Each Sunday I play pool with eyeballs for billiard balls
at the Other Place & envision what it might be like to be touched
by felt & fluorescence in alternation. The light of passing cars
filters occasionally through our pitchers of PBR. I know no metaphor
for sight, yet the beams protrude, pint shaped,
from the sockets of anonymous angels. Lines sharp as axe blades
gently part the trees, then brush away before the fall.
You ask where the terror is located—
Is it in the horse yet to be broken or the broken horse?

I’m embarrassed by my telos,
a stance of cue balls awaiting sticks. The future
perfect will be an ongoing breeze. I have no theory
for dream without waking. Falling from the lake onto the shore,
I wanted to know how you felt about the hurricane
hoarding air above the Atlantic, the one that shares a name
with your lover. Instead, I zipped my coat against the wind —
whose breath? A thin horse swept up from the South
and kicked my eyeballs back into their dark pockets.

 

Luke Burton is a poet and artist writing from Burlington, Vermont. His work has appeared in Crossroads Magazine, The Redlands Review, Pomeroy Poets Anthology, Bard Papers, and more. He is a senior Editor at GENERAL SUBJECT and NO SUBJECT Press.

 

Yesterday I mixed the past and egg whites
in the kitchen. Yesterday the Kitchen Aid
aided all my measures, churning. Yesterday I split
the crew and forced them to assimilate in bowls.
I sugared rims. I salted wounds. Yesterday I made enough
to batter over all protests. I lorded over cupcake cups.
I force fed yellow mix to polka dotted folds:
those upsidedowny skirts. I shoved it in the oven,
prayed. My efforts puffed, then puffed again,
resulting in collapse. My molten offering. Yesterday
I made the same mistake as days before but faster,
yesterday I read how long you beat the batter:
beat until it’s quick. Beat until it’s just mixed.
Beat until your arm is stiff and you forget.
Beat until it beats you back, bubbled up, refusing
proper form. Today the dog licks shrapnel from the floor.

 

Emily Pérez is the author of House of Sugar, House of Stone, and the co-editor of the forthcoming anthology, The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood. A CantoMundo fellow and Ledbury Emerging Critic, her work has appeared in RHINO, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, and Fairy Tale Review. She is a high school teacher in Denver where she lives with her family.

 

One thing I miss is
losing teeth. It tasted good
somehow. Did you like to yank
it out as soon as it wiggled?
I always waited until it hung
by a thread, so a nudge
of my tongue set it clacking
against its neighbors
in my mouth. Dangling
enough I could twist it
to feel the warm throb
of dying nerve.

After, there was the
tender spit-flooded gap,
impossible to keep my tongue
off, somehow tasting
so much more raw and alive
than the rest of my own mouth.

Now that I’m older, it isn’t so easy
to grow a pearl alongside my body
and then rip it away,

to bury it under a pillow or in a
velvet pouch in the lowest
layer of the jewelry box,

to let something stronger
grow in its place.

 

Hanna Lauerman writes both poetry and fiction and has been published in Longleaf Review, Folklore, and Grlsquash. Her short fiction has been nominated for the Best American Short Stories anthology. She lives in Boston with her supportive girlfriend and unsupportive cat.

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.