Nicholas_T CC



    Time does not always feel like a gift. The body ages ungracefully, the number of people we love dwindle in death or a death-in-living. We can't go back and fix things (oh, though we want for nothing more) the best we can do is to fix a few things in the here and now. Even so, we want more time. With the people who are now gone, with the parts of ourselves that once were so vibrant and seemingly unencumbered (a beautiful illusion) or with the parts of us that never even had a chance to form before disaster struck. If time is a gift, it is a difficult one. 

   There are things we come to know in no other way than through great difficulty. Perhaps it is not at all accidentally said that one must rise to meet a challenge. You can go through something and not meet it. A whole life can take this direction. A good part of mine once did. My early environment did not rise to meet any moment. We were on the descent. The toughest thing I have had to learn in this life is how to fashion my own emotional tools. We are the only ones coming. But that there are also more than a few fellow travelers on that road we come to know and lean on. Time brings them in and out of our lives in beautiful and devastating measure. Sometimes it's but a moment in time. And a moment is enough. We can hear a thing said a million times before, but sometimes it's the way someone says something to us that helps it to land. Timing. Tone. Timbre. When something lands it lands. It goes in the tool box. 

    All of the work here, for instance. It lands with me. And it is but a moment in time, and it cannot last, but the feeling does. The purpose, the why of us, why we are here, why we reach out, why we even try at all to describe all of the things that have happened to us in our lives. I tend to think it matters greatly that we meet each other in this way. Meet a moment, or a feeling, or a loss the size of everything. 

    How easily the trees let go of their cover in Autumn, we think. But why should it be any easier for them? We know as much about a tree's struggle as we do our own, and we know so very little. And just that little bit is enough. We can do a lot with that. Maybe it's a struggle for everything in life to let go. Letting go / letting in. Making room for more. How do we ever? But sometimes, don't you? 

    With the little time we do have it is good to not stand alone in it. Even if it's only for a moment, and the tide is high, and it seems all of our work is written on sand. Who knows what the sand remembers of us on the washout? Surely, we each made some small difference here. We have learned our way through on the roughest terrain there is; in here, our own hearts, our own bodies, our own minds. But it's the meeting of others; hearts, bodies, minds, that makes for a richer crossing. 

   Thank you all for being on this stretch of the journey with us. For sharing your stories of moment-meeting and heart-connecting, your how and your why and your rising. In this moment in time I feel extraordinarily grateful that our unique and differing paths have crossed, here, in this way. I hope we meet again. And even if we don't, this small and tender moment was enough. 

    Happy Fall, and safe travels, friends. May you all rise and meet your difficult thing in your own unique and beautiful way, and in your own time. 

James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic

       Thomas CC




Phase Change

My therapist says Sleep Now,
but I struggle. Each morning,
I watch clouds give birth,

witness starlings fling themselves 
into figure eights, squint to see 
Andromeda’s red star.

My will says, 
Set me afire 
until I’m atomic, 

which is not a demand,
but a telescopic question 
for my daughter 

to answer. Soon, 
my spine will be a mountain 
instead of a moon. Soon,

she will spit glaciers 
on my chest. I will prepare her 
for my many unravelings, 

static fissures towards a single 
black hole. She won’t understand 
this poem, its bleak debris 

ashing onto the page. 
She’ll watch starlings migrate 
to Mars and float into sunlight 

she can’t name. She’ll whisper 
See you later instead of 
Goodbye. 





Johnny Cash

My knee cap split open 
like a melon. We listened 
to Johnny Cash 

on the way to the hospital. 
I cried. It wasn’t ugly, 
but it wasn’t pretty 

either. When we arrived, 
a mass of people snaked 
through the parking lot;

we didn’t even exit 
the vehicle. Don’t worry, 
you said, My father 

is a doctor, as if 
learned skills could be 
passed down, as if 

you weren’t still drunk 
and over confident 
and in love.

But we didn’t go 
to your father’s. 
We went home.

You carried me 
over the threshold, 
cut a lemon 

for my tired mouth. 
I was just a shell 
of a person then,

trying to escape.
Hold tight, you said, 
not meeting my gaze.

