BLEATING THING 02 - (Fall/Winter 2024)

ISSUE FALL/WINTER

2 2024

ISSUE

© November 2024

02

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Amy Jannotti

POETRY

Thalia Geiger

ESSAY HYBRID

EDITOR

MeeRee Orlandini

EDITOR 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 Mihai Pirlit.

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

bleatingthingmagazine.com @BLEATINGTHING

poetry 07/ 10/ 14/ 16/ 18/ 25/ 29/ 36/ 38/ 47/

In the beginning by Castle Yuran The Tygress by Reyzl Grace Fairy Tale by Para Vadhahong summer ‘24 by Ahana Chakrabarti How to Skin a Grape by Larissa Larson sanctimonious by K.M. Hanslik unweaving a halo by Divine Inyang Titus A Visit to My Grandmother in the Last Years of Her Life (Which I Do Not Want For Myself) by Lucia Finkelstein PALIMPSET: SKETCHES OF DESPAIR by Precious Chidera Harrison untitled by Castle Yuran

essays 21/ 32/ 42/

Polished Rocks by Crystal Taylor Amos by C.M. Green It’s Not About the Canyon by Tom Leveen

hybrid 03/ 12/ 28/

Grail, 2004 by Spencer Nitkey dark passion (i) & (ii) by Julia Biggs 10th Meditation on Sexual Futurism by p.e. garcia iii.

46/

The nights held promises by Sarah Nichols

visual art 09/ 15/

Upright/Upend by Heather Bowlan embrace by a.d. content warning(s): mild nudity

17/

Head in the Clouds by Greta LaLeike content warning(s): animal gore

20/ 23/

PAINTING 3143 by Claudio Parentela heart of the poet by a.d. content warning(s): mild nudity, gore

31/

matrimonio // sacrificio by a.d. content warning(s): mild nudity, knives

41/

Water Level by Adrian Acu Mother Remove This Cup From Me by Elena Sichrovsky, featuring Brecht

I. /

Contributor Bios

35/

iv.

in

meditation May this issue remind you (as these artists did us): for each dark night of the soul, there must also come morning.

Grail, 2004 by SPENCER NITKEY

Content warning(s): mentions of stroke, blood, hospital

Grail; or, alternatively, The Difference Between Missing Someone and Mourning Their Absence; or, Shattered Glass in Stained Blood Feet; or, a Meditation on Loss; or, Afterimages: Where Has He Gone, Where is He Going; or Suspected Death; or Please, Please, Please, Not Any More of This; or, Finding Strength; or, I am sorry but it all seems impossible, and I know others have done this before, lived through the thin air and found breathy heaven in the aether above, but I don't think I can, I really don’t, and I’ve spent a lot of time waiting for some vision of what the end of all of this looks like but it’s cracked glass every step forward for as long as I can see, and my feet are hurting so badly now I might have to start crawling soon, but then my hands will be in it, too, bleeding, and I can’t keep going on like this, it’s too hard, because the dawns sound like shattered vases, and the nights sound like shattered vases, and the midday overcast afternoons where the grief lodges shards in my flesh are unbearable, and did you know the body can’t dissolve glass, it just holds it, forms whatever kind of scars around it it can as the glass either moves deeper into you or farther out from you, and it doesn’t really change, ever, and that’s what this is like if I’m being honest, that’s what this is all like, and the worst of it is that I’m not the one going through the worst of it so if it feels this bad, this hard, this impossible, what, god 03

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what, must he be going through, and please, will it ever be better will it ever be better will it ever be better; 2004 Emmett Winter Olsen ceramic, blood, tea leaves and steam In this piece, a shattered teacup1 is hung from the ceiling in its exploded shape by thin nylon strings2, expanding for feet in each direction.

Looking closely, one can see flecks of blood dotting the plain white shards. Beneath the hanging, shattered glass3, a tea-bag’s worth of leaves form a small mound above a tight grate4. Three times a day5 water is

1

On an early Sunday morning, the artist hears a crash from the kitchen while in bed. He finds his father collapsed on the floor. He cuts his bare feet scrambling to call for an ambulance.

2 During his first day in the hospital, the artist gets a frustrated call from the luthier his father had asked to mend his cracked, classical guitar. It’s just taking up too much space, you need to come get it. In the hospital, his unconscious father sleeps, the horseshoe of staples across his head sparkling beneath the antiseptic white lights. The world cleaves away from him. He never picks it up.

3 The neurologist comes into the room. “Your father will certainly die. The stroke. It is like his head has been hit with a baseball bat. The swelling might never go down.”

4 The first three weeks in the hospital and time patinates and rusts into something unrecognizable. His father is awake and wants very much to scratch his head, but cannot, because he doesn’t understand that there is a healing wound where they took his skull from him so he would not die from the pressure of a swelling brain. He cannot understand language at all. Either the artist sits with him and catches his hand when it shoots for his head, or the nurses have to restrain him.

