Backtracking is a rigged poker game, and yet, I still play. I bake backtracking on the top rack of the oven and scatter its crumbs through the forest. Like a bait dog, backtracking still growls at its own reflection. Backtracking and I steal every No U-Turn sign in the city of St. Louis, Missouri. Mounted on the wall like a moose head, backtracking stares at me through empty eyes. I bite into the poisonous pit of a backtracking plum because I’ve survived those juices before. Sometimes, backtracking pitches a tent in the wilderness. What’s the difference between me and nostalgia? backtracking wants to know. Mirrors reflect backtracking like a set of circular footprints in the sand, the hump of a question mark. Backtracking is the frozen tundra in the arctic onto which I can’t help but keep my cheek pressed. Like sandpaper, backtracking wants to use mindless repetition to make smooth what was once rough. Backtracking is disiecta membra, limbs of a scattered poet, Latin from Horace’s Satires. At the 7-Eleven soda machine, between the root beer and the cherry cola, backtracking induces nausea. Extraterrestrials don’t buy into backtracking because their aircrafts only move forward. Beam me up, I scream from a barren field of corn. Don’t let me track back into myself what I have collected by running away.

Gabe Montesanti is the author of BRACE FOR IMPACT: A MEMOIR, which chronicles her time skating for Arch Rival Roller Derby. She earned her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Her work has been published in Huff Post, LA Times, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a second memoir. 

When a man and a woman love each other, they can opt (i) for sexual
relations or (ii) to memorialize their feelings in a securities contract.

English makes it difficult to gender a piece of paper.

Even though I babble Latin, the doctor assuages my parents’ fears,
assures them I’m indeed living.

My parents, perhaps biased, repeat that I’m the most beautiful legal
document in the whole world.

After leaving the hospital, they take me to the exchange.

My crib is a plastic sheet tucked into a writing desk drawer.

A bespeckled man with a milky beard gazes from atop a wooden
crate. He predicts that, one day, I will be worth 30 pearls, an entire
bundle of flax, or six counterfeit rubies.

My parents are keen on those three outcomes.

What my parents learn is that securities contracts are not
circumcised. They are sliced into tranches.

Some price my finest details: a stylized T to start a paragraph, an
anachronistic diagram of a human skeleton.

Some speculate that a thumb-smudged page number or struck-
through drafting error will solicit a turquoise shaving or heron
feather at some later date.

Bidders disperse when they must pay more than quail eggshells for
my errata.

My parents are aghast as I’m confettied to the highest bidder.

Think of tranches like trenches.

A trench may be a rut, channel, furrow, or cut depending on when a
shovel breaks or Orion hides his bicep behind cloud cover.

A trench doesn’t become an excavation just because that’s where
the wind hides confetti squares appraised as worthless.

But that is one reason.

Jason Fraley is a native West Virginian who lives, works, and periodically writes in Columbus, OH. Current and prior publications include Salamander Magazine, Barrow Street, Jet Fuel Review, Quarter After Eight, West Trade Review, and Pine Hills Review.

welcome to [city]
please observe all traffic laws in [city]
park only in these designated lots
or garages       pay here
or on the app

the machines
will serve you
they are here to help you
we gave them mouths to say

pay for your parking here
pay for your parking here

observe them in rows     dominoes
echoing each other     activated
by motion   please enter
your license plate     that is not
from this state
you are a robot
try again     try again

it would be better
to download the app     where
you must also prove     you are not
a robot       the robot asking you
can differentiate

you may not
park elsewhere
you may not
park here         unless you pay
at the machine     that speaks
but again
it would be better
to download the app
which is different from the app
for [other city] and [other city]

you must pay       on the app
or at the machines       that say
you can pay   but cannot
recognize you   you
with your movements   your ability
to select     which pictures
have a bicycle in them

Rachel Lauren Myers is a poet from northern Nevada. Her work can be found in Red Ogre Review, South Florida Poetry Journal, Sky Island Journal, and elsewhere. She is an assistant editor at MEMEZINE. She recently relocated to Massachusetts with her pug, Watson, and can’t get over all the lush greenery. Find her on Instagram and Bluesky at @hellostarbuck.