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1/30/2026 1 Comment Poetry by Claire Maracle denipet CC
Konnorónhkhwa, the blood that flows belongs to you There is a river in my body I accidentally tattooed it onto myself at 4am when everyone was looking I left in search of a ticking clock Surely the sound of it will remember my own blood heaving with elegant amoeba I refuse to name Driftwood of the collarbone I call myself home I sleep with a journalist on new years eve her hair curls in my fist She smokes too many cigarettes leaves ashes in the river of me Floods the bed with body Quotes heroin poems clean I fuck her on the rooftop too Til the stars come vaulting across January's threshold Can a river be gluttonous? Be hungry for what a body does Can a river be sad & horny too? I have this disease where I can’t get enough salt Every river Is part ocean Maybe if I surrendered I'd become something like a Thundercloud On the front page of the hotel’s instagram is the journalist kissing me & I’m laughing/flooding/beckoning the river back into my mouth Cavalier/ caviar/crow kinda laugh I haven't had a cigarette in six years What does the river know about these rolling box scars about glitter about being half of anything? The river here is sick oil slick catfish littered refinery runoff stink We do ceremony The river says it hurts to be the beginning So much wind I gather everywhere Love hasn’t spoken my name in ages Soon, God, Somewhere after Quazzy The babies grow up free & the food is all sourced locally We gather honey everywhere, honey all of us in this room made real We feasting On three sisters and everybody's ancestral dish And our descendants in the joint too Soon, god, somewhere We are sea level, sandy & the ocean has been restored The salmon are back home is your sisters thick wealth reflected back in her green eyes Soon god, somewhere we are rich. All the nieces & all the nephews & soon to be somewheres Grow up In this sky who has no memory of war In these the streets who’ve never known gunfire All of us glittered up with love Poem drunk and creation stained Soon god somewhere change is soon God, somewhere everything you touch, you God. Peace, or, the absence of a thing The absence of a thing I cannot enter I bite my cheek at the same time as my sister Finally, I am no one’s mother Forever. We gather ants in the yellow kitchen We ants in the yellow kitchen Cinnamon us home Swollen knees, full heads of hair, 96 years old No one is breaking eggs in this economy Just us mopping vinegar to cut the yolk Moths fly out of cereal boxes. No one has died yet. The body is a messy miracle I watch it flail blue/coded A young doctor works the chest Compressions take turns I cannot look away I heard the heart stop beating Linoleum soft nurses chatter as if Life isn’t hovering in the ceiling waiting to be called home. I leave To kiss my wife, urgently to show my life that I mean business 96 years plus of business. I tell them I have the stomach for it. Everyone believes me. I am the one breaking eggs in this economy, Gathering ants in the yellow kitchen Milk in a mug & codeine. A white woman calls me a shaman I laugh in indigenous Or whatever blood quantum calls me/I cannot be a thing/deducted A thing I cannot enter - that is my own The land is a body The body is a discoball, a code blue, anthill, honey full, head of hair, the body is a dance and I do not like the music it is too beautiful. Claire Maracle is a Mohawk member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, raised as a guest on Muscogee, Osage, and Cherokee lands. They are the Executive Director for Words of the People, a Native-led nonprofit working to normalize indigenous language creative works. Their poetry has been published in This Land Press, Emerge Magazine, New Words Press, Wayfarer Magazine & Super Present Magazine. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation.
