Author: okaydonkey7

Pete the Cat: All Grown Up & Alone In His Car by Emily Dressler

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with help from my daughter


At the library,
we walk past Pete the Cat
and you say it’s weird and sad
how you grow up with these books
but they don’t keep growing with you.
Like, Pete the Cat doesn’t go to 5th grade
and lose a preschool best friend,
find humiliation from a teacher,
have ALICE drills
(but you did those in kindergarten too, I
want to remind you, but don’t
because Pete the Cat never does that shit),
strategize about how to take his pads
into the bathroom.

Like, Pete the Cat Gets Braces? I ask.
You smile and say, Pete the Cat Kisses a Girl with Braces.
That’s good, I nod.
We walk past a book titled
My Parents Forgot How to be Friends.
Pete the Cat Has Two Houses Now
you say, pointing.
I laugh. Poor Pete.
We’re going to put him through a lot:

Pete the Cat Learns to Lie
Pete the Cat Becomes Lactose Intolerant–
That comes later, I say,
when he cares more.
For now, he is carefree:

Pete the Cat Finds Joy,
in which he learns how to love
being alone, and eats vegetarian
crunchwrap supremes in his car. He’s
happy, he really is. He doesn’t tell
anyone about the parking lot meals
even though they feel like the most
real part of him.

EMILY DRESSLER lives and works in Northeast Ohio. She works as a proofreader for a global ad agency. Her flash fiction has recently appeared in Villain Era Lit.

Vanishing Twin by Jessica Ballen

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dear sister with the disappearing yolk, had I been less
starved, perhaps you’d have survived the utero scramble.
who were you before I absorbed your gobbledygoo?
would we have grown sitting at the same table, watching
grandma’s slippers shuffle to the kitchen before dawn?
her birdlike wrist, swift like a woman who has always
been bird, winding up a fork for a good whipping,
two eggs whirling into one. you and I
eyeing the tidal wave, that summersault and undertow,
our mouths cracking for the carved challah soak, the wet

before the burning, the dry. were you someone
who fried whole bodies, learning to eat
yourself? I lent you my ear as a parting gift; it was only fair.
did you swallow that part of me? me? I’m always inhaling—
but you already knew that, my copycat. never mind
the mother bird who chewed and spat. were we not the same
swallow splitting the same cracked house, fork tail,
sad song, yoked together before the beak sliced
our cord? I eat things that flit outside myself.
digest them hard. I don’t make the rules.

a greyhound and her owner walk outside
the windows of my life. on the porch, while I fill
feeders and baths, I wonder if the hound is you,
skinny legs reborn. stringy like a sprinkled fawn.
when I look again, the seeds spill.
one time I spotted a red-tail clawing a rabbit,
but it didn’t seem real. so I did a double-take
from my passing car, but the field was a sea of grass,
silent. that’s when I turned to the passenger’s seat
and said that’s you, dear sister. that’s us.

JESSICA BALLEN, MFA, is a disabled poet who serves as Editor in Chief of Lunch Ticket, Managing Editor of Defunkt Magazine, Senior Editor at Small Harbor Publishing, and guest editor for Frontier Poetry. Their work can be found or is forthcoming in RHINO Poetry, Harbor Review, and Ghost City Review (among others). You can find them compulsively posting on their Instagram stories @_j___esus, listening to dream pop with their four cats, and dancing in the Willamette River with their writer husband, SHT.

Blue Persons by Emily Wittenhagen

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I act like a train should be sleep and sleep
should be easy but sleep is only on the far
side of this conundrum, producing a world
in which snowplows scoop up our lamplit
remains after and push us into piles.
I felt like asking you, do you own all the
planets? Or are you just this one? In my
sleep you felt like the whole earth. Like you
were borrowing it for the night like a rental
suit or had always been all along the
whole earth. At the time it made sense that
a planet could be around me, and roughly
the same size, that a planet could fit into a
bed. Easy sleep like rain sleep, sex like
rain sex, rain smoke. Opening the window
during X-Files to let in the rain. The
lightning from the stoop at intermission
turning the fields blue and the fence pink
and the trees where the chickens meander
a yellow fever and up above it comes
down like it’ll never stop coming down and
neither will we. The narcotic of our planet
as long as we are together and you are
beside me on this stoop will never leave
the bloodstream. Sleep on the drug, sleep
with the drug beside you. Sleep if there
must be a place between needing, and
read if you can’t, or imagine a slow train
taking you softly into morning.

