9/30/2021 4 Comments Poetry by Makenna Dykstra Will Folsom CC
CW: mention of drinking/alcohol/substances give peas a chance has it ever rained on moving day? / trek a mattress through the thunder / and later that night / sleep on the sky’s leftovers / bruised peach skin / the same as a room i can hardly enter / for fear of falling through the floor / a crack in the wall / reminds you of a lobster you once stared at / through supermarket glass / i pitied it in a strange accent / that realized my own slow boil / tear me to pieces in pursuit of human tenderness / hanging skeletons / another version of flight / and a misplaced step / catapults me into the unbound sunset / bleached and pink / so you know / who to blame / i promise you / easy dreaming / the kind untortured by a bed / sour with sexed misgivings / a broken pocket watch ticks / the same minute in the corner / the water one degree from bubbling / hot enough to burn / but not yet sterile / i sometimes wonder how long i can say “good enough” / before it’s not / my darts never hit the board / unless i’m drunk / which i think says something / about how much you can trust me / the chair wobbles but holds / long enough for me to fill my plate CW: mention of de*th between the lightning strike and the thunderclap is eternal i wake in the night to thunderstorms around me. a flood of water and dream beg me with a soft hand to the riverbank to drink nectar-sweet immortality. lyrics of a song linger on my back traced in cosmic forthcomings the raspy lilt sounds eerily like my mother, until it bites my tongue and leaves me to spit red in the sink the next morning alone. moon-stained and frothing with melody, i plead fool to my higher intellect. surrender: eyes shut and palms up. i beg relief. revive the written word in every hue. show me my face again before i forget. under a sky bleached with hauntology, i cloak apathy in kindness while i wither half-shelled. martyrdom can’t be self-prescribed, much less in a rainstorm. the damp thwarts every attempt to strike the flint. the executioner’s work to protect the burgeoning flame gives me time to conjure last words worthy of remembering. in the amputated light, i am an unbecome self. i wake up still panting from sprinting towards a forgotten note that slips like water between tightly bound fingers. i forget running never brought me anywhere but to a cliff’s edge, lured to leap into the waiting expanse below. i’ll tell you it’s in pursuit of relief for my sore shins, but we both know i was born and i woke in the sea. it’s only a matter of time before i die there. but there’s no one to die for, dance with, or god forbid kiss. only a deluge ready and willing to sweep me off my feet. human’s most primal state was never savagery, but vulnerability. i often think of the mortal who, unable to control their lust, gazed upon zeus’ glory and was rewarded with perpetual dark. which is to say, beauty must be finite. which is to say, there’s beauty to be discovered. which is to say, at the risk of death, carry on. so this is how it ends knowing is a series of deaths in your twenties & somehow the streaks of flies that linger on my windshield from three states ago teach me more about honor than the God who opens the door for a man on crutches. in a random café off interstate 10, twin skeletons share a lighter. smoke drifts through the hollow of their chest like breath. under the cover of night the tributes to last week’s storms are exhumed. weaken & meet. the still-breathing are forced to inhale the damp & scrabble to hold their grip while the earth shifts into place again. consumption has no witness but the lines of a shaky finger twisting through the sand. memorialize a litany of goodbyes for tomorrow’s child to mourn in the gaping absence of connection. under the amputated light of dawn, i turn & curse the pebble that carved my unwitting signature in the continent’s face, carried miles under the weight of a glacier until the sun bid its freedom. loving after all is melting. which, by any other name, is disappearance. Makenna Dykstra (she/her) is an M.A. student of English literature at Tulane University where she calls New Orleans, LA home. She is an avid lover of anything peanut butter chocolate and jellyfish, though enjoys them best in separate contexts. She can often be found on Twitter @makdykstra or in the local parks, writing, reading, or admiring the oak trees.
