Author: anmly_mpusod

Venus

Back in October
    I found her
between tightly stacked shops,
    on a cobblestone street,

the smell of
myrrh + old paper
piercing through
    the thick scent
        of London rain.

Venus, cast in wax-
    not just soft,
            observant.
A goddess
    for my altar
        (not for their bed).

As I light her,
    I touch my hips-
unshrinkable.

With each breath
    they stretch
           demand space;
no apology.

My belly, soft not hard,
    spills out
        of denim
             like rivers
        that refuse
               to be contained.

My breasts looking like hoses-
    I watered
         garden after garden
    none of them bloomed
         (for me).

Now withered.
Still they try
    to suck the spring
         of another Venus
             dry.

My double chin:
    a layer of love
         I wore too long,
    tucked beneath smiles.

It tells the story:
    I bent.
    Until my spine broke.
Yet I am not in ruins.

They mistake
    softness
for surrender-
    but Venus
         does not bow.
She burns.

I rise
    from melted wax,
each curve
    a rebellion.

Witness me:
    not what’s left-
            what stays.

            Unshrinkable.
                    Unashamed.
                            Divine.

 

I Was Never Meant to be Tamed

velvet night
    my mouth tastes
        of burned sage
            & deliberate sin.
purple ink spills
    ancestral pain,
        coiled like dna
            deep
                within.
in the past
    i bore many names –
            now call me
                witch
                    before
                        anything else.
barefoot,
    i dance
        on broken vows,
            transmuting lead
                into gold.
this body – a portrait:
            time cracked
                the frame,
            sketched in stillness,
                now
                    erased
                        in motion.
she who shapes,
            she who tears,
                she who mends –
                    or none of it
                        at all.
                            you
                                were never meant
                                    to be tamed.

 

Vanessa Rose is a neurodivergent, bilingual poet based in Germany with deep U.S. American roots. Her work explores themes of self-empowerment, body politics and transformation through a witchy, feminist lens. Drawing from personal experience and the archetypal power of the feminine, she crafts vivid imagery that challenges societal expectations of beauty and identity. Her poetry blends raw emotion with striking, often provocative metaphors, creating space where vulnerability meets rebellion. When she’s not writing, Vanessa enjoys playing video games and spending time with her rescue cats.

 

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ENM

When I hide my face in the crook of your neck, my index finger rests between our bodies; my fingertips graze your freckled chest, the back of my nail touches my lips. And I wonder if you have thought of your wife tonight. I love your wife, have even fucked her, and watched her come with your fingers still inside me. But when you say I love your little moans, I hope you mean I love you. Once, you bit my neck and I pretended you did it so no other man would. And I wonder if you have thought about meeting me first, me being your high school sweetheart, me carrying your babies. God, I do love your wife and I even love your children. But when you say I want to keep fucking you, I hope you mean I want to keep you. And when you fuck me, I wonder if you could love me, too. If you wish we did not have to play pretend, if you have ever longed to stay for the night.

 

Born and raised in México, Sandra Dolores Gómez Amador is a poet, editor, and scholar. She holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee. Her work has been supported by Community of Writers, Tin House, and Letras Latinas, among others. Sandra is currently a PhD student in English, a reader for Only Poems, and a Tin House 25-26 Reading Fellow. Learn more about her writing on sandradolores.com.

 

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Sugarcane Ritual for A Bleeding Disorder

I was told I was born with
restive demons in my blood.

          One morning in June, my grandma,
          wilting like a sinking sun,

gathered my friends as oracles
to the part of my body

          where there are afflictions. 
          For several days I watched her

place peeled stems in the
purity of their palms,

          and as a child, I believed
          the sweetness from sugarcanes

would supply a weeping wound
with proteins,

          seal it off,
          as a ritual must.

But there is merely a trick for recovery,
because

          why does a rite meant to heal
          only deepen the torment?

The gods,
after nourishing them,

          surprisingly antagonistic.
          They fed on our offerings,

their stool firmed, then parted softly,
while I went on with bleeding.

