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Issue 5

Cover Art by Dana Booher

ON THE SUBJECT OF NOSTALGIA

2/19/2023

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Joseph Lee Meads
Forgiven: this: the sincerity 
of all my dead spermatozoa: 
lined up, one by one by one, 
under a swell of stifling sun 
in the wild of our hinterland.

To smuggle into / out of: 
black and white motives, 
algorithms of the ulterior, 
the pangs of war or sport 
and our earth’s harsh spin.

That’s blood money on my purse, penknife, and rope. 
That’s bloodied money frothing from my nose holes;
waiting meekly for the soft gulping of the humanistic
warmth of clots: as juxtaposed to the naïve & obtuse 

transgressions: like the breaking of a curfew or tooth.

▪

Forgotten: this: my Hippocratic Oath;
as well as what I said when I said: no.

▪

Forgotten: the names of lovers past;
my cripplingly outdated dementia praecox. 
Forgiven: the weight of the gravity of laughter.

▪

All the women of all my dad’s pornos –
VHS’d & assumed shattered; forever exhausted: 
yet immortal; aloft in TV static, as glue.

▪

And it was I who was that arsonist
setting ablaze your museum of sentiments; 
because they’re all so fucking lame.

Joseph Lee Meads is a diagnosed schizophrenic and currently an MA student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has previously been published in Columbia Poetry Review, Chicago Literati, Lover's Eye Press and elsewhere. He posts images of his muted television onto Instagram: @joseph.lee.m
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SPHERES OF DOMESTICITY #27

2/19/2023

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Joseph Lee Meads
 Our loving wives drive us
 drunkenly into the neighbor’s
 knot garden; scented bruising
 leaves coupled with gasoline,
 equations of mud flung afield
 via whitewall tires balding
 – O how so Americana! –
 we effort in vain in howls
 over the miserable growls
 of the Buick & its radio
 speakers heaving into
 that midday disarray
 a cello concerto
 by Schumann,
&, somewhere,
toward the rear 
of the lot – 
somewhere;




                countless hummingbirds





                                                       – a-humming.

Joseph Lee Meads is a diagnosed schizophrenic and currently an MA student in the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has previously been published in Columbia Poetry Review, Chicago Literati, Lover's Eye Press and elsewhere. He posts images of his muted television onto Instagram: @joseph.lee.m
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red elegy

2/19/2023

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Kim Ellingson
My first love is sitting at the edge 
of my bed. I wet a washcloth 
and clean the blood from his open temple

as he holds a bag of frozen peas 
to my bent, distended arm and tells me 
what it’s like being dead. 

Something about waiting for a train, looking 
for someone you used to know, and
needing an unbroken bicycle. 

His head will not stop bleeding, yet
my ligaments and veins proficiently stitch 
themselves back together while we talk--

I know he can’t stay. I’m readying 
him for whatever comes next, 
even if it’s nothing. 

He is wearing a white T-shirt. 
I pour salt over the bloodstains, 
rinse the shirt under cold water 

in the kitchen sink. 
I stand in silence, watching red 
stream down the drain. 

Outside, he is on my bicycle, 
riding towards the tracks.

Kim Ellingson holds an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Lost Balloon, Wilderness House Literary Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and elsewhere. In 2020, her work was shortlisted for the Cagibi Macaron Prize in poetry. She currently lives in Milwaukee and can be found on Instagram @its_a_lemon_tree.
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old enough to understand

2/19/2023

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Saffron Ezekiel Sofiane
I cut your tongue and refuse to listen,
Blood-covered white tulips remind me of your lies. 
This vessel you call home is still my favorite nightmare. 
Coiled hair and gentle smiles light blazing candles in my mind. 

But I see past the charming smirk and denounce your true intentions. 
Cigarettes lit on Moroccan balconies will have any woman you want on her knees. 
I encourage you to seek the validation you require, 
Though fair warning I refuse to allow you to step on me to get any higher.

