I Have Kieran Orndorff

You keep talking like you haven’t been here before Time and touch raptured in the brilliance of an atomic flash Talking like you’re not scared to die Will I find you in the garden, drying the blood peeking from your pores Look up and stay tight I have a part that wasn’t made for woman Designed by my mother under false pretenses of holy union and a blond fucker I have a joke about God and time When a million years zip in a blink, patience is removed of virtue Love the attention but in a fantastic frenzy surrender the punch line Each hair numbered but someone plucks them out; is it God or the Devil You keep talking like you caught me in a lie Bashful with a sprinkle of white across the peaks of each sentence Talking like we can cure it if we bleed it dry Don’t think my lights are off, although the lamp is broken Are dreams the reality or just a flash of figurative lightning

Forsaken.

Urja Shah

Could you weave through the ebbs of vowels and flows of consonants gushing from my lips to burn my face with the warmth of your own?

To lie down with you in the bath, the arms of my lover. For the water beneath us to turn into glistening rivers and gently float us into the oceans as your fingers feel their way through the rifts of my own. Yet as the sun shines brighter I must realize that your arms were never really yours but instead were sensations of currents on my skin. I had been in love, overcome by the profound sense that I had lived. Yet as currents slashed my skin, I felt sick.

How could you take me for a fool, the ditsy little fool.

Now I cry for the little girl; plastic slides in the scorching heat.

I see her untainted.

If I held the knife to my heart, my aching heart, she would bleed red. But would you hold her, hold her, and cry for her.

For what you did to her. How can I look into the eyes of my mother and see the end of the girl. Ironic.

Over in Intoxication

Anon Baisch

Fragile cuts of sound over the binary city :: landscapes rotting and surrounded by bowed heads disappearing in :: the intoxication of false haloes :: the featureless whiteness :: it doesn’t matter how deeply it is etched in since we don’t understand the definition of smiles :: the broken crowds walking in coincident clusters :: no one is waiting for gray fingerprints :: but they are losing their bodies :: faces hiding in blind rooms without the softness for imprint :: we are running into invisible and never touching :: the deadening will continually be forgotten until the next one

Nine Lives

(nine pieces of Japanese jisei poetry)

Ezra Sun

I. Within the white daisies

I float, tears waiting to fall over distant seas.

II. Leaves on the forest floor. Every whisper kneaded into soft-brown dirt.

III.

Head beneath water as stars lace the quivering surface. So I ascend.

IV. Ink strokes in feral patterns—my pages, unfurling, reaches its epilogue.

V. Marinate me in sweet sake; let the fat render off my bones.

VI. Let life thaw my arctic soul for just a little longer.

VII. The roots of my body: growing bitter towards gnawed corkscrew ends.

VIII. I came bare-assed into this world, and I shall leave it nude as well.

IX. Now the smog looms over a dissolved me, a lone puff of summer smoke.

Tell Me About Nothing

Maya Jacyszyn

I promise that someone will tell you they want to fuck, write, and frolic with you, spend the rest of their life with you. Perhaps, maybe even a few people, depending on where you’ve pitched your tent.

As any stray dog will tell you, I never thought I would find home, a love kettle-warm and hissing, as are tickles behind my ear from rose-hip lips pursed to kiss, bite a bit.

My love, if you are of the breed that carries a black trash bag behind you, full of chalked hearts—broken and beaten—from all your past lives and parents’ failures, I hear you. I know you’re older and can’t handle one more disappointment.

There is no reason for you to trust me, but trust this.

Mother nature sings her sad song every day, when chicklings fail to hatch and grandparents die, but I remember watching the news after Hurricane Katrina, and there was no more New Orleans, just splintered wood and calloused spirits.

Tell me about nothing. How you lost everything and now have nothing. What is nothing like? says every bouncing reporter.

And that grizzly woman stood on her blended house under the open sky whose berry face never swells after tear fall and heartbreak. Her wrinkles tumble dried, she spoke of many houses before this one, all with the same wrecked fate.

But she and her little dog hid in the hall bathroom every time, nuzzled in the sage-colored tub on a wiry box-spring twin, and into the blender they went; and then, the woman woke up on a bed of jagged wood and chaos, calling out for Bessie whose answer was nothing.

Terrible, but how does nothing make you feel? What do you think of all this nothing?

Can you grasp that this is your neighborhood, this nothing?