You poked my tender flesh 
with the needle, fished around 

for the other side.





Fog Lines 
            after September 11th

Fifth grade, a foal 
on stilts learning to walk,

and my father trapped 
in an airport far away, 

his voice a woolen whisper 
through the corded phone,                 

and aren’t we all connected by 

small grass fields, 
river oxbows, 
cords 

to our mothers’ wombs. 

I am still sucking on 
my mother’s breast with 

a small tongue, her milk 
like a string of prayer flags 

struggling to wave 
as she witnessed me wriggle 

in the NICU window, my head 
a wire trap, the nurses stern 

like bees. You Can Touch Her 
Tomorrow, they’d say, then tomorrow     
        
the same thing, always tomorrow, 
her nipples puckering to the sky, 

her breasts hardening 
like tempered wings.         

Her hands formed fog lines across 
the ventilator’s window, lines 

she’d remember ten years later 
as her hands reached for the television screen

to cover the New York skyline, 
the smoke pillowing 
the sky, the grayness 
a memory of me. 

​

Crystal Ignatowski's poetry has been featured in Barren Magazine, Four Way Review, Parentheses Journal, and more. She lives and writes in Oregon.

        ​Thomas CC



Missing

It's forgetting season when the leaves fall, and in the yard
we bury everything that died over the summer
and offer the last of our love, name the ones we want to hold

and not forget, and I am unheld, and my tongue
restricts its own words of wanting. I missed
the first October breeze and nobody knew

where I was living and nobody thought to know. As
I write this I have spoken only to the squirrels outside
my window for several days and nights, asking them to tell me

the point of a life too fortressed to let the summer in,
to let the winter out. They scatter at the scratch

of my unpracticed voice. All the remembered dead 
open their mouths and plead. Through this silent season
that was all I needed and all I could not do. 

October is the month of forgetting and I am being forgotten. 
Old friends leave me like a needle pulled from the skin,
which is to say I'm getting sicker. I wonder

which patch of earth will cover me next year,
which roots will finally embrace me, which fruit
will grow strong from everything my life could hold.




​
Bleak Autumn of the Fifth Year

It's winter again, or almost, and no 
fire in the fireplace, and my father
wears his big coat as he leaves,
hat carried by the wind, scuffs
on the car ceiling from hauling
dead trees home from vacant lots,
lonelier than it was some days, quieter, 
softer, darker, trees festering in a gaping sky, 
frost vanishing like days, blushful flowers greying, 
my sister's mittens hanging from the hook, the clouds
of yellow death on every tree, impressionist 
street corners, a deep sigh, our closing hands, 
the creeping ice that threatens cold, 
and she is still dying in my memory, 
and I am still living for another year
in this unlikely world, oh God, this world.

​


Originally from Chicago, IL, Lee Johns is an undergraduate student at Yale University. Their writing has been published in Body Without Organs and the Concord Review and is forthcoming at The Agapanthus Collective. Right now, you can probably find them at the library.
​

         Nicholas_T CC



​
​Undertow

spring’s slow trickle                 of trampled snow          unleashes 
backlogged precipitation         swells Mississippi          well over her banks

I don’t fish           but friends who do          inform me            bass don’t bite            
when the water’s rising           they hide in eddies         from the gathering current

and I do read                the obituaries of boys          who jump in        
and come out white          downstream in Vernon County  

boys survived by family         who swear              their deaths are intentional

and I do observe              that sliver of moon               left to hang 
like a cut nail            visceral as the silence                      between us

and I do feel          the cloak of your embrace          hands that belie       
the goodbye                in the soaked          midnight world        

and I do wish              to almighty             to go back          warn myself      
to evade your first touch                  but here we are          scuffing blacktop         

under maple buds              just opened             the divergence       
as incidental          and permanent                   as the river drownings




​Rachel White is an emerging poet and artist. She holds a B.F.A in Graphic Design from Viterbo University, and a M.Ed. from the University of Wollongong. Originally from Wisconsin, she has worked in Connecticut and Australia as an art teacher for over a decade, and is a U.S. Army veteran. Rachel’s work has been published in Third Wednesday Magazine.

