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8/1/2024 Poetry by Becky May John Brighenti CC
Mornings at Calle Floridablanca The ones where 4am keened, cold as floor tiles / your flatmate cleared her throat as she left for work / you wondered what she wasn´t saying / friends sent you facebook videos on how to survive a break-up / the cat jumped on your door handle / swung like a question mark / you needed codeine to get out of bed / your carrots slimed to black in the crappy fridge / people fought for Ikea furniture in the flat you used to share with your ex / your flatmate told you chickpeas were a natural antidepressant / you woke up after eight hours on benzo / the river called from the end of the street / Nina Simone sung you into the day / you taught the third conditional to students – if it had not been for therapy, I would not have survived / the blind rolled down by itself / the cat took the bathplug for its plaything / the sky was studded with starlings / you hung white sheets out to dry/ the roof terraces spread out like dancefloors, freshly mopped. Becky May is currently studying for an MA in Poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her poetry has been published in various journals, including PN Review and Ink, Sweat & Tears and is forthcoming in 14 Magazine. She can be found on social media @beckymaywriter 8/1/2024 Poetry by Katharine Whitcomb Roanish CC
Infinity Loop after Patricia Lockwood How the mind finds scenes to replay-- bad ones, of course, reanimated shame, danger, humiliation—rising to the surface like corpses full of rot & gas. You thought you might weigh them down, destroy them w/ neglect, wire a cinder block to each of their ugly necks. But they’re back. Not quite rape & no joke: truck driver in an abandoned smokehouse, dog-faced lawyer on a cross-country train, the naked, hard-on-ed prowler, & you alone, by a skin of a whisper, by the split-second thought-turn in a grown man’s mind, young, safe by just dumb luck each time. Close call, Miss Geography! So very close. For the Eldest Daughters petals fall from the vase of yellow tulips pollen litters the table/ still life today’s to-do list scratched on scrap paper/drier filter felted full of matted lint let the past sleep forever w/ its hoard of shame let someone else shoulder blame whenever you fill the gas tank /even if you’re alone/even to the blank air say this aloud you have four hundred twenty miles’ worth /now where do you want to go? Katharine Whitcomb is the author of three full-length collections of poetry, including Habitats, published in January 2024 by Poetry NW Editions in the Possession Sound Series, Saints of South Dakota & Other Poems, which won the Bluestem Award, chosen by Lucia Perillo, and The Daughter’s Almanac, which won the Backwaters Prize, chosen by Patricia Smith. She was a Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University and is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MacDowell, Yaddo, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Marble House Project, and elsewhere. Her work has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize, a Loft-McKnight Award, and the Nebraska Review Award in Poetry. Her poems and prose have been published in The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Bennington Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Narrative, Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review, The Missouri Review, New England Review, terrain.org, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a Distinguished Professor at Central Washington University and makes her home in northern Vermont. More information about the author and her work can be found at www.katharinewhitcomb.com. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Emily Wray Roanish CC
prom queen i cut the tip of my pointer finger on a soda can with a ripped-off pop tab. it’s thin, looks ketchup-red down here. if it was you bleeding in the basement, throat slit like this is an agatha christie novel, you’d be condiment-red too. and what if it was just us here, you sputtering like a model t, me a sandhill crane with duct tape wings. so you know me as a ground-dweller— just wait ‘til i’m up again. how do you get the girl? you had asked me. so make this like the movies. check “yes” or “no.” pelt her windows with pebbles like an aquarium filter with an ax to grind. we all left our shoes upstairs and everyone’s shuffling their feet, pretending to dance like lovers, but never so close that your heart starts racing. there’s so much static we’ve created a new ozone layer, and it reeks of axe apollo and desperation. i’m washing my finger in the bar sink— i’d be a whore if you saw me suck it— and there’s a couple wriggling around the corner by the washer-dryer set like i’m not even here. and there you are, jason with glauce, making your rounds. go home and sleep it off, you said, feeling my forehead for fever. but i did not. i walked around your neighborhood, shoes in my hand, crying and looking for planets. And when i stopped, i wiped my nose with my sleeve and willed myself to slip into a drainage grate, humming a requiem for the girl I loved in second grade, happy and gilden and loved. Emily Wray (she/her) is an alumna of Purdue University's undergraduate Creative Writing program. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Bell Tower, Batch, and PATTERN. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Rose du Charme Subharnab Majumdar CC
