Mirror Mirror




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Andreea Ceplinschi is a Romanian immigrant writer, photographer, graphic designer, waitress, and kitchen witch living and working at the tip of Cape Cod. Her writing includes poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction, published and forthcoming in Solstice Literary Magazine, 86logic, One Art, Wild Roof Journal, The Quarter(ly), The Keeping Room, and elsewhere. You can learn more about her at www.poetryandbookdesign.com

                                                                             Accomplishment 



Michael Moreth is a recovering Chicagoan living in the rural, micropolitan City of Sterling, the Paris of Northwest Illinois.

                                              Elegy



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Patty Paine is the author of Grief & Other Animals, The Sounding Machine, and three chapbooks. Her poems, reviews, and visual works have appeared in Blackbird, The Denver Quarterly, Adroit, Gulf Stream, Waxwing, Thrush, The South Dakota Review, and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal and Diode Editions and Director of Liberal Arts & Sciences at VCUarts Qatar.

     Shawn Kent CC





         Where do I even begin? I'll start by saying thank you. For being here. For being. Persisting. Creating. Even though, even though. 

Don't you sometimes just wanna ask the world straight out: "What's going on around here?" What's really going on? Beneath all that noise, what song could you be singing? Song of joy. Song of pain. Songs of disappointment and hurt and of all that happens from not tending to the deep breaks in us. The voices are many that'll tell you to put all that away. To eat your own kind, to measure whole and happy by how much and how big. And bigger still. The hole in the center. It holds nothing and no one. It's an unkind machine we've made the world into. But I believe there is something in us that won't let us alone. It is that small voice inside of us that tells us we've been living such desiccated and cramped forms of life. And how life learns to adapt in unforgiving environments. Can become cemented into the final cut. Like childhood was, for many of us: thrown to storm too early to know how to dress oneself for storm. How to survive storm intact. And so we fragment and scatter. And we spend our lives collecting pieces of our story. Putting things together in a way that makes sense. That keeps us here. Because if we can't make it make sense, can't make that pain sing, oh, we know all too well what can happen to us. We see it writ large right now everywhere in the world. Everyone trying to get the bad things out of them and onto someone else. But you gotta deal with that. We know this, don't we, you and I? 

That's why we're here. To deal with, and to help each other deal with, what won't go away in us. Every creation that comes from out of the long dark night of us takes some of the edge off our pain. But there is a pain that can never, and maybe should never, be entirely removed from us. It is the very specific, democratic pain that comes with being human. Not the pain caused by injustice and organized cruelty, these are never necessary, but the pain that comes just from being flesh and blood and bone. There is a soul-ouch that cannot be unfelt in being here. Sometimes we feel it too much, or not at all. But it's there, moving by degrees, throughout our lives. Mended by hand and open heart, by a rigorous honesty. By tending and holding that line, carefully, until just the right moment. Or almost the right moment, for when do we ever arrive, or hold in our hands the perfect anything? 

We can't do it alone. That is certain. Wherever there are two or more, you have a place to start. Much as in twelve step fellowships, it is the power of one person helping another that makes the difference between life and death, and a death in life. So too in any area of life. And art doesn't always help. Some are dedicated to a kind of hurting-art, an art that only widens the path of the primal cut. I was once dedicated to such a thing. Until. Time. Enough time, and a deeper yearn for the heal than the pride of the hurt. Are you helping or are you hurting? The hurt can help. It can't take our pain from us, but it can help to make us feel real again. Put in the service of the excavation of our core wounds, such hurt clears a path that can be walked by others. Emotional landmarks of the lengths to which we've each gone to feel ok in the world. That we belong in world. That world needs us to hold the line more attentively, for each other. 

To those who have ears, such dark days are but a call to action. To lifting others up, holding them aloft, finding just enough food, clothing, shelter, counsel and care for our fellow wounded-by-life. By both the large injustices and the small daily slings and arrows. What good are we if not willing to go the distance for those in the distance, and those right next door. There's always some small thing we can do that makes a difference in someone's life. All the work, here, for instance, in this issue. It helped me immensely, to read and hold space for this incredible and courageous work. Sometimes there was a common point where our similar pain converged, other times a necessary decentering, but one tethered wholly to compassion and - whew, do I know the feeling?

