Jacob Resor CC



"We are all broken by something. We all share the condition of brokenness even if our brokenness is not equivalent. However, our brokenness is also the source of our common humanity, the basis for our shared search for comfort, meaning, and healing. Our shared vulnerability and our imperfection nurtures and sustains our capacity for compassion." - Bryan Stevenson

​

   I was in some state of gone for an unbearably large part of my life once. Some state of stillborn, stasis, hibernation-years. What couldn't I know? Who couldn't I tell? Sometimes life mutes our core. And sometimes life offers, to unmute us, ordinary angels. People, sometimes moments, that help something penetrate, get through. We can only speak and really hear our voices when we're ready. By eighteen, I had been so completely broken down as a person that I'd no clue what to do as a person in a world full of people that seemed to. As far as I knew, I wasn't really a part of anything that I could put my own heart up against. If there is any comfort in being broken it's that broken knows broken. You may find yourself in strange places, broken palaces, full of fellows shattered early, shattered hard. The words we used with each other were sparse but potent. The longing for hope, for normal, is commensurate with the absolute fear of it. We only know what we know, and having seen what we've seen, over every horizon, we suspect, is exactly what we have been given so far. Brutal gifts. Those keepers, those homes, that vast empty place at every turn where life's joys are not to be trusted. It's a terrible thing to be given temporary assurances from home base, day one.

   If there's one thing we learn from that bitter-sweet beginning it's that we're not, no matter how much it seems we are, alone. I remember the first time I realized other kid's families were broken too. Our playing was a playing outside of time, a way to stop time, to escape, for a moment, a hell called home. Because broken children are still, if nothing else, resilient little dreamers. That place is maybe our first ever sense of real community. The challenge: how not to become what we were running from. Sometimes the only way to do that is to be gone. Years. Gone.

   I know that I've told some version of this story before. It might be the only real story I know how to tell. Everything in our lives flows out of a great big deep original wound. Rivers widen, break off, go wild, go raging, go bright-burning and hopeful. I think at a certain point, with enough help and understanding, we choose the shape of our lives, our rivers. It takes a long time. I loved so many people, and I know you all did too, who didn't have enough of it.

   The days are often in which I wonder: what would have happened if I had darkened one day longer? But someones and somethings broke through, and much to my surprise I found I was no stranger to the world after all. We keep what we have by giving it away, they say in the program. It was a little bit of that. And a whole lot of other things too. Like the poems that fell upon me like so much hard rain after long drought. Or the people whose lives I happened into who refused to let me disappear, to go easy. We are nothing if not saved by the being there of anyone at all. Presence. Lights on. Invitation. Sitting space. Talking time. The holy is so ordinary. It's here and nowhere else. Just a drive over, a cup of coffee, identification, hearing the similarities in each of our stories. We are those children now grown, and unalone. 

   Our stories vary. The severity of the landscape, the length of it, what we endured, the soul-murders, the ways we shut down, how we got through, how we rose from ashes to be dazzled, as if for the first time, by so much starlight. I think there is a red thread connecting us, a deep chorus of relational stories bound by a common geography of hurt and harm taken up into our own arms like the children we once were. What Adrienne Harris calls "our wounds that must serve as tools," is the practice we each in our own way and weary time come to cultivate, a language learned on the go, and in the fire.

   Edwidge Danticat writes of "creating dangerously, creating as a revolt against silence," because not speaking has killed many people we have known, we take to our language like a lifeboat. Can all that was taken ever really be put back? No. It cannot. We make room in our lives for our losses. Our very selves that once died. A subtle container where beauty begins to form. Slowly. Cautiously. "To be courageous enough", as Lauren Levine writes, "to allow one's "little voices" to have a life of their own" is to create scaffolding, a house to gather and to mend and to warm. I believe such is the work found here and that we gather together like this for a reason, and for but such a short season in the grand scheme of the universe. There is a hunger in us for a community that runs deeper than the ocean. A hunger to not travel the road alone. A hunger to keep what we have by giving it away. To be each other's keepers, gentle listeners. 

