BLEATING THING 01 - Genesis (Spring/Summer 2024)

ISSUE 01

© May 2024

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Amy Jannotti

POETRY EDITOR Thalia Geiger

ESSAY EDITOR MeeRee Orlandini

HYBRID EDITOR Justin Aoba

Bleating Thing reserves first North American publishing rights and non-exclusive rights to reproduce, display, and distribute material in print, online, or on social media. Upon publication, rights to all works published herein return to their respective authors.

Cover design by Amy Jannotti; created with assets by Christina Deravedisian, Liam Reed, and Marek Studzinski.

This issue was typeset by Amy Jannotti in Garamond, Bodoni MT Condensed, and MingLiU.

bleatingthingmagazine.com

poetry

10/ One Mutual Sheaf by Lucas L. Fernandes

14/ dream of the jadeite salesgirl & mother goose by Kailey Tedesco

17/ SELF PORTRAIT AS ARS POETICA by Sophie Bebeau

21/ poem beginning with a lyric by Alex G. by Saturn Browne

24/ on sisyphus and pebbles by Kaydance Rice

26/ borrow a vowel by atlas st cloud

31/ angel pain by Kailey Tedesco

33/ two questions by silas denver melvin

42/ lichen country by Ashley Cline

essays

04/ The language I create by Alannah Guevara

37/ Tiny Flies by Sidney Brown

hybrid

08/ crumpled hope by lae astra

12/ Seabirds by Nicole Revelli

20/ closer by lae astra

36/ Decline After Giants by Nicole Revelli

on genesis

For this issue, we asked contributors to submit work reflecting on the concept of Genesis as the intersection of creation & desire.

What follows is the result.

GENTLE by BRIDGET CURTIN

The language I create

by ALANNAH GUEVARA

I sit on my couch at the end of this poetic rupture, hoping to make peace with this document via addition of new beginning. Yet each attempt makes more sense to me in places far from this foyer of thought.

What does it make me if I cannot introduce myself? & what is my language if it fails me in spite of the hours I’ve spent learning to wield it?

I am a lifetime of language. It sculpted me during moments of silence; moments I believed myself in control. But what of those moments when words emerge like violence, cloying nostalgia from the annals of my nation? To whom do these words then belong, if not to me? These words I thought my own are beyond repair. I will work them until they tatter & crumble, but I seek something more.

my words are the language of ownership that claims my tongue while my tongue clings to foam encrusted words as they boil over my crooked teeth & spill between my budding breasts. my words are on loan for lack of finances. my words are an angry mob hell-bent on selective ignorance. my words cannot fathom my identity cannot fathom my epistemology of my self. my words hang haggard signposts, dusted & out of time. my words tarnish silverware at dinner parties. my words are cultura

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prohibida. my words scratch false x’s into ancient sands neath california palms. my words council expression as fork-tongued advisors. my words tease new tortures from old methods. my words reach out for stranger’s kindness with phantom limbs. my words flock to beauty as incubi. my words dissolve my meaning into cloudy alka-seltzer bloom. my words stain coasters like oxidized wine. my words “ask” me to spread my legs. my words are not my own. my words belong to bastards long since dead, buried, & leeched into my mother Earth.

How am I meant to define myself if these words I know are forged in the same ancient molds that produce what oppresses us? These words are historical whetstone that sharpen tongue & tooth into spiked barriers of western forts. & yet I’m meant to accept them appreciate them as a gift bestowed upon me like blankets. I’m meant to find them purpose. Like a hammer finds a nail, I am meant to find them purpose. Before I gulped my first Southern Californian smog, these words found me. Even before I withdrew into womb as in utero agoraphobe, only to be rejected by birth-house & home, these words found me. Like a fungus spread through soft cheeses or sliced bread, these words infect.

Quiero hablar con estas palabras. Quiero escritar con las lenguas de mis familias. Pero las palabras no me conocen y no las conozco. Me dejaron en mis años pequeños. En mi tiempo de ingenuidad. Como el serpiente, estas palabras me tragaron pero nunca me asimilado.

There are other words, I’ve heard, that spring from other tongues. Other words that hold tight a quivering body. Words that wipe tears, shush the blubbering infant howl into peaceful slumber. Other words that flood light into shriveling darkness. But these words I’ve heard of, though have not heard aloud, are said to be dangerous. These other words are rumored backwards, uncivilized, & culturally impotent. I don’t believe that. I don’t believe that the poisoned words I know are superior. I believe these other words are keys to worlds locked at birthright. These other words sense beyond sight, sound, smell, taste, touch. Vision futurity into potentiality. Sing discord into harmony. Permeate hostility into hospitality. Lick agony into pleasure. Squeeze insecurity into

accountability. These other words create, not destroy. I believe these other words expand boundaries.

