POSTS

i. Diorama

—After “Sperm Whale and Giant Squid” (American Museum of Natural History)

the gallery a lesson in pretending: spray foam gowned in plastic, ceiling blanched with cyan.
false gulls drifting like eyelashes in matte sky. remember the unlit corner, the only exhibit not
behind glass? in those days you braved everything. you left the contours of your body. in the
dark chapel of a new york city museum: the whale, the invulnerable grin; the squid, the pink of
the unbruised tulip. in those days your father was the whole world, your child’s palm anticipating
his. at lunch, his thumbs a pair of chisels making sourdough dinosaurs, two soft jaws, buttering
in straight lines. why does the whale look so scratched up? you’d ask, his smile a half-moon
circle. what first scarred it? little sparkles, disposable camera dangled at your wrist. you did not
know then what the exhibition label said. for in those days you learned the space between fear
and prolonging it: benthic zap, smothered terror. leaning out far enough to see or almost touch
the squid and the whale, your hand and your father’s clasped together in the abyss. to think,
perhaps they were not so frightening after all. to spy the litter fallen around them like furtive
snow, cigarette butts and soda lids, a floor ashamed by its own stickiness. to leave quickly,
brushing at your skirt like a phantom wrapper, ascending to the hall of forests, drifting upward
through centuries of light.

II. Diorama (restored)

the gallery a lesson in pretending: spray foam gowned in plastic, ceiling blanched with cyan.
false gulls drifting like eyelashes in matte sky. remember the unlit corner, the only exhibit not
behind glass? in those days you braved everything. you left the contours of your body. in the
dark chapel of a new york city museum: the whale, the invulnerable grin; the squid, the pink of
the unbruised tulip. in those days your father was the whole world, your child’s palm anticipating
his. at lunch, his thumbs a pair of chisels making sourdough dinosaurs, two soft jaws, buttering
in straight lines. why does the whale look so scratched up? you’d ask, his smile a half-moon
circle. what first scarred it? little sparkles, disposable camera dangled at your wrist. you did not
know then what the exhibition label said. for in those days you learned the space between fear
and prolonging it: benthic zap, smothered terror. leaning out far enough to see or almost touch
the squid and the whale, your hand and your father’s clasped together in the abyss. to think,
perhaps they were not so frightening after all. to spy the litter fallen around them like furtive
snow, cigarette butts and soda lids, a floor ashamed by its own stickiness. to leave quickly,
brushing at your skirt like a phantom wrapper, ascending to the hall of forests, drifting upward
through centuries of light.

 

Loren Maria Guay is a poet and speculative fiction writer. Their poems have appeared in Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Breakwater Review, West Trade Review, and other publications; their work has been a finalist for the 2022 Peseroff Prize in Poetry and a Best of the Net nominee, and they are a 2024 Periplus Fellow. Born in Asunción, Paraguay and raised in Brooklyn, they currently spend their time between Chicago and Ann Arbor, MI, where they are pursuing a PhD in English and Education at the University of Michigan. You can find them on Bluesky @nightgleaming or at lmguay.com.

 

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new emergencies

and where it begins it begins mid-fall against the fall
from some misforgotten state of grace a place played
edenic as narrative’s birth the inciting incident to rise
of action(able) response and what does one do but rush
to the store to get the coffee to get the speed to just get
across the street in rush to miss the rush of a car’s
sweep past the curb the hurdle forward to some money
money for some face for some space for some state of
existence in some future tense a climatic moment’s
resolve some relief sweet pleasure the problem with
pleasure it ends like any material the average american
buys seventy pieces of clothing a year seventeen million
tons of waste total clothes made by hands by machines
to cover the animal beneath to blend in to not be
broken against rule of law to color in lines on a map
borders touching borders between states a field of
hazegreen between sheets the sweat of what stakes all
the aperture wants is a figure to capture what is the
impulse to capture the self this idle engine this stalled
time the wasted paper on all these lines what laws have
you broken and not been caught what catches your
attention what sustains what sustains what version of
what narrative builds with each step to what direction
and please who loafs who lazes whose ease              

