The Junk Drawer Issue by Working Title Magazine

The Junk Drawer Issue

How Frightening

By Natalie Ingalls

The scariest thing in a house full of bats With a floor made of nails And a nest filled with snakes That has mold in the walls And a caved in roof Is the mirror on the wall in the bathroom

morning / routine

I woke up yesterday morning with a wholeness, with you with fingernails on bare back with nose bridges rubbing together with quiet exhales greeted by slits of sun

I’m swaddled in the heat and the emptiness the anesthetic absence of expectation grasping and fumbling for glasses and bowls to make breakfast and aspirations for the day to come

By Sarah Cassidy

I woke up this morning with a fervor, alone with too-long footprints flanking the words of every flapping mouth with groggy head gears mimicking and sputtering with a desperation to make things sound as beautiful as others do

I’ll keep up the practice and keep assuming everyone knows better /has better /is better than I perhaps it is abandon that allows their perfect prose I have always been timid and gentle absorbing too much light and static for the first few years and then onward, protecting

The line between togetherness / dependence when will I know? if my softness is destroying me who can tell me what is worth it, in the end when the only worth I’ve known is the amalgamation of every smile from every lover, from every friend mornings should be meant for smiling

I will wake up tomorrow morning and if this warmth is weakness I will still wrap myself in it and the words will come

so i have to do this Forever

By Curren Gauss

So I have to do this forever Forever

Crusted eyes and dragged feet and cups of morning coffee with cinnamon Watching shows and calling friends and growing old, too old, forever Forever forever

Spending that forever waiting for mail to arrive opportunity to come for love and time and space and growth Please growth Forever

I hate that it’s forever a lump of skin Saran-wrapped sausage meat, sweaty and salty and primally disgusting For you’re disgusting I am too Forever

The men whose taste stays young and their sons who know better They too cannot escape the fortune to befall them You don’t choose your Forever

A garden A wife

A woman on the brink forever blessed with absence of patience and thorn-pricked palms Like her savior before Forever

Fear and pain and punishment forever Your heart, strung forever Taxes and ethics and trying Forever

her coven. So, we move forward. I remind myself that no matter where I end up a year from now — no matter where my Big Kid Shit takes me — I can figure it out. And if when the world seems to warp and bend away from my reach, I will do my best to bend along with it.