          Did they not see—
          my jutted joints, my unsealed cuts,

my heart, near moribund—
at the ritual ground?

 

Hassan A. Usman (he/him), NGP II, a person living with Haemophilia, is a graduate of Counselling Education at the University of Ilorin. He is an award-winning writer and adjudicator, and a celebrated public speaker. His works have appeared or are forthcoming in Electric Literature, Consequence Forum, Blue Route Journal, Blue Marble Review, Isele Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, The Shallow Tales Review, Lunaris Review, Afrocritik, Five South, Icefloe Press, Paper Lanterns, trampset, Poetrycolumn-NND, and elsewhere. He’s an alumnus of the SprinNG Writing Fellowship 2022. Hassan is currently interning as a Business Development Executive, enjoys cooking, listening to Afrobeats, and models part-time.

 

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Self-portrait as a Broken Boy with Anxiety

They say grief is the wound that festers the heart.
But I’m only a puddle, rippled without cause;

A vagabond watching his prime tick off from
the face of a rusting Tissot. You cannot blame me—

I consulted the compass and it, too, gave no coordinates
after roving endlessly. In my gut, I harbour misery like

 a symbiote. I cannot yell; I cannot cry—I can only
ransom myself with deep breaths that pass for sighs.

 You might mistake this poem for a track off  a sad girl’s
Spotify playlist, but it is only a self-portrait.

 

The [F/H]ood [Chain]

“Can’t be hospital–
The life that we live is
so hostile”
– Central Cee, Up North.

Every lip clutching a lit cigarette, every pale face—
eyes bloodshot with brute—hosts hope and despair
like symbiotes, leaving it to morph into a ragged resolve.

It becomes a force, pushing stilettos and monk straps to
keep striding Awolowo Way,  urging  urchins sheltered beneath
Ikeja bridge to stay hard, hoarse throats not to
quit on passengers, basin-laden heads to
keep hustling through this labyrinth of a hood.

Here, there are no green pastures; greedy
Caesar razed them all. Even dreams feels
Sisyphean. So, it’s off with honest living
and scavenge like a black-backed jackal.

This is the tale of all nickers lurking in
the crevices of Kodesoh, of the
four àgbàyàs who took my Nokia C21 Plus and
patted my back with a dagger.

Ask around, they’ll call this hood a hustle kingdom,
but I see a biological field, reducing its
populace to a food chain:
producers and consumers.

 

Olaore Durodola-Oloto is a writer from Lagos, Nigeria, whose writing is shaped by deep introspection. His works appear or are forthcoming in Brittle Paper, Kalahari Review, OtB Poetry, Blue Flame Review, Anthropocene Poetry, The Crossroads Review, ANMLY, and elsewhere. He won the Lagos Poem Project 2024, organized by Urban Word NYC, and was shortlisted for the Bridgette James Annual Poetry Competition. A SprinNG ’25 Fellow, Olaore continues to explore themes of identity, memory, and transformation in his work, drawing from personal and collective histories to craft resonant literary experiences. Find him on X @olaore_philip and IG @iam.colossus.

 

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My Makeshift Motherland

We commute seamlessly, 
callous to our suffocating borders.
With a single flick of the wrist—thousands are transferred flauntingly,
but never donated altruistically.
Fawning over the newest transient novelty (you’ll throw it out in a week), we ravage to declare, ‘I bought that yesterday right before it was sold out everywhere’—
without sparing a thought for
the naked or the climate clock.

Their vivacious nature blankets this wonderful *little red dot with performative patriotism,
and sheer apathy.
Their materialistic vices boost the economy,
just not that of the needy.
Their hunger for (loud) victory brings about amiable competition and sportsmanship,
and starves unfortunate bodies while dehydrating the seas of this Earth.

I adore this transitional town.
I devote my life to it.
I will never let my nurtured beliefs falter.
I love this makeshift motherland.
(and you’ll succumb to its rulers)

*little red dot: a nickname often used in the media and in casual conversation to refer to Singapore. 