   What does it mean to say out loud, all these years later: yeah, I guess I was murdered as a child, and by those who were said to love me? By the world? What does it mean to be a living breathing murdered being? What animates our spirit? What calls us home? Wilfred Bion notes that change is a "moment of catastrophe". Like a tornado rearranges a landscape, so too are we emotionally rearranged when we take up "our wounds that...serve as tools." We each of us come to mourning as the introduction to creation. As Thomas Ogden writes, mourning is:

   "A demand to create something...a memory, a dream, a story, a poem, that begins to meet, to be equal to, the full complexity of our relationships to what has been lost. Paradoxically, in this process, we are enlivened by the experience of loss and death, even when what is given up or taken from us is an aspect of ourselves." 

  This work requires us to reckon with, as Lauren Levine reminds us, "the bittersweet and inevitable incompleteness of our work, accepting our own limitations and the inexorableness of mortality." Our stories will one day end. But I believe what we leave behind us serve as starting points for future wounded others. That each narrative constructed out of the darkness makes a dent of light curve infinitely through our world. We must be willing to get lost, Lauren Levine suggests. To live in "the messy unknown, navigating the stark landscape of arctic tundra and sea ice where growth is hard to come by in the frozen soil. This journey is treacherous..to create poetry out of the gaps left within us" is to refuse to add to the completion of our soul-murder.  

   We so often do things not knowing where they will really lead us to in the end. This space was created as a way of not disappearing from my own life and pain. What it has become is something so far beyond my own limited comprehension that all I can do is sit back and marvel at all this light pouring in through the cracks. What I do know is that you each have made this place something that I can finally put my own heart up against. As in the beginning, so too now, only no-longer-children gathered in order to stop time, but to stitch it together, to make it flow, a great arching overflowing river along the banks of which whole universes of life grow. Something happens here. I cannot name it, but I feel it. Each time, in every piece, in every voice. A refusal to mute our "little voices", a risky chorus, a venturing into catastrophe so that we might truly live and marvel simply at the stars. The stars. 

   Until we meet again, friends. May this new year bring you each the small and precious joys you all deserve. Be kind to yourselves. Accept the places that you have to go, even if it is sometimes into the darkness. What other way is there to reach our light?

James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroin Chic

Stacey MacNaught CC




The Gate

I asked God for a guard dog 
and the Moon gave me a gate. 

It appeared at the end 
of The Meadow. I didn’t want 

to cross through it. 
You’re not supposed to admit this 

but I was hoping to be saved. 
Wasn’t there a way to stay, 

in The Place I made. When I got lonely 
I tore my hands apart and buried them. 

They sprung up like willows, green 
and weeping. I was making something 

of myself. This was my work for years. 
I made a forest in The Place. 

I lived alone and was unharmed. 
Once a month, the meadow grass lit 

up silver cold-- bright in full 
moonlight. The moon would turn 

her old face of annihilation toward me. 
You can learn to love 

if you walk through that gate. 
My forest of hands reached out

for me, shaking in their lonely wind. 
I had myself buried here for a lifetime. 

I asked about the dog again 
so the moon turned to knife 

and sank into the tree line. 
It was her way of punishing me 

for acting like a man. I heard voices 
beyond the gate, asking me to come 

through, but they couldn’t tell me who 
they were. The voices insisted 

that they were people, too. 
Those people began to reach 

for me, their kindness like sunlight 
tangled in a bush. I thought it was always September 

through the gate, the most illuminated 
yet worried month. There were no animals in The Place, 

but I heard that a baby horse can run 
as soon as it’s born. Couldn’t I remain 

who I’ve always been. God was firm 
with me when the moon was exhausted:

You're not like the foal 
for the foal has nothing to learn 

and never asked me for anything. 






The Gate pt. 2, Here

On the other side of the gate, I am not forest 
I am singular and time 

can touch me and does often.
September can be killed 

like anything else, and always 
returns forgivingly orange. The Moon 

continues to flash her teeth at me,
but rounded for a night when I walked 

through her gifted gate. I learn
that’s the best she can do. 

