I felt you in my skin long after you left.
Under the dermis,
hair follicles growing out of me —

Thick and stuck just before reaching the surface.
I tried to itch you out of me.
Scratch you raw.
Pull you out with pincers.

The skin is the largest organ in the body.
You grew all over mine like a weed, a rash of
Dandelions,
Stinging nettle,
Crabgrass,
Pigweed.

I prayed you would bloom from within me in
soft petals and leaves
that I could cultivate come Spring.

 

Ivana Gatica is a Mexican-born, Chicago-based writer and a recent graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has earned an honorable mention on Glimmer Train and has been published in the print and online issues of Fifth Wednesday Journal.

what a deep dumb hell it is to be
subjected to the storm of myself
violently flung about
by malicious memory
nearly drowned by my own
convictions
to crawl my way to the border of the surface
to gasp for air and cry for relief
that I did not receive the death I begged for
and when I try to warn
the clueless shore huggers
of the treacherous depths of pain
lurking in the vast wet dark
all that comes out
of my reckless child mouth is:
            “WATCH OUT! BIG ROCK!”

 

Angelina Martin is a writer, comedian, artist, waitress, and jock based in Austin, Texas. She has previously been published in Inconnu Magazine, Sea Foam Mag, and Be About It Press, as well as in the book Anthology: The Ojai Playwrights Conference Youth Workshop 2006-2016. Her stand up and poetry both repeatedly touch on themes of sexuality, loneliness, and the lifelong process of healing from trauma. Find her on Twitter at @AngelinaJMartin.

“honey, you’ve got to know your name was always in bloom on
that tongue—one way or another, love makes a garden of us all.”

[your mother, after the funeral]

i.

i bet i could swallow the moon, you say & smile. such a simple
& magical thing, & how easily i believe in this yawning fever;
in such grinning hunger, gentle. how easily i believe—

ii.

that mouth, without arrogance or question. that mouth, which i’ve
watched drink from the sky & come up for air twenty feet beneath
rolling waves of sycamores & still, offering yet more of itself—

spilling & gasping & swearing & filling & asking for no more than
it can carry home, easily. that mouth, that was not built from gilded
things, but rather, found: in peach stones & nerve endings &

half-wild things; in match strikes & clementines & two-for-one bargain
bins—& still, how it shines like karats left on the halcyon vine: summer-
drunk & overripe & full of every season we’ve tried to name, but

settle on home, instead. that mouth, with its crescent laugh & pendulum
tongue: swinging & swinging & swinging—always—towards north or
nostalgia or the karaoke bar over on 9th & isn’t it funny how they’re

all the same, really? it’s just that we’ve taken such care in calling our
happiness by anything other than her name: a practice borrowed of
indigobirds. that mouth, & how it stretches philosophy into

bubblegum pop, how it flexes & fashions new mountain ranges
from my favorite song stuck in its throat in late-June; how it
calls my name, & even the tides turn to shore.

 

An avid introvert and full-time carbon-based life-form, Ashley Cline crash landed in south Jersey twenty-eight years ago and still calls that strange land home. Most often found listening to Carly Rae Jepsen, her essays on music and feelings have been published by Sound Bites Media, while her poetry has appeared in 404 Ink, Third Point Press, Sidereal Magazine and, most recently, Lychee Rind Zine. She graduated from Rowan University in 2013 with a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism, and her best at all-you-can-eat sushi is 5 rolls in 11 minutes. Twitter: @the_Cline.

How the dust never shakes off, even
after stripping, even after climbing
back onto the horse. How mud clumps
in the hair, smears on the cheek. How
everything is dirty, how she is always
dirty from heaving shit onto the shit
pile. How when it rains, cliff tumbles
into creek at her bidding. How she anticipates
the turning of her body into mulch
which will sink into the earth,
decompose and recompose,
and how she, then, can transform
into anything: a cottonmouth,
an oak, a man, another
girl.

 

Christina Thatcher is a Creative Writing Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. Her poetry and short stories have featured in over 50 publications including The London Magazine, Planet Magazine, And Other Poems, Acumen, The Interpreter’s House, and more. She has published two poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). To learn more about Christina’s work please visit her website: christinathatcher.com or follow her on Twitter @writetoempower.

After HAIM

Here is my panic attack: I haven’t been out in days
and it’s painfully normal. So when I take my first breath

of the day I’m already trying not to feel. After all these
days inside, I have become proficient in the loneliness of

catching the sunbeam that sneaks past my blinds
and putting it back outside. I know it seems like I’m always

sleeping now, but late at night with my knees aching
I’m wide awake considering how my body will push past

the threshold of survivability. I make little promises to keep
from kissing the sickle and tonight is another night alone

in this apartment, screaming every word of “Landslide”
into the popcorn ceiling. I think I fell like a meteorite

into this timeline and I should have expected you to scatter
but I’m listening for strange angels on the roof. Dawn

approaches like a purple bruise and I’m pushing my face
into the pillow desperate for oblivion. I dream again

and again of old friends and I don’t have the energy
to harbor this anger, can’t ping enough cell towers to

triangulate all the words I’d need to say. But the dreams
are the same and I wake up wrecked. The panic of

continued existing is a swansong I carry in my pocket,
and when I shine it’s because the rain cooled me while

I stood outside watching the iron gate open and close
in a thunderstorm. Some things can’t change. I wait for

your reply with my heart cracked open at two a.m. and
in my loneliness I sip at the air I’ve kept for myself,

collect a week’s worth of mail, wash my face slowly,
press my hands against the wall as if I might find a door.