"We are in the grit of human relating" here, as Jade McGleughlin writes. The real crunch of it what means to attempt real authentic relating with another. Which means becoming at times disoriented. Because none of our stories are the same, and we may fail to truly perceive someone's otherness if we read it only from the vantage point of our own lives and losses. No one's loss, no one's pain, is exactly the same. But there is an unseen thread that runs through us all. I've seen it, you've seen it. In the sweetest, most secular/holy moments, they happen so fast and briefly you want to bottle it, but it's gone before you can even wrap your arms around it. That feeling. It hardly has a name. Or many names. Every name. The threads by which we are bound to one another. In our joy and in our pain. You hurt, I hurt, that's the idea. But the feeling? Oh man, you gotta register that feeling. Make it real because it is the most real thing in the world. You hurt. I hurt. Love hurts, life hurts, it all hurts so much. But what do we do with the feeling? What do we do with each other's feeling? Much of the world encourages us to discount, devalue, and distrust it all. So much feeling. But as long as feelings are second class citizens, so too will people be, as Michael Eigen says. Feelings matter. Feeling matters. Feeling deeply. Feeling too much. But to feel nothing at all? Oh. We're seeing the dark birth of it, friends.

Be ready for the birth of unfeeling. Meet it with great feeling. Because that connecting thread runs through everything and everyone. Hold the line, mend the hurt, tend to the lost and those who are thrown right into it from birth. Some of us are right here, right now. Learning to be human in all too human world. Learning the world again like infants. What makes color dance, sounds sing, bells ring? Why is a mother a mood and a father boom. Sifting through patterns now that were not consistent enough for us to get a proper feel for them then. This is the work, in many forms and varied paths.

To get back to the core you must pass through the fire. You must want for others what you have found in your grieving hours. Hand to shoulder. Chairs in a circle. Warm coffee. A knowing smile. A knowing anyone, anything. It's not nothing to air such great feeling out. Because whatever happens to us, that feeling will not go away. It'll only get larger, more out of our grasp. Until it takes on an anti-life of its own. Wanting to leave nothing around it with feeling intact.

But here we are, feeling to the fore, feet to the fire. Hearts warm and ready to receive, to let in, to tell our story, to sing our songs, and with a courage that took its hits but never cut itself off from its root, we branch out from our pain towards the world. 

Till we meet again, fellow feelers/travelers. Brave your feeling out into that great and raging approaching storm. Soften all that dark with the light in your old kit bag. Soften all that dark. By hand. And by he(art).

In service and gratitude,
James Diaz
Founding Editor
Anti-Heroine Chic ​
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      Ed Suominen CC





Late Shift

We lied about our ages,
not that they cared; we
were cheap labour, 
short-changing
us on the hour.

In the old days it was called Fisherman’s
Wharf. It served up crayfish and squid
cocktails in lettuce leaves to busloads of Japanese
tourists shipped in through darkened intervals.

We scrubbed dishes, pots, copper-bottomed
cauldrons that were bigger than us. We climbed
inside the clogged arteries and scraped the burnt
béarnaise sauce from our aching aortas.

The tie-dyed waitresses played pseudo-geishas 
to the Japanese businessmen who left their wives
in Fukuoka.  The turned-down lights allowed
our adolescent imaginations to film porn scenes
in the red-velvet booths while the fake Elvis
shattered love songs under the glitterballs. 
The dance floor like the den of the Marquis de Sade.

At the end of our shift we’d nick six packs
and Jim Beam hipflasks and cheap Chardonnay
and we’d hit the streets for a 5 kilometre walk home.
The air froze our sweat and stilted our desire.
We hid in doorways, avoiding the patrolling cops 
who would confiscate our booze for themselves
rough us up for the fun of it, only for our fathers
to finish us off. 

We’d throw rocks at the moon, we’d link arms
pretending that we didn’t need one another. We’d
come to the Mobil station at Verran’s Corner, the lights
spilling onto the court like an Edward Hopper painting.
The sole attendant tucked inside reading Playboys.

Then we’d start to break off like the debris from rockets
shooting into space, one by one moving out of reach, the rest
of us carrying on through the night, until it was only me,
alone, the last bit of Chardonnay in the bottle. Over the trees
came the 3am anthem of Dragon singing April Sun in Cuba.
But this was no Cuba. I’d stroll slowly down the road 
where I grew up in a house that served as a gibbet. 
As I neared my letterbox, a little drunkenly, I’d stop
and lean on the electric transformer, warm and vibrating
under my ribs, thinking whether to go inside the orange
door, to face the cold prosecutor, or keep following the road.

I still see that fork in the road; I still hesitate.






The Night Will Take You

She pushes along a shopping cart
filled with her life’s bagged possessions.
Someone said:
“Do you know those shopping carts cost
something like $650 a pop?”
A quarter teaspoon of disgust in their tone.

They even wanted to take that away.
I see her when I’m driving, on those
mornings where your feet freeze 
on the bathroom tiles and you 
think the world is against you.

All those small pathetic reasons
you give your victim self.

She wears a witch’s hat
from a joke store.
There’s a house where she always
pauses outside.
Hoping someone may look out
from her past.
Offer to wheel her $650 cart
down the pathway.