The Honor of Slaughter or The Mangling of Language by Meaning I am the dirt beneath the coffin most often nothing new blooms here and like the carp I harbor teeth in my throat and there is violence at every one of my orifices. The evidence: they were shaped by worship. So, let this body be a reliquary. Let the elegies I write be estuaries between tears and spunk. New soft duets with times I declared myself a punk. when I carved resistance out of concrete. Prayed to blisters on my feet and ankles. I will roll cigarettes of old rose petals, keep my hospital bracelet on, my hair long and black. I will open my mouth to snarl. I will rarely ever bite unless it is His shoulder or her shoulder but never your shoulder, never ever your shoulder, never your shoulder. Never your shoulder, never your shoulder, never your shoulder. Rose du Charme is a poet from Long Island, New York. They have been published in HIKA, Violet Indigo Blue Etc, The Cackling Kettle, From Glasgow to Saturn, and Pith Zine. You can find them in Washington Square Park writing poems for strangers on their typewriter. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Annie Virginia Martin Cathrae CC
Harvest Moon and the Boys Are Waning and the Boys Are Wanting never been a full moon here where nobody leaves history more loyal than blood n milk gone thin to the bellies of their babies nothin can compare to shotguns Daddy says oh but bodies young a dull thump of dust in the hayloft trying at stars these boys hear larch needles whisper a cough syrup voice the sound of fire their mamaw’s needles stitching rebel folklore between teeth chaw in holes in their gums these boys all gaunt and full of tar their mouths stalactite caves broken where their sweethearts live bearing til they lose to a better shaking cycle certain as a jack-in-the-box what comes out will always be gruesome gruesome but still comes out fear gets creaky after all these winters strung scarecrow between the shoulders can tell snow’s near but no mercy of muscle so mamas breed lambskin babies with tar eyes heirloom cheeks gone pulp holy cross how the baby girls lie for the switchback boys nails in wood fruitmeat and stones and witchwhisper hair and mama tells them nothing sacred in the cornstalks nothing twist back for MNC (November 12, 1991-May 28, 2016) milkghost and sunflower i think of you all summer i heard most everything a soft wrong with all that rosemary in my ears our bones a small story about life that doesn’t end the light coming off teeth at dusk in the only hour the bulbs lining my apartment walkways could be called lanterns would you look at that loons breaking a drop of honey fallen on a smear of chalk the saw-blade jiggling between our knees in the truck outside that house where you sheltered me your wooden bird on my bedside table i wrote a letter to your mother i never sent it is selfish to die with so many people inside you back then if you were the moon with milk-clean veins i was learning a language if you were needled overfull even careless i am still asking and every June there is violet in my breath because women of the water always meet again like a river swearing return we swim in tidewater we coat our burns in cold milk we are never far from coming again to lamplight in heat Annie Virginia (she/her) is a Southern lesbian and an MFA runaway teaching high school English in New York City. She has fibromyalgia and a metal ankle. She was a 2023 Seventh Wave Bainbridge Resident. You may find her work at Pangyrus, Rough Cuts, Brooklyn Poets, The Seventh Wave, in 'Best New Poets 2019', and in Blue Earth Review. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Sara Mae SashaW CC