I search far & wide to find these words of myth. Wordsmith after brilliant wordsmith fail me in securing access to what I seek. I leave breadcrumbs for my kin only to turn around to find a forest ablaze. Cannot anyone reveal this arcane language? Cannot I perhaps find a word within myself? I seek words which enchant those who wield them with a power bold enough to reinvigorate communities lost to time. I seek to understand these words so that I may understand myself. For words that name are imbued with a mighty magick. For words that name are feared by those whose names remain unshaken. I search for these words to name myself.

Myself is a being of uncertainty. Myself now speaks words that harm myself. But myself is capable of new tongues, if only this tongue be unbound. The potential to adapt, grow, & even change can within myself be found. Myself will will myself into a being greater than myself. Myself will become compassion, community, & recompense before the years behind myself are no longer cyclical. These words myself lusted, always out of sight. These words myself dreamt but now understand that myself is not the words sought. Myself is what myself creates.

My eggshell was filled with memetic scrawlings. Enough to keep one entertained & unhatched for two dozen years. I, the yolk, remember the comfort of mucus; such sick saliva to keep a body warm, if not grotesque. I, the yolk, a mutant flexing fresh muscles hard as I could against fiberglass walls. Against socially secure shitstained pretender. Against every hormone aching for relief. Against myself I become me.

Take a look around my two-bedroom apartment & you’ll find relics of former selves. My wife & I share more than space here. We share history. Much of it is on display & available for your consumption at a nominal fee. Come on over & keep us company for a time, we’ll gladly indulge you with bohemian regalia & gothpunk façade. We’ll laugh through the night over baby carrots & boxed wine. We’ll construct words

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for points & watch fifty years of television in a single night. We’ll learn about each other with language only friends can form.

As we all eventually must, I have sculpted for myself a secret piggy bank where I squirrel away the pieces of myself which I hold most valuable. The identifiers I’ve come to worship as signifiers of the greater whole of me. I tuck them into the thin slot atop the piggy’s back as I whisper prayers. To whom, I do not yet know. Perhaps my future self will someday find use for such offerings. Just as disparate coins hold unique values–some extraordinary, some at face–so too do my identifiers. Sometimes I shake my piggy bank & hear the delightful jangle of Queer & Chicana. Sometimes I shake it only to be shaken back at the discordant clattering of American (US) & Vilomah. & yet I cling to my personal savings. Every now & again I will spill them out across the kitchen floor & count them up. This cache of identity is who I am, regardless of value. I hold up Daughter to the light & inspect for flaws. I wipe away the lint stuck to Poet. I count them up & drop them one by one back into the recesses of myself, my piggy bank, until I am once again full of who I am. Full of the names I have sought, defended, denied, accepted, rejected, & embodied. I am the language I create.

CRUMPLED HOPE by LAE

ASTRA

One Mutual Sheaf

by LUCAS L. FERNANDES after LUCIE BROCK-BROIDO

I am rejoice, I am brood. I am Being let out, My ceremonies navel, belly, the nerve white noise.

Under the foot of the sun I am strung in a gallop, Towards the knowing, the first fire.

I am preserve, ebullient, in my lost hour I am the hand That brings me back. Lilies tongue-tied,

Conjoined, eyes heavier than the lilac-strewn. Or lighter than a minute, or a second in the air I am molt,

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I am become, when insects have away with wings. Bartered sin, Trade of compulsion, the tilting head.

Tulips, darts in the ground of rage, the weather-cast Women. The stage, a box of grief, and my meditations

On the meaning of bezoars and swords. There’s arrows In the blood of hares. I am there, pooling, a frightened child.

All fingers twist in their sockets, for God’s sake, I am learning what it means to be a hand, the ends of a hand,

Rising, undawning, palms of my palms

Reach for ways to reach again. Naive ones glisten, assuming to tempt. Fields degreening, the age of a second chance. I am fury of Autumn,

I am commandment in reverse. Vertiginous hope, lay me down In your grasses. Shut me up, my eyes, and stay inside my head.

I am touch, I am seeing The beginning of a dream.