5 Once he is fully conscious, the physical, occupational, and speech therapists begin visiting him every day. Each of them gets his father for an hour. It is slow, grueling work, and it leaves the artist weeping in his car. They are helping his father’s body relearn itself, but the exercises make legible all he’s lost. They spend a week teaching him how to hold himself upright while seated for fifteen straight seconds, and point at a plastic fork when he hears the word fork spoken out loud.

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boiled beneath the grate, steam rises up6 through the tea leaves, and a fragrant vapor diffuses through the room. Look long enough and the steam begins to condense7 on the fragments of the once teacup. The light8 bounces off them in all directions, shimmering like a lawn bejeweled by dew in the early hours9. Installed in 2022, each day10 the gallery is open, tea leaves are replaced11 and the water that fills the heating grate beneath the sculpture is replaced12. At the end of the day13, 6

He stands for five seconds, wincing the entire time, and because the artist is in the room it is his job to adjust the cushions that lie beneath his father while the therapists have him upright. He moves quickly and when the session is done, he excuses himself and vomits in the bathroom.

7 The neurologist tells him his father cannot possibly understand language, given the extent of the damage, but the artist swears his father is following the conversation between him and his sister when he’s awake. He nods, he chuckles, he rolls his eyes, he smiles. The speech therapist pulls them aside after a session and gives them a pamphlet on aphasia. “Don’t listen to everything the doctor says. You never know what he’ll get back.” It’s meant to be a balm and it is until it curdles in the artist’s chest and the future spreads out like an unfinished porch, splintered and cracked after a rainstorm.

8 The artist’s first word as a child was light. His father loved telling the story, the weeks the artist spent pointing to every ceiling, at every glowing bulb and whispering “light.”

9 When his father is discharged from the hospital, he cannot walk, talk, stand, pee. He can laugh, watch football, roll his eyes at law and order, wince in pain, kiss the artist’s foreheads, and cry. He is transported to a new facility where he will receive three hours of therapy a day to begin to unfreeze his stultified body.

10 By now, the artist’s day job is making demands of him again. He has molded through all his sick time in the month his father was hospitalized. He wants to take his family medical leave, but the rehab facility tells him not to. He’ll need that when his father comes home, where, despite, they assure him, of the tremendous progress he is making, he will need 24/7 care, likely for the rest of his life.

11 He takes a picture of every doctor and nurse’s name placard so he has a record of them. In a month and a half he has over 100 pictures saved on an album in his phone. He’s grateful for them, but he hates them, too.

12 The artist that found his father is someone else, now, a doppelganger in his old skin. He does not enjoy his replacement. He is angry often. He is forgetful.

13 He eats too little during the day and too much at night. He smokes weed anytime he is not in the hospital and falls asleep with the T.V. playing old 05

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exactly one minute14 before the gallery is closed, the soggy tea leaves are scraped from the grate and thrown out. This delicate15 exchange that begins16 and ends17 each day—done by a worker or intern or sometimes, when too many people have called out sick or flown home for the week between Christmas and New Years and even this city is a little quiet, just a little, the artist himself—is as vital to the artwork as the shards strung like lightning, or this plaque. It is an effort, the artist whispers each morning. It is a prayer18 19.

westerns. He is failing to become the kind of person who can survive this, and he feels his failure condense and wick from him. Balmy, awful, ruinous.

14 Time sandpapers over him.

15 His father holds his cheek in the soft light of morning. The wailing in the rooms next to his have quieted for a moment. There is a language in his tryingeyes, but it will not come today. The artist resists the urge to speak, to fill the silence with something. In the room emptied of noise, his father wordlessly tells him he loves him.

16 It is enough.

17 It is far too much.

18 Our father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done.

On Earth as it is in heaven.

19 It is his, this life, this father who held him on his shoulders once, so he could touch the light, the sky, tomorrow. It is his. His to own, to hold, to mourn, to move, to wish, to live, to end one day. He touches his father’s face and touches their foreheads lightly together. This is your body. This is mine. Forever and ever. Amen.

06

In the beginning by CASTLE YURAN

there was a single stoke, a thrust of iron arrow, and the cosmos cracked open like a skull Our menagerie of fire and dust spilled out—scattered—a poem on a page, a flickering grid of ember verse scrawled in light across the fabric sky, the history of our folded universe— a song that outlasts even the shake and sputter of fitful red giants.

Do you know we, too, are made of letters?

Do you know our bodies spell connection?

Do you know the ghost of dead light on your dying skin, too, sings the word?

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It whitely reaches out from a cosmic potter’s field, returning matter to matter: the jut of your cheekbone, the dip of your palm, the bowl between your neck and collarbone.

We are made of everything, and everything of us; party tinsel waving in a doorway, a rusted wire fan churning its last.

