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12/2/2021 Poetry by Massey Armistead Mayr CC
Machine When pulling into the carport this morning mistook the thud under my tire as a flat, as I opened the car door realized I had taken a life, there a mouse on its back barely breathing. I wanted to find a way to honor this life, found a spot in the backyard to bury the body. But the dishwasher repair man was at my front door. Hello? Hello? I’m here for the repair request. What was I to tell him, come back in an hour when I know how to respectfully get rid of the body. Took a deep breath, pretended everything was okay. It felt so urgent to figure out what to do with the dead. Maybe because murder is a part of my bloodline, I used to say if it had been me, it would have been different. I bury the innocent in the backyard as an offering, selfishly, to try to pay the debts of my past. I’ve hurt a lot of people, I’ve hurt myself, made poor mistakes. The repairman called to me from inside, ma’am there’s nothing wrong. But there was something wrong. I don’t think we spoke the same language. I don’t think we were even looking at the same machine. Massey Armistead is a writer located in Nashville, TN. She is currently getting her MFA in creative writing at The University of Memphis. Her work has been published in GXRL Pod, Other Worldly Women Press, and Waxing and Waning Literary Journal. 12/2/2021 Poetry by Siân Killingsworth Øyvind Holmstad CC
Ouroboros Fever A shaking venom moves in my hours. Time feels too long. I granulate my emotions, spend each grain, miserly. Else be mired & consumed by endless need. Years heavy as a weighted blanket. A generational tether. Chemistry or environment-- what’s the difference? Prozac only made me fat. Not happy. Not blank. I turn on myself. Is this my place? There will be salvation. There must. My horoscope tells me to work & be dependable. I want flair. I want to climb out of my body & put it gently into the green can for composting. Walk away bare & free & free of identity. I am a rattlesnake at heart. If Consummation Were the Noun Form of Consume Fifty tucked-up wishes reside inside my chest, each one a witch with claws, each hiding her own magic, beautiful or brutal. Google glamour. Search shine. Yearning for posterity, a light in the light. Who would want to be forever? In living, I am first & last, ordinal, I unleaf-- My filaments and vapors strewn by wind. Everything clawed scrabbles up. Each desire frills away from me, dissolves, turns smoke. My last myth: some hope. Siân Killingsworth (she/her) has been published in Blue Earth Review, Typehouse Literary Journal, Stonecoast Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry (Poets Resist), and other journals and anthologies. She is the Anthology Editor for the Marin Poetry Center and Curator for the Second Sunday Poetry Series. Find her on Twitter: @sianessa and @2ndSundayPoetry. 12/2/2021 Poetry by Tricia Marcella Cimera John Brighenti CC
Love Poem for RW I will help you kill him. We will be child murderers, we will go back in time. Or we will drive to his house now where he lives as a fucked old man. We will discuss him rationally over the dinner table until we get in the car and start the resolute engine. Either way, we will grow fangs in our gums guns in our hands indifference in our guts: I will help you kill him. Tricia Marcella Cimera is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Published works have appeared in places ranging from the Buddhist Poetry Review to The Ekphrastic Review. Her micro-chapbook called GO SLOW, LEONARD COHEN was released through the Origami Poems Project. One of her plum poems was pleased to receive a recent Pushcart Prize and another plum-themed poem was happy to be awarded a Best of the Net nomination. Tricia lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois, in a town called St. Charles, by a river named Fox, with a Poetry Box (also named Fox) in her front yard. 12/2/2021 Poetry by Carmen Calatayud Alex Holyoake CC Our House: Ages 9-13 Mother’s liquid Dexedrine glows Through the large glass bottle Cocoa tinted. When she pours it into a tablespoon It’s a neon juice reveal: Valencian orange glam syrup Procured by dad that wakes her From a narcoleptic haze. In her orbit there are angel Food cakes and pink Sno Balls From the Hostess factory. We binge on sugar to soothe. She secretly smokes but I dig for the pack In her purse, rip each cigarette One by one, over the trash can As father ordered. I ruin her weight loss plan. My birth chains her to him. She drifts in and out of my life Takes to her bed with migraines And the opera of overwhelm. Her sadness fills sinks and bathtubs. I can’t turn the faucets off. She hides in the basement laundry room Her bomb shelter from a second Blitz. Father’s belt whips recorded By my blue arms and living room walls. I open the hall closet, medicine filled, Grab cherry red syrup with codeine. The scenic Costa Brava wallpaper peels. Yellow tiger’s eye teeth fall out of my mouth. Godmother There’s a woman on her front porch Inhaling her cigarette. She’s in love With the slender white stick Between her fingers. My fingers pretend to