Saffron Ezekiel Sofiane is a first-generation, Latinx, nonbinary, queer, raging feminist who uses their writing abilities to explore different aspects of social injustices, body imagery, and identity. They aspire to be a means of exploration of uncharted territories for people who read and support their work. Although they know that it is nearly impossible for their work to change the world, they hope that it will at least change the worlds inside their readers for the better. You can read more of their work on their Instagram @saffronwrites.
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the waiting room

2/19/2023

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Raye Hendrix
if the ceiling is not a ceiling
but a sky     if the plaster
popcorn protrusions 
are stars    if the walls 
of this white room are not boundaries 
but low-hanging clouds    if the gift
of the flower is blue            if
linoleum does not mean floor
but field where each speck
of gray is a dandelion gone
to seed     if there is only 
one way out     that dark hallway
    then I will bear it
this hard living     I will live
as hard as I can     
and while I live the seeding 
dandelions are wishes or    if not wishes      
    prayers     and if prayers
    then the lonely door 
and hallway are the mouth
and throat of god
    and if the gift of the flower
is blue         it’s because 
I have swallowed everything red

Raye Hendrix is a writer from Alabama. The author of the chapbooks Every Journal Is A Plague Journal (Bottlecap Press) and Fire Sermons (Ghost City Press), she is also the winner of the 2019 Keene Prize for Literature and Southern Indiana Review’s 2018 Patricia Aakhus Award. Raye's work has been featured in Poetry Daily, 32 Poems, Shenandoah, Cimarron Review, Poetry Northwest, Zone 3, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere, and they are the Poetry Editor of Press Pause Press. Raye holds degrees from Auburn University, an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, and she is a PhD candidate at the University of Oregon. You can find more of their work at rayehendrix.com.
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my ghost still carries a rooster

2/19/2023

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Marissa Forbes
Ghosts can whisper into key holes
& ignore the smell of flowers --
licking bricks & quill tips
because ignoring is harder than ignorance to pull off.
 
My ghost has wrenches hanging from her neck
spectacles close to her eyes, she pulls away to focus.
She can see the truth
but there’s a light fueled by gas
that keeps her awake at night.
 
Can my ghost see clearly
through her stained-glass window?
The morning sunlight refracts
casting rainbows
across her cheeks, her hands.
She grips a wrench & shifts her eyes
to her own specters.
 
Are we a collective ghost?
 
We, as women
who fold our thoughts into drawers --
tucked between stockings & braziers.
Covert & forgotten.
 
My ghost has a past
among men in muddy boots
& drafting pencils perched on their ears.
She’s hidden in the smoke-filled parlor
surrounded by starched shirts & cigars
wet from chapped lips.
 
Am I becoming a shadow
mortally attached to a man
cloaked in his own vanity?
Haunted by the smell of panic soaked in honey
& then dipping my feet in it.
 
I’m in an empty room, curled on the floor
salted with sweat & tears pooling on amber surfaces.
Aching for my ghost who isn’t scared of the water
she dreamed of drowning in.
 
Worn out from holding up crumbling arches --
the bridge she’s broken herself to build.
But my ghost still carries a rooster.
Even in death, she’s got victory in her lap.
 
& we are writing at the same desk,
reaching for each other’s fingertips.

Marissa Forbes began writing again after a 10 year hiatus late in 2020, she has since published short stories in "The Dillydoun Review," "Twenty Bellows," "Millennial Pulp," "Exit 7," plus poetry in "Dreamstones of Summer," "Prometheus Dreaming," & "The C.R.W.P Collection: The Story Behind the Poems." Marissa is a student in Community Literature Initiative and is editing her full length poetry collection about Emily Roebling called "Bridging The Gap: Poems & Ethos for Emily Warren Roebling." She has resided all over the country but found her way back to Colorado where she lives a colorful life with her two sons, dog, and cat. Her works can be found at marissaisch.com and she can be found on Instagram at @word_nerd_ris.
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an april zuihitsu

2/19/2023

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Jonathan Chan
woke up. prayed through the mist of a recalcitrant kettle. counted the ways to remove sinewy glue 
from the eyes. wondered how many ways there are to cross a river. wondered how many songs can 
swell from an abandoned complex. the hauntology of a spilling vessel. 

