ve met them. And wondered whose ass they must’ve kissed in our past lives. I carry on. Because even if the other side is hell, too, well, at least I fucking tried, right? I understand the ones who don’t. I saw an ad on Craigslist: Lookin for a room. Just tryna start over, get my life right. I was an addict, but God done took that from me and I be here today. I need a small room, not much, just a place to lay my head and a place close to some gas station I can work at. And thought: If someone can put there laundry out there like that, granny panties and all, speak with pride, call on the Lord for a fresh start, then I can mop my pity off the floor. Then, I think that whoever wrote that ad is probably high right now and whoever responds to such an ad may just be who they got high with. Fuck it-- I keep chugging down the sorrow in this ole’ heart, like acid, feeling the weight, heavy and blanketing, like too much jelly on bread. I yank my chin up, ripping red lipstick across my lips—thinning, cracked from wind, slapping-- Grit my teeth and drag one foot, the other drags along. To See what this other side has to offer.  Tiffany Lindfield is a social worker by day, trade, and heart working as an activist for climate justice, gender equality and animal rights. By night she is a prolific reader of anything decent, and a writer. (https://www.tiffanylindfield.com/)
9/27/2020 0 Comments Poetry by Christian Arthur Alexander Rabb CC Survival Merit Badge Start with the cruise up Route 119, the highway hilly like a roll of paper compressing inside a closing fist. Our careless joy turned three dimensional at a 711, buying cigarettes, blunt wraps, and the cheap vodka from a trunk out back, because Eric was already 21. Consider the banter of boys can be twig-like. A whistle of air in the car as it accelerates. Name it harmless as dead branches, found on the ground and always there. The surface of the lake broke by a bottle cap like a fish spine snapping against a rock. Is all violence practice? I regret how something feels good about kindling giving way to a force, such as when the sun sinks like alcohol, an orange ball resting inside the body and each sparring forearm is a log angled together into a triangle, bold as an arrowhead pointed up at the fur of the night sky. Do you know the most important ingredient needed to build a fire? Time. A slab of it, clear as Caldwells we called nail polish remover. I want to scrape it off, who I grew up as, bury it under paint. A ghost story that cannot be shelved. The night we danced, drank the whole thing, you, me, and the fire, pouring shots onto the blue tongue. No one will believe it woke up. I’m getting better at talking about feelings, but some things remain double vision and unholdable. Seriously, we literally talked to a fire for hours, until we were too drunk to leave our seats and it died and we understood we were actually alone. Then a dread descended. Addiction can be like that. Brotherhood as well. They grow and grow, crackling in the same stone pit. They can lean together, each the other’s fuel.  Christian Arthur is a poet, teaching artist, and public health social worker in recovery from addiction. His poems have been published in Meat for Tea and The Watermark. Currently he is a Staff Poetry Reader for The Adroit Journal and previously he received fellowships from the Poetry Foundation’s Poetry Incubator and DreamYard’s Rad(ical) Poetry Consortium. He’s on Twitter: @ChrisColdWater
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