And in the beginning, how could we have known what great majesty would endure?

Only the flitting of atoms, the bursting of stars.

We are a song that sustains like the fluting thrush, spiraling in a downward fractal evermore.

08

by

UPRIGHT/UPEND HEATHER BOWLAN

The

Tygress by

REYZL GRACE

— for E. R. Shaffer

BLEATING

THING

When you put me in the tiger / lingerie, twist / the embroidered sinews of its lace / heart to fit my breasts, / I am thinking of snowdrops, / St. Brigid draped / in newborn lambs. // It was then, at the start of spring . . . / You lay on the sheets / with moonlight in your lap / like milk and me— a kitten / with rough tongue asking / the power to become a tigress / as my claws dug deeper // till you moaned and wept / with nails in my shoulders like star- / thrown spears.

I have thought / of this every day / when your fingers trace my back / like the calligrapher’s brush, / stripe me in teasing henna. // I saw the work of a master, / once—the text of the “Naad / e Ali” scribed in the shape / of a tiger—but I could not read / it then. I didn’t know how / one could bring about / the extraordinary.

I didn’t // know how worries and sorrows / disappear, how God’s word / forms all things / by framing. You kiss me and tug / the lace to my hips— not / to cover what I was, / but to reveal what I’ve become.

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DARK

PASSION (I) & (II)

by JULIA BIGGS

Fairy Tale by PARA VADHAHONG

I want the light to hit me, but only softly.

I sing in fragments when the center of their songs fails to hold. Before I could master any tongue, I stuttered in gusts of salt, carrying a childish hope of slipping into mermaid fins. The only beauty I can claim for myself is one returned from water, where fathoms ripple into nothing beneath the imaginary castle’s floorboards.

You obey nothing except time, the downward tugging of fairy tales after the fact of true love.

We now live in cities where weather does not placate its residents.

I picture you driving past blue mountains, wrapping the fog as uniform before entering a building where you obey the contract of mortal hours.

The ocean seeps into my letters, foam begging to be released by the merest chances of transformation.

I am trying, in my own war against truth, to reach you.

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EMBRACE

by A.D.

summer ‘24 by AHANA CHAKRABARTI

Content warning(s): blood, animal death

may ends & i walk into the lake stare at the powerlines lovely aren’t they at this time of year no punctuation marks we die like children at the end of ring-a-ring-a-rosie with lychee seeds in our pockets otherwise empty with slanted sunlight very few things explain my existence like parentheses & em dashes with nothing in between or after before i existed nothing did unlike the bruise-soft growing in the space between your lips tongues rolling between milk teeth when does language stop mothering my phone ringing in the next room is the only creature that answers sometimes in bed i am proud of how i resemble a gut hook limbs splayed newly dead lamb blood rinsed & washed & wrung out into cherry seeds hooves spread out for the grass to see & in turn eat all our lives we have been softly waiting for the inevitable flies

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HEAD by

IN THE CLOUDS GRETA LALEIKE

How to Skin a Grape by LARISSA LARSON

Content warning(s): grooming

Pluck the brightest ruby from her tether. If she loses any skin to the vital vine, throw her away: an imperfect one is not worth your time. Next, remove her protective layer, bring her close to your lips: Hot breath is best for breaking down barriers. Find her wound. The one that held her purpose: the stem. Place her fresh crusted scab on the ridge of your two front teeth. Begin to burrow, tuck enamel under 18

immediate distance.

BLEATING

THING

dermis. Do not prematurely penetrate, this will diminish her worth and your overall experience. Instead, you will start to see her true pigments: kissed with deep purple pools, curved with crimson cells. Once your teeth have torn a large sheer sheet, use the tip of your tongue to lift and rip. Her rind can be bitter and unappetizing. Feel free to spit her out. See how you can see through her body, how she is rivered with hoary veins, throbbing. Remember she asked for this. Eliminate as much of her shell as possible. There may be remnants of rosy tissue to detach carefully, shear with tooth or nail. After her skin is completely peeled, hold the neon globe up to the light, watch her shine as you sink incisors into her lush body. Savor each tender bite teeming with ripe juices. Consume her.

Repeat.

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by

PAINTING 3143 CLAUDIO PARENTELA

Polished Rocks by CRYSTAL TAYLOR

Content warning(s): child & kitten abuse

Mama Kitty painted the back porch when she gave birth that year. Her babies, solid black, kneaded her belly with buttery paw pads and sealed eyes. They were missing the sleepy, round middles, customary of kittens. Grandma’s old poodle mix, Mimi, rolled over, offering her underbelly for the kittens to nurse. That was when I learned Mama Kitty had no milk, and neither did Mimi. A lanky seven-year-old, there was a lot I didn’t know, and few people around to notice.

