ISSUE 6
Cover Art: Michelle Boire
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Rome Smaoui I learned to raise my pain like god raises lightning, disappearing as soon as it opens the sky I let it haunt me, as I let most things. Every time I leave a city I tell myself to become new again: Joy is my mother holding her American dollar America falling around her like a voice that has never once prayed I have decided I no longer care where it is I came from. I let myself fear death only to remember my body. I think language is a gun with no bullets in sight, just the blow, the mouth belonging to nothing but ends. And I know where this road turns, I will follow it like a fire on a hill of pale grass. I am always watching the door for my body, the room defeated with silence dust wind against the gentle wind, you fly towards me, pull me to the ground and we kiss-- Are we not an extension of the shoulders on this earth we’ve crashed into? Who are we if we can’t at least give each other this. At least the distance between a sentence and the eyes avoiding it— Everything is dark except for the wound, you can see how lovely it glows; right there, I am free except for the moment where I chose to forget you. Like an arrow, you are both a killer and a bird, I tell myself this before it's over. Rome Smaoui is a Tunisian poet and writer based in the U.K. Her work has appeared in Narrative Magazine, Litbreak Magazine, Sonder Midwest, The Roadrunner Review, and other places. She recieved Gold & Silver Keys for her writing by the Scholastics Art & Writing Awards, and she was recognized by Palette Poetry's 2022 Emerging Poet Prize. In 2021, she was featured in Narrative Magazine’s 30 Under 30 List. She is currently an editor for Nighthawk Literature, and is completing her undergraduate studies in English & Creative Writing at The University of Manchester. When Rome isn't writing, she can be found near the sea reading poems to a society of mermaids.
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Karla Lamb At nine weeks, slant shadows pull across the stained floor of the outpatient clinic. Dirty blinds shield the cracked window putting out the lit cigarette of horizon. I imagine how a soul enters the body. How we sweated off winter, on carpet or couch. How our tossed sheets became my Tuesday afternoon appointment. I-- imagine the drawbridge to my future. I imagine us, living in your parent’s Michigan basement. I imagine having enough wire—to hang myself. Outside, pro-life chants thunder like a psalm of drills—I also pray: an empty meditation upon the nothing. My modicum of truth. I sign the fine print, pay the requisite blood. A volunteer nurse walks me out. I puke in the parking lot. Tell work I can’t come in. Sunset slowdrags against dusk’s lining. Heavy rain recoils off my Honda’s dusty windshield. I drive the familiar stretch edged with the small shrines that memorialize car accidents. My little fugue—You’re no one, I’ll pine after Karla Lamb is a Chicana poet, with work appearing or forthcoming in A Women’s Thing Magazine, The Shallow Ends, Yes Poetry, Word Riot, Coal Hill Review, Fine Print Press, Dream Boy Book Club, & elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology 2019, & translated in Revista La Peste. She co-hosts Charla Cultural, a bilingual podcast centering underrepresented literary artists. Lamb lives in L.A. with her cat Fulano. More at karlalamb.com & @vinylowl.
Davis Martin to consume / or to be consumed / spoken in whispers around the house / or written on street signs / above the lights across / I am among the verdant grasses / melding with the greenery / eaten alive / eating / among the fireflies mindlessly interceding death / I have written over the doors prepared the rooms / filled the lanterns / detuned the strings / buried the roads / to see / or to have been seen holding a knife to someone’s throat / it’s in the mirror in the hallway / it’s marked with a gravestone out back I would die for you I said / over the entryway / driven across the doorstep / I am above the setting sun / to be alone / or just to be / there is victory / spoken in whispers / around the house / crawling perpendicular to death / I have prayed for rain / I have closed my eyes / on my knees I awoke / to consume / or to be consumed / I have lifted you to my lips / I have written over the doors / I have seen you in the streets / I can feel you now / yes, even now I can feel you / I can feel you now / yes, I can feel you Davis Martin is a composer and writer currently working as a Teaching Fellow at the Hartt School where he is pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts in Music Composition. In addition to composing, he maintains an active performing career as a vocalist, specializing in opera and new music. His work in both musical and literary idioms draws from horror, his queer experience, and his Southern roots. In Davis’ free time, he enjoys photography and tending to his growing collection of plants. He can be found online @davisforpres and at davismartinmusic.com.