the light breathes between the shutters. a glare shoots up across angled louvers. 
the wind has whipped the leaves from autumn to spring. shadows dance like the glistening 
on water, rococo for a naked ceiling. 

still, somewhere, the sound of violins, practicing scales, mellifluous amidst the heater’s 
crackle. the gush of rain has shattered and ended. eschewed the split-second snap of an umbrella, 
the water trickling down the hood to the neck around the shoulders. 

i am mere auto-narrator. i am sheer self-ethnographer.

reflexivity is a precious thing. in one pocket, social capital, in the other, a jangle of coins. what is a 
field but an ambiguous system. a comb of grains births a new concept. 

the wick bends: an oath, a horror, a curse, a taunt. then the organ swells and the bright sorrow is 
more than the eyes can take. 

two rocks overlook a bare valley. their laughter is expressed in exactly ten syllables. a fine use of 
metre. tumbling off a cliff they enter an immanent sweetness. remember to be kind. remember to 
call your parents. 

the sighs of a girl can only be heard once the clacking ends. hands taken off a loom. soon they 
become coarse from lifting a sword, reining a horse. when two rabbits run, how can one tell which is 
male, which is female? 

on a day within and without the seas, an official gives thanks for broad waves. it was never for glory,
he etches in ink. brushstrokes fine enough to elide a foreign hand. a lonely cloud. 

count each time you are asked about divinity. count the statements about living in an 
estate of regeneracy. midnight marches past its own ends. try to hear the celestial music. 
a love of form is a love of endings. 

Jonathan Chan is a writer, editor, and graduate student at Yale University. Born in New York to a Malaysian father and South Korean mother, he was raised in Singapore and educated in Cambridge, England. He is interested in questions of faith, identity, and creative expression. He has recently been moved by the writing of Lucille Clifton, Boey Kim Cheng, and Spencer Reese. More of his writing can be found at jonbcy.wordpress.com and on Instagram at @fivefoundings. 
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Reasons to live

2/19/2023

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Ann Tweedy
1.
Sometimes instead of action
a poem 
                            imitates      emulates

2.
The website on methods instructs
pain free are the holy grail

and proceeds to rate each of the most popular
for lethality, time, agony.

3.
Cutting your wrists-- 
6% effective but dials in at 71 
on the pain scale. The images in my head--

mischievous, misleading, disingenuous.

Rationality requires smooth wrist 

      skin
                          riffle of 
                                             branched
                                                                  blue

4.
Charcoal burning reports Wikipedia 
is relatively painless and lethal.
A species of carbon monoxide poisoning,
it is not featured separately on the methods site,
but carbon monoxide in general is 71% effective
and rates only 18 in agony. Wouldn’t it be nostalgic?
A little hibachi in the house–summery whiffs 
rise and fill your nostrils. Red-orange glow 
                                                                           beguiles. 

5.
To issue 

suffering 
a cease-fire
verges 
on
beau


ty

but acting it out takes      wherewithal      verve      doggedness--
      desire 
not just to end 

but to hurt.  
And, only 1 in 26 
      succeed, 
meaning 

25 out of 26 
breathe      on.  

Ann Tweedy's first full-length book, The Body's Alphabet, was published by Headmistress Press in 2016. It earned a Bisexual Book Award in Poetry and was also a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award and for a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Ann also has published three chapbooks, the first of which was reissued by Seven Kitchens Press in April 2020. Her latest chapbook, A Registry of Survival, was published by Last Word Press in December 2020. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Literary Mama, Clackamas Literary Review, and elsewhere, and she has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and two Best of the Net Awards. A law professor by day, Ann has devoted her career to serving Native Tribes. In 2020, she moved from Washington State to South Dakota to join the faculty at University of South Dakota School of Law. Read more about her at www.anntweedy.com.
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A summer day with you

2/19/2023

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Katie Grierson
When the sun scares
the winter from my jeans,
we leave them
empty bodies off the edge
of my bed. You stand in the center
of my room. My sunscreen smells like
coconut. You smell like my
sunscreen. The back of your calves,
your arms, your shoulders, the small half-circle
by your collar the sun will lick. My hands.