At supper, I told Mom and Dad, “Something’s wrong with Mama Kitty and the babies. They’re skinny and Mama Kitty can’t feed them. I think they’re going to die.”

“Well, that’s the way of the natural world,” Dad said. Mom nodded in agreement, then they droned on about work, as usual. The next few mornings, I held the kittens, one by one, salting their fur with my cheeks, until the brakes of the school bus screeched to a stop, and again after school, when I finished my chores. Their bodies grew more emaciated by the day, until they barely mustered a mew. I knew they didn’t have long.

My eyes were so swollen and only halfway open from so much crying over the last several days. I was also lying awake at night thinking how hungry the kitties must be, and whether they would still be alive in

the morning. My friend, Lori, who wore her blond hair in a side ponytail, asked me why I looked so sad, on the ride to school. I told her.

“Oh, that happened to us. Me and my mom. We used a dropper to feed them,” she said.

“Did that save them?”

“Yep! We have rescued a lot of cats and it happened twice.”

“That’s nice you do that together. I’ll try the dropper when I get home,” I said with a weak smile.

I watched the clock all day thinking maybe, just maybe, there was a dropper somewhere in that kitchen drawer, buried so deep that I’d just never seen it. I knew nothing had ever been nurtured in that house but wanted desperately to believe. When school let out and the bus stopped, I sprinted across the street, jammed my key in the lock and left the door ajar. I ransacked the kitchen junk drawer in desperation. I rummaged and dug and sliced my hand on the turkey carver and a rusty ice pick. I rediscovered everything we ever had, but a dropper.

When I raced to the back porch, the kitties’ birth-stained home, their eyes were half open. Flies buzzed about and soon the kittens’ slow blinking stopped.

That evening, my scrawny body barely bore the weight of the shovel I used to bury the kittens one by one. In a solitary ceremony, I marked their graves with makeshift crosses from taped popsicle sticks, and crafted nameless headstones from my polished rock collection, even the purple one. I tasted sweat from the splintering world, with dirt on my knees and under my nails.

Exhausted and sick from the heat, I left the shovel in the field to haul back and clean in the cool of the morning. I didn’t care if I got in trouble. I dragged my sneakers, like cinder blocks, home on a walk that felt like years. The next morning, I retrieved the shovel from the field’s dewy growth. I hosed it down, but the water never ran clear.

HEART

OF

THE by

POET A.D.

sanctimonious by K.M. HANSLIK

Behind the junkyard where I used to wish myself away—the child’s heart you kept buried beneath steel, & me calling it stupid, saying this is where things go to forget themselves, but you kept believing we’re one far-flung miracle from heaven, & I, as wingless as ever, wanting to believe you.

The phone rang off the hook to the edge of a cliff where I I felt my body melt into a sunset of afterwords—like

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when you said you’d keep track of us & I said sorry, I keep forgetting the days you meant “keep” like a fossil record, like closing a fist of limestone around Sundays you should have spent in church, and my pendulum heart free-swinging, the word finite crashing through the wall of it when I heard. I wish Jesus didn’t die for us. His piety is a honey-beckoned prison; we’re suffocating in forgiveness.

Days that I pray are the most blasphemous, on my knees screaming that God is rich in blood diamonds & His son is a nepo baby.

I want to call and tell you: God is a bad liar and Jesus still loves you—but of course you know this already. I think of you / in the junkyard / I think of you in the graveyard, slipping your heart inside that too-forgiving soil and

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I think of bodies of steel, bodies of flesh, all lost / in that darkness of sanctity—Jesus’ face backlit against the clouds, palms opening towards me like begging for spare change.

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10TH

MEDITATION

ON

SEXUAL FUTURISM

by P.E. GARCIA

unweaving a halo by DIVINE INYANG TITUS

& yet, maize grows well, even in a hateful farm. what I mean is, love doesn't really bolster or hinder the sun.

I talked all day, gently, to a pot of daffodils and yet it didn't grow a feather. & when I barked at a finger of okra, it didn't wilt.

I thought, the rains, as God's tears will judge — & yet they fell soothingly too on the garden of the man who stole my father's breath. they even say he swipes his cutlass like murder & sneers at every warm greeting.

I guess what he means is his sunshine is many shades darker than the doodle of a child, learning the ways of the crayon. & yet, his yard is full of ears of corn gushing oxygen: what I mean is 29

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love is not water, or chlorophyll — love is only love & sometimes over-deified. did you not see how I held that pretty rosebush so dearly long after I knew it bled for other? & yet did I become Jesus?

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MATRIMONIO //

SACRIFICIO

by A.D.

Amos by C.M. GREEN

Content warning(s): discussions of suicide & self-harm

Amos Green drowned in a lake. Louella, his young wife, had died of the influenza months earlier, leaving Amos with two boys, James and Bob, aged three years and six months respectively. It was 1929 and Amos had the land from Mama Jesse but things were hard.