People Here are kindly, and try
to comfort each other but rarely 

do it right. In fact, we usually 
get it horribly wrong, God says. 

I do the same tasks as everyone else
and have stopped burying myself. 

This is how we love each other 
in the Real World.

The Moon is very protective of the ecosystem 
Here and worries that my willows 

could overtake the land. 
I am considered invasive.

Many animals live Here, we eat half
and love the others, depending. I have a cat

who can kill anything smaller than her
and nothing bigger. She rarely kills for fun. 

We are all working on a way
to touch each other and not starve. 

The Days are not a test. They pass by
in a friendly way, though still weary of me. 

They can see I try to be a good citizen 
of even their hated afternoons. 

I have not discovered a groundbreaking 
or brilliant solution for loneliness.

Not knowing is considered the polite standard.
God is tucked even farther away Here, but 

I still always ask for something. 

​

​
Kai-Lilly Karpman is a writer, educator, and translator from Los Angeles, California. She has been previously published in Plume, Image Magazine, Passengers, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Columbia University 2022 teaching fellowship, the Columbia University Word for Word travel and research grant, the two-time winner of the John Curtis Memorial Prize in Poetry, and the recipient of the Barbara Sicherman Prize in English scholarship. Her song lyrics have appeared in Mz. Marvel and The Marvels soundtracks.

Matthew Bellemare CC




Dear, 

I now remember what I came in here for. At your earliest convenience, 
could you give me all the green you have to inhale? The cash I have is useless. 

Civil, please.
​
Like the time I rolled myself out like some hard sheet of river water.
Not the gently curved tributary, not even a pearly trout stream.
Muddy. Lukewarm. River That You Don’t Want To Swallow Water. 
Always happening like that. Flowing downhill and ending at a mouth. 

Not as bad as it sounds. The pet groomer’s wife wore a yellow bouffant
dress. Sweetened with Baccarat Panetelas, Bo Strange told a ghost story.
(A peak above the knee!) Townspeople cried. And once the glimmering
of it all died down, everyone left.  It was an earthly unearthly occasion.
A recently rekindled couple straggled behind, kicking pinecones to suspend
the evening; others skipped home, drunkenly cursing the king. Each separately
grateful to the scared bodies they, for some time, get to call their own. 

Tell them. Tell them how you’re in control here. She does not jump 
from a high story in this one. 

Or maybe she does. Later. Is her face glowing? What do you do with her
afterwards? She wants you to touch her. 





Overwatering

My neighbor’s wind chimes, like the ones my Meme had. At the flea market, a woman answered her granddaughter’s call. Told her she loved her three times and to give the plants out back a drink. I take magnesium instead of anything with diphenhydramine. Turn on brown noise. A flattened bird in the coffee shop’s parking lot this morning. He told me circle of life. I killed the Norfolk pine, put it outside with the trash but they never took it. Kept dying more. Surely it reaches a point. Norfuck Southern. We threw it behind the fence to return it to where it came from. Dry needles, dripping soil. Only in West Monroe would it be this hard to find gluten-free pizza crust. At the third grocery store he drives to, I read the ingredients in line at self-checkout. Dextrose, a long list. Going to storm.





On Falling and Not Yet Landing

I still don’t know how 
tall one must be to forget. 
No, not forget, it’s thicker 
than that. A rock cools 
before erupting. 
I don’t know if mine’s 
the kind to ever reach 
the surface. I wish 
I could still fling myself 
off gathered cliffs, all of that 
red earth, red like when I 
was a child and landing 
quite pleased with myself 
a red sky clung to me. 
But that body is no longer 
mine. My mother will not 
know where to find me 
and the others will have 
gone by now, so I pull 
myself up and it’s red 
internally. I find a tree 
I recognize or some 
rusted piece of memory 
that tells me the street 
I need to walk down 
is that way. 

​


Bailey Lambeth is a 25-year-old resident of Monroe, Louisiana. She does not know much else about herself yet. She has been published in Aurora Poetry, Beyond Words, and Red Noise Collective.