When we sleep she follows 
the railroad tracks like a dreamsong.
She keeps our demons away
they trace her to the place she once called home
where her father worked kneading
bread, her mother a seamstress.
But now it’s an apartment high-rise
with breakout rooms
a shared lounge
hot desks
cappuccino machines
a day spa
a non-stop fucking party

Where there’s no room
for a shopping cart
or a woman 
in a witch’s
hat casting
spells.

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Lincoln Jaques is a Tāmaki makaurau (Auckland) based writer. His poetry, fiction, travel essays and book reviews have appeared in Aotearoa and internationally, including Landfall, takahē, Live Encounters, Tough, Noir Nation, Burrow, Book of Matches, The Spinoff Friday Poem, Blackmail Press, Poetry Aotearoa Yearbook and Mayhem.  He was shortlisted for the 2023 inaugural I Te Kokoru At The Bay hybrid manuscript awards, and was the Runner-Up in the 2022 IWW Kathleen Grattan Prize for a Sequence of Poems. He was guest editor for the 2023 and 2024 Live Encounters Aotearoa Poets & Writers editions.

     Emma K Alexandra CC




i love even when i hate

my mother shadowed me in the nest
but something wasn’t right 
she let go of her creation
she may have wanted to die
resisting the urge 
for the sake of legacy
i wanted to die & no one told her
my little critter brain cannot be trusted
hogging the light in our shared alley
i put my head in her crane-like hands 
toppling over she stood above watching
unsure of what to do 
i replicate un-love
& my therapist talks about memory
like a switchblade in a bottle
she suggests a rigged election 
for someone to care for me
i can’t pick more guys on the run 
they are beautiful obviously
torture me with a robbed goodbye
& sacred vomit six feet apart
i feel a fool for acting fertile
the way the cold might be colder 
for something so raw 
i stopped writing to be jovial
held on like a grudge
till i traded tongue for fingers
i hardly speak these days
awfully incapable of cracking 
i’m just all nerves
a hymn-like body
always up to something
a bit silly & hurting
to be part of the world
i claim poorly decorated promises 
& watch them grow 
into wildflowers & ripe bananas
my plot will be so warm
it will make you want to stay alive
i admitted a lot already
i'm inclined to start anew
sitting on the playroom floor 
legs bent at the knees 
splayed out like a pinwheel
i love even when i hate
i love






Every Season the City Drowns Me

I come up drenched, sputtering names.
Reborn a child that doesn’t mind, I don’t know my names.

The ink of my body swells & recedes,
my mouth practicing forms, the shapes of names.

I think of how I am still bleeding, purging every man 
who has ever touched me & whispered names.

I imagine if I had his baby & it was like him. I might also want it 
gone, to exist without names. 

All the women came to see if I was awake. 
They wanted to hold me & count my fingers with names.

I had to hold my breath & I did, God why 
did you make our ridges recognizable, fingerprints or names.

The women fished Paula out the wishing well. Skin, kidneys, hair follicles, 
everything but names.

​




Hunting Season

I used to be brave in the dark
bumping against others & learning their edges.
I can't bear it anymore-

my lovers are a fractured roof 
I broke my hip on just to count stars. 
I am bleeding but they are stenched in gore.

Hanging on my wall, bodies absorb decades 
of self-importance. 
I have other plans than revenge

—to simply shed
in your shirt, pretending to lay on your F train shoulder,
blood clots slipping out of me like coins. 

In a post-disaster party I invite the saints over 
& confront every single shade of green. 
They don’t notice my reveling

in voice scraps, half-second teases 
I can barely make out. 
After five listens I decide, with faith, that it’s you

singing me to sleep.
It sounded like a call, back home 
women greet strangers as visitors.

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Paula Gil-Ordoñez Gomez is a Mexican-Spanish-American poet based in Brooklyn. Her writing has been published in HAD, Variant Lit, X-R-A-Y, Rejection Letters, and Heavy Feather Review, among others. She is a 2024 Periplus Fellow. Say hi on Twitter @paulagilordonez and find more of her work at paulagilordonezgomez.com.
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     Nubrig CC




MASLOW’S HIERARCHY OF YEARNING

I want to swallow stars from the sky like a mouthful of cool water,
I want to eat yellow sunlight with my bare hands,
I want to climb trees like birds do, lifting off the branches,
I want to feel impossible sensations,
to see like an insect, hear like a dog,
open my eyes underwater in the ocean without the sting of salt,
I want to be a martyr like Saint Sebastian, strung up with an arrow in my side,
or maybe just to be a good person, with two cats and a decent job,
I want to have chocolate on Tuesdays and steak on Sunday nights
and to hang framed photographs of myself as an infant on every wall,
I want to have the moments between my breaths be finally unlabored,
I want to tattoo my bottom teeth and pierce my right eyebrow,
I want to own every unreleased Morrissey album on limited-press vinyl,
I want to sit up straight and to know how to shoot a gun,
I want to grow my hair out past my shoulders for once in my goddamned life,
I want to live at the edge of the universe and expand beyond time,
I want to have tits like Pamela Anderson and to be a natural blonde,
I want to be without wanting, to desire endless nothing,
to grasp infinity like a mother wolf holds her cub in her jaws
without biting down, no matter how much she might want to,
I want to raise my hands above my head and hold them there forever. 

