Øyvind Holmstad CC



​
To kiss, kiss him.

Smell of the jackfruit, colour 
of the sun: you are going to be 
alright. What you need is a bird to fly,
 
and a fish to follow. Knee-deep
in the hollow, the world revealed 
its alignments, at the moment 
 
when you thought it would not. Ring of 
fire, red gushes of rainbows – whose 
head is that in the toilet, thinking:
 
this is not a human? Thinking:
this has to be the end? Behold: 
the upturn and rebound. The song 
 
of sunlight, the yellow knife cutting
through your waters of dark. Dark 
was a bad idea – there'll be plenty
 
of time for that when the bucket 
is kicked. Meanwhile, darling, it's time 
to kiss, kiss him.




Lorelei Bacht is a bookworm and poet living in Asia. She enjoys climbing trees and observing orb weavers. When she is not drawing sad little sketches, she writes - too much. Her work has appeared / is forthcoming in Visitant, The Wondrous Real, Fahmidan, Abridged Magazine, Odd Magazine, Postscript, PROEM, SWWIM, Strukturriss, Hecate, and others. She is also on Instagram: @lorelei.bacht.writer and on Twitter: @bachtlorelei
​

               ​John Brighenti CC



​
​Mother, Superego, When You Died, the World

​softly changed shape, altered course
      in its unremembering. The sociopaths, freed

to be themselves, released their imprecise meanness,
      as the never-internalized superego 

ceased to steer the shaky stern. 
      Their fits done in unison and alone, 

on a plane, inside a tin 
      house or boat, the rage of their grief rocked 

waves an average brain
      might not fathom. Like the earth, lives shifted a little or a lot,

our incompletenesses unmasked and raffish.
      No one could pay

their bills on time, balance a checkbook, make their insurance, 
      or track the holidays, as you, Grandmother,

were the calendar, the forever-admin of this named family, all stuck
      in some time-wrench of our own design. What you skillfully managed

and gave so easily,
      replayed in memory and awkward apery.

Yes, all our unfitness laid bare.
      When you left, the maples I had planted to fill in

the lightning-torched yard withered in their rings.
      But the songbirds continued to sing each morning.

They knew something bigger than grief.
      A medieval goldfinch, blooming black and cadmium, 

tried to enter through
      the glass, and for the first time, I fed the birds,

who clustered hungry at the window feeder,
      my winter cronies until the coons and squirrels

moved in on our ritual, leaving glass streaks
      and bits of plastic

and seed on the brown mottled ground. 
      When you left, creepy men in cars parked outside my window.

In the wee morning hours, one beat my door in.
      I found beer caps in the grass, at home, and near your grave.

The funeral home sent grief counselors to sell me my own funeral.
      I told them I was gifting myself to the buzzards. They never give up.

I still get fliers all these years later.
      When you left, your piano did not sing and please

our ears ever again. The cover is still hinged over its ivory keys.
      I’m sorry for the dust. It has been years now, yet

I haven’t found a new home.
      When you left, your Wednesday friends still met without

you, sadder, but faithful. Each week, one by one, a husband 
      died, or another friend. I run into one of them now and then.

Edna’s daughter took over her life, moved her grandkids in.
      My “lifestyle” didn’t jibe with her daughter, and that was the end 

of our friendship. You predicted all of this. Of course,
      when you left, the homophobes shed their pretty clothes--

you had always kept them in tow. You made people better.
      Your chair at the round oak 

table, fifty years north, still
      sits empty. I find you in your chili

recipe, your worn black shoes,
      in the purple hues, 40s Christmas music, 

and in all the things
      untended.

​


Find work by Koss in Hobart, Cincinnati Review, Spillway, Diode Poetry, Five Points, Outlook Springs, Lumiere Review, Anti-Heroine Chic, and many others. She also has work in or forthcoming in Best Small Fictions 2020, a Diode anthology, and Kissing Dynamite’s Punk Anthology. Find her on Twitter @Koss51209969 or http://koss-works.com.
​

               ​Frerk Meyer CC



​
I Complete My First Obsessive Compulsive Test with My Doctor Who Wants Me to Have Only the Cutest Thoughts & Urges


HOW MUCH OF YOUR TIME IS OCCUPIED BY OBSESSIVE THOUGHTS?