 

new emergencies

wake to no change :: light stuck to window :: plans drawn
submerged in bath water :: surrender to the fact of  now ::
surrender to a distance wind slaps :: I to street as if matter ::
in the checkout line even :: in dreams we down pain :: where
fear might unanswer :: a gun like a call :: children make
language of safety :: photographs on a wall :: between face lit
+ screen rolling :: between cheek + chest :: the day brought
what us :: wake :: no change :: askew residue :: day strips back
to bone :: what time has done to us :: what we have done to ::
who am I to claim we :: watch the towers collapse in reverse ::
the us needs a patriot needs an enemy :: to call own :: call
home :: these same outward we united :: homeland security
since fourteen ninety-two :: so many bodies on the street ::
who claims we these united :: slow roil                  

 

new emergencies

                                   who told you that was enough ::
what’s enough is done :: the excess burns: night turns
promiscuous :: air thick with ourselves : sick of our selves :: we
gather round the firesound :: we ivy cling we’ll :: choke this place
out :: smoke this place out ::  tear the floral from our shirts :: slap
wine on these soles :: clap this night open :: delicious             
                     little revolts ::                          
                           enough about the landscape ::
just take it :: call it our invention :: just need a little cash for :: a
slice of here :: we plastic cling we’ll :: choke these selves out ::
smoke these cells out :: we skin awake we keep awake :: enough
are we :: working enough we could :: of course clink an afternoon
:: clink into it :: pleasant isn’t it so                                        
                      pleasant ::               
                                                 to clink an afternoon ::
we could of course :: be working enough :: awake enough we
keep awake :: choke these cells out :: smoke these selves out ::
we plastic cling a little :: cash for a slice of :: here :: call it our
invention :: the landscape just take it ::                     
                         delicious ::            
                                          little revolts :: clap this
night open :: slap wine to sole :: tear floral out those shirts :: we’ll
smoke this place out :: choke this place out :: we ivy cling ::
round the firesound :: sick of our cells :: air thick with our cells
:: night turns promiscuous :: burn the excess :: who told you that
was enough :: what’s enough is done                           

 

Paige Webb is a queer poet, thinker, person, and PhD candidate at the University of Cincinnati. Their poems can be found in Blackbird, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, DIAGRAM, Indiana Review, The Kenyon Review’s “Nature’s Nature” folio, poets.org, Poetry Northwest, Vinyl Poetry and Prose, West Branch, and in their chapbook Tussle (dancing girl press).

 

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Contrapuntal with death wish

Pray that when they recite our names, they will sing.

 

To My Friends, on the Day I Turn Twenty-Eight

This is a love story that begins & ends in blood & yes I know by now you must be tired of me
speaking of romance, friends, but stay with me & imagine you are standing on the stage

of an opulent theater with your own bleeding heart cupped in your hands & your knees
are wobbling with fear & you are trying to speak but the only sound that comes is weeping

& you are also sitting in the orchestra section of the theater & the seats are flushed with crimson
& a whisper descends from the balcony in a voice that sounds like your own & you cannot hear

the words & then the house lights dim & you know you do not have much time but still you want
to stand & run to yourself & you want to tell yourself to breath but you know this is not allowed

& dear ones, this is all to say that I re-read my high school journal last week & was reminded
of how heavy the aching felt to hands that didn’t yet know how to hold it & for once as I read

I did not hate the self that seeped through the pages & for once I wanted to tell that self to live
through the years that would follow & hollow out my ribcage beyond even the emptiness

I thought I felt at eighteen because I have learned, now, that loneliness is the seed
from which the outstretched hand sprouts & yearning is the sunlight toward which that hand

reaches for nourishment & grief is how any plant knows that sunlight exists when all it can see
is the moon & if I had not lived the hollow years, then I might not have sprouted & yearned

& grieved enough to meet you & what I didn’t tell you about the theater was that every seat
in the orchestra was full & on stage a chorus of beloveds was holding your heart with you

& the balcony’s whispers were many-voiced & woven with laughter & yes, there are those who
would tear this theater down & build a machine of war in the rubble but they are our enemies

& tonight I do not wish to let them in because the only blood they understand is what they can
bottle & sell but you & I know that what makes its home in our veins is too thick for that, so stay

with me, my beloveds, because it is my birthday and I must thank you before I let you go:
for the beds you made for me to sleep in & the jackets you draped across my shoulders

& the songs you wired into my ears & the plates of food we cleaned together & yes, of course,
for the time spent holding my heart,
                                                                     always.