Kwame Daniels in the act of perception we are rendered invisible there is only the cane, there is only the cripple cripping our clothes, cripping our queerness, cripping our speech are there enough ways that you know we are disabled? weighing the sound of skin on dry skin the thump of the cane against tiled floor iridescent scales running down the shaft we used to dream we were descended from mermaids a descent into madness quickened by dreaming each bead of sweat soaking our clothes into waking in the wake of illness, we suffer banality each mark of fatigue like chipped nail polish nailing the shaft in place as we lean on the cane but in the act of perception we are rendered invisible Kwame Sound Daniels is a mad black trans artist based out of Maryland. Xe are a VCFA MFA candidate and an Anaphora Arts Residency Fellow. Xir debut poetry collection (Light Spun) came out with Perennial Press August 2022. Xe often write about xir disabilities and xir spiritual identity seated in blackness and ancestral worship. You can find xem on Instagram, @the.okra.winfrey or on xir website www.kwamesounddaniels.com, where xir publications are listed. Kwame learns plant medicine, pickles vegetables, and paints in xir spare time.
Gabriel Waite Rusting, which happens when a thing is still or moving, and too long exposed, happened, of course, to us, so that we became thinner and brittle, and rang like bells when struck. Still, eventually, the surgery happened. And we suspect it helped us stay alive. I invited everyone to the celebration of my razed chest, and later, on the beach, I kept my shirt on. There was less of me, and more, but I was taken with the small, shy spiders under beach rocks who ran for cover even from the harmless sky. And when, in a dream, the dead dog turned her patient belly, she was mindless of her scar, and in patting her there I touched, with a ringing as though from the waking world, her softest part, where, though hollower she was still whole. Gabriel Waite is a queer/trans spoken word performer and an emerging writer of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction. Their work has appeared in Poetry Pause at the League of Canadian Poets, and their short story Jet Lag won the Lakefield Literary Festival Senior Fiction award. They live on the unceded territories of the Songhees, Esquimalt, and WSÁNEĆ people in Victoria, B.C.
Ana Carrizo Death between the eyes. How we could have known who left with red in their hair. To give me a terrain—unutterable when I learn him by taste. A god sits in the kitchen watching us keep score on the scorching of ourselves. We eat with all the hunger. Curvilinear passages & shuddered core-strings. Entering the sheets like a body in drought. I may open myself in the chilled morning. Become unfiltered into first desire, then nowhere. Ana Carrizo is a 31-year-old writer living in Texas. Her works are a way of healing and a personal reflection on the process of continual growth. She loves carrying orange peels in her pockets and buying used poetry books. You can read more of her poetry on tumblr @elvedon.