Moon Roof Gothic In temporal drag, I press a blade of grass to my palm & call backwards. This time I do not return but bring that small child out from hiding, our voice bouncing off plastic gems, fairy wings, a frivolousness where we can hear each other— materiality a balm—the distance of a wound from end to end & how it puckers—a closed distance, an echolocation. I had a dream I made myself shiny so a crow would fly down & peck at me. He tapped my neck like a spigot for syrup from bark & I marveled at the sensation, a new pulse, a gray sky above us. In my bisexual latency-- unless you consider shower thoughts a practice of ultrasonic hearing—I think only of breathing into each other’s mouths, my melodrama my sexual fantasy-- me the window & you the condensation, you the chimney & me sky catching smoke. I shed my Victorian collar for icebox skin, fruit bat gossip. Collection of blue butterflies & baby teeth—how I call on the self who was afraid to want, who slept in a closet & woke up to a figure the shape of purple television static, the one scared of hallways, the sound of the bath running, the way a house articulates itself-- the triangulation of my desires-- the shape of a roof. Exquisite Corpse as Recurring Dream to be fuckable is to be of linearity lipstick left to right letters stuffed with violets then spit linearity my fidelity bouquets like salt over the shoulder walking the aisle in chronological order but I was a backwards angel I stayed with you my sleep paralysis returned shoehorned wife sickle knife nights I woke up crying who was the succubus did I become her myoclonic jerk before dreams what sent me to sleep what did she smell like in this bed where you brought me sesame cookies if I was the monster if I am show me my seams I wore my best hope that summer even madonnas perch on serpents magnolias let loose from their faucets calves in the newspaper of a day’s outfits To be fuckable means to be cherubic ad nauseum I was an angel wrung dry an open mouth & linearity demands closure if my heart could have thrown back its curtains but to let you go would be an infidelity tell me what did she smell like in this bed where you brought me sesame cookies Cross My Heart & Hold a Stake Once, I wrote a love poem that ended if you hold a wind chime close enough it stops making a sound, then remained silent about my desires for years. When I perform for people on stage, through the dressing screen of the page, do I want to be holy & untouchable? To make myself ambiguous would be to turn myself monstrous. But I distrust myself & the audience too much to stay here long. I keep an eye trained to the door, haunted by my younger, beaming self, sometimes begging to be made only a mouth, sometimes tripping through onion grass, fleeing another’s desire. A little red corn syrup, a little lip liner & I become a citrus wheel on the hook of a hip of a tall glass of beer. Stuck in the teeth of readers. The color of blood & dripping. My desire is to stop my intrusive thoughts around paring knives, around how I would be looked at when help arrives & I’ve already gone through with it. My desire is to lay alone in a garden & let devil’s trumpet grow over me, to pulse open with the moonrise, to be told when to cum by the sky. My desire is to be forgotten so that I might become somebody’s precious secret, a message in maple tree bark, the first violets thawing out the zodiac, something undeniable & small. My desire is to open someone like a green apple with my hands, touch their seeds & taste their arsenic. My desire is to use T gel as if it were spit & grow something glinting from where I split. If there is a vampire waiting for me along this path I am walking, I am already his teeth & the stake that can turn him to sand. I am already his cold skin like October air I press myself to, to remind me I am alive. I am already his thirst & his bursting smile. I am smiling as I twist the stake in, the wood like something a tomato plant could build itself around. Palinode for the Exquisite Corpses Like Gram’s knuckles in her straightened hands carrying a pie dish from beneath, undoing the bramble of a fist, like her flat palms tucking pie dough over berries as into an envelope, like coming out of sleep paralysis and righting the fish hook of my spine, my forehead swept clean of nightmare sheen, I am smoothing out the story for you now. I wanted to close the distance between my queerness & my family, so I wrote accordion poems, folded poems, that I could fold my selves in from end to end, understand them to be closer together. (Think knapsack, where the corners meet in a knot. Think forbidden love letters between Gram and Grampa, their 65 year- old folds & thornbush cursive, forbidden because I wasn’t supposed to read them.) The poet who told me to start writing poetry said, griefs braid together. When Gram died, my mom snuck the love letters to me, & a napkin, on which Gram had blotted her lipstick. It is not enough to tell the story by doing my lipstick like her. She used to ask me to brush her hair in church, in the pews, & she’d close her eyes, listening to mass. It’s just that when I unbraid the poems, none of it makes sense. & so how will I live? Sara Mae is a high fem writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. Their work speaks to queerness, the surreal, the uncanny, body horror, and intimacy. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar and a 2022 Tinhouse Summer Workshops alum. They were a finalist for the 2023 Loraine Williams Prize and their work appears in or is forthcoming from FENCE, Waxwing, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their chapbook, Phantasmagossip, is forthcoming from YesYes Books and was the winner of the 2023 Vinyl45 Chapbook Series. They write shimmery rock music as The Noisy. They received their MFA from UT Knoxville. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Shyla Ann Shehan Martin Cathrae CC
What now? Yeah, I could eat 1 I feel so fucking lonely lately like every minute I spend thinking about my next meal or how my therapist said I crave acknowledgment because my parents ignored me because most things that are wrong with a person are that way because somebody screwed them up before they had a chance to figure out how to be a person in the world and the world is so fucking broken and on fire all the time like fire and brimstone and what’s a kid supposed to do with that but watch TV and write and eat Cheetos and popcorn with extra butter and salt and nacho supreme nachos with no beans from Taco Bell and breadsticks from Pizza Hut and SweetTARTS and Spree and Hershey's and, as Chester Cheetah is my witness, ALL the Milky Way I could eat and eat and eat and eat and eat and eat 2 I tried to make my life into a poem because I wrote a poem and it felt like a way out like life is some kind of maze and half the battle is knowing which direction to go and writing was a direction and the poems spilled out like children onto a playground at recess and it was easy I didn’t have to think about it and felt better about life and myself as a person in the world after writing until the day I didn’t 3 I sit in an overstuffed recliner in my room and listen to the thunder and rain and think it could be a poem. But the world… the world the world on fire with war and rage, gluttony and starvation, with rocks and sky in slow decay doesn’t want or need my poem about the rain and it’s probably for the best because I couldn’t write another poem now anyhow because there are no more children and it’s 5:11 AM and the house is still and quiet and it will be breakfast soon and I could have oatmeal with cinnamon and almonds or two eggs over medium and hashbrowns with salsa or toast with peanut butter and maybe a coffee with cream and sugar because I’m alone and can have whatever I want Shyla Ann Shehan is an analytical Virgo from the US Midwest. She has an MFA from the University of Nebraska and her work has appeared in The Pinch, Moon City Review, Door is a Jar Magazine, Drunk Monkeys, and elsewhere. She’s co-founder and curator of The Good Life Review and lives in Omaha with 27 fish, 233 golden mystery snails, and three cats.❀ For more, please visit shylashehan.com. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Samantha Moya Cristian Bortes CC
Neon Park I. Instinctually she makes herself as small as possible; not necessarily a fear of being seen, but something deeper and grimier, a perception of being a person, one of those living feeling sentient things with needs and wants, horrid, horrid wants. She gazes into spider-webbed glass and hopes to find a stunted inner child. She gets lost there. II. When does exposure therapy begin to work? She asked because she was constantly thrown into the deep end of the pool, but to this day the water holds intangible terrors all the same. The terrors play out as an experimental horror film on the body, shrieks like banshee, silence like the grasslands, blood like fine wine on the white carpet, nails scratching linoleum. The thud of a head on the floor. Exposure therapy, the scientific theory of "I don't know, people just get used to it eventually." III. When she travels back to the ocean, I remind her that we behold its majesty because we can't fathom its end in any direction. I imagine the deepest parts of it where the light will never reach, and I remark that it's beautiful, comforting even, that God himself cannot reach some places. IV. Tell me what you love the most, and I will tell you how to destroy it. V. Dust settles. Neon signs come down as the Old West is built over. There's a lot to not recognize anymore. The world shakes off dead skin while we're sleeping. It's hard to pay attention for very long. It happens while we make ourselves small. VI. But I put my faith in porch swings and our hearty dinners, I celebrate the end of a day by living in the world as it is, and not as it should be. It's time we shed our own bodies like