o sonny boy

Anjail Ahmad

     For Stephen c. Ferguson

head in the clouds

is what i said as gently as i could

half under my breath

to my colleague as we road along in his car. one eye on the road,

one ear screwed to his phone.

Exasperated as he listened to his son’s exploits

and the list of items he’s forgotten once more to collect before heading home—-

having raise my own boy filled

with absent-minded wonder the day long--

that was followed upon by another observation: feet landing wherever they may.

this sums up the life of a boy

of about twelve who moves through his world

filled with dreaminess and untied shoes and shirt-tales

untucked. unclaimed coats and jackets left in his wake,

a thin wisp of a god

who rounds the edges of the playground. demarcating

the untold boundaries of his neighborhood kingdom.

father to the man who will one day emerge

sheltering all beneath his six-foot wing span

while holding us all in his palms.

Anjail Rashida Ahmad, PhD, published poet, educator and advocate, a professor of poetry and African-American literature, founding Director of the Creative Writing Program at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University until I retired this past summer. Books: the color of memory, Klear Vizon Press, Chapbook, 1997; necessary kindling, LSU Press, 2001.

THe good mother

susan alexander

I am a good mother. 

I drop everything for my full-blown daughter. 

The symphony. The appointment with the specialist. The good line. 

I welcome her acolytes – she rarely comes alone. 

I feed and clean and bend my back and am grateful for the presence 

of the Holy One of God who comes to visit at the time 

most opportune to her and the moon.

She sails into bay. I swim to meet her,

catch the mooring line with my teeth, 

tow her boat to the buoy I’ve bought just in case 

she arrives unannounced because I am a good mother. 

Entwined, we bingewatch Netflix zombie shows.

I spurn my world because she is my world my true and it’s she who is 

the mast of the mast and sheet of the sheet and the winch of the winch is she. 

I offer up muffins and tea and slow-cooked ribs. I ignore my husband 

who is not her father – whose service I left – 

who she is coming to resemble. 

Tonight she glows as if shining from within. 

Behold the tall taper of her burning. A lit roman candle 

I hold in my hands to show I am not afraid. 

To show that I am good. A good mother who will not say no

to anything she asks of me. I do not say no. 

I cannot say no. 

As a reed before a great wind am I to my daughter. 

Forgive me, forgive me, I cry in my heart 

all day long. In my kitchen, I eat the leftovers.

I don my seamless garment of white linen and walk through my house. 

See how she fills every room.

I place my muffins on the altar of her daughterness. 

I am the high priestess of the good mothers. 

I make sandwiches in the temple and wrap them in wax paper. 

She casts off on a windless morning, takes the air 

from my lungs to fill her sails, my guilt 

to flood the tide. 

Susan Alexander is a poet and writer living in British Columbia on Nexwlélexm/Bowen Island, the traditional and unceded territory of the Squamish people. Susan’s work has appeared in anthologies and literary magazines throughout Canada, the U.S. and the U.K. She is the author of two collections of poems, Nothing You Can Carry, 2020 and The Dance Floor Tilts, 2017, from Thistledown Press. Her suite of poems called Vigil won the 2019 Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry while some of her other work has received the Vancouver Writers Fest and Short Grain awards.

bloody wells

noor ali

the forgotten victims of 

            war

are not the dismembered parts on fields

            the limbs strewn on yellow grass

            twisted, gnarled, crooked pieces 

                              not the detritus of village dreamscapes 

                                    new concrete dusted pale 

                                    quilted fabric snagged between the layers 

                              not the incessant ethnic tension

                                    the boots ringing in our ears for seventy-five years 

                                    flashes of metal under the broad and brown shoulder

they are hidden underground

            bodies of dark, long, black braids 

viscous hair in pools 

the wells in Hindustan are stained red

of the blood from the jumps of 

my ancestors 

each one 

nothing but 

the prey of a soldier

                                    the prey of the indian uniform

the prey of the men who forced their way in. 

Noor Ali (she/her) is a poet and student at Albuquerque Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She is passionate about the intersection between social justice and the art of storytelling, Noor spends her free time sorting through bookshelves, writing, or watching the murals of New Mexico sunsets.

poetry by akhim cabey

made love to her

and after going the fuck back

to my own country

like I’d been told—

aground with spear and shield

and gaggle of handwritten odes

in armpit—

I find our notorious shores 

empty     save the unmolested

sun-torched sand,

quiet dents left across

its gritty flesh

by the fragranced

din of you in the air

like the philter of boiled lemon

juice and cane sugar

you’d offered the night

I came home barefoot to pyramid

of burning wood,

gutted springbok draped across

my bare shoulders,

sunset reddening

our inherited sky, blood strings

dripping my ribs and hips,

travelling fatigued skin           

downward, pulled into the earth

like spear and shield

plunged into this beach

where you promised me

you’d be     because after this

I have nowhere

left to live but with this

foaming tide’s edge,

filling the hollow lungs

of my remaining days

in poetic recitation

of your medicinal absence.

