Take up your tricorn hat
and sweep the ghastly corners
of your waistcoat from my kitchen,
great-great-and-so-on-grandfather.

Take the soggy reins dangling
from your veiny hands
away from Sunday breakfast.
I do not need you to split
this egg on the pan’s edge
or slice this banana into circles.

Stop telling me the story
of how you died–headfirst
off your horse into a fence, splinters
and brambles crowning your corpse.
You were heroically old,
Tiresias in the saddle, going blind
on your proud gelding.

Stop with your tantrums.
No more tossing my keys onto the floor
in a pale fit of pique. Every time I retrieve
my driver’s license, I feel the urge
to check my temples for gray.

 

Audrey Hall is a recent graduate from the University of Florida’s MFA program and is earning her MA in English at the University of Alabama. She is a 2021 recipient of a scholarship from the NYS Summer Writers Institute and reads for Black Warrior Review and Five South. Her poems appear in Crab Creek Review, Saw Palm, Hunger Mountain, and Alaska Quarterly Review, among others.

I evolved to hold you
with all the tenderness of rain

filling a dried spring basin
after a century of drought,

washing the sand from the bones
of the not-yet-fossil fish

and drumming resurrection spells
into the cracks in the earth.

I evolved to carry you
in the curve between my five

lumbar vertebrae, sheltered
under the same roof

as a piece of sky tipped
out of balance by drunken birds

and dead moths pressed dry
under the desert sun.

I evolved to hide you
between two strata of the

unmarked cave where those
last fish sought futile refuge

from oblivion and where my
mother left me lying, ear pressed

to the ground, listening
for the vestiges of the aquifer.

 

Maggie Wang (she/her) studies at the University of Oxford. Her poetry and criticism have appeared in Poetry Wales, bath magg, Versopolis Review, and others. She is a Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic and a Barbican Young Poet.

IF:
            I rub something fast then slow on my tongue and think of you.
            I stare directly into a lightbulb painful but there you are—a wheel of light
            spinning over everything.
            I dream it’s your stellar lips your forest kiss.

HOURS:
            Build a history castle with you.
            Deepen my cupidity.

MAKE:
            Me bite into a French butter pear, your thighs
            Me dress in peppercorn silk, teleport to your hands.

HOROLOGY:
            You invent a watch for me.
            You stop the clock on me.

JUBILEE:
            Your body is a choir. I am its devoted listener.

ON:
            Bad days I want to go missing. Fantasize only you discover me.

OUR:
            Game: you bury me. I resurface dirtier than ever.
            Game: I bury you. You metamorphose return always more exquisite.

RENDEZVOUS:
            I rode you in December mornings and nights.

REMEMBER:
            I see an owl—it’s how you fell through my nictitating triple lid.
            I see a ghost—it’s how I’m in need of a good haunting.

 

Suzanne Richardson earned her M.F.A. in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the University of New Mexico. She currently lives in Binghamton, New York and is a Ph.D. student in creative writing at SUNY Binghamton. She is the writer of Three Things @nocontactmag, and more about Suzanne and her writing can be found online here: www-suzannerichardsonwrites.tumblr.com and on Twitter here: @oozannesay.

Everything is breaking at the same time.
The washer is refusing to drain.
A jar of miso cracked the stovetop.
The oak floors warped and soaked up
all our neighbours’ baths, and just last week,
we shivered in the shower, pouring kettle water
on our feet. But we are determined.
Every day we learn to fix things with our hands.
First, we warm our legs without a working boiler.
Then, we learn to ease the front door off its hinges,
let its weight lean into one of us while the other
lifts it open. Tonight, we’re squatting in the kitchen,
passing a tray of murky water back and forth
like an elaborate machine.
Soon enough, the washer’s drum stops leaking,
and we pull the filter out, shove our fingers in
to find the culprit. A safety pin!
– you’re laughing.
A bit of cardboard from my shirt!
We splash down on the wet tiles,
watch the animal we tamed and nursed
ease back into its body.
It’s beautiful – the washer,
the spin cycle, the kitchen
you called me from last year
saying, I can picture you here,
cutting a lime into wedges.

 

Yanita Georgieva is a Bulgarian journalist raised in Beirut, Lebanon. She lives and works in London, where she is an MA candidate in Poetry at Royal Holloway University. You can find her work in Hobart, Alien, HAD, and elsewhere.

Link to PDF: blue beard : blue jeans by Danielle Roberts

 

Danielle Roberts is a queer poet from California. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Atlanta Review, Blood & Bourbon, Green Ink, Jabberwock Review, Molecule, Moonflake Press, & The Poeming Pigeon. Find more of her work at sonnetscribbler.com.

Wound vac purrs and little jewels
of blood float from my body wondering
what they did wrong.

I try to explain, but my throat
croaks from intubation, my brain
seems to have misplaced the keys.

It’s easy to fall in and out of sleep
that isn’t sleep. It’s easy to say
this wholeness is the answer.

This wholeness stings like bees
with fists full of sweetness. This wholeness
is thirsty as the Parched Queen.

Do you know the Queen?
I ask my blood and piss as the tubes
ferry them to wastelands.

She ruled the dry places, her scepter
a snake’s bleached rattle on the tip
of an elephant’s femur.

She banished all water from her realm.
She thought this would cure her thirst.
Even the vultures wheeled away.

When her thirst became impossible,
she cut herself open as a door
with the spikes of a cholla

and do you know what happened then?
Her thirst poured out of her,
staining the desert blue and green.