At the zoo my favorites are red pandas. Tiny creatures who tumble and soft. Put them on a mug, a tee shirt, a lunchbox. I imagine hugging one and am rendered tear-edged, mama clutching her fresh baby. There has never been anything wrong with me. I wake up and go to sleep same as you or anyone.

HOW MUCH DO YOUR OBSESSIVE THOUGHTS INTERFERE WITH YOUR WORK, SCHOOL, SOCIAL, OR OTHER IMPORTANT ROLE FUNCTIONING? 

I’m digging a tunnel that goes back to when Shrek was in theaters       2001        What bliss   
                    Even             as babies                we got so hopped   up  on war     
Margie’s dad    
                    with his arms white                    with bandage       Boys 

in the cafeteria 
chanting SADDAM INSANE SADDAM INSANE SADDAM INSANE

HOW MUCH DISTRESS DO YOUR OBSESSIVE THOUGHTS CAUSE YOU?

                                             what ill will lies in my belly      my whole body turning against me with
tremors and flashes                 I am capable of the outdoors   trees don’t always bother me

HOW MUCH OF AN EFFORT DO YOU MAKE TO RESIST THE OBSESSIVE THOUGHTS?

oh well i don't see me going anywhere            anytime soon
it’s all indoors or bust                                sleep until noon

who will stop me besides my cat           who needs fooding 
me i don't need no food            nah 

i used to            sure       but that was different times 
weaker times                     less valiant times. 

now i stay indoors and the lightbulbs go out      one by one 
soon it’ll be just dimness then darkness                         when the sun really gets lost

if a man came into my house & told me how to treat my cat
i’d say okay      but do you even know her?

& he wouldn't & that'd be that
if i get outside my house            will i take a mysterious illness & die 

okay & so what do you want me to do 


HOW MUCH TIME DO YOU SPEND PERFORMING COMPULSIVE BEHAVIORS? 

I am flush      with the kinda joy you get     when you think your neighbor   is gonna kill you     &
then doesn't   cold breath of release       sirens in the street attending to some other body’s   
removal as mine just stoops & dodges    I hallucinate washing machine sounds         If my
apartment had a washing machine       then it would feel like home     I'd keep it running       &
pulse to zipper on metal     to button in drum      to water filling then fleeing


HOW FREQUENTLY DO YOU DO RITUALS?

her being a Rasional woman   before shee was so handled 
her now present condision         all that know her 
can testafy to the truth             shee yet remaines a miserabl creetr 

under a strang distemper & frensy        uncapibl of any rasional action 
her distemper supernatural         & no siknes of body 
but that some evil person had her       thay swabbed her body


HOW WOULD YOU FEEL IF PREVENTED FROM PERFORMING YOUR COMPULSIONS?

As a kid I thought can openers could kill me. Stupid, yeah? Now I know one day it’ll be god who kills me/ maybe through the hand of the billions/ maybe through stray virus/ maybe through sourceless fire/ a grief so big/ an angry mob/ my boss on a bad day/ me on a bad day/ falling trees/ no oxygen in the room/ a teen with a gun/ a horse’s hoof/ a cruel man’s hand/ the weight of a car/ a lover’s anger/ mouse shit/ no helmet/ cellular betrayal (that’s cancer, babe!)/ heart has no valves/ traffic sans pauses/ strange beasts/ mafioso/ tornado/ desert island/ sharp scream/ spontaneous combustion/ no way down the mountain/ runaway cart/ drawn & quartered/ collapsing cave/ sword blade/ poorly constructed ship/ hammer to the forehead/ second hand smoke complications/ an attack (physical, violent)/ necrotizing fascitis/ joke gone bullshit/ hiding spot discovery/ military of any country/ foodless pantry/ gunshot gunshot gunshot gunshot gunshot gunshot gunshot/ tall stairs/ shaky rock/ clog in the veins/ Craigslist exchange/ faulty wires/ asbestos exposure/ chunk in throat/ dog rabid off leash/ birth pain/ lane change/ poison in the blood/ serial killer on the run/ brain filled with holes/ curse of the phaoroh/ undiscovered allergy/ suicide prevention hotline/ mercury ingestion/ five foot long saw/ pit of snakes/ meteor shower/ excess water/ nonstop laughter