SEABIRDS

by NICOLE REVELLI

dream of the jadeite sales girl & mother goose

by KAILEY

TEDESCO radioactive green glasses my eyes & nursery rhymes the beginning of time with penetration &

piecrust. i dream up an origin story & it goes like this: stars ring-around-the-rosie then

heart-shape all the crops. mother goose rides her broom over the un-sacred ground. we made

it this way so that the pets would stop coming back without their souls. i ask the jadeite girl

how much green it would take for me to forget grieving & she responds in indiscernible lamb

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bleats. i get it: we are all sacrificial, playing pretty-pretty-princess & gemming ourselves

thorn-slit. i like my crown & the crowns of others. we all fall down; it’s true. i water-pail

depression era antiques into my psyche as a means of cluttering. tuffet up my mind so as to hide

the spiders beside her. & by her i mean earth, of course, or maybe just its endless

onslaught of falling eggs.

GIRL AND UNICORN by IRINA TALL NOVIKOVA

SELF-PORTRAIT AS ARS POETICA

by SOPHIE

BEBEAU

I should be allowed to write a poem that slakes & snakes through me like a swallowed ribbon coils around empty space answers a question I did not know I was asking I am always asking

for someone to bring me a bouquet of exactly the right flowers this poem is asking you to hunt me down like an eight-ball I want to be shot into the bowels beyond the pocket

I would like you to break a cue over your knee & annihilate the urge to talk things over

there was nothing then there was something uttered I am trying to be nothing again if a poem does not rinse the red from me it’s a problem

to try & pull out of the brain that which wants to stay all these poems tapeworms segments digesting what is being digested

I’d desecrate any body to get what I want honey & curled mint blood is not important only the stain can erase a name I am tired of it the living the way a robin tires of the blue of her eggs I have become

hungry for the large silence at the heart of me a chronic fermentation I’ve made

all these portals to nowhere in the cold snaps between small wars I tend to the poems in their sick beds send psychic messages to anyone

who might know low flame & precipice I deliver my second hand premonitions when the colors feel correct I skim the black off

the night will fall in love where there is barely any atmosphere a poem has never tried to stop me a poem has already predicted this lack

of oxygen I should be allowed to write a poem that can’t fight back break it off at the joint like a wrist slack with resignation

what consumes is also consumed I wait patiently for the tip of my tail to reach the inside of the tip of my tail

ASTRA

CLOSER by LAE

by Alex G.

poem beginning with a lyric

by SATURN BROWNE

& I have lost hope on the east coast It’s only October & yet, the bitter frost has already came striking through like summer lighting, hissing & full of danger, leaving an aftertaste of his musk on my pillowcase even when I smoked away the packs of cigarettes in my bedside drawer. How it sticks.

How, at 15, I was already learning what life wanted to take from me to survive. What it snatched, eagerly, right out of my own two hands. There is no more excusing my shame. After I broke up with B on the phone I went into the kitchen and boiled water and heard the kettle whistle and whistle. I walked outside and patted the dogs. I washed my sheets three times. How, after four months, I tried to google words so I could express my sadness

and found that even solitude and grief were synonymous and placed next to each other. And even though I put it through high gear the dryer was still stuck on cooling mode and still his scent never left my bed. And even then, I asked myself, what am I doing with my body?

How I left the eggs cold on the counter for a long time. For weeks I watched the shadows through my blinds, dancing. I stood below the powerlines and waited silently. How desperately I’ve tried to be happier.

TEMPORAL PART

by COURT LUDWICK

on sisyphus and pebbles

by KAYDANCE

RICE when we were ten, we made sand castles out of styrofoam and they still fell. last night i found a half open, half rotted squirrel hanging on a barbed wire fence, with its teeth still out and its mouth filled with mayflies, just beginning to hatch. what i mean to say is this wasn’t always a tragedy but it is now. what i mean to say, is if lear cut his own head off, would he have survived. for nothing if not the sake of the narrative, of the daffodil leaves. i pour rubbing alcohol in the cuts on my ankles for the burn of it. i shot the dog blind but before it died it bit me too. there’s nothing left but the cicada shells and the broken wind chimes and you’re right when you say not everything is a tragedy but i can’t help but remind you that the last time i ate, i was eaten back.