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9/30/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Wendy Brown-Báez Paulo César León Palacios CC Cheap Wine I learned to spill a drop on the earth before the first sip, no matter how urgent the thirst that drove him to panhandle, close enough to the liquor store that everyone knew. But still they paid the quarter, the buck into his trembling hand. Better him than me, they thought. Or maybe it was the way the corners of his eyes turned up, a man down on his luck, not like a man forsaken and drowned. Or if we sat in a basement beside rumbling washing machines, the drop was spilled on his jeans. Any place warm, anywhere out of wind. We trudged, he forging ahead and me following in his wide booted steps, the red kerchief wound around his head the only hat he ever owned, chains rattling against his thighs as he strode towards the cruel fate of wine. He taught me to say “for the brothers” those who had gone down. Who had been hit by a bus or died of hyperthermia or hitched their way to being beaten by the side of the road, locked up in prison, huddled under the bridge. He said it was communion. He said he never took a drink without thanking God for one more day. Wendy Brown-Báez is the creator of Writing Circles for Healing. She is the author of the writers’ guide Heart on the Page: A Portable Writing Workshop, a novel and a poetry collection. Her poetry and prose appear widely in literary journals and anthologies, including Mizna, Wising Up Press, Poets & Writers, Talking Writing, Water~Stone Review, Peregrine, Mom Egg Review, Duende, and Tiferet. Wendy leads creative writing and memoir in community spaces such as healing centers, prisons, libraries, and churches, as a member of Mn Prison Writing Workshop, Writing to Wholeness Collective, and The Loft Literary Center. 9/30/2021 0 Comments Poetry by V. S. Ramstack Marketa CC slow drift see the live action moments of your life and catalogue them accordingly. bloated tongue swiping along a splintered rail, waiting for the underbite to right itself; even the wisest wouldn’t dare tell us how it works if we could see how to dream, how to revitalize the combination between: swans landing on a pond and clouds collaborating – sink into a solid feeling the way taffy is pulled apart and quietly regarded to be whole there’s a rumor going around that the ocean can freeze over if given enough privacy. some day we may test this theory. until then i will be eating cantaloupe in my backyard, marveling at the beauty of it all i asked you ____ to tie two knots at the back of my dress i expected it to get dragged off in the water your knuckles leaking pus from when you stuck them inside the oven in your parents’ kitchen we were obsessed with unearthing how much pain was required to tap out, to throw our hands inside our lungs to hear the crying more clearly when i was young i believed butterflies lived inside my lungs, flapping their wings to pump me full of air, love, kneading my ribcage with their antennae i don’t believe this anymore, but if it helps you understand why i sit alone under trees at night then i will gladly let it speak for me then i will gladly teach you to believe it, too V. S. Ramstack is a Pisces, a selective extrovert, and an avid crier. Besides poetry, she enjoys cats, flowers, and checking out too many books at the library. She received her MFA from Columbia College Chicago. Previous work can be found in Night Music Journal, Curator Magazine, Posit, and elsewhere. 9/30/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Perry Gasteiger Leah Lovell Green CC Transience The road stretches its jaws swallowing the horizon in concrete lamplight the weight of the evening pressing in thick and heavy summer cotton sticking to warm thighs and damp spines. My feet tingle as they slap the pavement calloused and worn they welcome the midnight wanderings of a soft mind bruised by the hardness of reality: there is nowhere to go but on. I pluck a dandelion and nestle it into crazed locks pick a few more and braid a crown fit for the queen of the lost the forgotten, the damned, the discarded the ones who wander — and wonder — and get absolutely nowhere those who never learned to come home. I suck on gold-stained fingertips humming to cicada songs vibrating the air searching for somewhere to lay down my weary bones as dandelion heads fall from my hair littering the road in my wake. I make castles in the sandbox of a school playground beside the highway carefully erecting every tower bringing to life the haven I dream of until I find myself caught once more by the beckoning call of the night my kingdom falling at my feet as cool sand shifts between naked toes and I find my way onto the road again. I wonder why I roam the streets playing hide and seek with the dawn when I long for a place to come home to at night to rest my tired soles. But I love making dandelion crowns and sandcastles -- reaching for ghosts in the midnight fog searching for something solid to hold in the dark I keep coming back empty handed. Anthem of a high school dropout We are the damned ones living between the cracks, running nine to five streets, basking in the sunlight, learning lessons in the eyes of the ones nobody wants to look at: those angels sitting on street corners with baseball caps and dirty needles -- they found heaven and learned the price of bliss: burning in hellfire on main street pavement until they are allowed back home again. This is how we learned to live: crashing through the front doors of the school the wind at our backs as the principle screams that we'll end up dead and wasted, but