​
Alyssandra Tobin's chapbook, PUT EYES ON ME NOT LIKE A CURSE, is forthcoming from Quarterly West in 2022. Her poetry will or does appear in New Ohio Review, Poetry Northwest, Puerto del Sol, elsewhere.

​

               ​Martin Cathrae CC



Survivor Part 1

1983 
The year of the unkind fist.

I was the Trailer Park Kid
Living from tree fort to tree fort.
Dodging my buddy’s older brother,
Boo, whose bucked toothed sneer
Was usually followed by a beating.

I was rust colored corduroy
And a bowl cut.

I was He-man and Gobots,
Birthday cake in the front yard.

The world felt so distant,
But some truth sucks
At playing hide and seek. 

And we sucked at hiding 
The truth that our little trailer
Housed a hurricane 
Nestled in my father’s clenched fist.

And how he danced his hand
Across my mothers courageous chin,
Upturned saying
“Go ahead mother fucker,
I can take it.”

And how this one moment,
Definitely not the last one,
But this one replayed itself
Like a crashing song on repeat. 
A knuckle loop jaw line dance
My heart skipping terrified beats 
A scared little kid
The last one standing in this 
Cacophony of abusive musical chairs.

I can’t tell you how many words 
I’ve written in an attempt 
To pull the meaning from what I saw. 
All the choked blood and broken teeth in the words.
The language pulled out of the vein
The dictionary of a still beating heart 
Saying I love you and
I’m still here and 
Can’t you see me?

Sometimes being a survivor 
And bearing witness are so similar,
Twin sisters sharing misery
With everyone within the blast radius.

Sometimes being a survivor
Is more than the pithy statements
Carved into the backs of the living.

Sometimes being a survivor 
Is looking at your own children
And finding love somewhere
So deep and so wide
That you can toss all of those old memories in
And hope they drown.

Sometimes being a survivor is
Accepting that the part of you that died that day
Will never come back.
Some part of me will always be
1983
The Trailer Park Kid.
A part of me will never be more than a child
My heart will always see things 
Through a child’s eyes
And that makes it so hard sometimes.
But
I survived.




​
Survivor Part 2

1983
My favorite superhero is the Hulk.
I had been known to strip down to my underwear 
And growl at the elderly neighbors 
Flexing my child muscles.
Intoning in what was probably 
A comical Cookie Monster voice
That I am the Hulk.

What they didn’t know is that
I too have survived monsters.

I survived colliding voices
The wet sound of an open hand 
Across a defiant cheek
The thunder of broken teeth
Twinkling red porcelain chips
In the bathroom sink.
The sound that hair makes
When it’s ripped away from the scalp
Like a child pulled from its mothers reach.

I lived with monsters.
Then, when I crawled out of my skin
And stared at a life 
That stretched like an empty hallway
I, too, became a monster.

No amount of growling
Made it hurt less.

I was surrounded by pain
And hatred
The son of the monster
The son of the nightmare 
That jolted my mother from the few 
Fleeting hours of sleep she could muster 
Between shifts and second and third jobs.
The four horsemen of poverty, hunger, loneliness, and grief
Galloped by my bedside each morning
When I rose to start the day. 

The leering faces of addictions 
And regrets
And a worthlessness that cradled my head when I ended the day alone
Or empty
Or sad. 

But here’s the twist

I never hated them enough to
Not love them
I never hated them at all.

All I ever wanted was to be told
That the monsters weren’t real
But we know the truth. 