CICADA by CAININE

BORROW A VOWEL

by ATLAS ST CLOUD

i tell you i love you & i tell myself i mean it on the days deciphering emotion feels like looking for a thread of gold in a needle stack. everything catches light so nothing is shining, i pierce my thumbnail on rage but the bleeding stopped so fucking long ago. i am not god, god knows himself in a locked room; god can create a key. i am humanity's skin suit. i am a plan you want no part of. i've been contemplating disembowelment: maybe i'll find a vowel in my gore, maybe i'll put it all together, maybe my name will spell out something new– i keep looking for proof of life in the toll it takes on my body but i hurt i hurt i hurt & i can't read the signals my brain is trying to send so i'm left with shoulders so tense i'm cording survival rope beneath dermis; one day it'll spool around my spine. i decide naming things gives them power, so i name myself saint of earnestness & full flavored cigarettes; i tell you i love you & i know i mean it on the days my eyes water from the light.

THE

ABJECT by COURT LUDWICK

SELF PORTRAIT AS BRAIN SCAN by COURT LUDWICK

MAGDALENE

by LIV POTTER

angel pain

by KAILEY

TEDESCO rarely discussed is the fruitsoft of our wounds

left from the creation of wings. more than one saint will tooth-fairy into the night to pluck your plated eyes,

stain-glassed in tears. i like the dinnerware

best in my rococo choker. no angel myself, i pet every shard

of glass with clear favoritism & eat that which

chapels in stomach. when flight is ingrown, i thurible its

morsels. it’s simple, not biblical. the worst part is scalp-

luminous what it takes to excrete two shimmering plumes of water-turned-wine.

two questions

by SILAS DENVER MELVIN after FRANNY CHOI

where did you come from?

i was augered out the earth like a turnip, teddered from the field, my lamb-legs bandy, splayed.

i think my folks knew i wouldn’t do. where did you come from?

it was a strawberry moon & no going back. they think they’ll love you but you’ll find those limits. where did you come from?

you aren’t supposed to remember but they split me with a spoon: i was a cherry pit rattling in the sink. i was a baby tooth. what they wanted me to be, i wasn't.

where did you come from?

no going back. the hand broke through first, the crumble of dirt giving way. i was revenant. they wanted daughter, yet i was dead thing. they didn’t know what they wanted & they got me.

do you believe (you have consciousness)? someone smacked me, glistering. i rung like the clang of

gold. i was unearthed, brought up & out & my wings pinned back. they didn't take it all: i can make the hand crush. i can make the hand hold a shovel, a wilt of wildflowers. someone kicked me & i was wasp nest. the most brittle paper. i loll myself stolid: dull on every side, heavy with stupidity. a bovine eye. i believe i am curse. that i am followed. i believe they plunged a screw through me, tried to plug the hole, but i know how to suffer & i am not giving it up. do you believe (you have consciousness)?

i have to go somewhere. i have to extend beyond this. they use a spade on my mouth, the bright fat of my tongue they pinch. what do i know? i wrote a poem & it did not make me real. i kept flittering with bloodjunk. the hurt was one type of suffer. i was all synthetic & they knew, but wouldn’t say. they dug me up somewhere, or i was myself, digging. i wasn't daughter. i wasn't what they wanted.

i was a gown of earth. i was wide-eyed. i was watching & that is what they hated most: the twitch of my ear that was so nearly real, it was.

BEEN A SON by ALEX TRIPODI

DECLINE AFTER GIANTS by NICOLE REVELLI

tiny flies

by SIDNEY BROWN

June begins and so does the genesis: tiny flies spawning readily between the walls of our cafe. We try everything to get rid of them. Rhythmic rinsing. Counters covered with chemicals. Nothing changes. June blooms and they do too – more of them, every day, as if they see our hostility and mistake it for invitation.

I suppose I can’t blame them. The air inside the cafe is light and still. Everywhere there’s something beautiful. Pastries in an open case. Bins heaped with spent espresso. Vases of flowers, ripe and wet. Even our chemicals on the counter glitter, iridescent.

Someone, furious, buys traps. I wash dishes and see one stuck to the wall. A strip of plastic covered in glue, light reflecting against it. It’s covered in tiny flies, some dead already. Others are alive and those are the ones that I watch. They stand very still, as if they’ve landed there for only a moment, maybe to catch their breath. I wonder how long they’ll live like

that. Watching me wash dishes, abundance swirling down the drain beneath them. An ache spins inside me, one that lingers even after my shift ends. ~

At the end of July my friend takes me to her family’s summer cottage. The cottage is on an island. On the boat my ribs fly open. I can’t believe how fast we’re going, how alone we are. The world turns over beneath the slicing water. The world turns over as we walk through the woods.