play piano While tapping my left arm. Blue-green vein rises and I stroke it like a purring cat. It’s been four weeks, heroin, And I need you to feel nothing. There is so much I want to tell you I want to thank you for being my godmother. For taking me to the church where god doesn’t care And we don’t pretend he does. Truth blooms in a way a moon girl can understand Truth being there is no me. Just velvet junk afterglow that Streams from stars into my arm. On the sidewalk in front of my feet A grey feather just landed. The woman lights another cigarette The smoke smells like her name, Dulce. I pick up the feather and put its point To my vein, dream of burnt caramel Streaming in, lips smack from fast joy-- The sweet blur gone too quick. Wish alchemy alone could blow my heart open Fill it with lips to kiss all the losses Kill the desire for my godmother’s hug.  Carmen Calatayud is the daughter of immigrant survivors of war: a Spanish father and Irish mother. Her book In the Company of Spirits was a runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award. Her poetry has appeared in print and online in Cutthroat, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, the Virginia Quarterly Review and several anthologies. For five years, Carmen was a poet moderator for Poets Responding, a Facebook group created by poet Francisco X. Alarcón as part of the immigrant rights movement.
12/2/2021 Poetry by Tharani Balachandran John Brighenti CC
Music Festival in Oro Medonte, Ontario, July 2015 She wore a crown and a sash that that said birthday princess and I wore a onesie, her pink striped one that flowed from me as freely as the freedom we were seeking. We told each other that we were the best-looking ladies at the ball and I told her I wanted to find someone to kiss but she wrapped her arms around me before I could walk away and I wrapped my arms around hers and forgot about anyone that I didn’t love and I didn’t kiss anyone. 30,000 people filtered through the field elaborate feline face paint and inflatable unicorns showing side boob and doing handstands and laughing sparkly rivers down their cheeks and I ran smack into the former love of my life wearing an orange tie-dyed tank top that I always hated and an expression that was both surprise and regret. That kind of thing is always happening to me, to us, and he hugged me and it felt like strawberry ice cream and I wondered if I was really lactose intolerant after all. He turned to leave and I remained. like an abandoned sandal kicked off and flung without a care from its crowd surfing owner. A hologram of a man passed through me dipped a finger into one of my tears and placed it into his mouth before turning into a horse and galloping away. When she found me I was crying with my hand over my heart listening to Kendrick Lamar spit instructions to the crowd, sit down, drank, stand up, drank pass out, drank, wake up, drank which is not exactly the whine of a tiny violin the moment called for and I told her I can feel it breaking and she put her hand over mine and said I will put it back together. Instead she slipped something round and white into my mouth in the middle of Girl Talk's 3am set, and my heart sped up along with the music. My blood pulsated in rhythm with the flashing lights I couldn’t tell if I was terrified or homesick or simply having the time of my life. Hands raised all around us as if in prayer, worshipping in unison to a higher power, to a Messiah which was simply our own energy and the thumping bass. Neon lasers shooting from the stage right through our bodies. At some point I tried to turn myself into the police but she saw me and quickly guided me away she said they would not keep me safe but that she would. I drank enough water to drown out the music then we lay hand in hand in the grass on our backs, a cloudless blue sky above us, swelling with hope, an inviting blank canvas on which to paint a possible future. Neil Young crooned in the background I've been first and last look at how the time goes past but I'm all alone at last rolling home to you. He took breaks to throw handfuls of organic cherries into the crowd and we placed our hands on each other's empty bellies and talked about how full we felt, how for once, we weren't hungry for anything. For once, we wanted nothing at all. Tharani Balachandran (she/her) is a first-generation Canadian, lawyer, tea enthusiast, reader of books, lover of gossip and writer of poems who lives on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen speaking peoples in Victoria, British Columbia. If you have loved Tharani or she has loved you, chances are you will end up in one of her poems. Tharani is a frequent performer at the Victoria Poetry Project’s Tongues of Fire open mic and was an ensemble member of the 2020-2021 Fireworks Mentorship Program for spoken-word artists. She recently self-published her debut chapbook entitled Love in the Time of Corona. 12/2/2021 Poetry by Amanda Hawk John Brighenti CC