his eyes are just as dark as our angels' and we know the truth we are all dead already, coffins carved into the shape of classrooms and cubicles; but we seep through the cracks our flesh feeds the worms, decaying and rotting in the earth, bleached bones crawling onto sunburned pavement as we go searching for heaven once again. Perry Gasteiger is a queer, non-binary poet. Their work focuses on the mundane darkness of our everyday world using juxtaposition between the real and the abstract, the beautiful and the deformed, the congruent and the disordered. Perry aims to see the easily unnoticeable in an evocative and empathetic way. 9/30/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Marissa Alvarez Konstantin Leonov | GON CC Crowns & Blue Ribbons welcome to the County Fair ignore the flies around your hair here's your ticket, take a ramble that you're here shows you gamble our Council sure can spin a yarn so do si do 'round the barn they say the outlook sure is rosy but they've pockets full of posy enjoy some crafts & some funnel cake more of this isolation we cannot take we're not waiting to vaccinate the masses we're pretending the pandemic passed us ropin'? ridin'? what's your pleasure? 6 feet or more?! don't worry or measure don't bother with the face apparel it's only the sick or brown lives in peril have a listen to our maskless chorus we don't believe in coronavirus but we'll keep mentioning herd immunity and shouting we value family & community though you'll see us frown if we hear you coughin' hey what word rhymes with coffin? don't you dare cancel our privilege culture can't imagine what brought the turkey vultures step up to the cotton candy booth we fill our bellies with alternative truth nevermind equine next to bovine & swine our corona caramel apple is divine don't bother with 70% alcohol have a visit to the taffy stall we'll thump our bibles & brandish a gun we can't last 40 days without some fun quarantine got us pissed we know more than an epidemiologist so enjoy a corn dog & admire a quilt hug your friends free of guilt now the Fair is done, you're off to bed & in 3 weeks if you should wind up dead we'll remind you with all civility in the words of not-my-president we take no responsibility By Dec 23, 2020 more than 54,000 Latino Americans died of COVID-19 CDC COVID Tracking Project By Dec 22, 2020 more than 50,000 Black Americans died of COVID-19 COVID Racial Data Tracker By Feb 4, 2021 1 in every 475 Native Americans died of COVID-19 APM Research Lab This poem is dedicated to my 3 cousins who did not survive. Marissa Alvarez is a Chicana poet with multiple chronic conditions, and lives on Southern Paiute ancestral land with her parents (again), shih tzu sister, & 3 rescued cats. Recently two of her poems have come out in The Southern Quill 2021, as well as two poems in Rigorous Volume 5, Issue 3. 9/30/2021 2 Comments Poetry by Jessica Covil-Manset Paulo César León Palacios CC Foster Family Keeps Us for a Night I remember a house so big I kept exclaiming about it. Ceiling so high, like a church. I sang praises until my sister's eyes said I’d told too much. The faces are lost to me- not clouded over like in dreams, but cut off at the neck; not on screen even. Like that beautiful lady in the Powerpuff Girls, or the grown-ups in Cow and Chicken. I must not have been looking up except at the ceiling. My sister and I, so focused on not being a burden, couldn't tell the mother what we wanted for breakfast. The pantries had all been empty when CPS came to get us. So she took us to the store with her, walking slow and smiling through snack aisles- her young daughter in the cart more prone to speaking: pointing and receiving. The mother kindly awaiting signs, following me and my sister's eyes, listening and selecting. We woke up the next day to a feast. The mother said our dad was on his way- in the meantime, eggs whichever way, but we didn't specify. And we never saw them again, but I think about them often. seeking sanctuary hide me in whatever private pocket you can find; let it be just me there, protected from the outside. keep me warm safe close by- as close as it is possible to be. i am searching for some way, some circumstance where i am possible to be. in whatever private pocket, hide me, hide me Jessica Covil-Manset is an English PhD Candidate at Duke, where she is writing a dissertation on poetry and poeisis as political praxis. Her poems have been published in SWWIM Every Day, Whale Road Review, Rise Up Review, and elsewhere, and she was nominated for the 2020 Best of the Net. 9/30/2021 2 Comments Poetry by Derek Berry Christian Collins CC southern apocrypha with rumor of a rodeo clown heard it said (secondhand, maybe) if you drive a buick lesabre seventy-miles-an-hour toward the cliff of the ravine, blasting dolly parton’s “jolene,” you’ll float like the voice of a friend when telling you for the last time “i love you” before he dies & you’ll land clean safe on the other side on the outskirts of a carnival— no no, you heard from your cousin this was a rodeo, or at least a monster truck rally— loud & bright enough to make you forget how the body feels falling or how it might feel slapping the surface of a shallow creek, least that’s what’s been said: you promiseland a perfect jump like that & don’t end up dead or twisted, only garlanded with salt-rotten popcorn & you look down at the dirt ring of the rodeo (second rodeo, i swear) & you see not the bucking bull who resembles every future boyfriend you’ll kiss until you don’t but instead a paint-slick fool family-familiar, almost kin (& memory, it wavers gin-drunk like that one night you watched brokeback mountain at three in the morning & sobbed because it always hurts when someone dies, no matter how many crooked elegies you scribble in your head, & still after you dreamed of kissing heath ledger’s beautiful dead face)— you swear, you recognize yourself down there a ghost. no one told you, before you painted yourself a harlequin twin, that grief was a clown car we could all fit inside. Derek Berry is a non-binary writer, podcast host, and educator. They are the author of the novel Heathens and Liars of Lickskillet County and the poetry chapbooks Glitter Husk and Buggery. They work as a museum educator in South Carolina. 9/30/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Ashley Wagner Paulo César León Palacios CC