Benson Kua CC




We used to hang out at cathedrals at night

        For Nathan

Some might say loitering but we called it hope,
a summer night filled with equal parts
old pain we were running from
& crisp skies we were running to.
We’d go to church to find
God
ourselves
each other.

We inked our names into
the wooden city,
that summer living forever
in the ossein of me.
My friend,
we made an immortal moment
in a world full of moments
born to die and peel away.
We squeezed out of our old skin 
over containers of chow mein,
mugs of expensive hot chocolate,
the same three songs that vibrate
in my mind like a prayer
every time a new summer
wakes up within me.

The church bells would ring out,
9pm was our own kind of miracle,
every untouched minute a minute
we helped each other get to.
The only angel who has ever saved me
was you.
The only God I believe in
is the one that saw you
and saw me and said
I wonder.





​Possible (verb)     

            With a line from Shira Erlichman         

To feel the pressure of gravity
transform into freedom,
to cartwheel into a yes
that is not guaranteed.
To ask, what is knocking at the door?
What is wanting to come in,
to be nurtured and take root?
Is it music? Maybe stones, maybe purple?
To draw a world on the ground
in chalk and enter it.
Or:
To entertain the idea
that you are already here.

Here, where the eggs are fried
to crispy-edged perfection,
little oil-birthed lattices of delight.
Here, where the babies are
squirming and teaching us
what the future could be.
Here, where we tell each other
what words we like in hopes
that others like them too.
Here, where there’s no such thing
as too much or too little.

To find rich frothy bliss in 
the enoughness of this.
Or this. This, too.
To carry a friend in your pocket,
to take a walk out of an apple
and a bite along the beach.
Possible shares roots with potent,
they are cousins with French ancestors.
To possible, one must ask:
What here is potent?
And:
What if it were everything?





The love you call in

          For Joey & Wendy

Notice the way love has made this place
home: arms around familiar shoulders; hips
harnessed to the beat; laughter, diaphragm-deep
and unrusted. God, that’s good, isn’t it?
To know, to hold and to have, to sow
something true and alive in a hall of desert
and mirage. We have been lucky to witness you
keep small things aloft long enough
to become big things, strong enough
to bear all things. I swear, the heart picks
the most tender fruit, whispers the most
potent prayer no deity could ignore.
I swear, the love you call in pours out
entire rivers. It honeys the air, it bows
the whole orchestra’s strings, it renders
the mirage into something
crystal clear and real for everyone.

​


Rachelle Boyson is a Bay Area-based poet who refuses to stop writing love poems about her friends. She holds a degree in Linguistics from UC Santa Cruz and uses both her scientific and artistic love of language to inform her writing. Rachelle's previous work has appeared in ROPES Literary Journal and FeelsZine.

Matthew Bellemare CC



​
I’m a Bitch
               I’m a lover, I’m a child, I’m a mother,
               I’m a sinner, I’m a saint, I do not feel ashamed

Driving down a backroad with my windows down
& Meredith Brooks’ “Bitch” blaring through the speakers,
a cigarette between my fingers & then touching my lips — I feel
most myself like this, most like my mother’s daughter. How many times
was I sitting passenger as we went 50 down a backroad outside Cabot? Do you remember
when I called her a bitch & she laughed?                  I called her a bitch
                 & her laughter filled me with so much warmth
that I kept saying it over & over, my small voice getting louder & louder
until she started shouting it back & we were both screaming bitch out the window,
laughter getting caught in our throats as the damp summer air
filled the car, our legs sticking to the seats, but we didn’t notice.
                How many years has it been now? I don’t know
                what my mother’s laugh sounds like anymore.





Solitaire 

This morning I am playing solitaire & drinking too much coffee
              & thinking of you, thinking of me, maybe.
                             Or really, I am thinking of everyone I’ve ever loved
              playing cards with me around this table,
              eating dinner together here around this table,
our knees knocking or touching lightly as we settle into our seats, as someone begins
a story about their childhood & last nights’ adventures, 
               & i can’t help but to start grieving this moment,
               before it even starts. I am always always always trying to hold
onto everyone around me, I don’t know how to let go — even today
I am still thinking of everyone who has ever left --
               or did I leave them?
                             How did it go?