In Broad Daylight As a small town teenager, we walked the sidewalks in packs, huddled in front of the grocery store, dangled from the school yard monkey bars, or grouped in the corner of the local pizza shop. We challenged authority in our impatient tapping fingertips, indestructible glaring over sunglasses, and the sarcastic prose lingering on our lips. At night, my friends and I snuck out to roam the street edge and slunk down to the school; clustered together to plan our exit in a trail of constellations. My classmate, Angie, lived on the outskirts with her freshly divorced mother and punk rock sister. As a little girl, she smiled every day and mastered the monkey bars. As a teenager, she knew the number of steps from her front door to the school while she sauntered along the road and stared down headlights for an escape route. One day, someone did stop for Angie, It was the middle in the afternoon, when she walked home from school. Grown men tried to pull her into their van and barrel down the freeway in broad daylight. In a battle of teeth and nails, Angie got away and found safety in a farmhouse and police sirens, but left her invincibility like a loose jacket in their hands. Her name was a trap upon our mouths the next day, and Angie became a lesson for us teenage girls. We sat in weeks of school assemblies about strangers, safety and our frailty. Angie never came back to school. Ripe Strawberries Once upon a summer, a girl ripe in strawberries and deep blue ruffles confined to her home with the babysitter- a wolf. A girl in pigtails and spaghetti straps dangling before the boy a high schooler in thick framed eyeglasses. He plucks her curiosity with savage palms. She forgets about closed bathroom doors, best friends on front porch waiting, and the feeling of calluses biting skin under loose straps. Girl rises from six or seven years old and the dress remains wadded in her closet with faded strawberries, the metallic smell of his breath, and his name crumpled in the front pocket. She grows into a woman that will not know the rasp of a half-starved tongue and its slow motion along her thighs. A woman that will not see snap jaw muzzle fingers in the hands of all her lovers ready to pull her apart one button at a time. She fragments that summer from her memory- deletes the thick rimmed glasses, withdraws the wolf hands, erases the deep blue ruffled dress, and with a survival needle and silent thread, sews herself back together. She pulls out the letters of his name like jagged teeth and stitches him up in the word predator. Amanda Hawk lives in Seattle, Washington between the roaring planes and concrete jungle. Her poetry has been featured on Rain City Poetry Slam's Instagram and an honorable mention on marylambertsings.com. Recently, she has had poems accepted at borrowed solace, The Raven Review and Drunk Monkeys. 12/2/2021 Poetry by William R. Soldan Dane CC
Poor Kid’s Obituary I didn’t really know him but knew him too well, because I too knew hurt. He lived far off Lornfield road in a trailer stained orange with rust. His were the sinewy limbs of the perpetually ground down, the worked since they could walk. Emaciated face of hunger. The strength of three kids our age, body and mind, cloaked in a shabby coat of unbreachable armor. He could outnumber the pushups and pullups of the baddest motherfucker in the whole school, and did, as if he didn’t have enough to endure. Or so I remember, now, how life’s cruel choirs glanced off his unbathed skin, his Salvation Army sweatpants, pushed past gashed shinbones to knees toughened and flattened by prayer, his treadless shoes those goofy Velcro numbers favored by old men nearing their own ends. But what we remember can get so slippery, like the oil-slick cement where he ultimately landed and burst and bled out. Gave his life over to blue. The way the night sometimes weeps and rain suicides itself into the street. Molecules blown apart. Seeps into the drains and the pores of the earth. Becomes vapor. Returns to the air, to our lungs, our blood. Yes, they come back again and again, to invade our cells. Always inside us. After all, we too are the grease in the gears, for years have known hunger and humiliation, have heard the call and felt the pull, the push to sever. Because they are us, those whom we never really knew but whose ghosts we do. How they mirror the smallest light inside us, always on the cusp of winking out, and so seldom enough to reignite what’s kept us going this far. The singular ember, caged in our caved and aching chests, the one that, time and again, starts to darken and go cold. William R. Soldan is a writer from Youngstown, Ohio. He is the author of the story collections In Just the Right Light and Lost in the Furrows, as well as the forthcoming poetry collection So Fast, So Close and two more books of fiction. His work has appeared widely in print and online publications, some of which can be found at williamrsoldan.com if you'd like to read more. He can also be found on Twitter @RustWriter1 if you'd like to connect. 