Joan Tate Joan Tate is a transexual, mystic, and MFA candidate at UMass Amherst's program for poets & writers. When she isn't lugging her typewriter into the graveyard across the street she can be found making strange noises, listening to strange noises, and fawning over her partner's snake, Miso Soup.
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Syd Westley Syd Westley (they/them) is a trans poet and artist from the Bay Area. They are currently pursuing their MFA in poetry from Washington University in St. Louis. Their work has been supported and/or published by Lambda Literary, Frontier Poetry, Lantern Review, and others.
Matthew Roberts Matthew Roberts is a Chicago-based poet and the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Amy Schofield Autumn rain pours like gasoline on the blazing canopy. The air still swollen with summer heat. I’m wet. You’re still not here. Above, two squirrels scrap. A hiss of fang and claw. Tails swirl like fuses into the bomb-black hollow. Boom Lightning now. It’s knocking on nine. Do you remember when we were sick? Thewindowfullofstorm. Skin licked with sweat. Thunder we could feel in our throats. How we begged the sky to split like a fat heron’s egg. That’s what want is: A keyless door and a crack of light. Amy Schofield is a poet from West Yorkshire, UK. She won a Leeds poetry festival prize in 2023, and her work has been featured by Sunday Mornings at the River and Nymphs & Thugs.
Dorothea Lasky I am here by myself And I have finished everything There are no pretensions No way around the door I have eaten all the cans of beans and lemons And am face drunk on the floor There are no cats here Only children Crawling around above me Yes, they look at me They absolutely do not know me They want to look at me And tell me they know They are fed and ready for the ceremony I haven’t prepared anything I am so wholly unprepared for this I was told I’d have a lifetime Now the whole thing is coming at me I can’t even see myself in the mirror Or in the space between the mirror and the wall He brings me to the grey fixtures And mentions that we are dead Who didn’t know that When I checked into this Godforsaken hellhole They locked me in the tiny yellow room With no belongings but my lipstick And said that I’d be ok as long as I didn’t make A movement In and out he entered me Letting me know what I could or could not say I wasn’t saying anything I never wanted to say a thing I only wanted to see myself as vast and unknowable In some horrific ocean Instead they drove me for hours And up on the lands I wandered Red boots and a dark-brown coat I collected aqua pencils, four of them They said it’s your job now to tell this story But I was no storyteller I was an action figure that had no set box I was tied up inside the cardboard A little person took me down And drooled all over me I was not a seer at all And they knew it I was only her And will be forever And when you see her empty eyes That’s me Except my eyes are gleaming And when there are tears I will cry them Only for the days that have left me They drove me here and locked me in A tiny yellow room They said to be quiet But I am not able To be quiet Any longer Dorothea Lasky is the author of several books of poetry and prose, including The Shining (Wave Books).
Charlotte Thießen Lotta Thießen is a poet, translator and parent who grew up in Porto (Portugal) and lives in Berlin. Her chapbook In This came out in 2016, and Fragments of Baby was published in 2019 by Materialien (Munich). She co-ran the magazine and international reading series artiCHOKE for which she translated and wrote about the work of Alice Notley, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Adelaide Ivánova, Don Mee Choi, Anne Boyer, Lionel Fogarty and Simone White (a.o.). Currently she is working on a new series of poems under the working title COINEATERS.
Bianca Stone I arrived outside-- all the baby goats had been slaughtered impaled on pikes through the anus and out the mouth laid neatly in a row in the back of a white truck. The young couple, the cheese-makers, walked by smiling, arm in arm, the sun shining around their faces. Yes, it was “just their time,” they laughed. Silver air in which more light lies outside of history, how white the hair around the mouth was, the stillness of the white truck, the red insides—I paused above the frozen mouths, where once the fractions of true events occurred having begun elsewhere, no more and the stillness felt like something achieved. I watched in idle scrutiny the world be world. Bianca Stone author of the poetry collections What is Otherwise Infinite (Tin House, 2022), winner of the 2023 Vermont Book Award; The Möbius Strip Club of Grief (Tin House, 2018), Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Octopus Books and Tin House, 2014) and collaborated with Anne Carson on the illuminated version of Antigonick (New Directions, 2012). Her work has appeared in many magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The Nation. She teaches classes on poetry and poetic study at the Ruth Stone House (501c3) where she is editor-at-large for ITERANT magazine and host of Ode & Psyche Podcast.