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1/28/2026 2 Comments Poetry by Sarah Morris Shux Judith Jackson CC
Our Family Is Secrets Upon secrets Diagnosis pushed behind couch cushions Sisters not knowing the very worst things That happened to each other Anger released into hollowed out trees With the cigarette butts Pushing most things down deep Then gasping when They find their way back up through New roots Through fresh skin Through blood—wearing it, lipstick-red Fingernails bitten too far down “That was meant to be in the Will, She was working on a new one right before—“ Saying “she would never understand if she knew What really happened” Saying “She would be rolling in her grave if she knew—“ Knowing damn well that she is under no earth That she was scattered Thinking about the lack of expression for those who were Burnt Saying “it should have been me” Saying “I wish it had been me” Saying “I will take this to the grave” And making good on that promise Sarah Morris Shux is a poet, screenwriter and short story writer originally from the Adirondack Mountains and currently living in Los Angeles with her very loud Siamese cat, King Tut and her sweet black lab, Sami. She enjoys obsessing over ghost stories, bedazzling random things and spending too much money on vinyl records and weird, antique tchotchkes. Find her words published in The Paper Cult, Anti-Heroin Chic, Superfro amongst others and on Medium and Substack. Find her on social media: @awwshux on Instagram Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 1 Comment Poetry by Morgan Matchuny Vastateparkstaff CC
Broodmare I cocoon myself in winter—vicious. The sunless sky, a rhetorician, salts the earth with specks of light dotted over achromic fields, spouting hollow promises. Call it pasture the way we drag our feet, search for high heaven, stuff ourselves with chaff. He created not a life but a fending off— a mouthful of bitter seed dressed as beauty. A body trained to hunger like soil that opens only to take, then cracks, empty and obedient. The god who touches me loses his hands. Inpatient (Variations) The building rattles, startled as an alarm clock. Lights click on, forget why. I arrive with a map folded into two. Ink still drying. Hallways reset themselves. Each day a new pain personified in property. The patients burn small and steady. Match-head bright. I cup my hands. The heat transfers. Everything is scaled wrong. Tiny chairs. Plastic windows sealed shut. A house arranged for looking, not living. A hand outside keeps shifting the furniture. Walls blame the body for pressing back. People blame the bodies that only know how to push. By the last hour my name fits loosely. My breath inventories itself. Drawers hold what I forget. I fold the map again. Smaller. Smaller. A hope persists. No revelation. No neon light flashing. Just enough to notice what the house is made of. Morgan Matchuny is a writer, visual artist, and poetry editor for Tiger Leaping Review. She lives in Lexington, Kentucky. She is the inaugural featured poet in the Rawhead Journal: Point Blank series. You can find more of her work in HAD, God's Cruel Joke, and elsewhere. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 0 Comments Poetry by Nicole Dalcourt Petras Gagilas CC
LOSING MY VIRGINITY IN MY BEST FRIEND’S BASEMENT I start my leaving minutes after he’s done, even though he’s kind to me – this almost stranger. His warm fingers circle my wrist to pull me back from the edge of the bed. Stay. Everything in the room is soaked in purple. The wallpaper, bedspread. Lampshade. A crocheted blanket limps across the foot of the bed, before slipping to the floor. Why are you crying? I answer him with my kissing mouth, say the song on the radio played at my brother’s funeral and it made me think about his accident. That’s what I called it then, an accident. My other mouth, the one that drinks stolen vodka from my parents’ liquor cabinet, doesn’t tell this lie. That girl says it true – he was alone in his room with a gun to his head and their pupils swell with the shock of it. But I am not drunk today and there is nothing to soften what happened here. I know now, a body can be hollowed or filled depending on the action. He runs his hand up and down my arm, so lightly I almost miss it. I’m sorry for your loss and I still don’t know which one he meant. Nicole Dalcourt is an award-winning poet living near Toronto, Ontario. Dalcourt’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Writerly Magazine, King Mosaic and Sky Island Journal. When not writing, Nicole hosts and participates in open mics around the region. Her favorite colour is green. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 1 Comment Poetry by Megan Merchant Derek Σωκράτη CC
Consider that none of us are loving correctly. I’m told that to cure loneliness, I must sit while it’s teething the soft parts of me softer. I’m afraid of disintegrating into the bulb lights that almost reach. They keep the darkest corners dark in my studio. If there are too many abstractions, please, take this silk ribbon and rusted spigot. This funnel and nail. I cemented camera lenses as eyes to make a sculpture so I could fix a heart. Soft pulse red. Padlocks that I wrench open. I am fragile. Saying this out loud changes nothing. Most days, I do not know how to handle me. I purchased each lens from a woman online who labeled the box as hazardous materials, took it into my house, tore it open with my teeth. Last time, I sat for him, on the edge of the bed, I let my hair loosen and spill as he traced the line of my low back. Language undresses meaning, attaches to it. The technique for joining materials without heat is called a cold fit. This joining is not meant to last. But, know—there was heat— the way inside of this poem, there is another. Tell me more about the light where you are how it enters glass block