12/2/2021 Poetry by Morgan Boyle photoscarce CC Clang Clang Clang i am exquisitely archingly stupid being so stupid is warm and soft that moment before deep sleep in wool socks in winter i am michelangelo’s sistine chapel level of stupid worldwide tourist attraction stupid they’re coming from far and wide cause there's a new heaven in town and that’s stupidity baby! i am getting dumber and more free by the day! wanna see the new heaven i've set up? i built it on the job i've got 8 hrs 5 days a week to create it imagine what you can do in that amount of time i’m building stupid towers to the stupid clouds this shit is babylonian wanna gaze down from the towers touch the clouds stick your big stupid head in? slide the sweat off your palms and slip me $5 $5?!? i know i know but that’s capitalism that’s the stupid reality you think god’s up there not charging a price to get into heaven? you think that price is really lifelong faith? the price is as green as the day the plants were born and i’m cutting you a deal get with it get on it fuck it but that’s what stupidity’s for isn’t it this is the way in which to exist in an ending world stupidity is the magic road around the competing miseries of the catch-22 contrarian impasse the two options: sunburn your face stare down the dying planet occasionally find the wherewithal to whip your ever crushing sense of existential dread into acts of morbid crackly hedonism or swallow the rising tides, don’t watch the glacier documentary, ignore that trickle of sweat down the back of your neck in march, you’re excelling at your job, your relationship, you’re having a baby! what fresh hell to be smart at a time like this! stupidity is so much work sometimes it really takes it outta me building this heaven i think i’m in need of an apprentice i think i’m never gonna go to work again never gonna hop on the subway for anything but enjoyment purposes will not be dipping existential dread in iced coffee anymore while wondering if i'm going to be late because who knows where the c train goes when it disappears in the tunnel did you know? the c train goes to the stupid void this is fine and acceptable if you think about the current state of the world we should all be the c train somedays the c train doesn't wanna work the c train doesn't give a shit the c train'll leave you stranded underground at clinton washington on monday morning only to show up three days later after you've been sucking down bodega bagels and watching the skin on your knuckles stand up here it comes just rolling in crash crash on thursday morning you're 3 days late to work? shoulda taken a car to the heights can't afford a car? fuck you your finances aren't the c train's problem the c train has seen the void baby what've you seen? manhattan? what's manhattan when compared to the infinite the c train carries more importance than your dumb job but you knew that that's the fear i guess the dread when you were a kid you'd never thought you'd be 29 comparing yourself to the brooklyn thru uptown local you never thought you'd come up wanting but no worries, there’s no comparisons when you’re stupid the c train is just the train and you are just you and it doesn’t matter that the c train can’t catch the plague like you can c train’s body isn’t wet and messy like yours third rail’s merely movement rather than a death sentence the pandemic doesn’t mean to shit to the c train and for you without stupidity? for you without stupidity death is real and mourning is ever present for you they are dying people are dying people keep dying people won’t stop dying my cousin is dead over a week ago my cousin died felt my bones, mortality, rattling took a day off work no shelving books in the silence no building stupid heaven hottest day of the year mixed my tears into the ocean sparkling sea under the sun what a way to be sad cousins aren't covered by my work's bereavement policy bereavement policy lists family members for which it is appropriate to take time off to mourn unfortunately, they tell me in a crisp email, cousins are not on the list a day taken off to mourn the deceased daughter of your aunt is, in the eyes of your work, a holiday hottest day of the year baking in blasting sun cousin is dead you are on holiday watch a nebraskan funeral in new york from your office leave in the middle to cover the desk there were no extra days for you to take to sit the funeral in person sit at the desk face the public wrestle with the human act of mourning on your public face the public is human i am human it is human to mourn fuck it this is the age of stupidity the age of mourning fuck it mourn at the desks there aren’t enough hours bestowed in our lives that we own we are needed desired wasted at the desks and i’m letting snot flow freely now down and out from under my pandemic mask there’s not enough time for the mourning we’ve gotta do so it’s time to sit at the desks and sob with wild abandon this is efficiency baby this is capitalism at its finest this is the best multitasking you’ve ever seen this is the way this is en route this is the seeing and the being seen this is the road to new heaven  Morgan Boyle is a poet from Nebraska currently residing in Ridgewood, Queens. She has works published in Yes Poetry and The Red Wheelbarrow and has a poem and video forthcoming from Peach Mag. Her poem Witnter After Fall was voted poem of the month at the Brooklyn Poets Yawp in March 2021. She can be found on Instagram at morgan.le_fay.