So Amos Green drowned in a lake. Unsaid, but implied, when I was told the story: Amos Green drowned himself in a lake. Grief overcame him, hardship overcame him, the water overcame him.

Louella was gone and the boys were young and Amos couldn’t bear it, so he took to the lake and the lake took him.

This left the two boys in the care of Mama Jesse, orphaned before they could talk, raised by their grandmother out on the Home Place. Bob didn’t like to talk about it much, at least not to his grandchildren, not seventy years later. When I would visit him in Texas in the 2000s and 2010s, I would flip through the family history and linger over Amos and Louella’s portraits, like two movie stars, and wonder what it felt like to die underwater. ***

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I wrote a poem recently about learning lessons from suicidal men in fiction and music: Would I desire death if I had never met Hamlet, and would that desire threaten me if I ignored Patrick, or does the body know without instruction what it needs to silence the predation of circular thought?

And this has been bothering me recently. Is the notion of selfharm inherent or learned? If I didn’t know that depressed people used knives on themselves, would I still have the urge to do so? If I didn’t know that so many trans people attempted suicide, would I still think about it so much? If I hadn’t been told that bipolar put me at higher risk, would that risk be as real?

If Amos didn’t drown himself, would I feel it like destiny?

But maybe depression doesn’t need to learn lessons. Maybe it’s instinctual. *** In mid-March I sat on my bed feeling more suicidal than I ever had in my life. It was different than anything that had come before, because I was so calm. I faced my death with equanimity. I was not histrionic and I was not particularly afraid. I just knew that I would die in the next several days, at my own hand.

I waited, though, in case it might pass. It didn’t, but my fear increased, horror at what this meant, and I called my psychiatrist and found a way to stay alive. But I was left wondering why death was the answer. I couldn’t stop thinking about Hamlet and how he wanted it, too, that consummation devoutly to be wished.

Now that I’m stable again, it’s frightening to remember how close I came—and to know that with only a small alteration in my brain chemistry, it could happen again. When I’m not in the midst of a bipolar episode, sometimes I forget that I’m sick, or feel as though my claim to

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sickness is weak. I am just a reproduction of madness and sanity, alternating, one giving in to the other. *** Amos Green drowned in a lake. I always understood this to be suicide. We all did, my father, my grandmother, my siblings. Possibly even Bob thought this. But two years ago my brother-in-law, fond of genealogical digging, unearthed an article in the Goldthwaite Eagle that revealed a different truth.

When Amos drowned, he was with friends and family, a crowd at Pecan Bayou near Mullin. He was swimming with a child on his back when his heart gave out. The crowd rescued the child, but it was too late for Amos.

When I used to imagine his final moments, I imagined solitude, a desperate depression, alone, out in the water. But Amos didn’t die alone. He didn’t drown himself. It was a false memory, reproduced by silence and inference.

If there’s a lesson to be learned here, I don’t know what it is.

What was true is not true anymore. In moments when I wished to die, I would sometimes think about Amos, who had more reason than I to end things. I felt connected to him, a man I never knew, a man that no one I knew ever knew.

But he died surrounded by people who loved him. He died at play. He was twenty-five, which is now my age. He had lost his wife three months earlier. He did not kill himself. Neither did I.

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by

WATER LEVEL ADRIAN ACU

LUCIA FINKLESTEIN

by

A Visit to My Grandmother in the Last Years of Her Life (which I Do Not Want for Myself)

37

Smells of citrus and rosemary tickle our nostrils and I stifle a yawn.

On the drive home, we are quiet.

Passing the highway graveyards I do not hold my breath this time.

When I kiss her goodbye, it is once, twice, on the top of her silver head.

The door clicks shut as she is staring out the window now draped in golden sunset.

THING

It rained at dawn this morning. The cracks and divots in the sidewalk below her Queens assisted living facility evoke the veins of her silk-spun flesh.

Why do we correct our errors?

Our timid stutters of uncertainty? Our misreadings?

The books I got my aunts this Christmas from the campus store The night before flying home on the red-eye.

We are reading poems aloud— Alternating between Cummings and Neruda.

BLEATING

PALIMPSET: SKETCHES OF DESPAIR by

PRECIOUS CHIDERA HARRISON

— after Ernest Okia

II I waited for these memories to drown in the muffled moan of rainfall.

My heart, a mouth stuffed with feathers. & every memory here, a portrait easily submerged in water.

Some float away gently on the waves, drifting off, blurring out in the seamist.

Others flotsam shoreward, flouncing like tiny boats. & submerged, many sink & form reefs in the sea.

I No matter how far up a stone is thrown, it will not pluck a star.

Say the night sky is a skin. A skin folded inside the memory of a scar. & the stars wounds bleeding light.

Say the night is a scar. Say the morning, an eyebrow bleeding water.

