This is our dog. We do not love him any more.
Not after all the things he has done.
I am sorry to have to relate that his ears are the color a brass doorbell turns
at the home of a family with many friends. Their texture
is reminiscent of the bristle-back stroke
of a Eurasian boar. This is not to mention his talent
for walking long distances saucer-eyed on his back legs,
which look like drumsticks of a kind you would not want
to find in your bag coming home from the store.
There is not much we can do about these because they are attached
to our dog, whose nose tapers to a fine matte point like
the very furriest and most hopeful of doorstops, and whom
because of persisting difficulties such as these, in addition
to the importunate amber of his eyes and the peculiar tufts of black whisker
that he has sent out mutinously from the underbelly of his very long chin
like tusks, and the snack-sweet scent of his white-tipped paws
on winter mornings when he otter-undulates his
hairy and cunning way into our bed, we do not love any more.

Emma Cairns Watson coordinates university conferences on Egyptology and Armenian art by day and inhales other people’s poetry by night. Her work has appeared in Barrelhouse Online and Menacing Hedge and is forthcoming in RHINO, Half Mystic, and Ninth Letter. You can find her on twitter @EmmaValjean and (more importantly) her dog on instagram @the_durg.

What is this me you see
in the waves,
from ink so deep?

Swimmers with spears
or driving rain
bring her on.

She seeps from my center,
blossom minded,
mottled,
lacks maps
and swallows night shrieks.

She slips in, nutrient-dense, saying:

You are not what
you say you are.
You made a mess.
You should eat garbage,
you cheap
rubber
thing.

Amy Alexander is a poet, visual artist, and homeschooling mother living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, not far from the Mississippi River, which is very far from her hometown on the Colorado River, but still familiar, because of moving water. Her work has appeared most recently in The Coil, Cease, Cows, Anti-Heroin Chic, the Mojave Heart Review, Mooky Chick, The Remembered Arts, and RKVRY. Follow her on Twitter @iriemom.

Emily Murman is a writer and illustrator from the northwest suburbs of Chicago. She is currently majoring in writing and studio art at Lake Forest College. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Cease, Cows, Déraciné, Milk + Beans, Peculiars Magazine, and Tusitala. You can find her on Twitter @emilyrosemurman.

The bird is brave to stop
in Atlanta. Her name is Tennessee.

She only wants to taste the big city.
From my balcony, she tries to see

the skyline through the trees,
but it’s so hard to hold her eyes open.

I think she’s dying.
I don’t know whether to give her water

or poke her with a stick.
Sometimes a girl just needs a little rest,

I tell myself. Too pretty—
how her yellow feathers accent neutral tones.

I worry that she ate a poisoned wasp.
If she dies here, it must mean

the worst for me. At a highway rest stop once,
I used a bathroom with the sign “omen.”

I was migrating too. I offer water
in a bottle cap. I tell her she has to fly away,

that if you stay in one place too long
you’ll be taken for dead.

Emily Banks lives in Atlanta, where she is a Ph.D. candidate at Emory University. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of Maryland and a B.A. from UNC-Chapel Hill. Her poetry has appeared in numerous journals including storySouth, Cimarron Review, Free State Review, Muse/A Journal, and Yemassee.

You swung the chainsaw through the rosebush,
lopped off its top, and found,
tucked in fang and bramble,
a nest of juniper twigs. Inside it,
I waited, dead since last season,
curled like a dropped dishcloth.

You worried you were a terrible father.
You worried your sunblock-slathered daughter,
splashing at the water table across the yard,
would totter over and thump you
with a question shaped like me.

You worried too, briefly,
if I was a blunt omen
when you didn’t believe in omens.

You placed my nest and I in a grocery bag
as if you’d just come back from the store,
a quick errand to pick up a little death
because you’d run out
and who knows when you’ll need some more
to sprinkle on your pillow or morning cereal?

You knotted the bag,
and gentle as laying a babe in her crib
you placed it in the garbage,
unhitched another worry from your throat.

In the dark I listened to the chainsaw growl.
I imagined you holding it over your head.
I imagined you thinking: I am trying to be a good father,
bringing the chainsaw down.