tarantulas, so casually stepping outside of ourselves, like the earthly creatures we fear. Spring, 2022 On this, the 23rd day of the month, we spoke little of anything that really mattered — instead, we had a conversation about your old recipe for millionaire pie, my fondness for collecting coasters, how the motel comforter itches, how I'd smear beefaroni all ove my highchair. And this brevity, it incinerates like a manuscript in the fireplace. There’s a beauty in a détente that we’re well-aware will not last. We wished for imperviousness, more conversations a bout pie, punctuated with light laughter down the signal. Your possessions, everything about you that is worldly, are locked in storage, and everyone has long stopped listening to your tiny violin. You created rifts so deep that your ancestors in hell worked their way up to the earth’s surface, back into your life. But I remain, a stubborn animal, and our combined breath tastes stale, feels dry, a saltine challenge. We don't have a price point, but our oral traditions are bartered for, buried, sitting under our fingernails with the rest of our regrets. My hands don't hold water anymore, not even for a few seconds. Your skin, it's crisp, but not like an October morning. I can no longer sit with my back to the door, just like you haven't slept in years. That shared lump in our throats never retreats, and our twin scars just blend nicely to their home. Today I'm relearning some watercolor techniques, creating an impression of something I both barely remember and can't stop thinking about. You don't live by the tracks, but nevertheless, the whistle of a train woke you up this morning. I reflected on how that seems like a disturbance from a bygone time. You never left that small railroad town. Interholidays a pause, call it Boxing Day lull, the limbo between parties. we retreat a bit, staying warm, attempting to stay occupied, thinking nonchalantly about everything, the ache in our lower backs, crisp beer, purging the basement clutter, seasonal suicide, counting loved ones present and loved ones lost – it’s the only kind of math that becomes useful over time, a party trick, an elegy. but somehow the world bustles and stands still simultaneously, the air, simply candle smoke, and you remember last night’s feeling— the feeling at 11pm during a party that started four hours ago, somehow the liquor is still hitting, but some are finding the door, some are too far gone to know, and it’s beginning to feel like the same old stories are being told, but you, you are not ready to leave, not just yet, it was “one more” three one-mores ago, time stop. and others curl up with no company at all, inventing myths and legends about this time of year, maybe even about this life, their life, the deliriousness of the hour, the debauchery of the whole season, consumer waste, how the retail hours buzz, fixing up the last of the egg nog and rum to sit in a quiet corner, a spectator. so as they do, late nights fade into lazy mornings, and lazy mornings fade into a brooding afternoon, and into orange early evenings and an ambivalent 9pm, nothing to occupy the mind but a protruding guilt, a sweat sheen of shame. eventually the tree in the corner will become firewood, because the calendar breathes its last and all twinkling lights twinkle less over time and we swap pine scents for fresh starts, muttering to ourselves: Well, what now? Samantha Moya is a data specialist with a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Colorado Boulder. She does her own writing and arts on the side. Her work has been featured in Serotonin Poetry, The Raven Review, Epoch Press, Tension Literary, and The Poetry Question. She is originally from Albuquerque, New Mexico and currently resides in Denver, Colorado with her husband and two dogs. She can be found at Twitter/X and Instagram @samanthalmoya. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Aleikza M. Diaz Lise CC
Body after Man’s New Consciousness Part 5 I mourn the death of that social creature I was, a death so hot and green. A precipitous teen mortality that touches me now, even at such an old age as twenty-one, where I can say or do anything, but I don’t—don’t I? When plans are being made and I fail to accept them, when conversation doesn’t come easily it is surely because that day is stuttering about the room where it happened. It stands a person of its own within the body where it lives: my body. Where it occupies space, taxes my bones, and stakes its claim. Know that it is present when my heart quickens to the pace of duckling feet trailing close behind mama, just at the raspy noise of violation, like the grating hoot of an old September owl. Just at the look—the twisted, sharpened nails, the seething face and wrinkled skin—of