“Well, that’s life,” her wisdom strikes, filling that black trash bag once more, and still, after seventy years it never seems to get full. “But I’m alright—” until she was interrupted by chants of “dog, dog, dog!” Mixed in the shreddings and shrapnels was a furrowed face, wiggling out of the debris.

“Bessie, oh Bessie,” the woman crawled on her knees, digging through rusted pipes and couch cushions until she held home in her hands. “I thought God didn’t answer one prayer to let me be okay, but he answered both of em’.

Because it was here and it was gone. Then, there was light. Now, there’s Bessie.”

Beautiful Wretch

Margaret Marcum i heard a terrible thing today. “when i wake up, something awful happens, i wake up”—the universe inside of my chest clenches. what am i to you? kneeling, soul retches. i feel the thunder ripple under the covers, there is a storm inside me, idleness and boredom make for toxic lovers, wickedness loves company. too scared to care, for you each breath propels death. it is a hard lesson to learn— love cannot tear. and i tell you, “suffering stems from our addiction to yearn.” happiness you say is what you seek—but first, my dear, riddle me this—how is it that one may gaze upon one’s own eyes? you crave to be free, and yet you are so full of fear. and I’m beginning to realize the lows were never worth the highs.

POETRY: AND A CITY WAS BORN

Feast in the Sun

GJ Gillespie

Anguish of Achilles

Friendship is a Love Language

Maggie Bowyer

How are you doing? How are you feeling? How is the puppy and how is puppy love? / Here’s a meme that made me think of you / We need to FaceTime soon / Let’s form a coven and create a commune so we don’t have to communicate with anyone but each other / We can create our own holiday traditions and cobble together the family I never had / Six texts a day but I still feel how much I miss you in my aching bones / Can we Snapchat more? I am afraid of forgetting your face or not noticing the way it changes / Snagging everything in the Dollar Tree that reminds me of you, stockpiling them for the next time I see you / Bringing me espresso beans so I can make you a latte / Laughter roars over the sound of milk frothing / Our pitch drops when we talk about old crushes and rises when we squeal about our future / The only thing time apart has created is longing / Distance is the miles between us and that is all / I reminisce on the simple days of smoking Js sitting on your shingles while rearranging furniture and buying you edibles for when you come home / I’m pretty sure soulmates actually come in friendships and we’ve spent sixteen lives together, but I still won’t waste a second of this one

North Burma Temple

Kenneth Kesner

an october wind burnt its walls to ochre some look there to look away see their hearts among autumn leaves in a dawn travelling towards home as colors of its roof have started to fade shadows paint lines you try to follow has the sun eclipsed itself into a grey sky an ocean you can never bear to overcome watch a nun falling from the eaves of noon and you’ll sense infinity in her hands nothing left to touch or feel anymore everything’s moving even out of reach maybe some are hiding—no one’s alone so you think of the lost and forgotten who’s that glancing around so many times hoping to be there though she already is the evening’s monks turn their eyes to ghosts people will burn money to keep them alive waiting to be covered in chants and incense

Hug Me

Shu Tu Life is a work-in-progress, and my work leads me to clarity.

In a world of meeting expectations and reaching for achievements, it’s easy to lose the sensibility of our own voices. My art is my way to discover, document, and reclaim phases of my life, as well as a constant reminder for how beautiful the ordinary and the truthful can be.

Main Character

Shu Tu

Yet Another Post-election Day

Abbie Doll

where i encourage my pups to piss in the yards with conservative signs still staining the streets with their filth

’cause if these constituents are so committed to chiseling this country into a rubbly right-less mess, the least i can do is wreck a few blades of their precious grass on these g-d groundhog days, any voice of reason feels muted & unheard, despite its supposed importance [and so,] i give in to these tiny acts of passive aggression /but/ relief arrives only in these emptied bladders because the feeling that amerikkka is broken warped & skewed like a knotted slinky (which my intestines mirror) never quite dwindles

& the discarded pregnancy test i spot on the street pierces my heart as direct proof of another kid born in some god-forsaken place that claims to want it with parents who don’t in a country that refuses to develop a good & proper system for appropriate caretaking

& i see the red the red of the map the red of /fury/agony/&/pain/ & it’s flooding these streets i walk, dousing them in needless blood.

Present Situation

Peycho Kanev

You can always find us at the bar or in the library, reading or drinking until the lights fall off— shelves full of books and rows of bottles, like a purgatory within the purgatory, we wait for the last call.