BLEATING

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THING

III I waited for a morning raining magnolias.

I stood, staring into the bleak distance, a morning foggy with blue mist.

I begin by unlearning the language of silence, by learning different ways to be loud, by loosening the noose around my heart.

There is a dog waiting inside the drawer of my heart . . .

I begin by accepting that it is very human to die & be remembered only for our wrongs.

That our bodies, even with all the kindness & love we are capable of, will certainly fall back to earth.

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02

Note: The Dore (which in Urdu, means line, cord, rope, or thread) is a poetic form created

by Sanam Sheriff. Following its parameters, the first and last lines split a quote by someone the poet considers to be a part of their lineage.

MOTHER

REMOVE by

THIS CUP FROM ME ELENA SICHROVSKY featuring BRECHT

It’s Not About the Canyon by TOM LEVEEN

I’m standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon considering a lifetime of promises about its grandeur, its epic scale, this colossal landmark that was sure to take my breath away.

I am 25. Brilliant red, white, and brown stripes across the canyon dim to blue by atmospheric perspective. I take and hold a deep breath, release it, light a Winston.

And think: Is this it?

Wind ripples my Social Distortion tee, warm wind that does little to chill the sweat lining my forehead under my cap. The heat here is no joke. A few summers ago, on the afternoon of the Fourth of July, some of the guys I’m standing with now and I went downhilling on our skateboards on a residential road. We discovered it was so hot, we could scrape up the blacktop with our fingers.

So we went swimming instead. We were young enough back then to think we could fend off the heat with Super Big Gulps. We know better now. And we’re lucky to still be alive.

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Rod, Michael, Joel, and Jason squint at the massive hole in the ground. No one speaks. Someone spits. Spitting is the ultimate renegade move in this state. It’s a defiant act against the hellish sun.

We’ll grow out of it eventually.

I have lived in Arizona—in Metro Phoenix, the middle of the state, specifically—my entire life and only at this moment have I gotten around to coming to see the Grand Canyon. Now that I’m here, given the long drive, the heat, the cramped quarters of our van…the awe of the canyon vanishes.

I’d’ve gotten the same thrill from a photograph.

The Grand Canyon is big. It is pretty. And that is it. The breathtakingness of it lasted all of thirty seconds.

I’d rather be back at Papago Park with these guys, which sits at the intersection of the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, and Tempe. Papago is a reverse oasis: a stretch of relatively pristine Sonoran Desert in the middle of a sprawling metropolis of five million people. Five million people, ensconced all day and night within glass and steel high-rises, enjoying planet-warming levels of air conditioning. (In Phoenix, you must bring a shrug or wrap to Starbucks or Harkins Cinemas, because otherwise you risk indoor hypothermia in the summer.)

There is more to do at Papago. The Phoenix Zoo is there, and the Botanical Garden. There is Hole in the Rock, the unimaginative name for the tall hill with the hole running through the middle of it. There’s Governor Hunt’s tomb, a white pyramid that rises from the tan ground like an alien tooth, an odd sepulcher.

I can imagine Hunt’s temper tantrum. “I wanna pyramid! Next to the zoo!”

Typical tone for an Arizonan.

Arizona needs to grow the hell up. Our political stance is best described as arms folded, lips pouting. Arizona is the youngest state in the continental union, and we act like it. We think we’re out to tame the wild west when it comes to our social and justice systems, even though most of our politicians were not born here. In fact, most our citizenry was not born here. They come from all over and bring their driving 43

ISSUE

02

habits with them. This makes for an interesting situation on the freeways that surround Phoenix and its sister towns in one long, pale ouroboros: the 101, 202, and 303. Deathtraps, all.

I spent endless hours at Papago as a teen with my best friends from high school, who are now lined up alongside me looking out at the Canyon. We played Flashlight Wars: poor man’s laser tag. We climbed the hill in the middle of the park and smoked and spat and talked shit.

We launched water balloons at each other with a two-man slingshot. We got detained by park rangers and searched and sent home.

Sometimes, we just sat and inhaled the desert.

The aroma of creosote bushes after rainfall is unequalled on Earth.

Petrichor, it’s called. Sitting atop that central hill in Papago Park, the intoxicating scent drifts through your nose and down your throat as if tangible. It’s the Sonoran’s way of apologizing for its myriad ways of trying to kill you: no water, deadly heat, scorpion stings, rattlesnake bites, Republican legislatures…

The Grand Canyon offers no such aroma today. It only sits, empty, trying to demand respect it did nothing to earn…which is pretty characteristic of the entire state. We are the same way, expecting to be treated like a New York or a Los Angeles with no demonstrable claim as to why we ought to be included in their exclusive clubs.

We got a big hole! Arizona says. What makes you so special?!

And New York’s like, Oh, sweet summer child…

(Further away, I can hear Damascus responding to us both: Bitch, please.)