EMILY WITTENHAGEN is a writer living in Maine, fascinated by the natural and the supernatural. She studied creative writing at UMaine Farmington where she was honored to work with Beloit Poetry Journal and be granted an Excellence in Poetry award. In Seattle, she co-created the poetry journal HOARSE which was shortlisted for a Stranger Genius Award. She is a long-time writer and editor, and also practices nutrition, hypnotherapy, and herbal medicine. She embraces herself as queer and lives with her sweetheart and their daughter who asks compelling questions like, do butterflies sit in chairs to eat lunch? Most recently, her work appears or is forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine, the Champagne Room, and Mutha Magazine.

feelings come & go but teeth are forever by Kristin Lueke

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bring me lord a herd of teeth big as buffalo to wrap around this apple.
i ask so little, really—eight hours for sleep, eight hours outside, eight hours
for what i will. what i will is water, mostly hot, to sit in til i’m decent.
what i won’t is die working. i won’t shut up about solace, starlings,
what i read on wikipedia. i won’t give my body to science, just birds,
if i’m lucky. if anyone’s listening. i won’t listen to barbarous bullshit
churned out by chickenshit senators paid by a body count so high it chased
god from the room, i’d rather kiss a caterpillar, kick a cop, marry moonshine.
i won’t make promises i can’t keep, i can’t promise i’ll be more patient.
wouldn’t you know i won’t stay up past midnight if i can help it,
you wouldn’t believe what i can help. i can’t help that i won’t wait
for what i have to beg for. i won’t tell my body give me up, give me
quiet but no more hells. there is no better devil. i choose nothing
but us & by us i mean all of it, everything i won’t call anything but holy,
bring me what i want.

KRISTIN LUEKE is a Chicana poet and author of the chapbooks (in)different math and here i show you a human heart. Her work appears in Sixth Finch, Wildness, HAD, Always Crashing, Birdcoat Quarterly and elsewhere. She writes and reads poems at www.theanimaleats.com. 

Time Only Looks Human by Lynne Jensen Lampe

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Everything starts with a start. You emerge from the lake in August, a toddler covered with silt. The neighbor’s mastiff cleans your face and noses you to the glass of cold milk on the porch. An hour later you’re nine, wearing a Scout uniform and no longer thirsty. In the crook of a linden tree you find a small package wrapped in brown paper. Inside is a matchbook and a diagram of a log cabin fire. You gather kindling. The wood flames. You turn thirteen. After eating a salad of dandelion greens, nettles, and wild violets, you sprout breasts and begin to bleed. The mastiff teaches you the word estrus, tells you to go to the c-store for tampons. It’s almost noon. You’re almost twenty, clad in t-shirt and jeans. A car stops. The driver wants to sleep with you. A paper in your pocket reads Sleep = Sex = Death. You think of the lake and sunfish darting in and out of pelvic bones, yellow perch laying opalescent roe along strands of hair. The sun shifts in the sky. You’re thirty-two and ache for motherhood, hike back to the lakeshore. If you wade into the water, you must remain. You decide against this sacrificial birth. The mastiff drops a pup at your feet. You feed the campfire. Before blue spruce can hide the sun, you reach fifty, t-shirt now a fair isle sweater. By the time Ursa Major emerges, you’re seventy-four. Arms empty woolen sleeves, then cross your breasts. Skin heats skin. Fire dies.

LYNNE JENSEN LAMPE’s poetry appears in journals such as The Inflectionist Review, Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, and THRUSH and anthologies in the US, UK, and Germany. Her debut collection, Talk Smack to a Hurricane (Ice Floe Press, 2022), an Eric Hoffer Book Award winner and finalist for the McMath Book Award, concerns motherhood, mental illness, and antisemitism. A Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize finalist, she edits academic writing, reads for Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and lives with her husband and two dogs in Columbia, MO. You can find her online at https://lynnejensenlampe.com; Instagram @lynnejensenlampe; or Bluesky @ljensenlampe.

Breakfast, 3 a.m. by Dawn Macdonald

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(In the dream) my mother wasn’t angry and she made a sort
of breakfast out of photographs. I went out through the window
and set my toes to the slope of the roof. The sound of frying
felt at any rate neutral. In the (dream) three bears were accompanied
by a fourth of greater ferocity. In the dream (I) had never known
about shoes. My feet could read and found ways of winding up earth
into sensible chunks, or dollops. No lump could truly be called
identical. The sound of frying was indicative of compression.
A photograph, already flat, flips easily upon the application
of a spatula. My (mother) kept her back turned. To ensure safety,
I used all my senses except for sight.

DAWN MACDONALD lives in Canada’s Yukon Territory, where she grew up without electricity or running water. She won the 2025 Canadian First Book Prize for her poetry collection Northerny (University of Alberta Press).

