Yes,
I cut into the flower
and it became
mine. Then         the sick thing
                              died.

Eyes why-wild,
you sugar through the teeth
of it all.
                              Yes,

I traded hinge for door,
                burned my shelves
so they wouldn’t look           empty.

I told you,
my sun was down
                way below belly.
I’m telling the truth           mostly
                            all of us are.

 

Corinna is thankful to live surrounded by trees in New York’s Hudson Valley. She shares her home with four wonderful beings: her husband, two dogs, and cat. Her poems have been published in Pleiades, The Submission, The Golden Triangle, and elsewhere, but that was about 10 years ago. In that time, she has not stopped creating but has mostly kept her work to herself. After a long hiatus, she’s once again nudging her work out into the world.

—After Jessica Kim

At the very least, you still have your own
Backbone, splintered over every other
Cremated body beneath you. Today, another
Dream you’ve borrowed, a dialect from an
Earth you don’t own scraped under your dirty
Fingernails. You’re noticing that now, around here,
Girls keep losing their names inside their own bodies.
How their skin learns to smoke themselves,
Idolize something so formless that they can
Kneel before a country, another stamped bullet-wound.
Learn yourself into submission, your own name now
Melting down like a wax candle; everywhere →
Not anymore. It’s best to remember: you’re
Owned by the same words you shoplifted from
Poached languages, collapsed throat
Quivering over picture books you never
Read. Tomorrow, your mother kneads your
Shoulders raw, tells you how English simply came
To her. How it came to her, stillborn and
Unwavering, and how she had to crumple it into a
Voice. It’s just that you haven’t mastered
Whiteness, this melted love, these syllables like
X’s on the roof of your mouth. This country of
Yours recites the Lord’s Prayer over your wrists, more
Zip-ties, more thank yous.

 

Sharon Zhang is an Asian-Australian, Melbourne-based poet and author. Her work has been recognized by Paper Crane Journal, Antithesis Magazine, and elsewhere. She is a mentee at Ellipsis Writing and an editor at Polyphony Lit. Outside of writing, she enjoys collecting CDs, scrolling endlessly on her phone, and thinking about Deleuze a touch more than that which is necessary. She is the poet laureate of pretentiousness and using the word “body” when any other noun would work instead. Skin. Limbs. Humanness. Tablecloth.

And I was like,
but ain’t that shit cannibalism?
Ain’t that your cousin in some retrospect?

I should be more empathetic to hot wing homie,
flying off with fam drenched in Frank’s Red Hot cloaked all over its claws.
I might be witnessing a long-distance funeral;
I recognize that we need physical evidence in order to personalize our grief.

I walk into Whole Foods and think
damn,
somebody’s house
was ripped out of the ground
to make room for this poultry section.
Government done stole somebody’s livelihood,
then gave them a job,
as a cashier,
in the store
of the home
they ripped from them from.

Maybe that seagull was onto its way to a memorial.
Maybe he knows, and doesn’t plan to eat cousin Hector in Red Hot.
Maybe Hot Wing Homie has a shrine on the corner of a Wing Stop
where he’s actively protesting Lemon Peppers and we can’t hear him
because the crunch from crispy skins drowns him out.

I am standing in front of a Telco in the neighborhood that raised me
but can no longer afford.
A Chinese Buffet, into a Starbucks.
The wedding boutique, is a Taco Bell.
I hear a Jamaican woman in the distance proclaim to a customer
“We ran out of oxtail,”
and I pray for more of those grievances.

As I turn the corner,
I peep Hot Wing Homie hiding behind a 2010 Range Rover,
piercing his claws into his cousin.
Tearin’ that wing up,
Franks Red Hot smeared across the beak and I say,

Damn, sometimes it be cannibalism.

 

Khadjiah Johnson is an Afro-Caribbean American poet, producer and comedian from Brooklyn, NY. You can see more of her work in The American Bystander, Sakura Review, Widget LOL, and more. She’s a Periplus Fellowship finalist, her poetic comedy “Shady Shepherd Psalm” was nominated for the 2019 Best of Net Anthology by Emrys Journal, and she currently serves as a Contributing Writer for Black Nerd Problems and Crunchyroll. You can also catch a couple of Khadjiah’s produced pieces on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver.

I’m drinking the coffee but I’ve forgotten to take
the laundry out of the dryer. I’ve made dinner but
I’ve thrown the burnt ends of the meat into the sink.
I’m no good at this, this domestic life, where you
come home from work at the end of the day and
want a martini, a pint of whiskey,           a little bliss.
                Tell me how to be alright,
because I can’t find my way to the door. The ambulance
is coming and I’ve thrown all the instructions for the
bookcase into the garbage disposal.