​Loving You Forever

Standing before the bathroom mirror, my dark curls
falling to the ground around me as I snip haphazardly.
I am learning how to be my perfect lover. Spend my days
wrapped around myself in bed, kissing the freckles on my shoulders,
coming home with fresh flowers. Tonight I will make myself dinner,
paired with cheap wine from Aldi’s.                  I am alone, yes,
swaying back & forth in the kitchen, stepping on my own toes
as I dance to Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” but tonight
I have never been more in love with anyone in my entire life,
& it feels so good to pull my own warmth over my chest.




Michelle DeLoiuse-Ashmore is a Native Hawaiian poet living and writing in Northwest Arkansas. Her writing explores ideas of grief and love, family and trauma. You can find her poems in Plain China, RookieMag, Hawai'i Review, Clementine Unbound, and more. 

r. nial bradshaw CC




blessing

my best friend has the same name as me
we do everything together/ i think i should be more 
like us but don’t know what that means/or why 
when we go to her house she says things like
we leave doors open here
things like/ do you want anything/ my mom made 
cookies/they say it’s my house/this house 
has no secrets/so i give her mine/and she nods
we float together/between the salt water 
pool & jacuzzi/ imagine we’re birds 
splashing from our nest/she says 
she’s an eagle/ asks me what i am
when i dive under i feel 
the smooth blue tiles/ let my mouth fall 
open/ send air back up in bubbles/say  
i don’t know  yet/to see if she can hear 
me. she asks       can you stay 
for dinner ?  this house has a way to make 
you feel light/the light hits differently
in this house there’s always a breeze through
the foyer/ black and white staged photos
we wrap ourselves in towels/sit goosebumped 
around the fire/ breathe together while we wait 
to eat/someone always prays to give 
thanks/i hold my breath/ like i’m under 
water again/ask for this moment to last
for this to be mine one day when they say bless
these young bodies that want for nothing.



​

​trying on clothes, i see myself

becoming my mother—stuff/ing myself into year old jeans/something about shoes that never stop fitting/i never want to throw away. i used to ask/for a new pair each year/new backpack and set of thongs then briefs then/thongs again—always trust a good thong. i hear her/telling me, when you get to be my age you stop/caring. wear what feels good/clothes never made us/feel good, they feel heavy and keep me/from running through sprinklers and when/i finally got my boobs done to make a home/of my body, they were foreign all over again. i stopped buying myself things/now all my money goes to you/all my money would go to me, too if it were my/way. if it were my way mama, we’d put all/the money in the back room full/of shit you think you wanna remember/throw in the too-tight-jeans/fancy bras, dad’s hole-filled socks/any object that starts with the first initial of a guy/who said arm hair was for boys/sprinkle in some gasoline/go outside together(grab the dog), hold hands/share stories we never thought the other would understand./hold hands and cry when we see each other/for the first time/take one deep breath in and out/light the little match and watch while/we let it all fucking burn.





for a moment

we went out toes-ready,
asphalt our stage. twirling and yelling
about friends we’re probably outgrowing
(was the consensus i think). my fupa, showing
& i let it—took my hood off and hugged her
for no reason. we decided the barbie 
movie was more about humanity than anything 
else. ran around front to find deeper 
puddles, drown our bare feet, dreamt
about finding a new state where 
this sort of thing happens—but there 
was no longing in it. we were there, we were 
happening, slapping rose bush floods
with the palms of our feet. there were 
towels, somewhere if we wanted--
but we kept standing, swaying under 
the sky until there was no piece of us 
left untouched. the clothes were heavy
the body was a body. we were all 
we needed to be. 