 

Isaiah Newman (they/them) is a queer, Jewish writer and social worker living in the Boston area and organizing in solidarity with Palestine. They write both fiction and poetry, and their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Diode Poetry Journal, Joyland, Waxwing, Rust and Moth, and The Lumiere Review. You can find them via their website, isaiahnewman.com.

 

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Grownfolk Talk

I studied the history, know the lore, can recite the year
credited with The Family Fissure, the events of which
began before I came to crawl, running quickly after & into 
what runs through my pre-problematic blood. I can speak
to strange pain in my side some mornings, to overstretching
& upsetting my shoulder, to relief at T-Jeanie’s divorce, though

this talk has an unpleasant taste.

we mark time by financial considerations. tax season, open
enrollment. our only breaks are mental, fine, we are resisting
resisting. we smile about sales on detergent & linens, & our
grandparents won’t tell us what happened to them. we are often
considering something. going back to school, skipping town,
breaking from bread from liquor from sugar. we are lonely 
& lacking practical advice, we are tired & only have platitudes
to give. it has to get better, yes it must, though if it doesn’t… 

this talk has an unpleasant taste.

yesterday we said can’t complain, then we did, lamented 
something kids today do or don’t. answered what’s for lunch
or dinner with the usual. we worried about being wrong
about something. we found something wrong with ourselves,
we lied, we said we didn’t play pretend, yet we spoke through
the swell of our bitten tongues, searched each other’s faces. oh,

this talk has an unpleasant taste.

 

You is a child again

every holiday. Your feet kick under the dish-crowded table.
                You pretends not to notice Your parents are missing,

at least one to some back room, yet You doesn’t need them 
                there to cower under their demands—eat nothing

& say less. You keeps a neutral expression, engaging when
                engaged. The macaroni is blackening at it’s corners,

is crusted well, yet You asks someone else if they think it’s
                ready. You dances at the burnt edges of every family

photo. at least a limb in each tableau, there if someone wants
                You there, unable to flash a ring or a beau like Your

cousins. them, perfect in the eyes of gods & grandmothers. 
                You, the one that there’s always one of. the grownerfolk

are telling You what lasts forever. they speak of the internet, 
                babies, tattoos. You is looking for something of the sort,

since none of them say us, this, love.

 

Louisiana-born Jae Nichelle (she/her) is the author of God Themselves (Andrews McMeel, 2023) and the chapbook The Porch (As Sanctuary) (YesYes Books, 2019). She believes in all of our collective ability to contribute to radical change. Photo by Christopher Diaz.

 

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The Old House

How much blood is enough blood to call me my father’s son? I look like him, they say. & I tell them that the mirror has no truth in it. It’s full of the past, of everything I’m trying so hard to leave behind. I sound like a wounded river. I cannot rust the old nails piercing my ribs. I cannot drown the agonies. I cannot quench the thirst of my dying joy. Neither can I reflect the face of the beautiful morning sun. My mother was a seamstress. She said the chances of a miracle are thin as threads. Yet, I cross the lines unstitched. My palms are like a tree. They carry a handful of ripe memories. The heaviness of my heart is the weight of a breadfruit. She says when a breadfruit reaches its age, it falls. My prayers fall off like manna from the heaven of my mouth, from the bulk of my heart. & my tongue is in peril of molding a plethora of Amens that do not carry kinetic energy. My body is a house with no threshold. My adrenaline is fright and fright. In the old house, I walk through the back door to meet colorful dreams covered with weeds of uncertainties at the backyard. The front door always leads to the mouth of a gun spitting bullets. & between both doors, there’s an ambience of loneliness, sorrow & that’s where I’m at my safest. 