I look at my friends lined up against the chrome railing that is meant to keep us from falling to our doom. Are they any more impressed than I am? They don’t look it. I do, however, notice something else, perhaps the one thing that keeps me here in this godforsaken heat and the omnipresent risk of death by 101 Freeway.

They have the same expressions I’ve seen at Papago Park when we gather for our youthful hijinks.

It’s not about the canyon.

It’s about who you’re with at the canyon.

44

BLEATING

THING

It’s not about Papago, or the politics, or the deadly wildlife, or even the aromatic joy of creosote.

I love it here because they are here. We are here.

“It’s fuckin’ hot,” Rod says.

We all grumble our agreement and go into the café where it’s cool.

Together.

45

THE

NIGHTS HELD PROMISES

by SARAH NICHOLS

untitled. by CASTLE YURAN

Darling, listen closely enough, quietly enough, and you can hear the endings of things. Entropy has a sound, a thrum like cold air blown through a keyhole: a diminuendo stretched thin, then thinner, till it is only an echo of an echo.

I’ve heard it in the autumn fields, in the turning of youth, in moments with lovers who would not stay.

It finds a home in us, asks that we might let it live, even as we stare into the blemished eyes of our parents and wonder if today is final, or if we still have tomorrow.

47

contributors Adrian Acu is a teacher and photographer living in Oakland, CA. His work has appeared in Boulevard Magazine, Boyfriend Village and MQR Mixtape. His photography can be seen on Instagram at @Adrian.Acu, and his website, www.adrianacu.com, is forever in progress. a.d. is drawn to the sacred, the profane, the mysterious and the mythological, which provides inspiration for her work. She is an emerging bisexual poet and visual artist, and her poetry is published or forthcoming in Querencia Press, Midnight Fawn Review, THINK, Ode to Dionysus, Swim Press, Poetry as Promised and Sublimation, among others. Meanwhile, her visual art, mainly photography and selfportraiture, is or will be featured in Small World City, SCAB, RESURRECTION Magazine and Antler Velvet.

Tumblr & Twitter: @godstained Julia Biggs is a poet, writer and freelance art historian. She lives in Cambridge, UK. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Osmosis Press, Ink Sweat & Tears, Streetcake Magazine, RIC Journal, Black Bough Poetry, Annie Journal, Green Ink Poetry and elsewhere. Find her on Twitter/X @Chiaroscuro1897 Heather Bowlan is a writer, mixed-media and collage artist, and community organizer. She is co-director of Philadelphia Small Works Gallery, a space for people who build community through work that reveals our obsessions, resists oppression, and celebrates our complex connections. Her poetry and criticism have been published in

the Anarchist Review of Books, the anthology Feminisms in Motion, New Ohio Review, Interim, and elsewhere. Heather's collection of self-erasures and collaborative poems, Highlights & Blackouts, was published by _mixlit press in 2023.

Ahana Chakrabarti is a high school student from India and a member of the English Editorial Board of her school. Her work has previously been published in The Shore and Broken Antler Magazine.

Lucia Finkelstein is a young writer born and raised in Brooklyn, NYC. She mostly works in the short story form but writes a poem every once in a while. One day she hopes to start a literary magazine of her own! p.e. garcia is a writer in Philadelphia. Their work has appeared in POETRY, Prairie Schooner, the Rumpus, and more. Find more of their writing at avantgarcia.com Reyzl Grace is an Ashkenazi Russian American writer, librarian, and translator working in English, Yiddish, and Russian. A past Pushcart nominee and contributor to Room, Rust & Moth, So to Speak, and other periodicals, she is also a current poetry editor for Psaltery & Lyre and an incorrigible lesbian. Originally from Alaska, she now lives in Minneapolis with her novelist girlfriend, arguing over which of them is the better writer. (It’s her girlfriend.) Find more of her at reyzlgrace.com and on social media @reyzlgrace.

C.M. Green is a Boston-based writer with a focus on history, memory, gender, and religion. Their work has appeared in beestung, Full House Literary, and elsewhere, and their debut chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is forthcoming with fifth wheel press in 2025. You can find their work at cmgreenwrites.com.

K.M. Hanslik is a Midwestern writer who currently works with The Turning Leaf Journal and was recently nominated for “Best of the Net.” I.

Their most recent publications can be found in Corvid Queen (forthcoming 2024) and 3Elements Literary Review. You can probably find them out hiking the woods somewhere, or ruminating on Twitter/X (@kmhanslik).