Now that the monster that never stayed
Beneath my bed
Has been laid beneath the ground
And I see his face in 
Every mirror 
And in the eyes of my children 
I only feel love 
And grief 
And I miss him often.

We are so much more
Than every mistake we’ve ever made
And surviving is
More than making it out alive
It’s found in our ability to find grace
In forgiveness.

I still roar sometimes 
It’s my way of saying hi old man
I miss you.



​

Paul Jackson is a lover and a fighter, hustling misery and poems out the backseat of a broken heart in Phoenixville, PA. He’s been conducting these verbal autopsies for the last 30 years in the quiet comfort of his own home, but now has decided to release them into the wild void.
​

               ​kelly bell photography CC



Body High

Yo ‘08, can we get high and watch
HGTV? Act like we
Luxurious enough to love it or list it
Just buy the best
View in West Bubbafuck—or cop that stone place
Some host called “quaint enough to be a summer home”
Cause HGTV ain’t quaint enough to use cop outside a sentence about “community safety.”
They watched it all through ‘05, his last
Summer alive
Spent spectating
Geography that could redirect death or at least
The sex worker asleep under our stairs, neighbors
Loud-mouths mastering Mookie and Tina vibes—the first
Niggas I saw Spike
Name but not imagine.

But you’re ‘08 so inside, we sleepin to
Sounds of next door gay
Bar-goers tentatively shooting 2 A.M. shots. And damn
They ain’t even built the Whole Foods we
Gotta walk through the projects to till 2010.
With this fiancé she watches like claiming, decorating
Aren’t about if but when.

Sorry, bro but before this eddie hits lemme
Get out the rest of this heavy shit...
You know that dumb happy Natasha Beddingfield song?
Released either right before or after you came around?
Deadass thought she said
“There’s no more life
And the darkness is light and my body
Cries. There’s only butterflies.”
Never told anyone but I fucked with that
Heavy. Maybe it’s because
Titi Tiffany told me that he was up
Somewhere sippin cherry Kool-Aid from a veritable chalice
So much strawberry ice cream his nappy
Curled baby girl used
To beg for before
Sticking her tongue back out so he could
Remove the offending texture.
And Titi Gladys with her Jehovah’s Witness joy
Said I’d be able to see
In Jehovah’s afterlife paradise.
Little me even knew I wouldn’t want that
But if we ain’t
Banking on bodies to
Balance out space... seems like we all blind.
Aw shit I’m stoner self-aware, aren’t I?
If I lost you I think it’s hitting.
​


​
Danielle is a blind, Blackarican and queer poet Born and based in NYC. Her work has received an honorable mention in Causeway Lit’s Revolution Issue and was performed as part of Rattlestick Playwrights Theater‘s Block by Block project.

             ​  Øyvind Holmstad CC



​
Dark Matter Matters
the story I tell my son to comfort us both

Baby,
everything--
every.  single.  thing. 
in our whole                  w  i  d  e           universe 
holds-together 
because of darkness.

This thing
that we think is super scary
is just the universe’s glue.

It’s true!

Dark matter, the scientists call it. 

This dark matter doesn’t reflect or give off any light, so
we can’t see it, no matter how hard we squint  or
how     w      i      d      e        we open our eyes.
No telescope or FLASHlight or microscope 
in the world 
will let us see it.

Weird, right?
We can’t touch it, we can’t see it, so
we only know it’s there because 
of how it makes
other things act.

It’s kinda like the wind, like how 
a gust makes leaves   shoot                    up off the ground 
                                                                                into tiny little 
                                                                                   tornados, 
                                                                                        how
plastic bags and shopping carts go on
unscheduled flights, how
the kite tries to get away from us and we cannot see what’s—pulling—at—it--

But, if we’re paying attention when the wind blows,
then we might notice other things:
​
like how
the dog can catch smells in the air,
tracing the path with her nose
and her eyes closed. 

Like how 
water can ripple without being touched.

Darkness works the same way, my darling.
Dark matters.

It lets us see what we otherwise miss, like
stars and streetlights and lightning bugs. 