        Andrew Seaman CC




Self-portrait with Elegy (III)

Whenever I am adrift
a faroff earthbound watery star 
means home      a house 

in the fields      of memory
where it’s always evening
an ending just beyond reach

and welcome that way
And I’m always that kid
kicking dirt clods

the clotted remains
of a growing season gone
down the tubes     too much rain

too little time to breathe
between the wet hoof beats
clopping their way

down the roof
into my dreams
A mosquito swarm into a chord

a single car      muffler sputtering
down into the dark
of the closing day

At the window      
the bruise-colored waves of rain
wash in from the west

fireflies compel
their own morse code
with cricket and thrush

and distant thunder 
hollering       like a father
from up the stairs
​
I wasn’t much more then
than the result of old growth
that grew close enough

to rub away the rough in each other 
But the world turns
on the momentum         of leaving

There’s a moment
when it feels like twilight
can go either way      the way

maple leaves can seem
to keep waving        goodbye
even after the wind stops blowing 





Partial Eclipse

I’m learning    to lean in    to the falling    almost-
dark    you call it    a game of trust    those arms    

warm rivers    merging    tracks of light    lean in    close    
tell me    your lies    I’ll believe them    if you tell them 

truly    you’re teaching me    turn in    to the skid    the ice    
won’t form yet    for another    six months    outside now    

blows profuse    hymns    in hummingbird    tongues
a honeyed weight     as light descends    too much almost    

to breathe    sometimes    when the days    grow long    
twilight is    a compromise    of territories    your rich outline    

and mine    dark    in the window    tracing    vague shapes    
doves    in twilit flight    barking dogs    teach me    how

to live    with your hands    out there    luna’s glossy plume    
halfway    out of frame    earth cutting    into it    a fine line    

we walk    the bleeding edge    this game    of dim shadows
shows us    more fully    than full light    ever would

​


Marko Capoferri has lived and worked in eight US states, including Montana, where he currently resides. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Montana in Missoula. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Painted Bride Quarterly, Porter House Review, Prometheus Unbound, Camas, and FatherFather.
​

      ​   kami rao CC




Phiale

Shape my body into a bowl and drink from the shallow collarbone 
                I leave for you. Wading in the wine sky, a half moon
                                                                              rediscovers us—the doctrine of our bodies.
                We lie here, offering the world nothing
                                                                                                 but ourselves.
The way your cheek presses medallions in my chest
                             aches. Your breath, flowers.
                                                                   A mouth is a measure of faith
                                                                                                            is a curl between skins is
               the night that belongs only inches from our lips 
                                             is enough.
Don’t wait until morning for renewal, when the bed is made
                                                                                          and light turns everything too certain.
                            Think of the gestures that make us endless.
Speak, if you can.
                                                       Tell me how prayer is too small for this.

​


​Michael Beard (he/him) currently studies poetry at the Bowling Green State University MFA program and serves as the managing editor for Mid-American Review. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jupiter Review, Bending Genres, Moss Puppy Magazine, The Mantle Poetry, and other places. He can be found on Twitter @themichaelbeard.
​

        Doug Kerr CC




​Squall 
​              or, "You're always so quiet."


normally I'd not swirl I'd not whirl about      what seems

at the seams a half acre there      a crowd fest where      quiet 

should be   hush-hush could be      but the rush      that spasm so swish 

cataclysm    of rain      of sleet    of hell more snow     & hail hard blows 

in the thick of it        like a bomb's tick-tick of it          at the cusp of storm 

breaking       last gust of two lovers aching        holding together 

silicone-seal-tight       fear of leaving greater than cold blight      that silence 

that comes humid still     but devours but devours but devours      so why 

wouldn't I                why wouldn't I                now tell me: why wouldn't I 

throw all caution to that brawl of wind and scream & scream & scream?




Michelle Menting's recent poems and flash prose narratives appear or are forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Passages North, Eco-Theo Review, The Dodge, About Place, and others. She lives in a small house along a little river in a patch of woods in Maine.