Dylan Gilbert clench clench clench clench clench clench clench the doctor says I have to stop holding my vagina like a fist. I tell him I am a young woman. I don’t have a fists. just accessories. I am just pursing: purse, verb, very, ladylike. e.g: my vagina is pursing like a grandmother’s lips. stehstehstehstehstehstehsteh - that's the sound of a tongue sticking-unsticking from the roof of a happy mouth. that's satisfaction after a cup of sweettea that was not a want, but a need. of course, I am not satisfied. my soft animal and I have not had a good drink in months. we are parched. I just moved to this cut-stone city. I am hardly ever recognized. I am hardly ever a guest. no one has had the opportunity to offer us: a hand, a seat, a photo album, or a glass of something with or without ice. the doctor says clenching usually follows at trauma’s heels. did I know/ I was both / the two god-hands and the babydoll being / squeezed to its seams? no nothing ripped. but the jaw does unlock itself and pendulum from time to time. I ask the orthodontist why my mouth keeps unraveling and hitting the floor like a cat-cartoon in love. well, because I am, yes, clenching. ing ing ing ing ing he puts one finger in my mouth, squeaking and blue, tells me to bite. my jaw is quite strong and this is not a compliment. the pink doctor throws in a finger too. he notes that me and Mine are not very hospitable. no “come in”, no “can I take your coat”, he asks who raised me? I beg him not to tell my grandmother! He asks for my history. I hand him his history. claim whoever bled on the other side of his pink hands. okay. well. Mine is too tight and have I heard of vaginal physical therapy? it's a little uncomfortable lots of single, plastic fingers, and deep breaths, we can call it: a last resort I put on my underwear. I rinse out my mouth. I pay my deductible. I leave the building and stay in the lot. in my car, I imagine myself as an open palm. see each finger of my body undo and soften until I am as exposed as a peonie at the top of May. I imagine my therapist or the youtube yoga instructor in the passenger. next to me. taking my bloomed palms and placing one on my heart, one on my stomach, reminding me how to breathe so that my belly stretches into a bowl. I do this until I am calm enough to be bored with the way boys have wound and hardened me. I Type. Tweet. “doctor said my pussy too tight! And my jaw?? very powerful!” Send. Dylan Gilbert is a poet from Ann Arbor, MI. She received her bachelor’s degree from University of Michigan and currently resides in Harlem where she is working towards her MFA at Columbia University. Her work has received multiple Hopwood Awards and appeared in several college literary journals as well as UCL’s Panacea Review.
A.J. Birch a bearded iris burrows deep in winter grips petaled quilts tucks its entire being into a fist and waits for the warmth of spring to open pollen-crusted eyes. mold grows fuzzily leaves a film that erodes love and memory wishes to come backandbackandback no matter how many times it dies. i’m so tired of curled days that go by before it’s time to unfurl again but i don't know how to stop this heart from perennializing. my body forgets to flinch when it senses a exhale of warmth a faint knock asking to be let in again you are just checking if i’m still breathing but you’re here and a touch would send me spilling into frostbitten april mornings without a speck of memory to remind me this will hurt. A.J. Birch is a prose-writer turned poet by quarantine. She loves anything subtle, small, and haunting. She lives in North Carolina and is a 2021 graduate of Catawba College. You can find her at @ajbirch444 on Twitter or ajbirk444 on Instagram.
Hari Alluri i Beneath the earth the earth is always rumbling. And here, a little helplessness to hold like a newborn child-- it’s not only the child who’s helpless it’s the holding. i If you ever get to watch the eggs fall as you rush them out the fridge, crack on the lip left by its open door, spill there and onto the linoleum as they tumble; if you towel those eggs up, sob-sobbing the whole time, “I can’t do this, I can’t,” hand and knees to floor, “I can’t,” pour the surviving yolks, from the somehow upright carton into the already- warmed-up frying pan, no need to panic: there will be other chances not to quite pull through. i Please, don’t appropriate this error into the good small moments of your day--we need more betrayal if we want to keep forgiving—not if you believe that language is a spell. Blessed are those who ghosts and demons flock towards. And every time, ingat, my loves. My loves: Ingat. i Is it possible that countries do not have a body the same way my knees my hips my spine my lips don’t have a country? It’s true: some days will sorrow more than other days, and the lightest drizzle mocks us by refusing to downpour. That must be part of it, yes? The gravity we need? Strong enough to pull down rain, weak enough to let it rise, kind, no maybe soft, or dare I say it generous enough we aren’t pummeled always by the falling.
Hari Alluri (he/him/siva) is a migrant poet of Philippine & South Indian descent living and writing on unceded Musquea,, Squamish, Tsleil-Waututh. Oayqayt. Kwikwetlem lands. Siya is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya Press) and the chapbooks The Promise of Rust (Mouthfeel Press) and Our Echo of Sudden Mercy (forthcoming from Next Page Press). A co-editor of We Are Not Alone (Community Building Art Works) and co-founding editor at Locked Horn Press, his work appears in anthologies, journals, and online venues, most recently – via Split This Rock – in Best of the Net 2022. Find Him @harialluri and at https://linktr.ee/harialluri.
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