Gallery by Jane O’Sullivan

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Loie Hollowell, Two centimetres dilated, 2023

I’m telling Ben about the heist I read about, how she distracted the security guard while he went upstairs and plucked a painting off the gallery wall. ‘De Kooning!’ I crow. It still thrills me. ‘No one even knew until they died!’

It’s late. Ben watches me from the end of the couch, that pinch to his eyes. ‘Should we call the midwife?’

‘What? No.’ I wave an irritated hand. We have miles to go. Miles. I reach the end of the living room and turn. ‘But I haven’t even told you about the best bit. He—’

‘Slow down.’

‘—Wore a fake moustache. That was it, the whole disguise!’ I keep playing it over, how anyone could just stroll in like that. No real plan, just a dollar-store stick-on and a baggy coat. That’s what I marvel at. How either of them thought it could be alright. But I only manage a few more steps before I’m hissing through my teeth again. The pain is red, orange, magenta, black. Pulling me wide.

Dana Schutz, Breastfeeding, 2015

She was on a plane, long-haul flight somewhere. Her baby was crying so she fed him, like they tell you to do, to calm him. But then she fell asleep. This is what I think about, at three, four, five in the morning, whatever broken time it is, willing myself to stay awake so I don’t suffocate my child and turn into one of those mothers on the news.

The bedroom door creaks and Ben shuffles out to check on me. Also because last week at the clinic, the midwife gave him a pamphlet on postnatal depression. ‘These are the signs,’ she’d said, like she was already thinking about what kind of muffin to get on her break. ‘You should both look out for them.’ And now he is, because he’s like that, and I am pretending I can’t see the doubt in his eyes, the way he studies me. It was his idea, the baby. I thought I could. At least, I told him I could.

The tap runs in the kitchen. Ben sets the glass of water beside me and bends over the back of the couch. His breath is warm on my neck. ‘Look at him,’ he whispers, because love is no problem for him. Love comes easy. ‘Look at his little eyes, rolling back like that. He’s so bloody drunk.’ 

The glass is the only still thing in the painting.

Julie Rrap, SOMOS (Standing On My Own Shoulders), 2024 

Those mothers. The ones who are never on the news. The ones who say, Just heading down the club for a bit, there’s baked beans in the cupboard, and sort your brother while you’re at it. The ones who tell you, Don’t ever get knocked up, worst mistake of my life. The ones who, if you reach for the remote, might suddenly lance their cigarette into the back of your hand. 

‘I don’t know how to do this,’ I tell Ben, our son in my arms. A weight now. A squalling leviathan and he knows. He knows I’m failing him and it breaks me into a million tiny pieces. I do everything I’m meant to. I feed him. I change him. But it’s not enough. And maybe if I’d had a different mother, the love would flow just fine. Maybe it wouldn’t always get so tangled in the constant terror. 

Ben somehow manages to hold us both. ‘But you are,’ he says into my hair, the same thing the midwife taught him to say in the delivery room. ‘You already are. You’re doing it.’ 

Around us, the gallery creaks with other people’s footsteps. The two bronze women rise tall, the one balanced on the other’s shoulders, working together, feeling their way. My son, fifteen now, young leviathan indeed, hunches into his embarrassment. He wants to but he can’t quite face it. These two old women in their nudity.

Grace Cossington Smith, The Window, 1956

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ I say, when my son asks what I see in it all. ‘This and that.’

He’s uncomfortable here. Doesn’t like the quiet, or the feeling that he’s missing something. ‘It’s just a window,’ he says again. ‘I mean it’s pretty, but is that it?’ Like every teenager is always saying. What else is there?

He looks back at the entrance. The crowds drift past on their way to the main exhibition. He wants to be with them, not out here in the wings. No headsets. No trim explanations. I could tell him, Yes, it’s just a window. I could tell him how his father used to plant his hands on my shoulders when he caught me standing there dreaming. How rituals are made, over and over. How eventually I told him I was thinking about my mother and how I was just the same and he said, The fuck you are. Don’t even think it. 

Ben has already found a bench. I watch him across the gallery, squeezing his bad knee. ‘Maybe you could take your dad to the café?’ I say. That is, after all, why the two of them cooked up this plan. The view from the sculpture deck. The pistachio crème brûlées. A nice mother’s day treat. ‘You can get us a good table. Go on, love. I won’t be far behind.’

He is taller than his father now, has the same worry to his eyes, but the uncertainty doesn’t last long. He’s too hungry, for everything. Too eager to see what comes next. He nods at me and goes to collect his father from the bench. And I know exactly how it would feel. A small canvas, maybe. Nothing grand. The tidy weight of it tucked under one arm. The quiet surprise of making it down all those steps and out into the street.