Reading the classics or drinking the chalice of forgiveness— equally bitter. Blinded by the sun of noonday, we walk down the avenues with sunken pupils past someone’s girlfriends and parked cars covered in dusty light. Cafés with drawn blinds and red-brick banks with tinted windows show us the way to the big clock that will strike the last hour when even God will go to sleep, when all the beautiful women will blend into one, when we, finally, will start to read alone.

King of the Park in Jackson Heights

Brenna Manuel

Four hundred finches in rollers like straightjackets packed inside his suitcase emerge and sing, wail their hearts out to a crowd in Jackson Heights.

Michael Jackson could sing and do the moonwalk better than any other.

I stopped my car to absorb the touch of violins and cellos thrusting through haze in the bog this spring. I rolled down the windows on both sides to let my car drown in a stream of bellowing frogs at 6:10 p.m. precisely.

I made a note to pass by the next day to hear the symphony with my son. We made the turn and slowed where two doves held tight with talons and invisible rings to each other and the wire above the grass that swallowed filmy shallow water.

This year cicadas rumble through, push the underground turf away—their scream, a scrape of sanding blocks across endless hardwood boards.

Banneker waited, claimed the number seventeen years as his.

Stolen finches in a cage on a park bench raise their voices high, part aside the clouds. Their tiny toothpick bones, half an ounce from a wormhole, sing each pitch with quantum splendor.

And Michael Jackson sang and did the moonwalk, unsurpassed until the end.

Meander after “Floaters” by Martín

Leonardo Chung

Espada

like a beer bottle thrown into the river by a boy too drunk to cry, i do not shatter when i hear the words hurled in my direction; i only gently float down the river of marred dreams, but still thrash about when the waves smack me in the face. when i walk on stone-lined paths snaking fox river park, glass shards of last night’s addicts puncture my shoe soles. i don’t mind when country clubbers shout insults in my direction, or when a disc golf patty slices my throat, and my head rolls down the hill like a soccer ball, knocking down the bowling pins of slurs. i couldn’t be bothered to shout anything back besides, because what gives me the right to return those kicks in the teeth when i don’t even know if i belong here?

Laundromat

Callie Crouch

I guess I want to know what your mother’s laundromat was, what her go-to place looked like when the power went out or the washer started to shake once a month. In my memory-pile of dirty laundry she’s still sitting there, stacked on a love seat beaten down and broken in somewhere, only growing fonder of the gas station view next door. With each rinse cycle and every fallen cent on the floor offering itself up to a stranger, she dreads the machine groan that means her clothes are dry and so is her peace. Would our mothers have run into one another and never spoken, only exchanging fingerprints through change dropped on dirty tile or clothes swapped by mistake? Or do you and I really have nothing in common at all?

Normal Dry

Elizabeth Mason

There is this certainty: There will always be the laundry and all of its puzzles: a blue ankle sock to match with a blue ankle sock, the old-man pajama top to be buttoned before folded and set aside until the pants emerge from the mouth of the dryer. Hope is slippery. Outside this laundry room, the world is dangerous even if my lawn is impossibly green. The modernists believed they could restore order to a chaotic world with the stroke of a pen. The narrative, the unified force of the story. I used to write every day. I used to write every day. I used to write occasionally. I used to write. Now, I suture the broken pieces of a messy world, here, with detergent and patience, with a perfectly folded sheet, two matching socks at a time.

Meat Department

Savannah Jackson

I shuffle down the cement ramp gripping the rolling trash bin in front of me. Tonight across the parking lot the car wash beeps and groans, the train drones by behind the dumpster, my hair blows. I open my palms, sticky from the blood of the carcasses in the bag. I heave the bag over the edge. Small houses line the train tracks. Behind sleepy yellow windows, men and women carry spatulas and baskets and dish towels and babies. I wipe my hands on my apron and go inside, back to the sink to scrub the dried, waxy fat off silver trays. I hear the others manning the counter up front. They don’t wear gloves. They caress the steaks and finger the food. Delicately, like the meat are women, like they want to be nice. They are gentle with it. One, the tall pale man, especially likes to touch the meat in the case, point it out to me, rub it with calloused fingertips. Sometimes I can’t help but blush. Certainly kills my appetite. I wash my hands. Don’t touch the food. Stick to the sink.