 

Gospel Chinedu is a Nigerian poet from the Igbo descent. He currently is an undergraduate at the College Of Health Sciences, Okofia where he studies Anatomy. He loves music and is a big fan of Isak Danielson. His poems are mostly speculative and cuts across different themes. He is a 2021 Starlit Award Winner, Runner Up for the Pacific Spirit Poetry Prize 2023, the Blurred Genre Contest (Invisible City Lit), 2023, Honorable Mention in the Stephen A. Dibiase Poetry Prize, 2023, and also a finalist in the Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets, 2023. His works of poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in Chestnut Review, Worcester Review, Augur Magazine, Fantasy, Fiyah, The Deadlands, Channel, Apparition Lit, Mud Season Review, Trampset, The Drift, Consequence Forum, The Rialto, BathMagg, and other places. Gospel tweets @gonspoetry.

 

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Televised

we are all in one room, drinking
cocktails mixed with legacy brand
liquors. we don’t notice. we forget
that companies are responsible
for our vodka, for our water, for
our lights and for our roads, we forget
but we remember, too. we talk
about our reading lists, a girl is
reading Agua Viva, she says
Lispector had a way to see
around the bend of time, she hits
a vape beneath a sky that glows
the bronze of fresh-stripped wire.
soon a Beyoncé song comes on inside
the purple bar, which nudges us
to bitch about the ethics of our billionaires,
and then to dance. we run the world.
we are also the resistance. we sew
red patches with thread from Jo-Ann Fabrics.
thanks, Jo-Ann. we love you Jo-Ann.
we love you Tito. we love you
Ralph Lauren. we love you
and we are never going to be
quiet, you’ll never hear our voices
fall silent. we are plotting
your demise, we are architecting
better worlds, we are watching
how you scissor us in half.
we are young but we will live
beyond you. we grip our city
with arms and hands made fast
by all your evil tools. we are posting this
to TikTok so the Chinese government knows
that we are hot and young and slutty
in our artificial cages, in our handcuffs,
in our straps. we need the spies
to learn about femdom and
the Wednesday Dance. we know,
we know—this could threaten everything
that makes this country great, our security
could be at risk, but we don’t care. we don’t believe
in borders or in anything. you have taken that
from us, belief. and you only have
yourselves to blame. we are all
in one room and we are angry,
we are vicious, we are tired, we are
trying to find a way home. we are all in
one room, and the room is everywhere
in distance of a cell tower, everywhere
our ankle monitors can beep. we can’t
get out and we’re becoming feral, we are starving,
we’re exhausted, we are pretty, we are desperate,
we are entertained, we’re young and we are dangerous,
we are all in one room. we know damn well
who put us here. and when we make it out,
teeth gnashing, eyes alight with fear
and hope, we’ll be like any uncaged thing:
we’ll kill before we go back in.

 

G.H. Plaag is a queer poet, writer, and musician originally hailing from Boston and various corners of the American South. They received their MFA from Hollins University, where they also taught, are an alumnus of Sundress Academy for the Arts, and have published work with Tahoma Literary Review, Winning Writers, The Hyacinth Review, The Winter Anthology, and poets.org, among others. Currently, they reside in New Orleans, where they are developing a novel in conversation with various structures of power along the Gulf Coast.

 

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Communiqué, Or Trying to Find the Right Words to Describe an Inflorescence in Fluorescence

To Corporal Corporeal, and to all those with a body and a name,

Reports have come in of a meadowlark in the throes of matricide in Massachusetts.

High up in the scarlet leaves, about to pass the knife through, the meadowlark takes a breath, looks at their murder-weapon-clutching wing fluttering above, suspended danger, thinking hardships of their birth.

A clutch of eggs, 5-6 in count, over half mother’s body mass.