Jane O’Sullivan is an Australian writer. Her art writing appears in Vault, Apollo, Art Monthly, Art Guide and many others. Her fiction has won the Rachel Funari Prize and joanne burns Microlit Award and also been published in Meanjin, Bull, Peatsmoke, Passages North, New Flash Fiction Review, Milk Candy Review and the Spineless Wonders anthologies Pulped Fiction and Play. She lives on Bidjigal and Gadigal Land in Sydney and is online at janeosullivan.com.au and @sightlined.

蝴蝶梦 Butterfly Dream by Emily Anna King

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in a dream, i perform the butterfly concerto with the silhouette of a man
familiar, but not yet known.

in a dream, a white rabbit with a mouthful of jade approaches
and asks if i remember the story of how he found the moon.

i only hear the music, and i am swept away.

when zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly, did he want to stay?

when he returned, was he fearful of living as the man he is after meeting another world?

was he awestruck by the movement of things, the displacement of consciousness?

this afternoon, i left my keys on the kitchen counter
and forgot my best friend’s address.

pine trees shed their leaves.
wandering off, i followed a trail made of dust and gold.

i opened my arms to a fox made of jewels
and it leaned its chin against my shoulder.

we saw a vision of the sunset reversed;
time continued forward.

i stand before a mirror as mere mortal.
cracks in the wall stretch across yellow paint.

bottles of medicine remain behind cabinets unused,
no elixir, no change.

in the living room, the story of the rabbit recites itself in ink:
selflessness ignited over flame

the rabbit throwing his body forward
the jade emperor disguised as a poor man

rabbit sent to the moon with honor.

in a dream, zhunagzi plays the butterfly concerto
with the silhouette of a woman

familiar, but not yet known.

in a dream, a woman tells him the story of how the rabbit found the moon,
how the fox became jewels, and the woman wrote of a story she is still too young to live—

how the music is the space between sleep and wake, a falling of piano keys, a falling of rain,

like wingbeat after wingbeat generations later,
                                                                                              generations more

Click here to view a pdf of the poem with its original lineation.

EMILY ANNA KING (锡萍芳) completed her MA in Creative Writing at UCC in Ireland and is currently teaching writing at an international high school in Massachusetts. Her debut poetry collection, The Dog with the Flute in its Mouth, was published by Finishing Line Press last fall. 

Leaving the Wedding in a Fever by Cassandra Whitaker

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Streets cobbled together from where? Rooftops leaning
from where earth grew its longing toward sea
winding –drunk—all the way up the mountain’s snake
The streets open up closer to sea—which is a dime
to enter and bathe—noisy of gulls—children–sweets gobbled up
in the ocean’s insistent i am god i am god i am god i am
I find myself in the sink with a threat to my temple
—forgiveness discovers I am only an old woman
My feet carry me out of danger into danger—
I remember —I know no one My name tells me
no one will believe me—there is nothing to believe
but the sky’s own tellings– I have learned all the wrong lessons
Here comes a bender again- a sack over my head
All leaning roofs lead inward There is only one way

CASSANDRA WHITAKER (she/they) is a trans writer living in rural Virginia. Whit’s work has been published in Michigan Quarterly Review, Gulf Coast, Conjunctions, The Mississippi Review, and other places. Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf is forthcoming from Jackleg Press in 2025. They are a member of the National Book Critics Circle. Wolfs-den.page

Double Dutch by Jasmine Khaliq

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It sounds like gibberish, I said. It’s Double Dutch,
they said, and their grandma invented it.

A boy my age, a girl my sister’s. I wasn’t sure;
they lied about plenty—they were royalty

on a faraway island, their father was an astronaut,
their names were not their real names.

But the language I could hear was real as any.
Pattern I could attain. If I listened closely. If

I really tried. A lot of B’s, a lot of I’s. In his voice
my own name like an alien’s. I surprised them

after two weeks, sauntered into conversation
leaning blasé against their house, air

hot as any Western midday, mid-July.
A door unbolted. Talking in plain sight.

Selves and syllables doubling.
Secret language with the boy

across the street. We talked
about everything, nothing.

I wish I had a dog.
My dad is going to Mars.

They fought last night. I don’t want school to begin—
Anything. Just to speak.

We had never been so close
and we would never be so close again.

The differences between our lives closing
soon over our heads. Jordan’s rabbit died.

Summer is coming to an end.
What’s your favorite color, again?

Jasmine Khaliq is a Pakistani Mexican American poet born and raised in Northern California. Her work is found in Poetry Northwest, Poet Lore, The Rumpus, Bennington Review, Best New Poets 2023, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from University of Washington, Seattle. Currently, Jasmine is a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah. She can be found at jasminekhaliq.com.