Like how
bright neon green the alarm clock light is. 

Like how
the straight-back chair somehow makes a 
funky-round shadow against the wall.

So remember, my child:
the dark matters,
and we need not be afraid.



Monica Smith Hart is an English professor living with her husband, son, and two rescued pit bulls in the Texas Panhandle. 

               ​Dane CC




Maroon Dodge Ram 

with five bullet holes 
blasting through the driver’s side window.
 
Call a tow truck in the morning 
peel the vehicle off the street 
once the body is cold in the morgue. 

Call it gang violence,
talk about the people drinking champagne in the streets.

Call it drug deals 
remind the public he was throwing heroin out of his window 
before the police arrived. 

Show the photos of the spiderwebs in the glass, 
get close enough you’re able to count the holes
like a game of connect the dots.

Ensure the detachment from human, 
include every detail of all the horrible things he did 
since he started dealing drugs at the age of thirteen. 

Show the holes in the glass. 
Be careful to not show the blood stains. 
Because if you do, 
you might have to tell the public he was human, too. 

The photos show the maroon truck, 
riddled with golf ball sized bullet holes. 

The photos don’t show how for the better part of two years, 
a neighbor looked in a parking spot 
to see if the truck was parked
in the hopes of saying 
Hi, how was your day? 
Thank you for helping me.

​


Lynne Schmidt is the grandchild of a Holocaust survivor, and a mental health professional with a focus in trauma and healing. She is the winner of the 2021 The Poetry Question Chapbook Contest, 2020 New Women's Voices Contest, a 2020 Pushcart nominee, and a ten time Best of the Net nominee. Lynne is the author of the chapbooks, SexyTime (forthcoming 2022) Dead Dog Poems (Finishing Line Press, 2021), Gravity (Nightingale and Sparrow Press, 2019) which was listed as one of the 100 Best Breakup Books of All Time by Book Authority, and On Becoming a Role Model (Thirty West, 2020), which was featured on The Wardrobe's Best Dressed for PTSD Awareness Week. In 2012 they started the project, AbortionChat, which aims to lessen the stigma around abortion. When given the choice, Lynne prefers the company of her three dogs and one cat to humans.
​

              ​John Brighenti CC



​
August, Dayton, Ohio

three empty months and one terrible day
passed and you asked
me over for a beer.

your living room was the same
but the world had changed.

maybe you were bored or drunk or
wanted a fuck

maybe you'd seen me out with someone new
last week

or you couldn't face the night
alone after someone shot up our home.

i was sunburned and puffy eyed
and not particularly strong
you were forging armor from domestic lager
the cans lined up like soldiers.

i knelt before you with vanilla lips
and stained jeans like offerings
i left them at your feet and
mouthed wordless prayers

we are alive.

maybe you couldn't hear above
the thudding of my heart but i
didn't ask you to love me back.





Off Linden

I was thinking
about that place where
you used to screenprint,
those old buildings, off Linden.
We'd watch the sun go down out the
wall of windows with the plants.
The air in that studio
smelled like warm dust and crayons
Old wood.

We'd get real high.
There were so many
colors
up there, the spilled inks
and stacks of t shirts
Your red hair.
You'd put on hip hop
or podcasts and I 
always learned something new.

You don't print t shirts any more, or live here, and
that shop
is in a whole other building across town now

But that was a happy place,
up there at nights
stoned, hot shirts
folded against me.





​Class (warfare) of Covid 19

You know that old saying
you can take the girl out of the trailer park
but it'll just track her the fuck back down?

I don't know about you, but I'm real tired
of running the socioeconomic poverty trap rat race anyway.
Do not pass go;
do not collect your welfare check.

And it doesn't seem to matter that I've never seen a hard drug
up close and in person
because my neighbors have
and that shit'll get you by proximity all the same

the way we're dumped in here, cheek to jowl,
in the trailer parks and the hollers and the goddamn west end,
the poor and the poor bastard who can't stop, the have-nots.