Steam Fresh

Elizabeth Mason

I know that if I look hard enough, there’s a poem in here somewhere, like the matching sock that gets left behind in the washer when I transfer the clothes to the dryer (teetering on tiptoe because I can barely reach the bottom), or that slips onto the laundry room floor, mixed up in another laundry basket, or that never made it to the laundry basket because it’s on the floor in the closet or tucked between the sheet and the comforter in my son’s bed. Maybe it’s morseled in the hem of my husband’s jeans. I will find it

I have to wiggle it loose from wherever it’s hiding, the way I flatten stubborn wrinkles from the pajamas that have been abandoned in the dryer for too long, Steam Fresh: three minutes and then a few minutes longer on Speed Dry. There has to be a magic button. There must be a special cycle, a trick to finding my voice again. There will always be the laundry. There will always be sheets to fold and matching socks to find and shirts to hang, but I’m starting to wonder what happens if that’s all there is: piles of dirty clothes, sheets, towels to sift through and arrange, lunches to pack and dinners to make, teeth to brush, dishwashers to empty. I have to keep looking. I will empty my pockets, turn my closet inside out. I will empty the glove compartment in my car, check the spaces where I keep things in shopping bags when I “quick clean” for company. I will clean the lint trap and then I will find something in the crevice between the machine and the floor. I will make myself that small if that’s what it takes, because I know that there is, that I am, more than this.

When It Happens Again

Ky Davis

When It happens again. our anger will be broadcast again.

Blamed again. It will happen again as sure as the sun will rise, it will be justified. Again.

Just another mistake, just another uproar, another life. Another nigga.

Echos from the past anger warn us.

Curses from the present indifference kill us. When It happens again, when the

Fires start again.

I hope they burn a trail, Light the way toward an end. To this cycle.

Juggler

GJ Gillespie

POETRY: THEIR LAST WORDS

Abstract figure collage in the style of mid century abstract expressionism.

Monster Tries to Write But Finds Only Compromise Christian Lozada

Teacher, with a soft vowel ending his name, feels a heat in the cool classroom, props open the door to let the air no one asked for in. sweating, he talks about: being civil being evenhanded being mentally ill sweating, he talks about: agendas fairness complaints being mentally ill

Teacher, with his skin like mine, with compromises I haven’t made yet, with his eyes slow scanning from person to person, eyes that make one, random, hop before and stick the landing after me.

To my fellow students: Thank you for diagnosing me and seeing me as a writer with “some sort of mental illness” because I call you out on how you write me and people like me, the Brown the Black the others

Thank you for diagnosing me and erasing my skin with “some sort of mental illness” because my critiques are laser focused on how your characters of color are the first and only and often

Thank you for diagnosing me by giving me the same benefit of doubt you give your lone gunmen and murderers

I never wanted to pay for this benefit by losing my skin and masculinity

And thank you, Teacher, for letting me know this is the second compromise I need to make; the first was joining their program,

Neither fish nor fowl again

No, I don’t have an agenda when I say your character shouldn’t be proud of General Lee, when I say the slick-backed hair and switchblade are not a Latinx uniform, when I say Asians don’t occupy spaces of silence

We went to the same high school, and if this is all you saw when you looked at us the others then the agenda, the lens layering reality, is yours

When you see us, you erase us to prove it: the quiet Asian in the back is me saying no

But you can’t hear it because I’m too big, too male, too loud for your eyes

Your eyes clog your ears

And everything visual about me says I cannot be one of them But sure as shit ain’t one of you

The Boy with the Broccoli-Shaped Hair Tells Me I’m Beautiful

Esther Sadoff

I see myself shatter in his eyes as soon as I’ve read it. This note will self-destruct in 5, 4. 3. 2. Suddenly a familiar head nod and grin feels like I’m walking on a tight-rope. Beautiful means you are beautiful until you are not. It’s a constriction, a construction made by a momentary lapse. To be beautiful is to be trapped like a fly in honey, a mosquito in amber, the ooze of sap swallowing an ant. I know infatuation is next to obsession is next to blindness.

I don’t want to be the image under the microscope’s glass. I want to be transparent like the beakers and vials at the back of the class.

Countless Shards

Leonardo Chung i didn’t mean to drop your trust in me into the trash. it floated down like a piece of paper carried by a breath of wind and settled in the remains below of dark, unknown materials. it wasn’t in my control. i don’t understand what you want me to do. because when something’s dropped into a black hole, it explodes, engulfed into nothingness, blinked out of existence. the remains spin around the black hole, forming a disc, one i cannot put on my cd player to mend our vexation.