No one tells baby all the things that came together to give them life, that even if one newspaper was reprinted, seven wouldn’t have eight nine.

So the knife has dropped, scouts report, stabbed down below, by near-fraying roots’ penumbra, taking place among cobalt and salt-gray autumn blooms of which a faint glow exudes— ~{ * }~

The blooms are no man’s land, so stray away, operatives. Peony peons are of no concern to us.
They’re a Groucho mustache on the real problem: punditocracy,
                for who decided that pectorals are PPE?

Reminder: you are always naked to yourself.

Don’t be a patsy to bodily propaganda of the 22^nd century.

There is no precursor for existence other than what you are is now.

 

better_off_spectral.txt

special permission is requested intimacy is requested flesh download and soft interface is requested cut flowers are requested definite heat of the morning sun is requested all of experiential life is insistently requested a “yes” in response is requested a “no” is not requested a “cancel” is far from requested I suggest in the meantime in this mean time between choice think what lies beneath each option how “yes” could represent dad in his forest green recliner mom on the new couch peeling mangos Walmart bag wet between her feet “no” being brothers glued to the tv how sister is out how she is always out and you the “cancel” a scar-legged gargoyle watching over the staircase in darkness nose dripping you wipe your face with your shirt a dark splotch womb to mucus the other day your nose bled for an hour you worried your mind was melting memories scarlet-soaked in Angel Soft toilet paper the dogs dying their ashes in tins that used to house air at nine you took a photograph of your face through a glass of water on the mahogany dining table mahjong tiles in the foreground you didn’t know what the symbols meant or what even creates meaning what makes you see two eyes in two circles and name the face you see Oswald a joke you keep to yourself but actually the joke is I can still see you through the glass half-full you never left the moment you never learned that choices are made for you sometimes, never mind, I say, as if I have one

 

Karla Myn Khine is a writer and poet from South Texas. A recent MFA graduate from San Francisco State University, she currently resides in San Francisco. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in ANMLY, The Pinch, Sho Poetry Journal, poets.org, Radar Poetry, and elsewhere. You can find her on X @bunrealism and check out her other writing at karlakhine.com. ╰(◡‿◡✿╰)

 

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Raven

I had a series of violent coughing fits. A sharp invasion of sounds like those which you hear from
nitrogen and phosphorus curdling in open ponds.
I was taken to see a doctor.
This doctor held my face in her hands, then reached her forearm down my throat, there retrieved
a raven, black feathered and black billed, the source of my coughing, and that which had pecked
my airways to decay.
Here’s the sad things about ravens: they know a great deal of the past, stories we’re better off
without, the muscle and cartilage that do not fossilize, the snare that had failed to loop around an
angle of attack.
The coughing had stopped, and I was thinking this would be the last time I would see my raven.
I bent my head closer to him so that he would recognize my short breaths. He held one of my
lungs in his bill.
“You know this don’t you?,” I asked him. “That the weight of damaged objects can be judged by
how they behave in the wind.”

 

Coyote

When I was claimed by a pack of coyotes, they called me sister, and we traveled across the
hydroelectric dam picking salmon with our teeth.
We followed the scent of mule deer to the overpass, then reached the grassland between the
decayed airport runways teeming with mice and rabbits.
“All this is yours,” the pack said with a repertoire of growls.
I ate the ears of a rabbit and said, “Yes. Yes, it is.”
I covered my hands with blown sand and clover, I strung the organisms sitting on the airport
bedrock below into long strands. Their cells rumbled when I placed them on a coyote’s coat.
As high atmospheric pressure spread over the grassland, it clung to the air and squeezed
and the air screamed.
I was sure that the anatomy of this world had adapted to ambush and drag prey over a
board, longing to make us a dead place like stone.

 

Sinkhole

I found a three-bellied sinkhole in a glass jar preserved with ethanol.
It had hosted a form of tuberculosis acquired from monk seals, and its armor had darkened
through the years.
Though the scars along the throat were evidence that it had been rendered mute, I swore I could
hear its elaborate calls.
Nothing like the recorded calls of European Atlantic sinkholes with a chorus like a hurricane
bending its back into green things.
It was more like a hundred cats wailing below wind turbine blades, a long song scattered inside
electricity.