savior

my mother poisons me in the Bronx at thirteen

with the daydream that her crack-pipe is a fife

whose melodies can be used to rethink myself into a son

birthed by radioactive spider bite or fear of bats. the orange

glow of glass and smoke guarantee I will one day

travel the stars rescuing damsels from fire-breathing

robotic pit bulls with just a blink of an eye.     instead I love

Sebrina from apt. 3C—a church girl whose bible

is bound in leather dark as her skin. I tell her the truth—

when she gives me the one chance—about who truly

bore me     about the false musician who poured fantasy

into my ear.     Sebrina covers a wide opened mouth

then crosses herself down a flight of tenement stairs

and back inside the invention of my life. if you see her again

in that long-ago borough, remind her, please

of the night she watched me climb the air unlike

an ordinary flesh and blood born boy     and snatch

that bullet-thrown spiral into my body with one hand

and with the other squeeze a parent back into

a rightful diamond. but beware of her offerings

from the good book: psalms that warn against hunger

of heroism and frantic imagination but not of watered

and blossomed fictions of original inhalations.

AKHIM YUSEFF CABEY is a Pushcart Prize-winning black author whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Callaloo, Indiana Review, the minnesota review, TriQuarterly, Shenandoah, Passages North, The Florida Review, and elsewhere. A six-time recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, he is originally from the Bronx, New York, and now lives in Columbus, Ohio. He can be found on Instagram @the_fit_poet.

umbra

Elizabeth Crowell

The boy hit the ball high,

beyond the diamond, swept and carved.

It soared into the muscled, windy air

onto the street, beneath a car.

And then we saw another boy

running in cleats, click-tap-click-tap,

scoop the ball and throw it home.

The players whistled and clapped.

A sudden, springtime wind

lit the field to dusty clouds.

The boys bowed, hands on their caps,

until the field settled back down.

Tonight, beyond the shaking panes

a shadow show comes into view.

I see a part of it, a peachy-stain

and then the darkness, and then you,

Time itself, your click and shift,

the boys all grown, now fathers

to other boys, unseen, eclipsed

by another and another.

Something moves again,

My child talking in her sleep.

Lights go off in the house

and then even universally. 

Elizabeth Crowell grew up in northern New Jersey and has a B.A. from Smith College in English Literature and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing/Poetry from Columbia University. She taught college and high school English for many years. She lives outside of Boston with her wife and teenage children.

the conquest of hoarding

M. A. Dubbs

At Nana’s house we set up base camp.

I create a tent of sheet and towel

while my cousin gather supplies.

North of the den lie the mountains:

piles of clothes, both dirty and clean,

tubs and trash bags, papers, empty bottles,

brand new shoes with tags still on,

all looming high over our heads.

Nonetheless we begin our trek,

guide-less but determined,

quickly ascending as junk groans

and crushes under our steps.

The hike starts easy, a quick tempo

until we pause at Camp 1.

We giggle underneath one of Nana’s dresses

and dig through a jewelry box

of costume pearls which we drape

around our throats.

The mountain inclines past our tent

so we take this part slow, careful of thin air,

and mindful of sickness this high up.

We come across a crevasse

so we tie panty hose around both of our waists

and place an iron board to connect trash piles.

I start crossing first, my ankles trembling

as the board wobbles and bends from my weight.

My cousin claps and begins to cross,

crawling on all fours like a bear on a log.

Suddenly, with a loud metal snap, the iron board buckles.

She jumps to me, misses, and clings

to the side of a pack of toilet paper.

The groin of panty hose tied between us

is taunt enough to slowly belay her up to me.

Camp 2 is quiet between us,

as we squat in a cardboard box,

eating stale Twinkies we found

just outside our route.

The last leg is the most treacherous.

The deathzone, we call it,

and we slide on our bellies toward the summit.

There’s many memories in this segment,

stored and frozen in the piles:

a dirty diaper from my cousin when she was a baby,

a picture of our uncle who passed before we were born,

an almost skeletal mouse in a trap,

crushed Bud cans from when pap used to drink.

Just shy of the top we hear the dreaded sound

of all hikers on this mountain:

the whoomping sound of Nana’s cane

as she forms a path to us.

She “tsks” us as we slide down the cliffs,

heads down in guilt,

and she gently lifts the faux pearls

off our small shoulders.

“I’ve been looking for these,” she smiles

as she caresses each strand.

She sets them back on the peak

and they glide back onto the slopes,

back into some segmented memory,

‘til we find them again.

M. A. Dubbs is an award-winning Mexican American and LGBT+ writer who hails from Indiana. For over a decade their writing has been published in literary magazines and anthologies across the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia. They served as judge for the 2022 Poetry Out Loud state competition and in 2021 released their debut book collection: Aerodynamic Drag: Poetry and Short Fiction. Find them at https://www.instagram.com/madubbspoetry/ and https://melindadubbs.wordpress.com/

above ground

sam floyd

If I had ten just like you, the doctor told my wife,

I’d expect eight to survive.

She meant, survive to die of something other than

breast cancer.

My wife has a friend who smokes heavily and rides a

motorcycle to work every day;

she was disappointed that he planned to quit smoking

but then decided not to.