Precious Chidera Harrison, a poet and artist born and raised in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He won the maiden edition of the Pawners Paper Contest (Poetry Category). He was shortlisted for the 2024 edition of the Chukwuemeka Akachi Prize for Literature. He was an honorable mention in the inaugural Rhonda Gail Williford Prize, 2023. His debut manuscript was longlisted for the Arting Arena Poetry Chapbook Manuscript Prize, 2023. He has works published in Brittle Paper, FERAL Journal, IHRAM Publishes, Swim Press, and SprinNG. Greta LaLeike is a Graphic Designer and Illustrator based in Brooklyn, New York. She currently works full-time in Empire Design’s New York office designing movie posters. In her spare time, you can find her reading whatever she can get her hands on (whether that’s nonfiction, graphic novels, or the back of a cereal box) or working on her personal illustrations. With her preferred mediums of graphite and gouache, Greta likes to thematically explore the concept of intimacy. Often pulling the viewer in closer through her use of scale and subject, her artwork asks how intimacy exists romantically, platonically, and personally.

Larissa Larson (she/they) is a queer poet who lives in Minneapolis and recently received their MFA in Creative Writing. They have served on the editorial board of award-winning literary journals such as Water~Stone Review, RunestoneLiterary Journal, and The Briar Cliff Review.

Larissa works at a used bookstore, explores the many lakes with their partner, and watches scary movies with their cats, Athena and Midas.

Their poems have appeared in The Best of Kelp Journal, Cool Beans Lit, Anodyne Magazine, Discretionary Love and forthcoming in Great Lakes Review.

II.

Tom Leveen is an award-winning novelist with nine books out originally with imprints of Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Abrams, and Sky Horse. He has also written for the comic book Spawn for Image Comics, and fiction for the BattleTech TTRPG for Topps, Inc. Sarah Nichols lives and writes in Connecticut. She is the author of eleven chapbooks, including These Violent Delights (Grey Book Press, 2022), and Press Play for Heartbreak (Paper Nautilus Press, 2021.) Her work has also appeared in the Final Girl Anthology (Porkbelly Press, 2024), Unlost Journal, and Action, Spectacle.

Spencer Nitkey is a writer, researcher, and educator living in Philadelphia. He was a finalist for the 2023 Eugie Foster Memorial Award for Short Fiction, and has been nominated for Best Small Fictions, a Pushcart, and a Rhysling Award. His work has appeared in Apex Magazine, Diabolical Plots, Weird Horror, Cream Scene Carnival, manywor(l)ds, Paranoid Tree, and others. You can find more of his writing on his website, spencernitkey.com.

Claudio Parentela is an illustrator, painter, photographer, mail artist, digital artist, cartoonist, collagist, journalist freelance... Active since many years in the international underground scene.

During the 1999 he was guest of the BREAK 21 FESTIVAL in Ljubliana(Slovenja)... ...His obscure & crazy artworks are present & shown in many, many art galleries in the endless web & in the real world too...

Elena Sichrovsky (she/they) is a queer disabled writer and photographer who likes to explore the Venn diagram between body horror and religious trauma. Her work has been published in Apparition Lit, Baffling Magazine, Nightmare, and ergot, among others. Follow them on IG @elenitasich / X @ESichr.

III.

Crystal Taylor (she/her) is a disabled Latina writer and poet from Texas. She is a homebody who loves her dogs: Bunny and Mr. Pie. Her cat, Caroline, keeps everyone in line. Crystal’s work lives in Maudlin House, Book of Matches, Anti-heroin Chic, and other sacred spaces. She is a 2025 Best of the Net nominee. Someday, she will build a website. For now, you can find her on BSky and Twitter/X @CrystalTaylorSA, and Instagram @cj_taylor_writes.

Divine Inyang Titus is an assistant editor at Afapinen and author of the chapbook A Beautiful Place to Be Born. He is the recipient of the 2024 Toyin Falola Prize and joint winner of the 2023 Brigitte Poirson Literature Prize for Fiction. A past winner of the STCW Future Folklore Climate Fiction Contest, his work has been published in Brittle Paper, Lumiere Review, The Ex-Puritan Magazine, and Olney Magazine, among others.

Para Vadhahong is a Thai American writer whose poetry and fiction are published in Kingdoms in the Wild, Hyacinth Review, Lover's Eye Press, INKSOUNDS, Ice Lolly Review, fifth wheel press, HaluHalo Journal, DVAN, Sine Theta, Honey Literary, and others. They are the winner of Salt Hill Journal's Arthur Flowers Flash Fiction Prize (2022), the Lex Allen Literary Festival's Fiction Prize (2023), Hollins University’s Nancy Thorp Prize for Best Poem in Cargoes (2023), and Palette Poetry's Sappho Prize for Women Poets (2023). You can read their work at paravadhahong.weebly.com.

Castle Yuran is a writer of poetry and fiction. She loves all things horror, supernatural, and true crime. Her favorite pastimes include aimless adventures throughout the New England countryside and spending time curled up with her cats. Castle holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Goddard College in Vermont, and she currently works as an Academic Coach and Instructor at Quinnipiac University in Connecticut.

V. IV.