after Rachel Wiley

Did you cry when you watched The Notebook?
How many women have you believed?
Do you believe that boys will be boys?
When’s the last time you called your mother?
Would you be ashamed if she read your tweets?
How long would you mourn me after I die?
Have you ever had a mullet?
Are you business in front of coworkers and a party at the back of the bar?
How many times in a row do you sneeze?
Do you prefer cats or dogs?
Are you allergic to cats?
On a scale of tolerate to lay down and die, how much do you love cats?

Have you ever ghosted anyone?
Do you continue to haunt them?
If I tell you the thing I’m most ashamed of about myself, will you:
(a) run; (b) bring it up during every argument we have; or (c) love me anyway.
How long can you hold a grudge for?
Will you ever hold our relationship hostage?
Will I be able to afford the ransom?
Do you believe “that a woman’s temple gives her the right to choose?”
Do you listen to Frank Ocean?
Do you listen to the Pacific Ocean?
How did your last relationship end?
How will this one end?

Tharani Balachandran is a first-generation Canadian, lawyer, tea enthusiast, reader of books, lover of gossip, and writer of poems who lives on the traditional territory of the Lekwungen peoples in Victoria, British Columbia.  Her work has appeared in the Racket Journal, Anti-Heroin Chic, Quail Bell and Fine Lines.  She recently self-published her debut chapbook, Love in the Time of Corona.

            — according to something I read on the internet

Last week poetry was $3.09 at the Circle K near my house and $3.11 at the Marathon across the street from the Circle K. Plus nine-tenths of a penny, obviously. Poetry is almost always a few cents more at the Marathon, but sometimes I’d rather not make the left turn on my way out, so I pay the extra. Some days are like that, more than one way to where you’re going, but regardless of your path you need a full tank of poems. I don’t know. I could start talking about fossil fuels and how we always burn what we need most, but you know how that would go. I’m just trying to get from here to there. This week poetry is down to $2.99 both places. Still with the nine-tenths. Always with the nine-tenths. Which is the part of the law represented by possession, they suggest. Which is to say this poem is nine-tenths of the way to being yours, with the final tenth of the process being determined by the rest of the laws, the ones written—like poems—out of language and granted meaning by our need to have shared words for how we interact with each other. This is why most people keep their poems buried in tanks under parking lots. I read that if you put 250 baboons on a cross-country flight they would all pretty much kill each other by the time the plane touched down in Los Angeles. Or wherever.

Amorak Huey is author of four books of poems including Dad Jokes from Late in the Patriarchy (Sundress Publications, 2021). Co-founder with Han VanderHart of River River Books, Huey teaches at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

She arrives in a crowd,
points out to me in a voice needing new batteries
that everyone else here smiles with their eyes.
Say you have a headache, she tells me.

She sends me letters in the dead of night,
when the house could be leagues underwater.
This is the way it’s supposed to be, she writes,
this is the way you’re supposed to feel.

Her penmanship is flawless.
Her letterhead’s like mist.
She makes me think of uncracked eggs;
of trees falling silent in forests.

One morning in April she flies me to Keukenhof.
Look, she says, they feel it too,
so far from alone, yet so consumed
with their own blooming.

Study each one in turn; see how its stamens are held high?
I don’t reply. My head is too full of colour,
a community of petals,
an unclenching of something.

When we touch down at home,
I notice the way my neighbours’ windows
throw gold into the dusk, hear someone laugh
further up the street. Her face changes.

Later that night I receive another letter
in that maddeningly rounded script.
I am apparently no longer her ideal client.
She suggests we go our separate ways.

The world opens up like a tulip.

Jen Feroze is a U.K. poet living by the sea. Her work has recently appeared in Stanchion, Stone Circle Review, OneArt, Magma, and Poetry Wales, among other publications. She was a winner of the 2022/2023 Magma Editors’ Prize and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming with Nine Pens Press.

Today, I read about a mother bleeding
mysteriously from her vagina
not quickly, but enough to stain,
something dark inside, and
when the gynecologist found it,
attached to the slick muscle
by its two suckers and tugged it free,
and it kept bleeding for hours, I thought
about how leeches, too, are mothers,

how I once spotted one, undulating
through the shallows
of a New Hampshire pond,
a stripe the color of leaf litter
down her rippling back, and at her side,
a wriggling cloud of S’s—a tiny school
of leechlets. When I reached out my net
they ducked beneath her awning
and disappeared.

Host dearest, what do little white boys take?

Back at the lab, I scraped her
from the bucket wall,
into a vial of ethanol. She writhed,
shrank in seconds
to a close parenthesis, stiff enough
to roll through the swirled preservative
onto her back, revealing
a small cluster of petals
clinging to her underside—
an umbilical flower
of dead children.