          ​Vlastimil Koutecký CC



​

Poems Written in First Ten Days of Sobriety 


Melancholic as bees filling a Crown Vic
or a headlamp in ashes inside the cave while
feeling for air, I become the breezeway 
of past attempts to stop harvesting liquid,
a Penelope of sorts, agog and cramped,
as I adjust to a new regimen of saltines
and despairing downticks on the scale
of absent suitors in myth. What once was
written in sinew now weights heavy on
blunt variations. My liver unfizzes, 
my kidneys relax, blood pressure moves 
the direction of fish. What I once was— 
another creature. What I will be—an upsurge. 
Unsure, I become options optional, imparting. 

*

 
5am, they injected the vaccine at a Walmart
on the edge of a North Florida wilderness of
gothic plastic assemblages while the wine 
glasses arrived broken in their Amazon box 
too big like a child who wears pants that fall 
from his waist revealing how flimsy the body.
In ethanol and ferment, the pomegranates
of our spiked hellscape sit quietly in their breeding 
turning my throat glassy: I’ve got hummingbird lungs. 
Green bottles thrown to goddesses and kings’
pudgy fingers clasp flukes and goblets, formulating 
decrees: You will never drink again. All things stew given 
enough time: cherry, elderberry, currant, me, you, 
brooding, lust. Lifting my arm above nothing was torture.

*

Half-baked lies permeate my existence: I can
quit anytime, I won’t die on my own watch, silly
epiphanies mocking themselves ad infinitum. Sisyphus 
hurled his gramophone across existence calling it
a rock, then the rock was abstracted to a fate rolling 
towards hegemonic distractions like Google and socials.
Cosmology is the next best thing. Curious how time 
dwarfs even the most disastrous of human cacophonies 
like Greta Thunberg offering snark to the Twittersphere  
of trolls, domestic terrorists, and recipes for scones.
After work, I twist like a rag in a bucket of rumination. 
If I pass the supermarket, will the debit card cleave 
from my bleached justifications? Will I graze the wine 
aisle with my scarred knuckles in animal magnetism? 
Will I drive my car into the ditch’s creamy twilight
or resist my own twitching impulses like carbonite? 

*

Amphetamines make me orgasm super awesome.
             Like a video game to avoid the past. 

I wanted to burn down the treatment facility.
             As a way to unhinge the label from spirit. 

I couldn’t sleep because I would relive an incident
involving my then two-year-old son.
             Like a script memorized to avoid the past.

Because the world is so dull and tedious. 
             The brain feels sandblasted and raw as dunes.

It’s perfectly rational if you heavily discount 
the value of the future. 
             As a way peel off the label from spirit.

Fun fact: pleasure is a reason to do things : ) : ) : )
             Bare as brain, sad as dunes.


*


To feel bummed like this, 
an avalanche of coordinates
on the body’s temple translates 
into kissing sharks and parasites, 
for the long haul it’s been a week
with no substances except a man telling 
me that I should inhale and exhale agog. 
I watch the crescent moon, say “I do” 
to the world but don’t mean it
because inside I’m dying of fear 
and wine is sloshing like rivers of 
fuming days, days diluted, moon 
reappearing after thirty nights 
and calling itself eyes. 
      

*

Water is cold and wet,
     wine—hot and dry like
a lake on fire turns purple
    as pines smoke.

Hippocrates tells 
   the story of a man
who slept on his back
in a tent as serpent 
   entered his open 
mouth and he bit down.

*


Day One:

Finished with saturation.
   Done with the dish of spreading
colors and clicking. I could Google
myself twelve times daily only
to find I have not left the house,
    that I’m really tending 
to my scraped knee.

Day Two

Fell again. Nothing changed.
I don’t want to know the things 
I think I want to know, don’t want 
to drink things, I think I want to drink.
Besieged by blight and loneliness
deep in the body’s cavities. Behind 
the eyeballs weeds grow
and parting the weeds, the murky
pond gravitates to static when it should 
be stiller than hands that hold
deadened plants at noon. 


*

The spheres demanded 
I didn’t cry. On the pavement,
I thought about it while
pain shot through 
my arms and ankles. 
The spheres are cruel.
The man across the street
who saw me fall helped
his wife into a purple car. 
Hey, that’s my car!
I got up, blood gushing
down my shin. Kept 
running, lush plants 
exhaled, hand numb 
by now—only 8am. 
What else did Tuesday
have in store?