My feeling was that if he didn’t also plan to stop

riding his motorcycle, there wasn’t much point in

his quitting smoking.

I’m losing my life and my wife every day.

I’m not sure anymore to what extent I ever really

had either.  I’ve been pretty stupid actually,

about the whole thing.

A famous avatar has remarked, so I’m told:

We are not our bodies.

My wife, however, has fought a war the last six months

for her body, beaten back the enemy.

Now we are mourning the losses that come with war.

According to an unpublished Court of Appeals

decision I read at the office the other day,

the Commonwealth indicted three men for raping “T.D.”

on the darkened porch of a burned-out house

while they sat drinking and taking pills.

“Following these attacks,” the opinion recounted,

“the men trundled the victim, naked but for a sleeping

bag wrapped around her, deep into the woods

where she was raped once again.  An eyewitness described

his incredulity as he watched Appellant next lead

the victim to a newly dug grave into which she silently

laid herself down.  Appellant then pulled back the hammer

of his sawed-off shotgun and killed T.D.”

A fellow prosecutor reminded me recently, as we spoke of my

wife’s illness:  Every day above ground is a good day.

Perhaps T.D. came to believe otherwise.

I see myself these days as a face in a streak of

rainwater, a dark reflection on wet glass.  Rooms are visible

behind me, with walls connected by doors and angles.

While I am not my body, I believe that every day my body is

above ground may or may not be a good one.

According to current defense estimates, at least eighty percent

of my wife has survived the war but not all of that

eighty percent has come home to me yet.

Maybe some of it never will, forever missing in action.

It’s like how you know in a given situation, when the

attorneys show up, regardless of how the litigation turns out,

you’re screwed.

All of the wife I knew died when she found the lump,

but I didn’t realize it at the time.

I am now married to a luminous apparition with scars.

She is grieving and healing, brilliant and shining.

In many respects she is still much too hot to handle.

Since I never expected to have a wife, I am continually

amazed.  Transfigured, she has become a meteor shower

passing through the house, a promise of new life,

a wondrous sign in the heavens.

The guy who committed the rape and murder was not

sentenced to death.  He got seventy years.  He survived

to die of something else.

I change constantly like a downpour against

a midnight window.  I have never been my body.

The one I was born with is long gone.  The one I’ve got

now is smeared, wearing thin.

I can’t possibly love my wife enough.  How can I

when all the bodies I love most keep dissolving

day in and day out in a landscape of statistical probabilities,

a thunder storm of fractions, and I can only see them

in muzzle flashes, scalpel slashes,

lightning splashes.  A deluge of blessings poured

like piss out of a boot.

I am still in the primordial soup.  I’ve never left it.

I see the outline of who I’m not, changing from who

I wasn’t into what I won’t be ever.  I’m standing in

a very shallow grave.

If there were ten just like me, I doubt I’d recognize

any of them, but I hope none of them ever gets

the cancer, and I hope none of them ever does

what the rapist with the shotgun did.  And I’d donate

every single one of them to the Salvation Army

if it would spare my wife the suffering she’s endured.

After six months of war, I’m sick of being helpless

on the home front.

Maybe we’ll eliminate war someday,

and capital punishment.  Maybe we should.  Maybe

we’ll find a cure for cancer.  We’ll never eliminate

the carnage though, not so long as we

live in our bodies, not so long as there are cigarettes

to smoke and motorcycles to ride.

The odds will simply remain against it,

so long as every day above ground—no matter how

God-awful—is a good one, and every night

the heavens—no matter how impenetrably black—are

alive with signs and wonders.

Sam Floyd lives in Louisville, Kentucky. He recently fulfilled MFA degree requirements at Eastern Kentucky University’s Bluegrass Writers Studio with the completion of his poetry collection, Broken Rules and Ugly Rumors. His poetry has appeared in Little Somethings Press and The Heartland Review.

wax

lydia host

a.     Again,

we pick our tortuous way

around the pebble patches, still

gouged in delicate wax, unhealing,

still pressed into our plastic brains

that this unfeeling sunlight yet

                             could be our god.

b.     Stirring

(you laugh) lilacs, sure,

No, neck and shoulders,

closer to the heart, place

a rusty spring outside, wait, the

happy scrap somewhere contains

a thin bright cord of metal

coiling like a wisp,

                                and gone.

c.     But then,

you say oneiric, I say,

Oneida. You say, silver,

I say, slaver. We could

go on like this all day,

                             you say.

d.     Well

plumping in the desert has

no lily hopes that ship

has sailed, under a cedar mast, that’s just

a poor denuded tree, with blanket.

e.     So let’s read, then,

from Norton Anthology, page

eight hundred and eighty,

under Leslie Marmon Silko,

about the world’s beginning.

f.      Alternatively,

the McDonald’s billboard,

(which comes to the same thing)

billions and billions served,

thus, and thus, and thus.

g.     Accounting

for differences in pressure

I think I died eight thousand

years ago, sad as I was when

my best friend fell into a peat bog,

as was fashionable in those days,

                                             you say.

h.     Maybe it’s hopeless,

and maybe it isn’t.

i.      So, why not call it

İstanbul, and lighten your step

to a trot, thinking of tulips

and six dozen brides

all posing for pictures

in Emirgân Park?