12/2/2021 Poetry by Emily Butler John Brighenti CC
Scent Meditation Find a comfortable, symmetrical position on this lawn chair. Might I suggest resting the soles of your feet on the bottom rung of the wooden chair in front of you. Yes, the one you found on the street and painted baby blue but it’s still ugly and chipped from the rain. Do not chide yourself for forgetting your possessions in the rain: bike, fire pit, hammock. Now, close your eyes. Someone else will have to read this to you. There you go. Inhale deeply. Recall the time when your therapist read you a body scan meditation. You felt so completely watched. She told you to exhale through your mouth, so you did. It was uncomfortable. Exhale however you damn well please. Inhale through your nostrils. Notice any scents. Earlier, doing the dishes, you got deja vu while calculating how many more days your boyfriend will be travelling. The neighbor’s radio static sounds unnervingly similar to those experimental bands you like. Broken Social Scene. Múm. Oh now you’ve done it. You’re only supposed to reference myths or the Bible. You aren’t supposed to make the dual “you” so obvious. You aren’t subtle. But the smell of your cut lawn is. Inhale it. Notice how each inhale smells a little different, almost imperceptibly, but it’s there- like the differences in each and every moment of your life. Each and every bite of your boyfriend’s chocolate cake. Notice how you’ve never noticed this before. Now, sniff your own armpit and remember you’re alive. Emily Butler is the author of Lucid Dreaming, Waking Life: Unlocking the Power of Your Sleep (Toplight Books) and the poetry chapbook, Self Talk (Plan B Press). Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Cape Cod Poetry Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Bone Parade, Adelaide, Jokes Review, Waxing and Waning, The Lamplit Underground, and Moonglasses. You can follow them on Twitter @EmilyFButler1 12/2/2021 Poetry by Erica Abbott Øyvind Holmstad CC Poem Beginning with a Retweet after Maggie Smith I dream of never being called resilient again in my life. I am not a rubber band, made to snap back with elastic bravery- watch how she rebounds so effortlessly! I’m sick of battered ships being viewed as nothing more than a floating metaphor for survival. Picasso’d portrait of an enthusiastic party- goer slapped across my eulogy-laced lips. I don’t wish for my trauma to ever be seen as an emotional gymnasium, only there in the name of making me stronger. Never will I ask to be another Atlas, holding this weightless burden on my shoulders. Won’t frame different perspectives of it on my fridge for people to view as art. Your find meaning means nothing to me if I have to crumble to obtain it. Tired of being told when to spring back to life and how not to make it look like spiraling. As if the clock monitors my face for any gear shifted out of place for too long. Never dreamed of being called a piggy bank of grief, collecting heartache until I’m shattered and spent. Look how well she responds when the hammer meets her skin! I never asked for these personal teaching tools- had enough of these lessons in becoming china and learning how to rebuild after each strike of the bull’s horns. I’m throwing away the red cloth and searching for a white one. Please, I’m fine with being fragile instead. Knowing I could break apart at any moment. In the right hands.  Erica Abbott (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based poet and writer whose work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Kissing Dynamite, Midway Journal, Serotonin, Anti-Heroin Chic, and other journals. She is the author of Self-Portrait as a Sinking Ship (Toho, 2020) and volunteers for Button Poetry, Kissing Dynamite, and Mad Poets Society. Follow her on Instagram @poetry_erica and on Twitter @erica_abbott.
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