it. The touch of man—oh, how it makes my skin fold, rather than crawl, into a cube of repugnance, abhorrence, and synonyms not yet discovered. This thing has made me fear sweet, pink girls, fear them because I’ve done something detestable. Something wrong. Something wrong. But no sweet, pink girl you did not, they say. And they cry with me now when I tell them about when I died. The girls cry with me and share their expiries, too, so that I’m not so alone. They bare their bony chests, their bruised softness, their lengthened nails, and heart-clad cheeks, so that I’m not left alone in the place where it happened. Alone at school. Alone everywhere, and nowhere at once. Alone in this body, which desperately roots for the home team but must keep honest score. Body after Man’s New Consciousness Part 2 I can’t get clean without this dry brush that scrapes off my skin and leaves bloody strands across the most vulnerable part of my thigh. Just that feather-soft part toward the middle that touches its pair on the left to keep my strange girl—I hesitate to name her, though we’re so close—tucked within. She more governmentally “protected” than I will ever be, though not by my standards, but those some senator/justice/president made for us. They without a clue of what she truly holds—more than the sacred life of a phantom golden child or real babies or rust—but love and warmth and the slide of peaches. Not fresh ones, but those prepackaged in grocery store cups, submerged in high-fructose goo—slick with time and patience, and never robbed from the tree that bore them. But, oh, we know how they like to steal fruit off green branches. Aleikza M. Diaz (she/her) is a writer and editor from New Jersey. Her work is published or forthcoming in Bullshit Lit, Glass Mountain, and others. Find her on Substack, Instagram, and X @aleikza. 8/1/2024 Poetry by Sara Femenella Nicolas Raymond CC
Paterfamilias Of not knowing the difference between real harm and the illusion of harm, just like you I pretend you are not sick. Father of the second cocktail. Father of Mahler and Dylan, where every bit of my womanhood comes from what I wanted you to see when you saw me, call me fantasy, phantasmagory, father of my vices. We’re both so good at ignoring what is right in front of us that we cannot separate our ghosts from our haunting. Father of perfectly parallel lines. Father awake at all hours. Every time I think I’ve escaped you the littlest daughter inside me drags out her fear to lay it at the feet of your fury. Father my misery wants to be the same as your misery. You keep your sickness hidden with your Catholic guilt and your Sunday stubble. Father of St. Erasmus patron of sailors and labor pains. Father I want to tell you every time it hurts. You keep your sickness tucked neatly inside your misery, a hurt inside a hurt, a ghost inside a haunting. My misery is a good daughter too, hurting just how your misery taught it. Father of twin ghosts. A doubled love. An inherited haunting. Father our ghosts are looking for someone new to haunt. Father when my son watches me in silence to see if I am angry, when my rage unfurls at his mistakes, it’s your voice exploding from me. And after, when I sing him the songs you sang me, when I laugh with your laugh at his joke, it’s your apology winning both of us over again. Elegy in an Ordinary Apocalypse Our hands do as they are bid, freedom is what you do with what has been done to you the freeway stretches through quick-sands of crawl and glimmer, our hands on the wheel we are on our way home, past our detritus smolder and tinder, our hands, our quarter century barter in horror and bathos we’re bored with this already, this daily commute of our hands segue nonplussed the telegenic deaths across our maps hanged by their martyr-laurels and dangling over the shores of them-not-us grieving technologically, our hands stroking the news cycle lassoed by our road rage the setting sun on each windshield like a grand piano in an empty ballroom, once we demanded a god for this, for our hands in repose, our hands so gentle gathering us to rest at the end of each day blessing what is already dead, blessing what we have done to ourselves and so soon Sara Femenella's poems have been published or are forthcoming in The North American Review, Palette Poetry, Pleiades, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, The Saint Ann’s Review, Denver Quarterly, Salamander, and Seventh Wave, among others. Her manuscript, Elegies for One Small Future, was a semi-finalist for Autumn House Press' Poetry Prize, a finalist for Write Bloody Publishing’s Jack McCarthy Book Prize and a finalist for The Waywiser Press Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son. |
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