Portrait of the Poet on a Hot Day after Lorde She sits at her old desk in her new home office, a window on either side of her cloud-filled head, each sill lined with glowing stones, and it is entirely too hot. She may stand slowly and turn on the ineffectual fan sitting squat on the floor. She fears she may be pregnant, or else it’s just the heat tumbling her insides like river rocks. She’s building a secret world in the hollow-dark of her body. Her stocky legs are banged up from days of lifting things she was not designed to lift. Her stomach yawns empty, and the fridge joins in solidarity. Through the window to her right and across the street, sweet-mouthed children pop fistfuls of firecrackers and the silver- coated gravel breaks free. When the sun dips golden behind the dome of a nearby church, she wears her cat slippers out for a smoke. She wraps herself in the cool eddies and gusts cradling the deck and eyes the lightening gathering in the clouds’ dark underskirts. She hears city sounds rumble like far-off thunder, hears car tires crunch on pebbles, reminding her so much of rain. Ashley Wagner is a queer writer, reader, and roller-skater living in Baltimore. She is the poetry editor for Ligeia Magazine, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Whale Road Review, FOLIO, Door is a Jar, and others. 9/30/2021 0 Comments Poetry by Emily Wolahan Christian Collins CC Tansy Tanacetum vulgare ASTER FAMILY 4’. Many tiny, button-like yellow flowers You in dense clusters; rays minute, barely visible did around large disk. Leaves dark green, fern-like, not tripinnately compound; aromatic when crushed. injure CAUTION Poisonous. BLOOMS Aug.–Sept. me. HABITAT Roadsides, ditches, pastures. === Thrumming on the street just beside where I am trapped multiphasic, multifocal, multi-bound to the slap of ash in air. The fire cannot jump this road - until the fire jumps this road. My answer is left off the static page. Is spread, barely visible pulling energy to its heart. You placed the paper on the embers with an ease that did not cease until the show was over. Smoke rose. False snow blurs edges between solid and immaterial, somewhere between injure and nurture. You keep on leaving your mark. Whorl me, disintegrate me, crumble me up. Take me in your mouth. I taste rich. Emily Wolahan is the author of the poetry collection Hinge (NPRP, 2015). Her poetry has appeared in Puerto del Sol, Sixth Finch, Georgia Review, and Oversound. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Anthropology and Social Change (CIIS) and is a Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal. 9/30/2021 1 Comment Poetry by Remi Recchia Benjamin White CC We’re in the car on Main Street & it’s dark 1. outside. headlights glide past us like luminescent whales. the moon is out (or it’s not). the car’s name is Lorna (or it’s not). a gift from my grandmother that I will eventually wreck. 2. inside. Songs for Swingin’ Lovers stashed inside the glove compartment. beige seats overwhelm me. the steering wheel, fake leather, rough under my shaking hands. I grip it carefully between my knuckle-teeth so we don’t crash because I am drunk. 3. underwater. each firefly outside the window perhaps, in actuality, a florescent jellyfish. your voice like the scream of pink or purple coral moments before they are un-reefed. a tree branch too close to the windshield. 4. in my head. small traumas like cereal overdosing beyond the box. and then: four-legged distraction too quick for .31 BAC. the two of us holding hands as if no one has ever held a hand before but it’s not a hand, it’s a mouse or a rat or a possum nesting in the sticky jugular dark & the windshield shatters into tiny pieces that want my jugular. & there are other cars & there is noise & there are many sea owls in my brain. the white darkness of the stars burns the rubber off the tires in an elegant, sea-star pattern while I remember what it was like to own a pet dog. the way a creature needed me but could tear out my jugular had it wanted to. 5. when I wake. you are not there & that is to be expected. I am still drunk. I dream this night over (& over), smooth the pillow next to me (& my body). the porch light turns itself on when I cum without you. a lifetime of revision, of orange spots lighting up my liver. Remi Recchia is a trans poet and essayist from Kalamazoo, Michigan. He is a Ph.D. student in English-Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. He currently serves as an associate editor for the Cimarron Review. A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Remi’s work has appeared or will soon appear in Columbia Online Journal, Harpur Palate, and Juked, among others. He holds an MFA in poetry from Bowling Green State University. Remi’s first full-length poetry collection, Quicksand/Stargazing, is forthcoming with Cooper Dillon Books in fall 2021. |
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