Lydia Host is a writer and poet born in 1994. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming from: The Ravens Perch, The Woven Tale Press, Choeofpleirn Press, The Decadent Review, and Oyedrum magazine. In 2021 she won the First Prize for Fiction at the Westmoreland Arts and Heritage Festival.

A Cabin in the Forest

K Janeschek

You are allowed to grieve

            the gender you were given

even if you set it down

      on a stone or step

            on your walk home.

Entering the cabin you live in

                  whose logs

were taken from the dead trees

            on that dome

      after wildfires raced up

the slope, you imagine choking on that burning,

                  that burning air. Somehow,

from under the ashes,

      this wood. Remember you drove

for days

            through nothing but charred fields

                        and valleys, the burnt

      silhouettes of pine seared

into your journey

            here; seared into your mind’s

map of the world. Running your hands over

      the head you shaved yourself,

                        you know this body

      has come with you

                  a long way. Now, at your threshold, you shed

            clothes like skin,

setting aside the day’s labors, regaining

            a flesh you cannot navigate

                        even with every milepost you’ve singed

      into it. Yet, unclothed,

                  standing before the mirror,

you try to feel this

            your home.

K Janeschek is a nonbinary and lesbian writer originally from the Midwest. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in Mid-American Review, Foglifter, The Swamp Literary Magazine, Split Rock Review, Great Lakes Review, Hoxie Gorge Review, and elsewhere, and has won an AWP Intro Journals Project award in poetry as well as Hopwood awards in both poetry and nonfiction. They live in Alaska. Find them on Twitter at @KJaneschek.

butterfly garden

Lauren elaine Jeter

I.

My first real road trip is at age twenty-one

with my family, my last year with my maiden

name. We drive out to North Carolina,

where my parents hope to retire, to Asheville

and the mountains, and everything is blue

and green, and we can walk through clouds.

II.

As kids, we rode down to Galveston each year,

but that’s only a few hours away. We spent days

on the beach with family friends, swimming

in brown water and building wet sandcastles.

My brother’s hair was always white in the sun.

III.

My brother’s body is turning to vapor.

IV.

Soon, my life will be filled with the road;

when I marry, I’ll move to a town full

of trees in the east, and after a year

heavy with rain and green, I’ll move again

to the west coast, always a thousand miles

from home.

V.

We grew up in the same town my grandmother

was born in, the same town where she met my

grandfather and married him when she was

seventeen. She grew up so poor she didn’t know

the whole country was depressed. She remembers

snow seeping in through the wooden walls

of her home.

VI.

If our grandparents were snow, our mother was

tree—large pecans on the property she moved to

in her youth that took her breath away. Our father

was an artist, but we were recessive. They gave

birth to blue-eyed moths.

VII.

In North Carolina, we sit in a café in the clouds,

and the sky opens to blue mountains below.

We drive the Blue Ridge Parkway to its top.

When we come back down, we watch wide-eyed

as a bear rolls onto the freeway.

VIII.

Moths outnumber butterflies sixteen to one,

and we believed we were nothing special.

My brother’s body is turning to vapor like

the cigarettes he used to smoke. My brother

is my protector and my aggressor, and our

wings are speckled with sadness. My brother’s

disorder is psychosomatic, which means his

brain lies to his body. I want to tell him

that when you strip away organ and muscle

and bone, there is still something there,

fluttering. But my own fingers have cigarette

smell.

IX.

When I move to California, we’ll stand

in the Pacific with phytoplankton at our

feet, red with stench. Each break of a wave

will glow blue with bioluminescence.

Some people will see the sand light up

under their feet. But that is years away.

X.

My brother is a moth, waiting for the

hemolymph to pump through the veins

in his wings.

XI.

We shop along a river and laugh

and walk through botanical gardens

with plots of green bushes and purple

flowers. From above, I find that each

plot is a butterfly, and my brother

is drifting among them.

Lauren Elaine Jeter is an alumna of the Creative Writing program at Stephen F. Austin State University. She is the Co-Poetry Editor for Gingerbread House Literary Magazine and was most recently nominated for Best of the Net 2021 by the museum of americana, although her works have also appeared in Crab Creek Review, Gravel, and Thin Air, among other journals.

Dog Park, Ocean Beach, San Diego

mary junge

We who have watched too much television for more than a year

look to dogs to cheer us, and these dogs do their job.

Some of us throw frisbees and slimy tennis balls to huskies

and German shepherds, to dachshunds and pit bulls, to Labrador retrievers

and cocker spaniels, to bulldogs and Weimaraners.  Soon we are smiling.

The dogs mostly play chase, stopping to sniff each other’s privates,

turning again to meet the gaze of their owners as lovers would. 

It is still early, but the sun ascends quickly.  Two dogs ride surfboards,

though never over any wave’s crest. Who could feel sad

watching dogs float on surfboards on the sparkling expanse of the ocean?

