is gift-giving, and I don’t have room for all this crap.
Psilocybic peaches rotting in the crisper,
crystal balls sticky with grime.

The black snake shriveled to onionskin,
the wedding dress sulking unworn
at the very back of the walk-in closet.

Goodwill stops taking my donations.
My free boxes overflow onto the sidewalk.
There’s a landfill named after me,

a whole shuttle full of glitter-drenched
padded jackets and danger-red lipsticks
to be incinerated in the vacuum of space.

But I accept the love he gives, and I build
more shelving units for it, just as he accepts
my affection has no physical dimensions.

My love language is language itself.
I incant his name into my vanity mirror,
lie that he has no power over me,

then watching him jigsaw the stars
into brand new horoscopes
just to prove me wrong.

 

Rita Feinstein is the author of Life on Dodge (Brain Mill Press, 2018). Her work has appeared in Sugar House, Grist, and Willow Springs, among other publications, and has been nominated for Best of the Net and Best New Poets. She is a graduate of Oregon State University’s MFA program.

A teleporter walks into a bar & walks into a bar & walks into a bar &
stop me if you haven’t heard this one.

A teleporter walks into a bar & a brothel & a beach &
never enters the same place twice.

Tides reflect more than the moon’s arousal:
place & name, their cartography. A needle starts its life

as a sword yet still knows its way to blood. Place & name:
two different landmarks. Where you are & what you could be.

I know her arms from a photograph that tells me
they existed. What she made in felt & flesh, lace &

latitudes. The planes of a face, hers and hers and mine.
Teleportation requires the traveler destroy herself

to be built in a new location. A needle also knows
its way to mercy. Its potential for pain.

A teleporter walks into a name that is and isn’t hers.
The potential to be a holy war or a small victory.

A teleporter walks into in two. A door named
for its intentions. If you’ve been waiting

for the hatmaker: she’s been standing in this
doorway, replacing screws with stitches.

 

Shannon Austin is a writer from Baltimore, MD, with an MFA in poetry from UNLV. Her work has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, After the Pause, American Chordata, and elsewhere.

“And see how the flesh grows back / across a wound, with a great vehemence, / more strong than the simple, untested surface before.”
                        ~ Jane Hirshfield, What Binds Us

call it unlovely,
a wanton blotch,
an undone stitch

call it a raw blossom
garish as a flare

call it the reef’s
clamour seething
to the surface

a scorched line,
heat clawing its way
out of my body

call it reptilian,
webbed & thickening —
a mottled seam

call it my
skin’s frayed hymn,
my body’s scripture

what’s left,
but the gnarled root of memory,
raking its debris,
with metal teeth
over me

what dark wounds
we are made of,
how they wreck & remake

I eulogize my younger skin
& all things young, but
I will never disown this —
revision, souvenir, script,
seal? — this gilded asymmetry,
of what was.

We heal ragged
even on the inside, pain inlaid
like an everlasting nacre.

Still,
praise what was salvaged:
the self, ravaged
now rising.

 

Ottawa-born and Costa Rica-based, Cara Waterfall’s work has been featured or is forthcoming in Best Canadian Poetry, SWWIM, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and The Fiddlehead, among others. She won Room’s 2018 Short Forms contest and second place in Frontier Poetry’s 2018 Award for New Poets. In 2019, she was a finalist for Radar Poetry’s The Coniston Prize and shortlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize. Most recently, she won the Editors’ Prize for the 2020 Magpie Award for Poetry. She has a Poetry & Lyric Discourse diploma from The Writer’s Studio at SFU, and a diploma from the London School of Journalism.

sorry i can’t come to the phone right now,
my body is 1000 hedgehogs in a trenchcoat

& loud noises make them nervous.
            & soft noises make them nervous.

i pay my carcass rent with stillness.
even the life rafts make thunder of
my limbs.             the critters know this.

they keep score when my muscles can’t.
baby,                 i’ll have to call you back.

 

Kora Schultz (they/them) is a queer Wisconsin-based poet, writing student, and assistant editor with Juke Joint Magazine. By day, they work with folks experiencing homelessness. Their work has appeared in various literary magazines, poetry journals, and on their partner’s fridge. You can find them on Instagram and Twitter at @oatmilkmom.

I have a kidney bean blooming beneath my jeans.
As a child I feared watermelon seeds, but never kidney beans.