My blood and piss search for a moral.
It’s easy to fall in and out of
morals. It’s easy to say

pain is the door we open into
wholeness. It’s harder to tell the body
this pain is also tomorrow, is also

the day after, the weeks to come,
this pain is the blue and green,
is the whole coming round.

 

Corinna Schulenburg (she/her) is a queer trans artist/activist committed to ensemble practice and social justice. She’s a mother, playwright, poet, and a Creative Partner of the Flux Theatre Ensemble. Her poetry has appeared in Arachne Press, Capsule Stories, Lost Pilots, LUPERCALIA Press, miniskirt magazine, Moist, Moss Puppy, Oroboro, Poet Lore, SHIFT, The Shore, The Westchester Review, and more. https://corinnaschulenburg.com/writer/poet/

My lover makes dragon
noodles on a Tuesday. I watch him
measure sriracha with his tongue.
I know that tongue like I know this
place, my home, between his lips.
He sips red wine as I tell him a joke,
his smile stained in soft purple.
When light seeps through his teeth,
I imagine glow in the dark stars
on the ceiling of his mouth. Wind-chime
vibrations when he laughs or says my name.
Micaela. like a chili flake brush of heat
to the cheeks, like his favorite word
to swish, swirl around & swallow.

 

Micaela Walley is a poet and essayist living in Baltimore, Maryland. She is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Baltimore. Her work can be found in Huffington Post, ENTROPY, Hobart, Longleaf Review, and elsewhere. You can follow her on Instagram & Twitter @micaela_poetry.

We found them between ads for discount flower pots and a story of in vitro success, and I’d ask my mom to read mine. Try to understand the shape of a lion’s mouth, the color of water running over the side of a pot. Forecasts, love, written in dusty tongues she so desperately wanted to sink pincers into. She would sometimes buy them from the grocery store, tiny scrolls in clear plastic cylinders. Hers on orange paper, mine—blue, opposites on the color wheel. I like to believe the solar system and I are intertwined, our cells made in the furnaces of stars, the fate of the sun determining mine. I count the ways in which the moon is at fault for so much, so many crumbling constellations of lies I tell myself.  The stars are so heavy, ripe with what it is to be beast, to be bearer. I would look at my mom and think of all the starry things that we could never have. How the world is shaped elliptical and it keeps returning us back and back to the pages of the newspaper, the ink on our fingers, the seeds of something we could never map just right.

 

Randi Clemens is a poet, editor, and educator who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds an MFA from Northern Michigan University, where she previously served as the Managing Editor of Passages North and taught creative writing. Her work can be found online at Pidgeonholes, LandLocked, Lammergeier, Meow Meow Pow Pow, and Up North Lit and has been nominated for Best of the Net.

I’m completing the form:
Selection of Next Life
It’s due by Wednesday.

You never know what
you qualify for.
Maybe a tortoise or a redwood
or one brick in a great pyramid.
Maybe the life of a mayfly,
a Big Gulp cup taken to the landfill,
or the mold on a sandwich
forgotten in a locker.

The lives we get
are funny like that.

This time I’m up for a Life of Minuscule Importance
Is this an upgrade?

Section One: Moments and Spaces
(Select One)
 An open door on a parakeet’s cage
 The curtain parting on a stage
 A crack crawling on a dam
 The pop of cork
 The silence in a room with a corpse
 A symphony’s second movement

These don’t appeal, too much like another life
of being overlooked.

Section Two: Portentous Things
(Select One)
 An unfound shard from a shattered plate
 An electrical arc coursing a severed line
 Animal tracks in the muddy grass
 A pickaxe chipping for a vein
✔ A deadly storm’s first falling inches

Oh yes! The first flake of a blizzard
talked about for many years.
That’s the life I want.

 

Bill Verble lives in Lexington, Kentucky with his family. He’s inspired by his father, a former poetry teacher. His work appeared in the recent edition of The Poeming Pigeon. You can find him online on Twitter at @BillVerble.

        1. they come—
in a harrow of sacred pilgrims to the arch,
beloved         bestowed         &         innocent
with a creek in the smile

our old pillars are falling apart, like singles:
as a strand out of mayhem
but today, first, the smoke is in the barn
like an orchid fire     or     obvious forest agni —
a citrus split in the dark centre

We stand, we fold, we finger,
the horses are dead and the ashes are craving rabbits.

        2. they tell—
it would be the last time, last Oklahoma
farmland on gunpoint

I told you they would come for us
                        in a kind way.
I told you a bit of your meat
will run on the rear of my neck

I raced, I tried, walked backwards on the leaky
pebbles across the pond.

        3. I try—
to climb a wounded horse, I told you they were no guests.

        4. they think—
Of making it into a cemetery. A dead horse,
a dead master, and until you call us dead.

        5. I told you—
The only way this would end was in ruins.

        6. I would—
run a pint of beer in the falling pillars
and hide to Alabama.

        7. they watch—
when you cry on the lost island
you will become a feathered man
a mad bloke left alone after a red storm,
        a late worm
when they go after you
                they will take everything but debris.

 

Ajay Sawant is the assistant editor at the Southern Humanities Review and 2021 CPB Writing Fellowship recipient from The Bombay Review. He has received honourable mentions for the 2021 Christopher Hewitt Poetry Award and Dan Veach Poetry Prize. His poems and critical work appear in The London Magazine, Live Wire, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Bombay Review, The Louisville Review, Lunch Ticket, and Cold Mountain Review, among others. Ajay often tweets at @ajaycycles.