​
​

Hailey Gross is a poet, editor, and educator from Los Angeles. As a first-generation college student, she earned her B.A. in English Literature from the University of California, Santa Barbara. She's a recipient of the Sarah B. Marsh-Rebelo Scholarship for Poetry and the Prebys Poetry Creative Writing Endowed Scholarship and is currently in the final year of the MFA Creative Writing program at San Diego State University. Her poems and translations can be found or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Laurel Review, Harpur Palate, Sepia Journal, Poetry International, and Zone 3. 

Matthew Bellemare CC




the door is not a simple proposition 
after Jay Besemer

the habit of body/bastes itself in its own juices/my dream book/my names for bones/the borderkissed shoals of our voices/a throat opening/a voice scabbing over/so few mouths to take my word/a bomb filled with starlight/yr shimmering media/tendered like a slip of flesh/the shape of anything can be changed/the steely ice of terror & loss/tenderness is something to belong to





when you breathe, listen for the horses in your chest
after Jay Besemer

make space between words/and let me enter/fill yourself with the thing you have named/be a ripe muscle of choice/surrender to the lump of night beneath yr tongue/tomorrow you will still happen/tomorrow you will still be emotions existing in unstructured time/there is never a time to not reach for a word/love is a private thing/verging on nasty & violet/long and inexhaustible as hair

​
​

​
Carleen Tibbetts is the author of four chapbooks and two full-length collections, most recently Dossier for the Postverbal (Carrion Bloom Books, 2023). Her work has appeared in Sink, jubilat, The Pinch, Forklift Ohio, Dreginald, Deluge, Broken Lens, and many other publications.  She edits poetry for Dream Pop Press. 

Hypatia Alexandria CC




Bones

How we lay 
in the bones, 
says a lot about how we love. 
We love from the bones,
not the skin or the muscles,
the fingertips or heart. 

From the bones we make our 
prayers: Dear God, 
let me live upright. 
Let me find the truth 
I was born with and lost
as a child.

Our bones allow us 
to scream wild in the woods. 
To hunt poisonous flowers. 
To tip toe over whole villages 
invisible to the human eye. 
Then, run. 

From the bones, we know we heal. 
The bones will last,
if only we can endure the suffering 
rather than burning it away.
Lay first with the bones, 
then gather their strength, for eternity. 





Hometown

Driving south 
on California’s Highway 99,
a horizon line of almond trees 
is an arrow into my chest. 
I am overcome by a teenager’s
arrhythmia, 
still so desperate to understand 
the rhythm 
of my own heart, 
still so curious to understand
how this place has the power
to freeze me,
after leaving so long ago. 
It’s as if he’s still slumped over
the kitchen table, blood running
to the ground,
and I am eight, and stuck 
in the doorway of this haunted house
my parents call home. 
Was it really that bad?
Were the roses really dead from the beginning? 
The 105-degree heat brings me back
to the corner of fifteen years old
and Pelandale Avenue,
around the time I gave up
trying to grow up
and instead gave in. 
Became as flat as California ag country. 
Disappeared into the farms
to black out and have sex. 
Slunk into the malls to shoplift.
Showed up to school to cheat off some kid 
whose parents weren’t preoccupied
with bills or pills. 
We raised each other on Marlboro Reds 
and money in the ashtray for Taco Bell. 
The sun went down,
we went down with it. 
Claimed our spots in the cracks,
where they saw us slip,
and did nothing. 
Claimed our spots in the wasteland
of coming-of-age nothingness. 
None of us knew what had happened to the other,
just that we were sorry. 
Sorry it had to be this way. 
Sorry there wasn’t anything better. 
Sorry no one taught us how to care. 
Sorry they taught us not to care. 
We drove fast onto the edge of ruining our lives for good. 
One of us went missing and was never found. 
It was 1995 and this is what it was like:
All heart and lost soul. 
I had not yet met the woman who would make it out. 
The woman whose sister would not. 
The woman now driving south on California’s Highway 99, tears streaming down her cheeks,
wondering how this place did not flatten her forever,
still not able to admit how 
dark and beautiful and terrifying 
being so lost and alone
really was. 





after unexpected loss

my lover is there 
behind glass, holding two cups of coffee

and i am a mix of shadow and light
tangled in bedsheets. 