and swarms yellow. I know desert light in my bones. Years of trying to scrape it. But you cannot gut what is already hallowed. Here, the morning is tamped by rain. Blue everywhere. An overture of sage and smoke. I am trying to be more direct, but cannot pinch the you of you between my fingers. Yet. I lay the heaviest wool blanket over the bed. It smells forgotten. I need to name it. I am every version of myself that I have ever been—a carousel on rapt speed that blurs every silhouette until the center is every nowhere. I. I. I. Tired of myself, I loop a broken pocket watch through the porch rails. Wait for a day of sun to shimmy through, for the ravens to scavenge it, make better use of memory. In my desert, there were marked hours when the heat rose from the pavement, so I walked. Coyote scat. Horizon cinched by prickly pear and creosote—almost greening, like mockery. Absence has its own endlessness. Refuses brittleness. I look for the slightest scrap of meaning in every nothing. Forgive me, I forgot this was supposed to be about the light. The other evening, I uncovered projector slides of my mother. Placed them on a light board. Noted the documented moments where she never smiled. There is one, she is standing in a paddock, young, reins in her hand. The horse not wanting to still. The scrapwood barn lit in the background, as if she had already moved into the deepest shade. Blue. It is possible to forgive yourself for not tending the ache that another refused to name. I am working, instead, on unknowing the version of me she stamped with her own unhappiness. When I was little, I used to curl inside of every plank that slated through the dining room curtains, wait for it to shift inside of a broken hour. Chase it with my body. I track the miles you traverse, moving further away from a fixed point—you. you. you. Despite the grit and ambiguity that is the only contour, the light you send keeps brightening. Megan Merchant (she/her) is author of six full-length poetry collections, a children’s book with Penguin Random House, and a handful of chapbooks. She is a board member for the Northern Arizona Book Festival, she is the owner of the editing, mentoring, and manuscript consultation business www.shiversong.com and holds an M.F.A. degree from UNLV. She is a visual artist and, most recently, won the New American Poetry Prize for her collection “Hortensia, in winter”. You can find her work at https://meganmerchant.wixsite.com/poet Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 0 Comments Poetry by Iain Grinbergs Johnny Blaze CC
My Therapist Says My Exile Is Like Bloo in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends And I have to find him like Mac going to the orphanage, a traveler lost in a map of crayon, a mother saying You’re too old for that as if age is a gate where you stop running in checkered Vans. Don’t be so sensitive. Man up. Tenderness, a costume worn once a year. By a Feltwell swingset, I once danced like a weathervane, around and around, all elbows, until I didn’t, thinking life could be lived in advertisement— toothy smiles, an endless Bloo-blue sky like the ones in New Mexico and above my father, who I went searching for in that Swaffham house and found finally in the spare room, asleep inside his silence, and then lost again. Balloon flowers under a coverlet of snow. A toy soldier maimed by lighter and buried near the trellis and Triumph motorcycle. I admit: I went into my room and murdered queer Sims in ladderless pools and kitchen fires— I only modeled myself after God. My therapist speaks of other parts, like Managers and Firefighters, and a core, sagacious Self. You’ve been using your imagination for evil, she says. Stop it. I know now the cure is accuracy— I know now to befriend the damage and watch it lose hold. Iain Grinbergs (he/they) is an English professor and the author of Vanity Twist, a chapbook (Bottlecap Press). He earned his Ph.D. in English from Florida State University. His work appears in Sho Poetry Journal, South Florida Poetry Journal, storySouth, Meridian, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 1 Comment Poetry by Valentina Gnup Christian Collins CC
One Barn —after “Cotton Gin” a photograph by Andrea A. Gluckman One barn is a memory. Fragile as a bombed-out church nave. Common starlings roost on thin rafters— terrible, holy birds singing stolen songs. One barn is full of chrysanthemums. In Japan, the word for chrysanthemum is kiku— a word meaning listen to the first line of a poem. One barn is made of longing. On a farm in any country, clouds prop up its leaning walls. An old draft horse searches for something gone and not returning. One barn is a womb. One barn is a coffin. Wood, the petrified gray of ancient forests. Dust motes float like bullets, or a thousand spinning prayers. Tell me you’re ripe with sorrow. Put away your wars for good. One barn has a padlock. You can imagine anything inside. A choir singing Chopin. The last linden tree. The words you were too afraid to say. One barn is yours. Feel the peeling paint, smell the cow corn, listen to the wide, forgiving sky— it’s not too late for you. You’re a chrysanthemum, a kiku, lovely and imperfect as the first line of a poem. Driving in Los Angeles I believe the God of Death hides on the I-5 and picks his victims out of a shoe. Maybe I’m just afraid of freeways. My date is behind the wheel, a guy from Vermont who moved out here to become a screenwriter. It’s too late to warn him his choice is a tragic one, and who am I to judge stupid choices? He has a fearless approach to lane changes, and his long fingers look sexy hugging the stick. His car is the oldest Toyota in America. We’re going somewhere for cheap food, a Pretenders song is on the radio, Oh but it’s hard to live by the rules, I never could and still never do. We’re confessing our sins. Mine are better. I want him, but mostly because of the song, my boots on the dashboard, and the way L.A. makes everyone feel a little dangerous. My right hand hangs out the window trying to hold onto whatever the night won’t steal. Valentina Gnup's poetry collection, Ruined Music, was published by Grayson Books in 2024. In 2023, she won the Tucson Festival of Books Literary Award for Poetry and second place in the Yeats Prize for poetry. In 2019, she won the Lascaux Prize in Poetry; in 2017, she won the Ekphrastic Challenge from Rattle; and in 2015, she won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award. She lives in Mill Valley, California. Visit at valentinagnup.com Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 0 Comments Poetry by Noel Sikorski Tery CC