 

Alanna Tan is a 15-year-old student poet from Singapore. Her work explores human complexity and the politics of perception. Alanna is currently preparing for her O-Level examinations while submitting to journals at 3a.m. She hopes to keep bending language until it bleeds what the soul cannot.

Snorkelling on the Great Barrier Reef the first time I used a tampon

I remember staring down the archipelago
of blood spots in the hotel bathroom, the night
before we caught the boat to Green Island.
My mother hovered outside the door,
rattling a box of tampons stacked
like bleached staghorn, repeating
the generational myth of shark attacks.
Then, dreams of being left on the sand
to burn up like a gift shop starfish,
the unthinkable driftwood of my body
beached and baking. The next day,
I waddled backwards into the water,
green fins slapping, part fish, part woman,
uneasy siren. At first, I felt skewered
by the cotton spear sitting below my cervix,
but slipping out beyond the jetty, the knot
of discomfort slowly ceased. Mask snug,
I peered down at alien continents of coral,
like an astronaut through a shuttle window.
As the landscape came into focus, there was
the rush of the familiar: curves of rock,
the womb of cave with foetal eel, anemones
clotting beneath the pubic curls of seagrass.
The reef was a woman, vibrating with life.
My body was her shadow on the surface,
our salts mingled, thighs waving.

 

Bex Hainsworth is a poet and teacher based in Leicester, UK. She won the Collection HQ Prize as part of the East Riding Festival of Words and her work has appeared in Nimrod, The McNeese Review, Sonora Review, and trampset. Walrussey, her debut pamphlet of ecopoetry, is published by Black Cat Poetry Press. 

 

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Poem Beginning with You and Ending with Everything

You give me the last raspberry
from your garden, a tiny burst
of sweetness that fits on the pad
of my pinky finger. You offer me
the softest parts of your body to sink
my teeth into when I’m overcome
with wanting. You call my pharmacy
and get my meds refilled when I’m too
despondent to dial the phone.
I come over and wash the stack
of cups and bowls that have
accumulated into a small mountain
on your bedside table. I give you
my blood in a heart shaped vial
to wear around your neck. You study
how I make my coffee, how I like
to be touched, curtail your urge
to devour, unthinking, and learn
instead to coax pleasure from my
strange and particular body. We no
longer speak, but when I fall ill,
I still make tea the way you taught me:
ginger and honey with a clove of garlic
and a dash of hot sauce to clear
the sinuses. We no longer speak,
but I’m made up of a million
gestures, touches, turns of phrase
that I learned from you, every you
I’ve ever loved, whose sweaters
I’ve wept and wiped my nose on,
whose art I’ve hung on my walls
and letters I keep in a box beneath
my altar, whose loved shaped me
into myself. I still don’t know how
to let love lay me bare beneath
its probing gaze without apologizing
for my body’s failures: when I bleed
through my pants and underwear
and stain the couch with a puddle
of blood as dark as rain-soaked
asphalt, you scrub the cushions clean
before I can say a word, knowing
I’d never ask. When I’m so
constipated I can barely move
without groaning out my agonies
like a creaky, rust-coated pipe,
you make me soup with sweet potato
and lentils to soften my stools. So this
is it, I marvel every time I am undone
by another disgusting display
of devotion. This is what love asks
of me: to accept every gesture of care
no matter how humiliating it feels,
to let myself be witnessed in all
my unkempt, abject, leaky, embarrassing
glory. I try to be precise and contained,
to fit myself into brief, neat stanzas,
but love makes me unwieldy, long-
winded. Love writes lines that spill
over the page. Love doesn’t care
about show-don’t-tell or the flimsiness
of adverbs; it wants me to tell anyone
who will listen how dazzlingly,
frustratingly, terrifyingly, mundanely,
devastatingly, blessedly, earth-shatteringly,
ass-shakingly, world-makingly it fills
me. I used to think I needed
to sand my prickly edges smooth,
to temper my too-muchness and restrain
my terrible need, but every day, love
takes my face in its hands and asks,
Who are you without performance?
while I stare back as blank
as a Word doc the night before
a deadline. I wish I could cast off
this straitjacket of my own making.
I wish I could say what I mean
without cloaking myself in metaphor.
I wish I could stand before you
and let my body be nothing
but a body, no pretense
or artifice, a night sky
unblemished by stars. Love,
by which I mean God, by which
I mean the universe, by which I mean
you, let me be as unabashed
as the single long, coarse hair
curling up from your toe knuckle.
Let me revel in the excess, ecstasy,
echo, expanse, romance, fervor,
horror, pleasure, prayer, play,
swell, spill, shine, divine, thrill,
heat, wet, want, mess, miraculous,
nameless, vivid, agonizing everything.