Katie Grierson believes in aliens. She is a 2020 YoungArts Finalist in Novel-Writing, was named a Presidential Scholar in the Arts Semifinalist, is an alumni of the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program, and has been recognized by the Academy of American Poets as the 2022 Jean Burden Prize winner. Besides being prose editor for Lumiere Review, she also overuses the em dash and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Body Without Organs and Dishsoap Quaterly, among others.
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in time for the end of the world

2/19/2023

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Rachel Sandle
What do you write
about when you’re
doing fine? I cut
celery with my best
knife and laugh
at other people’s 
jokes. My cactus
dies. I bury it. How
do you forget that

night? I tripped
desperate into
longing. I was
a writer then,
too, when I wore the air 
too loose. The grass 
too long and lusting
(lusting!) after 
hunger. What
morning does my 
skin begin to sag
glad into waiting
cheekbones? My
god, my breath
tented on my 
skeleton. I 
make myself so
pretty. God I
was so hungry
then. Now. I am 
never ashamed
now. I have 
finally fallen
in love with being.

Outside, we burn up 
and down. The world
curls an ache into
its scaffold. Inside, 
my persistent body
is water carving
out a canyon.  
Always something
is eroding.

Rachel Sandle (they/them/theirs) is an MFA-dropout-turned-crisis-counselor whose writing has appeared in What Are Birds? Journal, Occulum Journal, Into the Void, and others. Rachel lives in Lawrence, Kansas, where they are pursuing a master's degree in clinical social work. You can find them on twitter @floating_orb or on instagram @sachelrandle. 
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three hymns of happiness

2/19/2023

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Jennifer Mariani
I. Kalopsia

A postmortem photograph 
Showed you 
Incarnadine 
And I wondered when you are 
Reincarnated 
Will you remember the 
Viridian days 
That summer 
Or the onyx nights 
That wept stars 
For the sorrow you would stain 
My life with 
Obsidian sins 
That would creep onwards 
Oil seeping over water on a moonless tide 



II. Ataraxia 

Burlywood 
Soft 
Dusty 
Sepia brown 
There sit layers of sediment 
That should have been childhood 
All lost now 
In time we will gilt the edges
And remember 
Heliotrope days 
Lusty-gallant sunsets 
Tyrian nights where the stars 
Blazed 
Bone burning phosphoresce
And we could imagine 
We would live 
Unscathed 


III. Acatalepsy

Photographs of sex in public parks 
And upside down a blackbird perched on your upturned foot 
Would you tell me 
We didn’t walk upon the moon 
Or would you rather believe this 
We are wholly lost
And the world (whimpering) at its end
Burns 

Jennifer Mariani was born and raised in Harare, Zimbabwe. Her first collection of poems “All Forgotten Now”, a chapbook, was published by Off Topic Publishing. Her poetry has also been featured in Mosi oa Tunya Literary Review, Uproar (The Lawrence House Centre For The Arts), Off Topic Publishing, The League of Canadian Poets Poetry Pause and Wingless Dreamer anthologies. 
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Out of Body

2/19/2023

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Helen Gallagher
Out of Body

Helen Gallagher is a writer living and working in New York City. For the sake of money, she writes advertisements. For the sake of being alive, she writes poems. You can find her at @helenoftheinternet. 
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I Go To Sleep in an Andres Montoya Poem and wake up in a Rumi Poem

2/19/2023

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Sara Borjas
I have found the face of story lying again. It came dressed as a road to my artist’s residency. And I forget I am not a cup plotting against rain or a bartender’s last call or a man walking up and down the street, or innocent. My therapist asked me, what is it that you can do? And I said, I’ve got this man who doesn’t respect me, this country that doesn’t respect me, this job that doesn’t respect me, this art that keeps lying to my face! It was then that, behind the beautiful lake I was staring at from my writing studio, that I heard myself telling the same old joke about a woman walking into a bar. A woman walks into a bar all alone. A woman walks into a bar all alone. I keep saying it and I can’t forgive anyone for that. Sometimes I get so tired of my sore molars and the music and the dry lipstick and the sweet coffee and the alarm clock and the country road. No one likes a joke without surprise. I prefer white wine this week. And my to-do list is insurmountable and also, written in purple and pink. I give my life to it. Pour it in my mouth. ​

Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019) received a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was featured as one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets. She has received fellowships ​
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I Want To Hear the Tears in Your Voice

2/19/2023

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Sara Borjas
I want to hear the tears in your voice, which means
I fell in love. A candle who sleeps under the valley’s
patchwork like expensive minerals getting drunk 
off of Chicano sadness. I want to hear the soccer balls
left in the back of the net, the favorite barrette
that exists in photos, the truth. If you have a train
roaring up your throat like a tunnel traveling through
another tunnel, honk the horn. When I’m quiet,
in my room of loneliness, it rains from the earth up
through my dirty socks, into all my travels. I want
to hear the tears in everything you eat, each door
you open like a waking up, running from this world
to the next like a whole trail of ants, never looking up.
For one moment: quit being sad. I heard we are all
made of water. Be proud to be made of water. 

Sara Borjas is a self-identified Xicanx pocha and a Fresno poet. Her debut collection, Heart Like a Window, Mouth Like a Cliff (Noemi Press, 2019) received a 2020 American Book Award. Sara was featured as one of Poets & Writers 2019 Debut Poets. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, CantoMundo, Postgraduate Writers Conference, and Community of Writers. She believes that all Black lives matter and will resist white supremacy until Black liberation is realized. She teaches creative writing at UC Riverside and the UCR Palm Desert Low Residency MFA Program, but stays rooted in Fresno. Find her on IG @saraborhaz and at www.saraborjas.com.
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The boar's heart

2/19/2023

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Colleen Collins
Dark-mantled.
Advancing; trim.
Unlinked; each isled but
    tandemned, and wick-ed.




the heart in my hand is not
her heart
it is a boar’s heart
she lives
(I let her go)
the boar is dead
tusks up
in the woods.




Signal as noise.
Indistinct.
An irretrievable ground /
    a figure in sit.

Colleen Coco Collins is here for the birds. On her knees for songs/poems/sea/sky/beats/trees… atemporal… living in rural mi'kma'ki, port greville, nova scotia, Canada admist crows, coyotes, grackles, bees, humpbacks and fox. She is Irish/French/Odawa.
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in mirror city

2/19/2023

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Teronig Tsoukato
Would you believe
THEY made my mother into a cool
pool of water?

i search for puddle in the city where every other eye
is a mirror,
do not be frightened of the two beams, I say,

the headlights, piercing the falling rain,
or the stop lights that seem as wobbling angel tongues reflected
on soaked pavement

every other eye will reflect
green and yellow and red, again, stop again even

teenagers and their acnes twinkle,
when they turn their heads I think
disco ball ! and tap my feet to the rain drip drip

THEY will look down from their glass cubes, in pity,
you will see only the soles of shoes, though they will see all of you
this will seem unfair

but what more could one need?
then green and yellow and red and green and yellow and red
Reflected in an eye, or the puddle?

Teronig Tsoukatos is an undergraduate student at the University of California Riverside, studying creative Writing and Psychology. She is the recipient of the William Henry Willis Memorial Poetry Prize. She is obsessed with radio static, soda carbonation, TV snow, and forgotten crumbs under beds. You can follow her on Twitter @teronig, or on Instagram at @enemytero.
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When I die let me feed the river

2/19/2023

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Issac Lewis
The fermented river
grey blue, through dry cane
scuds wave backward
under a cloy breeze.

Foam crumbles on
muskrats’ mussels
shelled like spent roe
from Chinook flank
rotting, eyeless,
credit winter’s
flesh on sand.

A raving year, bent
homeward, craving,
wrenching up mountains
burst upriver
thrashing release
up up up river.

This end
breathless, rotting
leaves fermented
melting on shores,
reeds, banks, beds

A winter to ripen
feed new year.

 Isaac Lewis lives in Richland WA with his wife and their foster children. His poetry has appeared in Hawk & Handsaw. You can find his casual nature photography @crossdiver on Instagram.
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