Baby After Dalton Gata’s I Don’t Need You to Be Warm, 2021 My crown of hair on fire, and my shaggy coat, a pelt of smoke. I’m the only lady here smoking, also as in smoking, as some called babes (not baybees) in the time before now. And, welcome, this is my desolate field, my barren ground, to the right and to the left a few stones, some shells, a former seabed, I guess, and behind me, at the horizon, mountains more liquid like rumor than rock, or whatever it is that make mountains mountains and these, these few stalks, emaciated shrubs, clearly exhausted from punching through the hard soil, lean left in the wind shrieking I’m not afraid. I’m not afraid. Brief Interlude Tis strange but not novel nor deranged when a colleague you barely know shows up in your dream. This is the year whenever you hear a loud squeak from something being flattened, you wonder, is it me? In your waking life, your heart is failing, but here through a window small as a wine grape, you watch as a red fox, the kind of fox that’s either giggling or cloaked as your grandmother, stands up on its hind legs and walks on water. The cool aqua of a community pool flickers in the courtyard of an Airbnb in Dallas, one of many you walked past (but didn’t swim in) after flying nearly 1400 miles to keep fucking a guy, who helped you see how easy it is to shed that cloak some call self-respect for some good sex. Jesus. All the community pools of my life gather here and now, ask me to bend my knees: repent. Noel Sikorski (she/her/hers). Her work has been published in the anthology Braving the Body; The American Poets Magazine; Painted Bride Quarterly; The Georgetown Review; The Bellevue Literary Review; Action, Spectacle; The Delmarva Review, and forthcoming in the anthology, The Big Brutal Act. She teaches in the Expository Writing Program at NYU. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 0 Comments Poetry by Ann E. Michael Edna Winti CC
Claims She Makes 1] her brain works differently from other people’s. that’s why. she does pay attention she says it’s just what she notices surprises. her thoughts she says lie close beside her body’s urge to act. to escape hurt. 2] “I’m not a behavior problem” she says “I’m a skiff going over ice floes during storm. I’m Tierra del Fuego,” she says she saw its seas churning in a movie. and it felt true. 3] when she hit the river it was colder than she expected and hard as ice she could have broken like a dry leaf fallen could have buried her mind in water but not for love 4] why she thinks as she does why animals trust her presence why she winds up and down because she says there’s more than brain in us there’s also gut and heart the horrible endlessness of want. Ann E. Michael lives in eastern Pennsylvania. Her latest poetry collection (2024) is Abundance/Diminishment. Her work has appeared in Ninth Letter, One Art, Ekphrasis Review, and many others, as well as in numerous anthologies, six chapbooks, and two previous collections. She chronicles her writing, reading, and garden on a long-running blog at www.annemichael.blog Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. 1/28/2026 0 Comments Poetry by LeeAnn Pickrell Judith Jackson CC
I drank because I could, because it meant I was old enough, even though I wasn’t; no longer a child, even though I was. It meant I was sophisticated. I drank because my parents drank, my whole family drank. I drank because it was there. Because it was legal even if you were underage, which was eighteen then in Texas, if you were with your spouse or family, and I was with my family and they drank and I drank too. We were all drunk together. I drank because it took away the fear of opening my mouth, being someone in a crowd of people. I drank because it took away the shame, knotted in the pit of my stomach, caused, yes, by the things I did when I was drinking but drinking was like saying fuck it. I drank because it was fun, because the world opened, anything was possible, even though nothing ever got done. I drank because it softened the edges, blurred the lines, took the pain away. Gave birth to dreams, not dreams coming true through the hard work, say, of putting pen to paper to write that book, but the dreaming itself. On a late spring Sunday afternoon, sitting outside at T.G.I. Friday’s, a pitcher of sangria on the table, knowing I’ve gotten too drunk too soon again but not caring because I’m making plans. I’m going places, sitting at that table going nowhere. LeeAnn Pickrell is a poet and editor who lives in Richmond, California. Her debut collection of poems, Gathering the Pieces of Days, was published in 2025 by Unsolicited Press, and Tsunami, a memoir about her experience in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami is forthcoming in 2026. She is also the author of Punctuated (Bottlecap Press, 2024) and has been traveling the road of recovery for years now. Anti-Heroin Chic is a sponsored project of Indolent Arts, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit fiscal sponsor. Please consider making a one-time tax-deductible donation. |
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