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IN TRUTH OR CONSEQUENCES, NEW MEXICO

Let’s say you’re singing karaoke alone at a dive bar in the middle of the desert, Blondie, or maybe Springsteen, and let’s say the bar is full but nobody is cheering you on, and they all laugh when your voice sharps on the high note, and let’s say you had an older brother once, and he was tall and kind and handsome, someone to fall in love with when you were seven the way only children do, and let’s say he moved to this town to grow up and never came back, and now you’ve got twice as much dirt under your fingernails than he ever will – so let’s say there’s a kind of cigarette that kills you instantly, and let’s say you’ve gone through the back door and smoked it, but instead of dying you wake up standing in a clear windowpane of light in the valley, right where the sun falls like rain from the split in the cloud cover above, and let’s say it feels like winter when it passes over your shoes, and let’s say you lie down in it and bite off a chunk of your own tongue, and the blood in your mouth is sweet and fresh and the only thing in the world that really belongs to you, this world with its animal stench of decay and instinct and rotation after rotation – let’s say you stay there forever, looking up into the sky, never blinking, but still moving at the speed of sound.

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S. Cristine is an emerging poet living and writing in her native Los Angeles. Her work has previously been published in or is forthcoming from The Passionfruit Review, DOG TEETH, and the LA-based literary reading series Car Crash Collective's first anthology volume. You can find her online on Twitter/X at @ standrdbrunette. 
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      Nicholas Erwin CC




Self-Portrait as Woman as Forest

There were signs: the leaf 
fragments that fluttered 

from my hair to my morning 
coffee; the crescents 

of dirt beneath each nail; 
all the honey I was eating, 

as if my mouth had become 
a home for bees; all the words 

I did not need to say: the way 
I held quiet in my orbit. 

I began to drink only rainwater, 
to crave light, but not 

with the same desperation. 
I knew warmth would fade 

and return, that I didn’t need 
to shine all the time. 

I let my limbs rest. I changed, 
always. I was alive.

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Emily Patterson (she/her) is the author of three chapbooks, most recently haiku at 5:38 a.m. (Bottlecap Press, 2024). Her work has been nominated for Best Spiritual Literature and is published or forthcoming in SWWIM, North American Review, Rust & Moth, Wild Roof Journal, CALYX, and elsewhere. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio and works as a curriculum designer.

      Isengardt CC





To My Father Flying the Kite, 1984.
(Love Letter to a Stranger) 

I won’t tell you of our 
drift, of losing you
so long we’d call it
decades; of the gape 
pulling you away and
pulling you away and
pulling you away and 
of our snap, our strain.
I won’t tell you anything
              except kites, 
and a memory’s meadow
drowsing in the westing
sun, dandelion dots waving
before launch and a father
teaching daughter the 
mechanics of flying a kite,
yes, but more - teaching her
how to be exhilarated; 
instructing her in 
strings and sunshine,
in soaring and sky,
in honoring a breeze, 
navigating a rise - my 
father flying the kite,
               only reply, 
tell me something of 
the look in her brand 
new and blue eyes when
she gazes up at the wild
kite in the wild sky, 
yes, but more, when she
looks up to you
what do you see? 




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Tiffany Greco has a Masters of Social Work and work at a statewide nonprofit focused on child welfare advocacy and reform efforts. She lives in Austin, Texas. Her essay “Dead-End Road Redemption” is published in The Groovy Chicks’ Road Trip to Love (Life Journey Press), and she was a recurring guest columnist for The Ithaca Voice in 2015-2015 where she contributed articles on understanding, preventing, and responding to domestic and sexual violence. 
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      Tim Vrtiska CC





​Mountain Bodies

It’s said Denver was carted over
by a band of angels who drunkenly
dropped the city on their way
to Sacramento. I suspect they scraped
the bottom of their wagon
on Longs Peak, the way it pierces
the clouds. Mom had summited
at 14,000 feet before I was born, slept
in lightning’s nursery.

If she was the child of runaways,
I began as the ache in her foot.
I was made in drought,
the Colorado River rushing
past like a rumor. Horses
and minnows scattered
over the land, the sun gated
off by the mountains not long
before dinnertime.

                                     Darkness walks
here early, Mom said with her eyes
so I never went alone to the spitting
river, never stopped in the glower
of a gas station. Get home safe
was the sweetest goodbye
someone could give. I didn’t
know then what can happen
to girls, only wished to be made
by the night into something
fearsome too.

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Jayne Shore is a Korean American writer living in Minneapolis. She holds a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University and is working on her first collection of poetry.