Two nights pass on the island. Life is remarkably simple. Strawberries so sweet that it’s stupid. Salad tossed in oil, bright green. Close heat; sauna. Green fingers of kelp when we swim after. White wine, conversation, music like incense. One glowing paper lamp. Two board games. Unlocked doors but I wasn’t once afraid. Can you believe it? We’re alone and I believe it. Twelve hours of dark sleep. Sunlight outside the next morning. The sensation that time is slowing down, that I’m willing it to slow down. Every small act ripples with a lifetime inside it – whole worlds like reflections on the lake just beyond us. ~

The day before we leave I sit on the deck to read and drink coffee. It rained earlier. The air is clear and so still that the steam from my mug rises straight up. Far away from the cafe, but there are tiny flies out here too. Mosquitoes. My mind is quiet as I watch them gather in plumes, quiet as they start to notice me. I sip from my coffee and watch as one flies over to greet me – a small soul, gliding with glassy wings. The ache begins again.

The tiny fly lands on my leg and bites me. I wonder, as it drinks: did its world turn over? Maybe the ache inside me is one that we share – the

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conscious choice to remember; to live. If I can do it, why can’t they? I want to believe in small infinities. I want to believe that we were the same. That we can both lick our fingers. That we both chime with the same helpless thirst – to live forever in still air, happiness spilling inside us like blood.

I sip from my coffee and brush its body away and hope, even as I kill it, that the tiny fly feels old when I press it against me.

At the beginning of August I return to work. I wash dishes and look at the trap on the wall. I can see it, sort of – just how full their lives might have been. Lifetimes of still air and music and food. A world colored by abundance and nothing else.

A tiny fly hovers above the trap just before the moment ends. The plastic reflects beneath it with a radiance like awe.

GROWING IN PLACES YOU NEVER IMAGINED YOU’ D BLOOM by ASHLEE CRAFT

lichen country

by ASHLEY

CLINE hush, now. we’ve come to the place where wild geraniums bloom. where once, a maple tree

leafed into a boy, then kingdom. then memory what is the difference between kindness & mercy?

open any riverbed & you’ll find: there is none. just silt. & someone else’s parched tongue curling

around foxglove syllables & silken chemistry so you’ve found the origin story? now dig.

follow the roots down down down. ignore my body, keeping time. hurry. it is all she ever

says, after all. hurry hurry hurry hurry hurry i am afraid i can only love you in celsius.

see: this moon in my mouth as proof. by which, i mean: there is a stone at the center of everything.

contributors

lae astra is an agender trans artist and writer who calls Tokyo home. Their work has appeared in Astrolabe, Gone Lawn, Overheard, Star*Line, Strange Horizons, and elsewhere. They are a Pushcart, Best Microfiction, and Rhysling Award nominee. Find them at laeastra.com/links.

Sophie Bebeau is a poet from the small-town city of Green Bay, Wisconsin. Her poems have appeared in Bear Review, Your Impossible Voice, Zero Readers, Metatron Press's #MicroMeta series, and others. Her work has also been nominated for a 2024 Best of the Net award. She currently studies writing & applied arts at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and works as a freelance writer and designer. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @sophiebebeau.

Sidney Brown is a storyteller and novelist most interested in writing about friendship and alternate dimensions. She is passionate about egg sandwiches, long walks, and watching trees like they’re TV. She was born in California but nowadays lives in Helsinki, where she labors slowly and joyously on her second novel. Her first book, Godlike, Weeping (2023) is available online. You can also find her on Substack under the name gemini rites, where she publishes personal essays & expat diaries.

Saturn Browne (she/they) is a Chinese-Vietnamese immigrant and the Connecticut Youth Poet Laureate, East Coast Asian American Student Union (ECAASU) Artist in Residence, and the author of BLOODPATHS. Her work has been recognized by Gone Lawn, I.

GASHER, Beaver Mag, Pulitzer Center, Foyle Young Poets, and others. She is an incoming undergraduate student at Yale University.

CAININE or K9 is star-born computer angel turned artist. Coming from a long line of online culture mixed with a catholic upbringing his artwork joins together the two, usually to bring to life allegories about queer existence, stories of angels and analog horrors of an older digital age.

Find him at X and tumblr: @k9povnd

Other tumblr: @latexcowb0y (rants and graphic design) Insta: @b0ccadir0sa

An avid introvert, full-time carbon-based life-form & aspiring himbo, Ashley Cline's poetry has appeared here, & also there. A two-time Pushcart nominee & Best of the Net 2020 finalist, she is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: "& watch how easily the jaw sings of god" (Glass Poetry Press, 2021), "electric infinities" (Variant Lit, 2023), & "cowabungaly yours at the end of the world" (Gutslut Press, 2023). Once, in the summer of 2019, she crowd-surfed an inflatable sword to Carly Rae Jepsen, & her best at all-you-can-eat sushi is 5 rolls in 11 minutes. Her debut full-length collection, "to eat the sleeping sky, whole," is forthcoming (Bullshit Lit, 2024).