We’re calm and smiling by the time we begin walking in the deeper sand.

Maybe we’re a little kinder too. You’d think war hadn’t been invented yet

or that slavery played no part in our history. When a dog nips at my son’s dog,

apologies come easily from both sides. Forgiveness is granted. 

We’re shoeless. Our stomachs rumble. The homeless remain wrapped

in sleeping bag cocoons near the line where the sand ends and pavement begins. 

One woman has forgotten to bring a bag for her dog’s poop. 

No worries. A woman in a canary-yellow t-shirt offers one.

Back home in Minneapolis, protestors occupy the city streets again. Daunte Wright

was killed last night. He was only twenty.  His name supplants George Floyd’s

on a long list. (Did I really believe there would be no more after George?)

I struggle to hold so many in mind.

They won’t smile again, won’t walk any dog to any park.

Daunte will never again walk hand-in-hand with his son,

who at age two is beginning to learn that his father is gone for good. 

It will take time, his lifetime, to grasp the meaning of the word forever.

Mary Junge lives, writes, and watches birds in Minnesota. She holds a Master of Arts degree from the University of Minnesota and has studied poetry and memoir at the Loft, Minneapolis, Key West Literary Seminars and workshops, and other places. During the pandemic she took online poetry classes with Ellen Bass. She enjoyed a residency at Rensing Center’s Italian outpost in Borseda, Liguria, Italy in 2017. In addition to traveling, reading and writing, she is an avid quilter. Junge’s poems have been published in numerous journals and anthologies: bosque, Crosswinds Poetry Journal (recent work appears in issue VIII, 2022), Rag Queen, Split Rock Review (to hear a poem in this poet’s voice, https://www.splitrockreview.org/mary-junge), and Water~Stone, among others. Junge's poem, “Demerol Dreams,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2001. She has published two poetry books of poetry: Express Train, a chapbook, Pudding House Publications, and Pilgrim Eye, Laurel Poetry Collective (available online). Her work also appears in six anthologies by Laurel and one edited by Nita Penfold, “Hunger Enough.” In 1999 she was among three finalists chosen by Lucille Clifton for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize. Work is forthcoming in “All You Need is One Avocado,” a chapbook by poets from the Twin Cities to be released in September, 2022. She is presently assembling a second full collection of poetry for which she is seeking a publisher.

Sainthood

Jennifer Lagier

The four days my baby sister lived,

I waited till we were alone,

furtively reached

through the bars of her crib,

found her tiny fingers,

jealously pinched them.

Ten years old,

I confessed my guilt.

My grandmother pushed me

onto my knees,

commanded I pray,

beg god’s forgiveness.

Later, I tore away fingernails,

sliced both feet

with a razor blade,

pushed my fists

through windowpanes,

offered cleansing atonement

of self-mutilation.

In adulthood,

every supervisor

admired my limitless drive.

I told them saints

who endured tortuous deaths

were my Catholic role models.

Jennifer Lagier has published nineteen books. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies ezines, and literary magazines. She taught with California Poets in the Schools, edits the Monterey Review, helps coordinate Monterey Bay Poetry Consortium Second Sunday readings. Recent publications: Rising Voices: Poems Toward a Social Justice Revolution, Syndic Literary Journal, Fog and Light: San Francisco Through the Poets Who Live There, Second Wind: Words & Art of Hope & Resilience. Her most recent books: Meditations on Seascapes and Cypress (Blue Light Press), COVID Dissonance (CyberWit), and Camille Chronicles (FutureCycle Press). Find more of her work at jlagier.net.

Whereas we thank you for your stewardship

katherine Leonard

With sincere gratitude to Layli Long Soldier
for her work, Whereas, which considers and deeply reflects
on the 2009 U.S. Congressional Resolution of Apology.

We say stewardship, whereas we have no words for inter-

relationship. We have no word for living

in harmony within creation.

And we snort and toss our cans and bulldoze

our stewardship of each other

into boxes to hold children

and sort each other by color and cost.

Until our tsunami of hunger swallows us whole.

Whereas we are sorry

or will be

                        or may never be         

for the dis        continuity

            driving us        drunk on manifest destiny,

                        joyriding

a superhighway.                      Whereas, anyway,

we mean to apologize.            That was all in the past.

Whereas things are clearly different

now     –          witness            the fact

                        that we are saying                   sorry.

Katherine Leonard grew up in the US and Italy. She lived in Massachusetts at the time of John F Kennedy's assassination and as a high school student in rural Texas, experienced segregation and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. She has been a chemist, a geologist and an oncology nurse/nurse practitioner. Her work has been previously published in literary journals, including Sonora Review, Hole in the Head Review, Speckled Trout Review, FERAL, and Tipping the Scales. Her work is upcoming in Stone Canoe, Allium and Northern New England Review.

show you matter

Christian Lozada

 My union representative asks me:

“Take a selfie with a sign about

why you matter.”

I say, “Yes.”

And think about two more months and the job’s probation is over

He says, “and send it to the Board of Trustees.

We want to let them know we matter.”

I say, “No.”