Elise Thi Tran In that hospital room, they cut one of two things that bound us. The one that remains is this. The Vietnamese words for mother, ghost, and horse are, to my untrained ears, indistinguishable. I know I’m her daughter because I swallow love like a knife. My mother cleans my scraped knee with a cotton ball and rubbing alcohol. I am once more a little girl. Bike mangled in the drive. Cicada chorus in the height of summer. Colorless wet, that acrid smell, the sting that follows. I can still hear her say it. You know it’s working if it hurts. Elise Thi Tran (she/her) is a Vietnamese-Filipina-American writer based in Chicago. She is the 2022 First Pages Prize winner, a Chicago Literary Club Collyer Fellow, and fiction judge for NYC Midnight. Her work appears or is forthcoming in HAD, the Kenyon Collegian Magazine, Margery de Brus, SAND, and Shō. Find Elise on Instagram @elise.tran
Lea Lumière And when you kissed me-- Were all the kisses of my life stuffed inside our mouths, And when you held me, between us all the things I ever held— old vases, broken suitcases, the photograph from my bottom drawer-- And when you whispered i do love you, all the love (and hate) Of all the worlds were stationed between us, Military men in foreign countries, little parades of people running marathons and protesting abortion rights, and making love in dimly lit 1920’s lower Manhattan bars-- And when we collapsed under the stars, I saw our star gasp, and in it all the gasps from the beginning of time-- there was a woman dying in childbirth, there was a man running out of time, an hourglass in his pocket, a sickness spread over his head, and there was God editing history— again-- And when you took me to that bench across the water To tell me I was beautiful, i wasn’t sure what was more beautiful the reflection of your face in the river— or the memory of what this will become—- and I wished I photographed the water with your face in it-- even more so, the memory-- it is like the thin layer of butter over the toast that thousands of people pulled out of the oven this morning-- because when I passed your ancestor’s grave, I saw this etched into another tomb “some people come into our lives and come and go, and some people leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same”-- And when we rent a room in my imagination, in it are all the rooms ever rented by old souls who carry many souls as time traverses, and God has the most photographic memory of all-- as every morning he remembers not to kill me, and the cotton sheet smells of all the cedar woods ever bottled, of all the wrists smeared with scents and longing-- and in the moment is always folded every other moment, every grandmother’s handkerchief, and in this life every other life, and I wonder sometimes if the future is like the romance of some man who might’ve stood at the doorstep with a miniature tree because she did not reckon flowers, or the one who bought two grave plots, and proposed marriage while laying inside them, or the one who fiddles with God’s key, like some day he will open the lock, and all the worlds will merge into a simple cup of coffee, and someone will take a sip, and even our memories will become part Of someone’s ashtray. Lea Lumière is a multi-disciplinary artist and writer. Her exploration of art encompasses many forms; experimental cinema, improvisational dance, visual arts and the poetries. Her art contains a visceral element of grief, the subconscious, and spirituality. American born, with European roots, she is drawn to the dark, enigmatic and ethereal quality of womanhood, death and the soul.
Eliot Cardinaux Where you can’t imagine me October turns the hillside pale & backwards green At night in the sleepless order of the house, beneath the dogeared sheets the city mourns you. Glares above my dream. If a crisis had eyes, her lights would open them Don’t wait for fate to place your memory back on the street Some days I lean like a fisherman & float out in Eliot Cardinaux was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1984, and spent time growing up in Geneva, Switzerland. He is a writer, translator, pianist, and composer working at the intersection of lyric poetry and improvised music. He studied briefly at Manhattan School of Music, and Conservatorium van Amsterdam, before completing his undergraduate degree in music at New England Conservatory. He went on to attain his MFA in poetry at The University of Massachusetts in Amherst. He has toured extensively throughout the U.S. and Europe. Eliot is the author of one full-length poetry collection, On the Long Blue Night (Dos Madres Press, 2023). His poems have appeared in Jacket2, Café Review, Fortnightly Review, Spectra Poets, Big Big Wednesday, Talisman, Caliban Online, Bloodroot, The Arts Fuse, Spoon River Poetry Review, and other journals. His translations have appeared in Solstice and Tupelo Quarterly. Eliot’s albums include American Thicket, Out of Our Systems, and Pavane. He is also the founder of The Bodily Press, an independent chapbook press and record label. He has taught at UMass Amherst, and worked as a bookseller at Amherst Books.
Laura Cesarco Eglin Parting with you is leaving the butter outside the fridge resting on the dish. The blade of the knife persistent as it rests beside the rigid block. The same kind of light yellow marks the beginning of the day. As I go about without you. Only in my mind— knowing that I forgot the butter, knowing nothing will happen other than a softening of the edges, and the sun will merge into the sky. The rays diffusing the blade of your absence. Laura Cesarco Eglin is a poet and translator from Uruguay. She is the author of six collections of poetry, including the chapbooks Between Gone and Leaving—Home (dancing girl press, 2023) and Time/Tempo: The Idea of Breath (PRESS 254, 2022). Her poems and translations (from the Spanish, Portuguese, Portuñol, and Galician), have appeared in many journals such as Asymptote, Figure 1, Eleven Eleven, Puerto del Sol, Copper Nickel, SRPR, Arsenic Lobster, International Poetry Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Columbia Poetry Review, Timber, and more. Cesarco Eglin is the translator of Claus and the Scorpion by the Galician author Lara Dopazo Ruibal (co•im•press, 2022), longlisted for both the 2023 PEN Award in Poetry in Translation and the 2023 National Translation Award in Poetry. She is also the translator of Of Death. Minimal Odes by the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (co•im•press), which was the winner of the 2019 Best Translated Book Award. Cesarco Eglin is the publisher of Veliz Books and teaches creative writing at the University of Houston-Downtown. More at lauracesarcoeglin.com
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