And they write us off, and hold us down,
the people at the top
of the ladder while they wax nostalgic
about their hypothetical bootstraps
and hand us down crumbs
like they're chunks of gold and we
should be grateful,
groveling across the widening gaps
of an unraveling safety net.

And maybe it's a lesson I missed
with my cut rate education,
but where do I sign up
for some of that trickle down privilege? 


​

               ​John Brighenti CC


​

Between Steps in Bozeman


The hotel parking lot is a stark, black plane
Efficient industrial buildings look down on it, stone-faced
The big sky looks down also, and on my morning debut
I am referring to the “big sky,” so treasured and adored
It manifests its true big self today
High above the fray
Bigger than me
Bigger than any of us


Tolerant, on this blessed 74-degree day
Other days, cold and biting
Like the cuts we inflict on each other
While insisting valiantly that we are right
Instead, we are gusting
We are whipping up a fury of fight-or-flight


Hotel lobby—take a step
Concrete swale—another step
Tarmac—step...


In the space between steps
Tranquility escapes
To... where?
Into the sky above us?
Into the pause between the footfalls?
That calm is gone now, shattered
No evidence remains
Leaving, instead
Recriminations, confusion, umbrage and self-defense
Like a wild herd
These emotions effortlessly jump the rickety fence of civility
They land and don’t look back
I do look back, then up, at the unblinking big sky...
Another faltering step





When I Align the Doors and Windows Exactly So


When the windows and doors of my house are aligned exactly so
And the wind blows from the west
I hear it whistle and thrum upstairs
Disembodied yet indomitable
With no specific point of origin, constantly seeking its path
It plucks me the way a finger plucks a guitar string
Is this wind the intonation of God’s voice?
Is it the penetrating manifestation of ineffability?


I remember being lulled into this same daydream-like state of mind long ago in church
Listening to the pastor’s lilting voice
His actual words were not important
The intensity of that experience came from his unflinching belief
The certainty of his understanding was like the wind
Unstoppable, demanding, hypnotizing
Also comforting
I wanted to yield to his words, to say, “Yes, you are right”
I wanted to fall into the grace and forgiveness of his sermon
It would have been so easy
It would have absolved me of any responsibility


I wavered then
I’m still wavering to this day
Why would I need someone else’s understanding to be my compass?
I have my own passage, flawed as it may be
I listen to the wind’s exhortation
I write and rewrite my own sermon
I align the doors and windows of my frail, short-lived house exactly so
I let my voice slide, whisper and howl through the world
The voices in the wind want to be heard




Lee Hudspeth is a poet and nonfiction author living in Southern California. His debut, full-length poetry book Incandescent Visions was self-published in 2019. His haiku have appeared in Cold Moon Journal, Poetry Pea Journal, The Heron’s Nest, Akitsu Quarterly, Failed Haiku, Presence, Fireflies’ Light, Haiku Journal, and Stardust Haiku. He is currently working on a second poetry book. He tweets @LeeHuds and his author page is https://leehudspeth.com.
​

               ​kelly bell photography CC



Atikokan Lullaby

Blue karenin eyes blaze out
- godless -
over the old tenement building
Rowhousing,
whose grotto-crawling staircase shivers in
the misty ice of dawn; where
silhouettes of cigarette beggars stretch on
into the blue wet light of new day; where
young not-yet mothers bear down darkly to
take in the brutality of brothers
while white-knuckled fists
take out ink blotted clumps of
matted hair and raw 
staring secreted cherubs greedily
cry out for more; where
screaming sounds of electric sirens dispatch.
But not for them.
For them
icy moan madness dilutes to dull thud,
replacing Grim Touch with
fetishes and cheap rum for 
pretty painted monsters
who open legs like lips
and roar.



Julia Florek Turcan is a writer from the Northern Canadian village of Atikokan, ON, currently residing in Winnipeg.  She has performed on local and national stages including the Winnipeg International Writers Festival and the Canadian Festival of Spoken Word. Her poetry appears in Contemporary Verse 2, The Literary Review of Canada, antilang, Northern Appeal, and other generous publications.