And think about two more months and probation is over

about the two times I was interim and the next in line

told in side conversations in hushed tones and coffee breath

close enough to sway the hair in my ears

only to see some White guy get it.

“Why?”

“I need this job,” I say, hoping to speak his language:

White people are all about the job.

“But it can be better.”

And I think: oh, he’s one of them.

“No,” I say,

and I think about the shady shit to get here

about going into the back entrance to cross the picket lines for cash

about how some people start their jobs with paperwork

and others start their jobs with sweat

about pretending to have options

like putting the beans on top of the rice one meal

mashing them together the next

or separating them on the plate to be proper

about the thick but delicate meat cubes

that slurp out of Skippy Dog Food when there was nothing else

but keeping the roof

“No.”

Christian Hanz Lozada (he/him/they) is the son of an immigrant Filipino and a descendent of the Confederacy, so he knows the shape of hope and exclusion. He co-authored the poetry book Leave with More Than You Came With from Arroyo Seco Press and the history book Hawaiian in Los Angeles. His poems and stories have appeared in Hawaii Pacific Review (Pushcart Nominee), A&U Magazine, Rigorous Journal, Mud Season Review, Dryland, among others. Christian has featured at the Autry Museum, the Twin Towers Correctional Facility, Tebot Bach, and Beyond Baroque. He lives in San Pedro, CA and uses his MFA to teach his neighbors’ kids at Los Angeles Harbor College.

STASIS

Aaron Magloire

I was not deceived. When the sparrow flew in

from the rain and headed up toward the rafters

looking for warmth, I knew it would not come

back down. Had I been kinder, or more awake,

I might have lugged the old blue stepladder out

from its place under the tarp in the cedarwood

shed behind the house, braved the epiderma

of dust, unfurled the ladder and walked up it—no

warmth—to find the bird’s small body. I did not

even pray. There is a difference between rest-

itution and gluttony, and what’s more the rain

would not let up, and sounded so beautiful

from where I was: drumbeat battalions

steady against the rooftop, night-slick

droves of talons seeking out a way in.

Aaron Magloire is from Queens, and majors in African American Studies and English at Yale University. His work has appeared in the 2021 Best New Poets anthology, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.

Depression is an art

glenn marchand

you sit between the here-right-now and the
where a person is headed. you are aware of
something, most deliberate, affected by
proximity, triggered unknowingly. you are

churchbell music, a sealed envelope, a
supposed apple, a natural inclination. you are
lethargic, listless, an alarming picture. you
are justice and injustice, style and

exploitation, unclean, or too clean to tolerate.
a boxy creature. a sore tooth. a netlike
intensity, spiraling downward. you and i
admire this, you are colorless, color

blind, the staircase never changes, perceived
by the entire world, an episode, a florist of
opaque roots. you are personality, or the lack
thereof, a soulprint, a mind pattern, part

thrall, part depth, part uncertainty. you
irrigate the insides; a songbird at moments,
producing, like invisible hands, a perfect
paragraph, a work of art, an immortalizing

portrait: a twinkle, a mystification, a pleasure
to sip with. you are in most waves, the
currency of sceneries, the gates to time,
space, and sanity. you are a trip to that place,

a need for something reaching, a reason to
say—yes to marriage, love, and promise. you
are a device—connecting through
experience, to speak of you, with intimacy,

is to be received by others, the likeness of the
interior, the mind of the current, the circuit of
the immortal. you invade intuition. you sit in
genetics. you are natural and you

come by unnatural means. you make a person
languish. you impassion a person to new
heights. you utter in essence more contrition.
you are bonded to religiosity. you

flog the person, the soul, and spirit. you are
flawless awareness. you are a universal
axiom—to mention you, ears perk up. you are
the need inside for the medication, some

medicinal form, something offsetting the
intensity. an asymmetrical creature. a person
grows accustomed to you, and you change
the rules. a person can trust you are coming.

you are the hospital visit—the sad
harmony—the reality in a jar, in a slump,
waiting patiently; you never go away, you
just linger, you sit, any activity is better than

absorption activity—the reason for risqué
activity, the source of the impetuous
rendezvous, or the reason a person needs
incessant affection. you are the catalyst to

masterpieces, the hand for self-hurting, the
breeze becoming an epiphany. many have
come to live with you, to expect your
attendance. you are a state of mind, an

irregular linchpin, so sickening, and when
absent for a moment, a person is concerned.
you popped up on me as a child—we weren’t
introduced, you were just apparent

at some point. i was sitting, and new
consciousness appeared—sullen, sad, and
heavy consciousness. you appeared at such
an early age, it seemed normal to be with

you, it must have been inevitable for me. the
dahlias looked different. existential
properties were apparent. deep interests seem
to intrigue the developing artist.

affection was once beautiful. it would soon
require of me more than i could render. you
would accompany me to every function. i
grew prideful in knowing most everyone

was carrying a piece of your legacy. the
empire was vast, and the recruitment was
rapid, and becoming indifferent was a form
of self-defense—it felt natural: the way we

ignore each other, the need for total surrender
into each person, the connections filled with
debauchery. you taught me the masquerade,
to anticipate nodding as alert to

the beauty of nature, nonetheless, heaviness
was mizzling in, latches were being
unbuckled, and religiosity was giving a
reason for suffering, where tradition was

asserting the naturality of the cycle. you
would seduce by preciousness the heart of the
rose, causing scudding and flitting and
flutters; no greater need than to comfort, to

be received as to serve a greater purpose—to
love as we might, sheer depth in its needs, to
suffer so much—human connectedness has
value, a silent desperation, as holding like
existence has come to its peak.