what has happened? i can only think 
it is for some greater good, some rightful reason,

some filling of black holes in hearts.
from these separate worlds we pray together, 

knowing that men live there
and women live here,

and it has always been this way.
it is supposed to be this way. 

there is immense beauty 
when the glass melts, 

turns into slick floor 
that shimmers with our footprints.

in this dance we’ve dreamed up 
and found ourselves living one night under a full moon

with the windows cracked 
and the wind speaking to us in tongues.

as our own tongues trace the memories of taste,
the sour and bitter moments,

we roll them over and over
and make them sweet again.

we know we come to love flawed.
we know we come to love through imperfect living.

so why do we so often 
hide the things that make us 

the most loveable? why do we turn those
things into parts of ourselves that we hate? 

or worse, need to heal?
not just messy floors, but messy hearts and minds,

in this hiding, we have lost our way.
after a strange week of unexpected loss

i am grateful for this shadow and light in human form,
who does not hold me like i’m behind glass

but like i am holiness,
so much blood and all. 

​



Alexandria Regilio is a poet, herbalist and soon-to-be novelist. She writes about rewilding her feminine urges through the lenses of nature, motherhood and reconnecting with her Native American roots. She has work forthcoming in Witches Magazine and lives in Oakland, California with her two children and two parakeets. Follow her on Instagram @good_goddess_urge.
​

Flickr CC



​
​we are tourists
we use the map we created

We hated packing the boat and we hated unloading camp. But we loved to play alongside the lake’s rim, seeing the land curve around and scoop out a little corner of Yellowstone… just for us. We shared that bay—boat beached—with the moose, our nights with the howls of wolves, and our ears with the Earth’s floor, listening to the geysers bubble and hum from deep underneath as we drifted off to sleep. I remember we swam in the cold water in Rugrats underwear and red galoshes, even when we learned about hypothermia from posters with pictures of a drowned man. And we knew the water was for fishing, not swimming. And we did it anyway. The stars met our eyes through a ring of treetops, and we never stopped looking up, while we told those jokes from so many colorful candy wrappers. 

We remember these moments as some of the best from our childhood. We like to remember these times so we can forget the others. We tell the same jokes from the same candy wrappers because they can protect us from what we know, what we share. But when we were in the woods, just the bugs and smell of pine were between us, and we always want that back. We dissociate into the wilderness and from each other and pretend this brings us closer and what we really want is to be as close as six cousins and two grandparents tucked away into one tent as the forest hums or howls us into sleep and sweet dreams.

What we share are secrets and love and pain. Funerals and fights… and secrets again. We pretend we don’t know he hit her or she’s high again and who’s not at holiday and why. We pretend we don’t know what happened to me because we couldn’t stop it—can’t fix it. It’s softer this way on the surface and we are together in our division—our walls and locked-away-ness. It’s unspoken, the work we do, because we learn it from you. And we are surprised when it should come from us, too.

We are resilient and strong, enablers but lovers. So deeply we love. We don’t tell each other what we already know because we think we don’t have to, like clockwork, old faithfuls, gurgling underground. Like singing to the water, standing on the banks of Flat Mountain Arm with only the waves applauding us, clapping up onto the rocks. Like the doe passing us every year, all grace with her claw-marked ribs—thick, thick scars—drawn into her fur, her flesh, so deep they must be. “Look,” we say. “She’s here. Isn’t she beautiful?” 





FIRST

Like the first time she shaved her legs
against her mothers wishes.

In the passenger seat of a suburban, small foot on the dashboard

he bought some shaving cream and a razor
let her pass blades over prepubescent skin 
light, blonde leg hairs while he watched. 

_________________________________________

later, in the garage–just her and the gas can

Walkman forever glued to her ears

aural distortion like so many popping fireflies dancing around her head as the fumes cut off oxygen to her brain and the high cut off all suffering

she felt alive, a part of, inside of something. Ensnared in the bowels of the house

the mouse shit and insects and gasoline, they were there and they loved when she’d come and she’d breathe in and contort her body to follow the euphoria as it passed through her nostrils, brain, blood vessels–seeping out of her pores. 

a secret little love and mine to command. 