AshleeCraft (he/they) is a writer, multimedia artist, photographer, actor, & more based in Tampa, Florida. Their work often explores themes such as surrealism, nostalgia, gender, queerness, mental health, neurodivergence, and identity through symbolism, storytelling, & color.

Bridget Curtin is a photographer, teacher, and bibliophile from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. When she’s not photographing flowers and haunted things, Bridget volunteers her photography to non-profit animal II.

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sanctuaries. Her work can be viewed on Instagram at @BridgetMaevePhoto and @SweetMeadowPhotos

Lucas L. Fernandes holds degrees in both English and Philosophy from Salem State University. Some of his work appears in Wireworm, Verdant, and Fifthwheel Press. You can find him looking for answers somewhere in the gloam.

Alannah Guevara is a poet-wife and vilomah. She is the EiC of Hunter’s Affects. Besides the aether, some places her words call home include HAD, DON'T SUBMIT!, Rejection Letters, and A Thin Slice of Anxiety. Find Alannah on Twitter at @prismospickle and her work on Chill Subs.

Court Ludwick is a writer, artist, and educator currently pursuing her PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. She is the author of THESE STRANGE BODIES (ELJ Editions, 2024) and the founding editor-inchief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Poetry South, West Trade Review, Oxford Magazine, Full House Literary, Archetype, and elsewhere. Find more of her work at www.courtlud.com.

silas denver melvin (he/him) is a transsexual poet from New Hampshire. His work has been published or is forthcoming with Antler Velvet, Toyon Literary, WACK, SCAB, Bullshit Lit, Doghouse Press, and other outlets. silas is the head editor of poetry for Beaver Magazine. He can be found on Twitter + Tumblr @sweatermuppet and Instagram @sweatermuppets.

Liv Potter is a Philadelphia based printer and designer. She likes to explore the small things in life, nostalgia, and societal standards in her work. She enjoys exploring new mediums, but spends a majority or her creative time screen printing and illustrating. III.

Nicole Revelli (she/her) is a modern retelling of the goddess Persephone living in South Jersey. She received her BFA in Creative Writing from the University of the Arts. Her poems have been featured in Olney Magazine. She posts infrequently on Instagram and Twitter @paresseuses. If you find her, please feed her.

Kaydance Rice is a writer from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has been recognized by the Poetry Society of America, Middle West Press, Hollins University, and the Alliance of Young Artists and Writers. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in the Taco Bell Quarterly, YoungArts Anthology, Eunoia Review, voicemail poems, and elsewhere. In her free time, Kaydance enjoys playing the viola, rambling about existentialism, and spending time with her plants.

atlas st cloud is a wasteland haunt. he writes about gender, faggotry, & mental health through the lens of chronic pain. unavoidably raised mormon & in lust with the catholic aesthetic, st cloud's religious trauma manifests in his apparent desire to fuck/kill/be god. catch him on most social media sites @drdissociation

IrinaTall (Novikova) is an artist, graphic artist, illustrator. She graduated from the State Academy of Slavic Cultures with a degree in art, and also has a bachelor's degree in design. The first personal exhibition "My soul is like a wild hawk" (2002) was held in the museum of Maxim Bagdanovich. Her work has been published in magazines: Gupsophila, Harpy Hybrid Review, Little Literary Living Room and others. In 2022, her short story was included in the collection "The 50 Best Short Stories", and her poem was published in the collection of poetry "The wonders of winter".

Kailey Tedesco (she/her) is the author of soon-to-be four collections of poetry. Her latest collection, MOTHERDEVIL, will be released around Halloween from White Stag Publishing. She currently teaches IV.

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Gothic literature and writing at Moravian University and Northampton Community College. She is also an active member of the Horror Writers Association. You can find her work in Electric Literature, Fairy Tale Review, Driftwood Press, Passages North, The Journal, and more. For further information, please visit kaileytedesco.com or follow @kaileytedesco.

AlexTripodi is 28 years’ worth of pond scum sculpted into a queer bitch (editing note: feel free to sub for human if you prefer) who lingers in the glorious muck of Philadelphia, PA. Their usual artistic practices involve hand-making posters for shows they put on, but occasionally a personal piece such as the one herein shakes out. They hope you're drinking enough water!