Glenn Marchand has an M.A. in Theology from Loyola Marymount University, and recently finished his requirements in the MFA Creative Writing program at Mount Saint Mary’s University. Marchand is an African American poet, focused on writing about existential truths, topics seeming apparent, or better, life’s aphorisms. Marchand believes in connectivity, a mystic universe, and the beauty in communicating through energy. Attached are a group of poems for consideration.

Where We Hid Her

Nicole Mayeux

In the third year of Hoshea son of Elah king of Israel, Hezekiah son of Ahaz king of
Judah began to reign...He did what was right in the eyes of the Lord, just as his father
David had done. He removed the high places, smashed the sacred stones and cut down
the Asherah poles. - 2 Kings 18:3-4

in our underwear drawer, behind the period-stained panties. behind the loose brick
in the fireplace. under the olive tree in the east field, marked only by memory. sewn
into the hem of our apron. between the joinery of the pig trough, and we hope she
forgives us.

taped to the ceiling beam. sewn into the stomach of our daughter’s doll. between the
largest and second largest mixing bowls. in our grandmother’s bridal chest. in our
vaginas, wrapped in linen. in the hollowed-out leg of the birthing stool.

and when it is time to pack up and move with the flocks
she comes with us in the secret places
even in the dirt under our fingernails when we can’t find her in the east field
even in the splinters she leaves when our husbands,
worse sometimes, our daughters
rip her from our hands.

Nikki Mayeux is a queer ex-Evangelical writer and educator from the strangest city in the Deep South, New Orleans. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans and works in special education advocacy. She also performs public storytelling and produces SANCTUARY, a performance series uplifting stories of religious trauma and deconstruction. Her work has been featured in Infection House, Dinner Bell, Room 220, Ginger Zine, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook, Ordinary Time, is available from Tilted House.

poetry by john miller

tidewater hedge-witch

for my grandmother

I. Sympathetic Magic

I woke to a scream and ran
to her in tears. Mimi cocked an ear
and purred, Oh honey,

that’s just an old screech owl.
Tucking me in, she knotted the corner
of my sheet. That owl stopped cold.

A stronger spell bound Mimi’s house
against harm. She chain-smoked
menthol 100s (Salems, of course)

making towers of glowing ash
that teetered into carpets and couches,
sacks stuffed with worked crosswords.

She drew her power from reaching
elbow deep in the earth—planting
and transplanting, nursing green things

to flourishing. Damn growing zones.
She summoned whatever she sought
to grow from seed, slip, or scion.

Some magic overflowed the tin pails
she kept to catch her famed elixir:
rainwater from thunderstorms.

After squalls, we’d dash between
her chuckling downspouts.
We’d dose her frail dogwoods,

treat the latest sapling grown
from seeds spirited past Customs
with a grin and grandmotherly guile.

My memory conflates the pails’
fish-belly hue with the water’s power
—fading like a fresh-caught fish.

II. Cruel Magic

Mimi taught my sister to read palms
the summer she turned ten.
One Sunday, driving home

from church in a vast Oldsmobile,
Emily sat up front, seatbelt cinched
across her skinny hips, dark hair

shimmering to her shoulders. She read
her namesake’s palm at a stop-light:
It says here we should have an aunt.

In the breathless car, Mimi told us
how she’d lost a daughter.
This was her cruelest magic: surviving

—even when she no longer meant to.
She outlived her mean-drunk ex-husband,
her coven of bridge-playing widows,

and her only child. Weeks before
her funeral, my sister heard her
curse herself for not dying sooner.

But Mimi’s not quite gone. Whenever
she wants to weigh-in, we catch a whiff
of menthol, then the desk she left us

pops and groans. I’m waiting for it
to share its secrets like her giant car.
I stomped its squishy brakes

on the way to have it serviced
before we gave it to her sitter,
and summoned a supernatural gift

from under the seat: a pint bottle
of bourbon whose gold-fringed label
and amber liquid glowed in the sun.

What I Knew

We were brothers—wrestling
the long, taut line between

rivalry and devotion: Who could
jump farther, climb higher, fall harder?

Who would invent the next game
just dangerous enough to be fun?

We were boys—struggling to grow
into our outsized confidence.

Older, my job was to know better.
Instead, I made a bow from a lattice slat,

notched wooden dowels for arrows,
snipped fins from sliver-gray duct tape.

We took turns shooting over each other
until the blunt tip raised a purple welt.

I apologized over and over, and as soon
as you stopped crying, you swore

not to tell. But Mom knew already—
before the dark spot bloomed

into a vast, grackle-black shiner
that took weeks to fully fade.