Todd Dillard’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous publications, including Crab Creek Review, Longleaf Review, Nimrod, Superstition Review, and The Boiler Journal. He was a finalist for the 2018 Best Small Fictions anthology, and has been nominated for Best of the Net 2018. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter, and can be found on Twitter via @toddedillard.

He bounds down the back steps:
my dog has caught
the scent of prey.
From under a lawn chair,
a bunny sprints
for her life,
dashes in sharp S-turns to thwart
the husky on her trail.
She reaches the fence
unforgivably low,
and when she can’t slip underneath,
she leaps into the air–
a valiant attempt
to escape
into the rest of her years.

The dog leaps too
catches her struggling body
just as it falls from the apex
of her last grasp at life.
Her bones crunch
between the strength of his jaws,
and he savors every bit of her–
head, belly, limbs.
The ravenous moment passed,
he lies down in the grass
satiated
panting
his head raised to bask in the sun.

I want to say I’m horrified, but
I have, after all, witnessed
the event as a bystander
who hasn’t moved
from her spot
on these steps
who hasn’t rushed to wrest
the dog away
to save
hasn’t at least called out Stop!

I stumble down the steps
fall into one of the Adirondack chairs
watch finches escape the feeder.
Thunder comes to sit
at my feet
a drop of saliva
lands on my shoe,
and I can’t help but pet him
bury my fingers
in that downy sable fur.

Christine Taylor, a multiracial English teacher and librarian, resides in her hometown Plainfield, New Jersey. She serves as a reader and contributing editor at OPEN: Journal of Arts & Letters. Her work appears in Modern Haiku, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, The Rumpus, wildness, and The Paterson Literary Review among others. She can be found at christinetayloronline.com.

whitewater rafting in molten silence,
a blunt abstraction
to distract yourself from your own humming of
insufficient hymns
melancholy was served as an appetizer
with a dirty glass later filled with water
with mostly melted ice cubes
that day
and it didn’t matter
because how could anything matter
when you’re mending your soul
lacerations with patches of anointed amnesia
sewn tight with silver seams but the
light still invades through the slits
since you’re not very good at sewing
wounds, your flux repairs an attempt worth giving up on

Savannah Slone is a queer writer who is completing her M.F.A. in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry and short fiction has appeared in, or will soon appear in Heavy Feather Review, Boston Accent Lit, The Airgonaut, Ghost City Press, decomP magazinE, Maudlin House, FIVE:2:ONE, Pidgeonholes, TERSE Journal, Glass, and elsewhere. She enjoys reading, knitting, hiking, and discussing intersectional feminism. You can read more of her work at http://www.savannahslonewriter.com.

I think I’m dying
for my heart forgets its job
to circulate blood.
There’s a fluttering in my chest.
An incessant flapping. Maybe
my heart remembers being a butterfly. Maybe
my heart remembers itself a false start
shooting off before the trigger
stalling along the way. Maybe
my heart remembers a past life
yearning for completion. Maybe
these butterflies will choke up
my throat, scrape pink
vomit heart from chest. Maybe
my heart sputtering is only
lack of use and not failure. Maybe
the ba-dum-dum-dum of my chest is louder. Maybe?
but I still think I’m dying
loneliness a persistent suitor
visits me every morning, reminds me
the sheets are cold
no one can fit in the house of my chest
laid bare a naked flame
ready to ignite everything
but my passions are dying
which are me right?
I think I’m dying
heart failing turned jelly
feet heavy but present
persistent in their opposing move
black goes first in this game
pawns protected by king’s castle
weak held dainty
toes after polish locked
skeletal to protect this path
this need to love, my heart
forgets I was once a martyr
dying. There’s a buzzing in my chest.
An untiring humming and drumming
a ba-hum-bug of forgetting. Maybe
my heart remembers being real
feeling and breaking down like a widow
old wood and weathered rock. Maybe
my heart thinks it’s dying
love an old cracked thing
weightless and priceless
flowing and steady.

Gervanna Stephens is a Jamaican poet and proud Slytherin with congenital amputation living in Canada. Her work has appeared in magazines like 8 poems, TERSE. Journal, WusGood.black, Whirlwind Magazine, Enclave, 12 Point Collective, and Anti-Heroin Chic. She hates public speaking, has two sisters who are way better writers than her and thinks unicorns laugh when we say they aren’t real. Tweets @gravitystephens.