Eben E. B. Bein (he/they) is a biology-teacher-turned-climate-justice-educator at the nonprofit Our Climate. He was a 2022 Fellow for the Writing By Writers workshop and winner of the 2022 Writers Rising Up “Winter Variations” poetry contest. Their first chapbook Character Flaws is out with Fauxmoir Lit and they’ve published with the likes of Fugue Literary, New Ohio Review, and Columbia Review. They are currently completing their first full collection about parent-child estrangement, healing, and love. He lives on Pawtucket land (Cambridge, MA) with his husband and can be found online at ebenbein.com or @ebenbein.

Most days, I wake up wishing I were something
like cold thunder. As in Zendaya, or the girl
in a pinafore dress who bakes rhubarb tarts in a cottage
made of cheese. I am instead trying to be punctual.
Zoom calls, grocery store appointments, downtown Zumba classes,
the studio slanted between the bank and a fruit market. This
is how I comfort my mother when she calls. Today, it’s five
across and the cause of this summer’s poor air quality
across U.S. cities, except I can’t stop talking
about the green bottle fly nailed to the windowpanes,
how I killed it with my right hand. Really, I should be sad
about bleach and glaciers, but I’m still mourning
my premature white hairs. The Zumba instructor emails
Saturday, apologizing because she can’t go outside, the fumes
disrupt her chakra. I call my mother, tell her it was smoke all along.

Grace Marie Liu is a Chinese-American poet from Michigan. She is a 2024 YoungArts National Winner with Distinction in Poetry, and an alumna of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Minnesota Review, Peach Mag, Sundog Lit, and Vagabond City Lit, among others. She serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Polyphony Lit.

I have no authority to say anything.
I clap my hands and a cat runs out of the room.
This is magic. It is expensive,
but well within your means.

The first rule to having mass
is not to have mass at some point.
You have no choice in the matter
especially if you are reading this.

Applicable sorcery: t-shirts,
Mickey Mouse, Ikea.

I conjure objects from nothing.
This water stain in the ceiling,
for instance, this Monstera plant—
both still growing. It feels good
to admit as much.

Beehives nestle in the attic rafters
and hum golden vowels
which I wrap in paper packets
and promptly swallow.
I’ll never die.

I clapped. I could not stop my hands
from clapping. There were cats
everywhere. You can purchase this
through the normal channels.

 

Mike Bagwell is a writer and software engineer based in Philly. He received an MFA from Sarah Lawrence and his work has appeared or is forthcoming in Heavy Feather Review, trampset, Halfway Down the Stairs, HAD, BULL, Bodega, Whiskey Island, and others. Some editors have kindly nominated him for a Pushcart. He is the author of the chapbook A Collision of Soul in Midair (forthcoming from Bottlecap Press). He was the founding editor and designer of El Aleph Press and his work can be found at mikebagwell.me.

See the mother. See through her skin. See the skeleton. See inside the body. Look, there is another body, only smaller and made of disconnected parts. What constitutes a body? See, Mother has a pelvis. See the pelvis move, separate, tilt and open. Shine a flashlight in. Look. See the body inside of the body? Wait no the body is gone. Someone has stolen the body? Who has done this to the body! See but don’t hear the baby screaming. And there’s a theory that says birth is the first experience of anxiety, so do you think that’s why everyone, all the time, is still fucking screaming? The father is outside of the hospital. The infant is outside of the womb. The breath is outside of the mother’s mouth and she keeps trying to hold in all the air but she collapses like a faulty lung. You never get to see how the outside layer of bone fuses together then holds up her, holds up the body. See the father smoking. See the mother, panting.

Court Ludwick is the author of THESE STRANGE BODIES (ELJ Editions, 2024), and the founding editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her words have appeared or are forthcoming in Archetype, West Trade Review, Full House Literary, Oxford Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, New Note Poetry, Sweet Tooth, Watershed Review, Red Noise Collective, and elsewhere. Find Court on Instagram and Twitter @courtludwick. Find more of her work on www.courtlud.com.

I was obedient, a dim beam
from a frayed wire, never

                alight. I was the finest void,
                listening to my mother sing
                about Diane sitting in Jack’s lap.

She talked to herself,
sobbing when she couldn’t answer

                her own questions. I tried to be
                a good unwanting, a quiet thing
                a collapsed lung. At night,

I bit my nails down to the quick
staining my sheets with dotted blood.

                I uncover my voice, my tongue
                filling my toothed gap. I speak
                to my reflection & ask

her to be the brightest light.

Kiyanna Hill (she/her) is a Black writer. Her work can be found in Porter House Review, Honey Literary, Autofocus, Peach Mag, and elsewhere. Her debut poetry chapbook, A Damned House and Us In It, is forthcoming from Variant Lit.