 

Joanna Acevedo (she/they) is the Pushcart nominated author of the poetry collection, The Pathophysiology of Longing, (Black Centipede Press, 2020) and the short story collection, Unsaid Things, (Flexible Press, 2021). Her work has appeared online and in print, including in The Bookends Review and The Write Launch. She received her MFA in Fiction from New York University in 2021 and is supported by Creatives Rebuild New York: Guaranteed Income For Artists. She’s also a Guest Editor at The Masters Review, an Associate Poetry Editor at West Trade Review, and Reviews Editor at The Great Lakes Review.

i am not an extraterrestrial. i am
leather-sewn and blistering

detritus at the cusp of an Appalachian summer, that kind
of amber decay hemmed with fungus and arrogance. here

i am safe, knowing that
the fruit the apricot tree could not hold is still light incarnate

lying sun-warm on the ground, rotting
to become new. the astral is a body too, and two

nights ago when i slept
next to my mother in her lover’s bed she told me

she didn’t know it would be like this, told me
that when the line is drawn

in my mind, the line of decomposing honeysuckle
cast aside and fractured, dissociated

nuggets of coal held together
sharp with multi-flora rose, to touch

the last place my feet hit the ground. it’s okay
to disappear from your body, i think–

we leave this world briefly, melting
to protect ourselves. what lies beneath

the sun and the dirt are no farther
than my hands, and enough

 

Madeline Augusta Turner prefers to be covered in glitter. Currently living in Northampton, MA, her heart is always somewhere at the intersection of industrial decay and endless cornfields. Madeline has received a Brooklyn Poets Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and the Smith College Elizabeth Babcock Prize for Poetry. In 2022, she was also a Kenyon Writer’s Workshop participant. Say hello anytime at madelineaugustaturner.com.

In my dreams, I am so pure
I don’t need a bath,

or a secret pill to keep
my liver from exploding

like a piñata. There is an artery,
I believe, for safe passage of faith

through the body’s dark. Fickle,
I am almost alive as the next

person. Brimming with desire, a real
boy, except for the bones lighter

than plastic. An Ostrich’s eye is bigger
than its brain, God’s eye is bigger

than my desolation. The expansion
of the universe is the expansion of us.

I hope no one looks me in the eye
ever again, I remember saying when

I caught wind of my prognosis.
You should know I tried counting down,

scattered my heartbeats like seeds
upon things that watered woe.

Whereas, God was busy, leagues above
tilting sunlight into my bone marrow.

 

Pamilerin Jacob is a poet & editor whose poems have appeared in Barren Magazine, Agbowó, Lit Quarterly, IceFloe Press, Palette, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is the curator of the PoetryColumn-NND, a poetry column in Nigerian NewsDirect, a national newspaper.

I am thinking about the flower
my son picked, insistent
that we put it in a glass of water
or it won’t survive, he said.
I didn’t know what to tell him.
Rootless, it floated
in a bottle. I knew the colours
would never glow so bright again.
That night, as the sun went in
the petals closed, and when it rose
again they opened. They were
still yellow: defiant
as a dying star.
There have been so many times
I too have strayed, adrift
on open water, with life seeping
from the very stem of me
but still I turned towards the sun
and here I am. And I am grateful
for the thing that keeps us
going through the motions,
trying: reaching
for the light.

 

Katie Oliver is a writer based on the west coast of Ireland, whose work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best Small Fictions, and Best Microfiction. Her debut short story collection, I WANTED TO BE CLOSE TO YOU, will be published in December 2022 with Fly on the Wall Press, and she is a first reader for Tiny Molecules. She can be found on Twitter @katie_rose_o.

Exit signs hang above every door, but I do not obey them. The lavender walls of my bedroom, baby-soft, lull me into sanctuary. In the hallway, my mother leaves cold fruit and a letter. It tells me her childhood friend’s husband has become a billionaire. We cannot pay the electric bill. Under a lightless roof, I split ripe grapes and expose the flesh with impatient teeth. The seeds lie fallow in a sealed throat.

I fold myself in the sheets and speak with the deer skull my father once brought home. It whispers in his voice about a bullet’s kiss and the caress of a knife’s edge, glints of solace in a long dark. Hearing the hum of a lonely moon, I open my window and throw the head out into umber woods. Everything falls on it. Endless needles, endless snow. The fossil breaks more easily than I under the pressure of winter.

I, too, fall apart,
year after year, until spring
will awaken joy.

 

Jemma Leigh Roe has poems and artwork published or forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, Permafrost, The Ilanot Review, The Fourth River, and others. She received her Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University.

He packs a lunch of phosphorus and amino acids
and enough water to cool a dwarf star. Overworked

and underpaid, he crash lands on an insignificant rock.
The heat from the nearest star thaws out his frozen meal

which he garnishes with iron from the planet’s core.
The home office calls him and asks why he has taken

his lunch break so early. Comet as paperboy tells
the home office to fuck off. The next day more comets join him,

each one carrying a tv dinner that he helps bring to life;
the shelves fill with meatloaf and lasagna. Home office calls again.

What’s this? You’ve formed a union now? Well, what
are your demands? Comet as paperboy hangs up. The comets burn

their phones in the lava pits, sulfur smoke sits in the air.
The stars shine brighter with jealousy, with bitterness—

their readers can get their news the old-fashioned way from now on,
the comets decide. They can wait for the light to reach them.

 

Samantha Blysse Haviland is from Mamaroneck, New York. Their work has been recognized nationally by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and has previously appeared in Ninth Letter, Blue Marble Review, and Lumiere. They enjoy writing in all genres and are especially fond of experimental work.