 

Amy Roa is the author of the poetry collection Radioactive Wolves (Steel Toe Books, 2023).

 

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Sestina for the Trans Girl Watching The Fly

What is more yielding than the flesh?
You, daughter of mad science,
you, who would bubble and rubber skin,
you, who chitin and acid dissolve,
the mirror will never call you a monster
no matter what melts away from your body.

Praise with the genius the changing body,
this miscalculation that makes skin into monster.
Give thanks for your special effect flesh,
you, bride of hormone and science.
To change, we must first dissolve,
teach machines the whole truth of our skin,

rewrite the poem of your skin,
corn syrup baptize the body
before the credits, let the binary dissolve
with the sick gray fear of the flesh,
not bug, or boy, but science,
and its rebellious, six-legged movie monster.

There is beauty hiding monster,
in the buzzing wings of your skin.
Your every morning is a new kind of science.
Your torso is a crackling telepod body.
Long live the new flesh.
Into pixels and light, we dissolve.

We only eat what we can dissolve.
We have to melt the old meanings for monster
in the plasma streams of our flesh
until they raindrop and bead off our skin.
You auteur the film of your body.
You Cronenberg beauty out of science.

You are light years ahead of their science,
watching experts and pundits dissolve
only to toughen your chitinous body
until you’re no longer prey for their monster
who would politic and red tape your skin,
who would claw their bad laws into your flesh.

Girl, you have given your body to your own kind of science,
found the love story of flesh that dissolves
into the beautiful monster of your skin.

 

Portrait of my breasts upon noticing a stretch mark

The contrast of color
traces across the skin
like a darkened house slivering
through the slits of a cracked bedroom door.

Less like a scar. Less like a wound washed with time.
More like a thin trail of footsteps.
More like an effortful hush in the night.

It is not crime scene,
but confirmation.

I’m not crazy.
Someone has been rearranging the furniture
widening the hallways.
letting in the light
while I sleep.

 

The Sapphic Prometheus

The gods’ mistake was saying forever
and thinking they wouldn’t have time to fall for each other.
That a titan and an eagle
couldn’t find more in common
than pain and a full belly
if they had forever to figure out.

On a long enough timeline
a liver is as good as a promise,
claws kiss as deeply as a tongue,
and the right kind of pain
is calligraphy.

They were made for each other,
their little hurts and epistles finding hope in hunger
and the will of the gods.
The titan’s stitched over skin a wax seal on a red love letter.

Dear eagle,
Tear the mailbox of my torso
open each day.
Find, purpled and wine drunk,
ripe and sweetly bleeding,
this thing again.
This everyday gift.
This love letter
I made just for you.

The eagle eats,
learns the nuances of flavor
tastes the difference
between meat that is taken
and meat that is given
and learns to push past the liver
past the pink waterfalls of flesh
and, soft as a kiss, hushed as a whisper
closes its beak around the titan’s heart.

Flying away the bird will hope
that its feast will grow back.
Watching the bird, the titan
knows that what was eaten was given
and what was given
will have to be held.

 

Billie Sainwood is a queer, trans poet and writer from Atlanta. Her work has been featured in The Passionfruit Review, Had Magazine, and en*gendered lit. Her first poetry collection, WHAT WAS EATEN WAS GIVEN, is available now from Kith Books. She keeps a diary of her inspirations and neuroses online at https://billiewritespoems.com.

 

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Open to the World

Examine this
the photograph describes the clovers
from ground zero
and the movement away from the grocer
selling right outside the estate
to the man with his schlong held back
against the material.
His yellow, egregious teeth
open to the world before him,
but does he come to this place
where the moonlight shows shells
on those mossy fences and
wooden lampposts?
Everything of his alone
and safe from the push and
pull of night.

 

Onyedikachi Chinedu is a third-year student at the University of Port Harcourt, Choba.

 

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