__________________________________________

First time 
on the floor
Shitsmearcolorcarpet

Cotton panties, barney sheets

Orgasm before alphabet
Before i know my name

​

​

Alyssa Canepa is a writer.
Professionally, creatively, sporadically, and compulsively. 
She believes in art, compassion, and being of service. 

Alyssa is a low-residency MFA candidate in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. She currently lives in Savannah, Georgia with two greybulls and her generous, kind, and loving partner Toby.
​

Tristan Loper CC



​Princess

Empress of white trash atop your cardboard throne
Post-apocalyptic puppy scavenging for suburbia
We lied and told everyone you were part dalmatian,
Trying to mystify the mutt inside you, the black spots
On your belly worm-wriggling, choking your ribs

We kept you chained to a nothing-house
In our nothing-lawn with nothing in your bowl
Or in your heart / when’s the last time someone 
Played with you, girl? When’s the last time
Someone readied the skin for you to sniff,
Presented their jean-thick knees for the scuffing?

In another universe maybe you’d be our little sister
And we’d keep you tethered to the kitchen table,
Tossing bones for you to swallow all the same;
In another universe you’d be pale and bruised
And hungry, starving, but with the hands to reach
For the food / but always, you’re imprisoned, rot-girl
You are a dead dog in every single universe

I know you were sick when it happened, half-mauled,
Not so much different than you were when we were babies
But were you leaping and licking and yapping so juvenile
And joyful the day daddy led you to the back?
Did the steel smile of his gun glow in a color
Your sad eyes could see? When he raised his arm,
Did you think: here it comes. I’ll catch it this time.
He’ll call me a good dog and the hurt will ease.
Just throw and I’ll catch, let loose the leash –





Milk

In the winters
We muse about deer meat

The black mornings
In the cobweb-clotted basement
Where we line our legs
With moth-bitten thermals;
The mythos leaks from
The brown-toothed mouth
Of dear old dad:

He will take a creature
Frail and holy and he will dissect it
‘Till it’s less than a being,
‘Till it’s only blood and weight /
It’s our birthright: to sodomize sweetness,
Eat in-awe the awful organs

But what about the deer?
The dreams leaking from their pale ears, 
Self-soothing inside their moonkissed milk

Milk and dreams meant for babies, 
Freckled by snow, listening: 
Vibrations of the universe
Shattered by gunshots
Born-of-big-bang – 

I want to sneak out into the night
And freeze to death, sheltered uselessly
By the underbelly of a beautiful thing,
Licked raw by the infinitely pink tongue
Of an animal slaughtered / an angel doomed





Solomon & Tummler

Skinny and ugly, we sip the sap of flat pepsis
Guarding the prize of stale cereal with teeth bared;
Hands, nipped and bloody, curl to feed the itch
The belly goes hungry / so the body grows restless

You’re mud-footed in the backyard, snipping worms
And hating yourself and chasing cats and hating yourself
And watching the road, devoted and terrified, like a Christian /
The truck could be dad’s or a robber’s or a savior’s or 
A stranger’s and no matter the result, you think about
The gun in the bedside table, blacker than hate,
And you think about your little hands on the little trigger:
So easy, easier than breathing, more bullets than teeth in your head

The television prophesizes and you listen, painted by static;
Sleeping on the floor, ladybug corpses squished like stamps atop
The dog-piss crust of the carpet you call a bed / two a.m. and you are
Insane, clinically – but you will still don the ramshackle smile
And you’ll still let the creek water cradle your bruise-bitten ankles
And you’ll still play poised for Christmas pictures, even when the rifle
Leans against the wall where the tree used to waltz

You’ll try to be a good kid, slicing off the skin where the wound used to sit –
The anatomy of your marvelous persona shrinking with every sweetness (but
Festering with every hollow, mangled night colonized by a neglectful mother-moon)

​


​
Savannah Gripshover is a writer and student living in Kentucky. Her work has previously appeared in Miniskirt Magazine.