I can feel new growth, leaves entangling between my vertebrae
tender sprouting between by ribs,
a lattice of light green climbing up
my skeletal walls, coaxing the sunlight
out of my skin, glowing beneath my fingernails,
turning me green.

There is a delicate balance, as it
grows brighter, stronger,
larger, and I grow tired feeding
relentless nature with joy and self-made sunlight.

I never wanted to grow kidney beans between my breasts
and beneath my nerves. I do not know how
to remove roots, repot or nurture to maturity
the glowing inside me.

But now I have a kidney bean whose tendrils
caress my neck and help me find sunshine
and relief.

 

Rachel Brown holds Bachelor’s degrees in Creative Writing and English Literature, as well as a forthcoming Master’s degree in English Literature from Central Washington University, where she also teaches composition. Her creative work has appeared in Northwest Boulevard. She is currently reading, writing, teaching, and running in Eastern Washington.

the weatherman says,
when the flower heads twist down
at a quarter past 6.

Remember that summer of hot breath,
open windows, and making love
to the sound of bicycles passing by?

Kiss me soft
as the clouds peel away
from the sun like dark yellow apple skins.

Let me hold you,
run my hands through your hair,
these last few minutes.

 

Austin Davis is a poet and student activist currently studying creative writing at ASU. Austin is the author of The World Isn’t the Size of Our Neighborhood Anymore (Weasel Press, 2020) and Celestial Night Light (Ghost City Press, 2020). You can find Austin on Twitter @Austin_Davis17 and on Instagram @austinwdavis1.

Hunter and Hannah watch me from the shore
except they do not watch me,
they watch each other
and I watch them watching each other

my feet don’t reach the bottom here

I swim out to the end of the pier and then
back to the shore,
where Hunter and Hannah still watch each other,
then back out, past the pier
and wait

I don’t dunk my head in, either,
not this time
just let the green-blue Chihuly waves
caress my neck and press against me
green-blue from above
green-blue from the sides
green-blue from below and between my legs

being touched often feels like
waiting for something to be taken away from me

here in the water where its only request
is to float or go under —
whichever
I prefer
— the touch of the cool wet gargantuan glass
feels like a responsibility
gifted to me by God

I dream of water passing through
my lips, my eyes, my ears
all my orifices
and my orisons
filling my throat and my stomach
until it presses through the tips of me and back out
into the lake where it belongs

ripping right through me,
a swimmer
drowning in the cool wet arms
of a body that knows how to hold me

 

Stephanie Neuerburg is an actor, playwright, and poet based in Chicago, IL. Her work has been featured at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, the Oregon Fringe Festival, Ashland New Plays Festival, and Seattle Public Theater, among others in the Puget Sound, Bay, and Chicagoland areas. Her original play Science Night was a national finalist for the John Cauble Outstanding Short Play Award in 2015. Stephanie holds a major in performance and a minor in creative writing with an emphasis in poetry from Southern Oregon University, and has worked with award-winning playwright Anne Washburn, Tony Award-winning director Bill Rauch, and poet K. Silem Mohammad. For more information visit www.stephanieneuerburg.com.

My doctor tells me I am as full
& empty as a window.

Actually, what she says is polyps.
I imagine mushrooms growing

along my insides,
delicate umbrellas glowing in the dark.

I am forest floor: network of one thing
but not another.

On NPR, I hear a story about maggots
used to clean wounds.

They eat dead or dying skin,
prevent the spread of disease.

A woman nearly loses
her feet to July’s sunbaked asphalt.

She says, I have a high tolerance for heat.
She describes the tickle

of maggots rolling beneath skin,
she host to hundreds of babies.

The heartbreak when they are excavated—
smashed garlic on a scalpel.

Home smells sweet & rotten.
I peel soft bananas off the counter, replace them.

(my self is the only thing inside myself)

Each afternoon sunlight finds my kitchen table between
the hours of not long & enough.

How do flies get in?—there is a maggot-sized gap
dividing wound & womb.

Flies pepper the window,
my fingers—sticky with what they want.

 

Poet Ashley Dailey is an MFA candidate in the creative writing program at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, where she is a poetry editor for Grist Journal and host of the virtual reading series Chiasmus. She is the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize and has most recently been published by Peatsmoke Journal and Oddville Press.