 

Ally Ang is a gaysian poet & editor based in Seattle. Their debut poetry collection, Let the Moon Wobble, is forthcoming from Alice James Books in November 2025. Find them at allysonang.com or @TheOceanIsGay.

Polyphony

The tree we’d mourn exhales no final breath.
Secrets carve no rings, only a gaze left in silence.
Yesterday’s smile still lingers in the empty swing,
While whispers hidden, as a riddle only time knows.

A mayfly casts fleeting shadow, its pulse
echoing with heartbeats, carried away
by tides and monsoons, where the sea waves
crusting gritty rusts, with hardened solitude
piled heaps and heaps on the coast.

Memory spirals and surrounds
like golden glimmering drizzle,
breeding mosses in the shade
where even tender steps recoil.

Under the lamplight, a child’s sweet sorrow
trembled between tongue and teeth,
The gates of remembrance sparkled, a coaxing glow,
awaiting a knock by unnamed innocence.

 

The Cocoon Years

If not for our reunion
in an iridescent rain puddle
how can I reminisce those years
so long cocooned in silence?

Footprints on the steps, once counting fallen petals
at the twilight of spring;
in the scorching summer, shabby fans hung and swaying—
whirring, stirring up our restless craving.
scraps of torn comics swirling—
like autumn maple leaves;
we trimmed the tendrils of desire,
fitted ourselves neatly into hardened shells.
Yet our clenched fists, swinging slow,
still lagged behind the marching beat.
So we shifted into new postures
wrenching against the cocoon, cracking

The cocoon years—walls scribbled
with mistaken formulas,
the glass mirror bending the daylight
reflecting a pale, gaunt face;
souls bound tight by threads,
chained deep within the darkened core,
whispering prayers
towards faint gleams at the exit—
though the veins in my wrists
had already scratched open the shell,
why had I seen, the dawn of final gallows?

It was amid the screams that I saw you on the rooftop
of the teaching building, your wings thrashing
beneath sleeves that flapped wildly.
an apocalyptic downpour wore away your body,
tempering hardness into something tender.
Your eyes, in a sudden silver
curve of fleeting flare, illuminated me—
even a speck of dust can cleave its fate.

 

Celia Lan is a bilingual writer from China exploring hybrid life writing across genres. She has mainly written fiction and creative non-fiction, with recurring themes of memory, diaspora, and queer identity. She considers writing poems as a tunnel into the territory of a new language. Celia is currently preparing for her Creative Writing PhD.

 

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Adjustment difficulties

for all I know                        
there were tombstones
in the foundations of the houses
they had been plucked out then

& the hollows were walled up
                              with lego bricks
just like the hollows of history

this is the place I used to live

monuments to murderers
were covered with chewing gum
like the remains
                    of the Berlin Wall

blue neon tears burned out
                              under a neon eye

windows had been smashed out
& stained glass
                was mounted instead             

walls freshly pissed on by
characters from cartoons
who never hit the brakes

& bright border markers
stick out of the hearts
of all the vampires

here is a photograph

I’m in the foreground bleached out
I zoom in
& instead of a thin smile
only a chain of pixels

& my memory moves along
                     a freakish trajectory                                       
not through time
but from one color to another

 

Mikhail Leshchanka is a visual artist and poet. He grew up in Belarus, and currently lives and works in Warsaw, Poland. Mikhail studied journalism and visual arts (in Antwerp, Belgium). He has been writing poems for the past few years. You can (hardly) find him on Instagram @mikhail_leshchanka.

 

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