after Camille T. Dungy

I bathe my tongue in syrup.
The rest of my body in sugaring
light, black leaf, smoke poplars, sulfur.
There is a stain on me that will not wash
out. No matter what a river says you cannot
flow in the direction of want all your life. Who
do I blame if not the shadow over the house, if not
the blade of his hands, if not the blade of the moon’s
light as it watched everything. if not the holler of night
turning to day, if not the room of my weeping, if not myself?

Dani Janae is a poet and journalist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her work has been previously published in Longleaf Review, SWWIM, Palette Poetry, Dust Poetry Magazine, among others. She lives in South Carolina.

I started to turn into a dragonfly while walking through Green Park. This wasn’t some sort of Kafkaesque escapade, or a bildungsroman drenched in hay-bright nostalgia, but a matter-of-fact, oh god hit the panic button scenario. The crowd, sunbathing like extras for a Monet, didn’t notice my limbs shifting. Nothing but the trees offered sympathy – their spindly arms reaching out as I tasted the new vocabulary of flight, sought out bodies of brackish water like nectar, and desired only to ride the currents. By the time I reached Buckingham Palace, I had fully transformed into a flying blow pipe, turquoise-green, with cellophane wings forming a constant X – a treasure discovering itself.

Christian Ward is a UK-based writer whose work has recently appeared in Rappahannock Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Double Speak, Wild Greens, Mad Swirl, Dipity Literary Magazine, Streetcake Magazine, among many others.

Link to PDF: FLORIDA by ALUKAH

ALUKAH is a cyborgbitch transpoet and antizionist jew. They have poetry past and forthcoming in New Words, Okay Donkey, The Ana, & others, & on their very free substack @alukah. ALUKAH attempts to decenter cis people in favor of a D-I-Y approach to transpoetics and queerness. They are currently at work on a longform work of autofiction. ALUKAH is somewhere between the thick forests feeling mud and a dirty glory hole filled bathroom also feeling mud. Stop The Genocide.

Sandra Fees lives in southeastern Pennsylvania where she is a Unitarian Universalist minister and past poet laureate of Berks County (2016-2018). Her poems have been published in The Comstock Review, Whale Road Review, Witness, and elsewhere. She also has a CNF piece published in The Citron Review.

The only way you can strip a bear
down to skin is with dart and gas-

            (light),
            or bullet-
            hands
            and knife.

Shined shoes and bare feet
pooled in my pelt. I was family
room luxury—but not for me.

I tried to scrape myself off
the marble floor—tried to unbreak,
and remake, an entire body.

By the time I stood, my fur had turned
to felt. But I’m a girl—
I learned

            to tailor,
            to stitch,
            to cut and carve
            a covering.

Sometimes when I’m alone,
I remove my coat.

My glass eyes still reflect light—
but sometimes my fingers fumble
with the buttons made of bone.

Shagufta Mulla is the art editor of Peatsmoke Journal, a veterinarian-turned-content writer/editor for TIME Stamped, and an artist. Her poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Stoneboat, Crab Creek Review, Blood Orange Review, the speculative poetry anthology NOMBONO by Sundress Publications, and elsewhere. Shagufta lives in Oregon, but you can find her on Instagram @s.mulla.dvm.

Today, at three months and three weeks old,

he musters all his focus,
and reaches out his pudgy, dinner-roll arms towards the target:
a pale-yellow tissue box with green deer and trees and squirrels and foxes on the side.

As he tries to pull out the prize, his brain’s joystick moves his limbs with the precision of a claw machine arm going frustratingly for stuffed toys.

Failure! The tissue is in his grasp, and then lost.
Failure! His arm jerks left, and he misses the tissue altogether.
Failure! The fingers fail to close.

And then, the hand, the eye, the brain all work together to create a successful grip, and with a tug there is the satisfying sound of paper rubbing against the box’s plastic dispenser opening. Another tug, and the tissue comes loose. His eyes go wide.

Success! He waves the white tissue around like a captured flag, and lets out a “Yap-yap-yap-yap-yap” that only abates when he plugs the tissue into his mouth in glorious victory.

Timothy DeLizza lives in Baltimore, MD. During daytime hours, he is an energy attorney for the U.S. government. His fiction has recently appeared in Noema, Southwest Review, and New South. His essays have recently appeared in Undark, Washington Square Review, Salon, and Earth Island Journal.