 

E. Kristin Anderson is a poet and glitter enthusiast living mostly at a Starbucks somewhere in Austin, Texas. She is the editor of Come as You Are, an anthology of writing on 90s pop culture (Anomalous Press), and her work has appeared in many magazines. She is the author of nine chapbooks of poetry including Pray, Pray, Pray: Poems I wrote to Prince in the middle of the night (Porkbelly Press), Fire in the Sky (Grey Book Press), 17 seventeen XVII (Grey Book Press), We’re Doing Witchcraft (Porkbelly Press) and Behind, All You’ve Got (Semiperfect Press). Kristin is a poetry reader at Cotton Xenomorph and an editorial assistant at Porkbelly Press. Find her on Twitter at @ek_anderson.

I say I metastasize when asked about my body
image. I do not think
of the inverted cliff

of my FUPA or how a knife
held to my neck could excise
the soft biological shape

of my family. My body
is antiseptic.
I want to contour my face

with iodine’s thirsty glow.
That three-month ache
above my hips—

must be cancer chewing
vertebrae, my back a honeycomb
of bone sweet with sick marrow.

I do not fear germs or hereditary
betrayal, that double helix calculus
of past and present: bipolar,

Alzheimer’s, post-traumatic
evangelism. I don’t mind—really—
that my 90% of my body’s 100

trillion cells are not me.
I am a density of virus, bacteria, microorganism,
and self. It is my self, not my body,

& that is at risk of calamity. I fear
being told my diagnosis
is “It’s time to fight,” because

my image of the body is not one
of trenches. It’s the way air
hollows out between car alarm cycles

& the night and I hold our breaths
waiting for something to start or to stop,
whichever comes first.

 

Taylor Kirby is a writer from Denver, Colorado. She is the managing editor of Porter House Review, and her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Cream City Review, Longleaf Review, Jellyfish Review, Pithead Chapel, Atticus Review, and more. Most recently, she was a finalist for the 2019 Indiana Review Creative Nonfiction Prize.

My dreambody’s first incarnation could have killed me and itself,
an irony too clever for fiction: dreambody as fail-deadly,

and to think I did all that for skinny thighs and clear piss,
but no one warned me when I let my dreambody go

that it’d leave a vacuum, and now I want to aspire to be something again.
My dreambody could be anything now: could be fifty feet tall

and made of shatterproof glass.
Hey, are you awake? Be honest: if I woke up fifty feet tall, would you dump me?

I would sew a dress from sheets of kudzu,
and use red clay for cheek rouge,

and the national guard gets called in,
but all their bullets do is crackle my surface. Just by standing in the sun,

I make the city disco ball glimmer,
and people wander onto their balconies to feel the flashing heat of me.

The hitch: I would miss peach fuzz and being held and hangnails
and everything else that hiccups life’s rhythm.

I’m making a point to remember: all I have to do is stay alive,
and I could grow old enough to feel an entire thunderstorm in my kneecaps,

and that’s my dreambody now:
I want my hair to tinge silver and grow past my ass like a cape.

I want to get so brilliant, even my skin starts to look like a brain,
and I want my voice to thin and then begin to tear,

straining under the weight of everything I know now:
the best way to astral project, the best way to kiss,

and in the dream, everyone’s leaning in to listen.

 

Casey Smith is a poet from South Carolina. She is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Tennessee Knoxville. Her work is published or forthcoming in Passages North, SICK Magazine, Booth, perhappened mag, and others. 

Look outside, it’s noon and the trees have hands
        and someday they’ll have bikes & knee caps
        but for now we enjoy their hard oak fingernails
        and the way they can palm the truck tire that swings

from its branch and how they shoot three pointers
        through the hoop of the yellow house across the street,
        the one where we hear the fighting, and I don’t mean
        bowls-and-plates-being-shot-by-shotguns-fighting, it’s softer,

like ducklings following a blue body across a foggy
        lake, like a gentle brook of I-can’t-take-it-anymores,
        like human blood, sloshing around in a yellow fly’s
        stomach, like shooting off a signal flare during

a fireworks show. Look outside. Their leaves are so
        shaggy and they’re playing with the squirrel curled up
        in their belly button. Hug them, this scene is so
        quiet. They’re looking right at you. Look outside.

 

Nicholas Holt has a B.A. in Creative Writing from Florida State University. He is the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award. His work has been featured in or is forthcoming from The Kudzu Review, The Shore, and Peatsmoke.

THIS IS MY FIRST RODEO by Brett Elizabeth Jenkins (PDF)

Brett Elizabeth Jenkins lives and writes in Minneapolis. Look for her work in The Sun, AGNI, Beloit Poetry Journal, Mid-American Review, Smartish Pace, and elsewhere.