​Sandra Simonds is the award-winning author of eight books of poetry: Triptychs (Wave Books, November 2022), Atopia (Wesleyan University Press, 2019), Orlando, (Wave Books, 2018), Further Problems with Pleasure, winner of the 2015 Akron Poetry Prize from the University of Akron Press, Steal It Back (Saturnalia Books, 2015), The Sonnets (Bloof Books, 2014), Mother Was a Tragic Girl (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2012), and Warsaw Bikini (Bloof Books, 2009). Her poems and criticism have been published in the New Yorker, the New York Times, the Best American Poetry, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Chicago Review, Granta, Boston Review,  Ploughshares, Fence, Court Green, and Lana Turner. She is the recipient of the Readers’ Choice Award for her sonnet “Red Wand,” which was published on Poets.org, the Academy of American Poets website. She went to UCLA for her BA, University of Montana for her MFA and Florida State for her PhD. She lives in Tallahassee, Florida and is an Associate professor of English and Humanities at Thomas University in Thomasville, Georgia.

         ​Nicholas_T CC




Becoming a better girl

1. By which I mean less wants, so

             No more lashings in dawn light.
             The rain coughs phlegm down the
             gutters, skittering your skin with layers
             Of petroleum. How the distance
             Between the clouds and the future
             Is impossibly large. How you tried to
             See your next lover, but only saw 
             more blue.

1. By which I mean loving yourself.

             To life, breasts upturned and bitten,
             Caught and hung upon hook hands.

1. Because you want to be 

             a hospital, to let the hungry inside you and eat
             You up whole, to pronounce the living
             dead. Because you want to thrash yourself alive:
             To thrash yourself out of your 
             mother.

1. Imagine there’s an arrow, and it’s

             Shooting toward you, and so you laugh,
             And it burrows into your wrist, and you’re 
             Still laughing, hand flattened out into
             An envelope with a name on it. Dawn is 
             crackling on the radio, your feet are stuttering
             A little song; nothing else to do, love. 

1. You wanted to put back a piece of

             Yourself where it didn’t belong. 
             And you wanted it badly, sainting 
             your body until you were sour. This
             was so you could let your skin roam,
             deify, another birth, zipping it all
             Back up, baby: we know that’s what you
             need.

1. I couldn’t quite figure out martyrdom; not 

             the silence at the very end, not the static of a
             Body as it falls off a highway. I sirened myself
             Instead, the country’s very best whore. You’ve
             Got to try me. You’ve got to see what I’m
             Good for.

​

        ​kerry o'connor CC




Genetically Isolated Since the Ice Age

I starved myself down the wrong way
not with a wailing stomach and day-long naps
but with the kind of hunger you reserve for pure hatred
(or fear)
I was an animal
gutting turkeys and chewing through the cow’s gristle
pushing through bags of raw vegetables and passing
on all the offers of sweet whiskey, the good bread puddings
and perfect gin martinis with perfect slices of ice
that had kept me warm and fat
bundled in thick layers of subcutaneous blubber
for all those lonely years
I hadn’t sprung up like a flower
and I didn’t wither like one either
Not me, for me
it was the failing predator’s way
a flailing Kodiak bear dragging a rusted
trap in my wake so you can all see where I’ve been
until the starvation caught me
tackled me to the earth and I breathed in the musk
of where we’re all going
the embrace turning more tender
as the weight sloughed off until all that’s left
is a solid block of sharp bones wrapped tight
in a fancy pantsuit of new muscle so young
and so shiny
and so utterly unlike who I am
or who I thought I was
I don’t know how to wear it right
and it’s just so painfully
heartbreakingly obvious
I’m playing dress-up in a closet I don’t belong​



Jessica Mehta is a multi-award-winning poet and author of the just-released "Selected Poems: 2000 - 2020," the winner of the Birdy Prize from Meadowlark Books. As a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space, place, and ancestry in post-colonial "America" informs much of Mehta's work. You can learn more at www.thischerokeerose.com.