At nine, an allergic reaction burnt
every bit of you to scab or blister.

You spiked a fever so high the hospital
packed your head in ice to keep

your brain from baking. I remember
your red eyes ringed with fear,

their sheen of tears. Dad summoned
a procession of doctors who bled you,

poked and scoped you, all in the name
of doing no harm, because fixing things

(even if by main-strength and awkwardness)
was how our father showed he cared.

When we were teenagers, he took us fishing
as the Gulf shook off the last of a storm.

Hours we pitched between whitecaps,
though we knew nothing would bite.

When a rogue wave tossed the boat,
a three-inch hook swung free and bit deep

into the meat of your pale forearm.
This time you didn’t cry, not even

when Dad fetched the rusty bait-pliers.
You just looked at me with wide, sad eyes

that said how sick you were of love that hurt,
and I knew to turn the boat around.

Hailing from Eugene Walter's Kingdom of Ghosts and Monkeys, John Miller was sent so frequently to look up words as a kid he toted a dictionary to supper. His poems have appeared in: Poetry South, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Paper Nautilus Press published his chapbook, Heat Lightning, in 2017.

[2020] the divided states of attica

henry 7. reneau, jr.

What was    continued to be    &

what might have been    isn't.   

Violence never starts with violence.    It always begins

with a callous word    something that sounds

like sarcastic denial    or a shrug of indifference    remorse-

like a Teleprompter scrawl of thoughts & prayers

the arrogant dismissal of political soundbytes

                                                   as if we weren't even there.        

The body language & micro-

                                              expressions of shamelessness.      

The collective belief in a biased mythology    & Progress

(the too long syllables

of assimilation of everything)    like blood spattered

on virgin white cotton    & faded

to a stubborn brown pentimento.   

My people have a hard time letting go    holding onto offense    &

too fed up to let go.    The only dying that scares us

is freeze Nigger!!    &

all men are created equal    like the scariest part on a rollercoaster

is waiting in line.

                         The resignation of We Shall Overcome    from mouths

                         gaped the shape

                         of the same old Hope/:  a million candles burning vigil

                         for the help that never comes.   

Every Blue(s) moan that documents a scar.     

We are descended from

the only tribe of people who did not run to Amerikkka    a flock of geese

hurricane shipwrecked

onto the shores of Hell during open hunting season    or 

the chalk outline    X marks the spot

where the demon    thug    criminal fell     after 18 bullets in his back.   

Always, what doesn't kill us    waiting for another chance.   

We saw the lightning & that was the guns; & then we heard

the thunder & that was the big guns;

& then we heard the rain falling & that was the blood falling . . .

How many things They take for granted &

act as if is normal.    Our skin color

                                  used to incite fear    &/or

                                  justify violence.   

Not a murder or a conspiracy   

but the complicitous Nigger!!    behind our backs.      

& just how regularly    does something bad happen?    the business as usual? 

Our lineage the Big Bang singularity    that collapsed

into the weight of its own gravity   

but formed the stars    sending our light into space   

long after we are dead.

Note: The fragment in italics is an abbreviated quote by Harriet Tubman.  

henry 7. reneau, jr. is a pro-Black man who writes words of conflagration to awaken the world ablaze, an inferno of free verse illuminated by his affinity for disobedience—is the spontaneous combustion that blazes from his heart, phoenix-fluxed red & gold, like a discharged bullet that commits a felony every day, exploding through change is gonna come to implement the fire next time. He is the author of the poetry collection, freedomland blues (Transcendent Zero Press) and the e-chapbook, physiography of the fittest (Kind of a Hurricane Press), now available from their respective publishers. Additionally, his collection, A Non-Violent Suicide Poem [or, The Saga of The Exit Wound], was a finalist for the 2022 Digging Press Chapbook Series. His work is published in Superstition Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Zone 3; Poets Reading the News and Rigorous. His work has also been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.

life in the body yet

Jerl Surratt

Light before dawn breaks, the sky suffused
with what a cloudless morning promises
is light enough that it unsettles you,
as I am privileged to know, and so
I rouse myself that you’ll not need to wake
and gently as I can untangle limbs
our dreaming’s thread us through.

Letting down the shade
I’ve long left up on turning in,
I wonder why this habit
is still so hard to break,
since I don’t need to see the stars
that I’ve stopped wasting wishes on --
one wish above all others met in you,
who under covers I resettle with,
the room again as dark as it was all night
except for the source of light and heat
I curl against, curve into and embrace.

Jerl Surratt has lived full time in Hudson, NY since 2017, after working in NYC as a writer and advisor to nonprofits in the fields of civil rights, early childhood education, health care, medical research, historic preservation, and the visual arts. His poems have been published in The Hopkins Review, Kenyon Review, Literary Imagination, The New Criterion and other journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Tor House Prize for Poetry by judge Marie Howe. Find out more at www.jerlsurratt.com

emergency

Amber Bachiochi Thompson

This morning there are coyotes
cackling after the damp ring of an ambulance.
First they are a child laughing then
a woman screaming then
dogs barking and finally,
definitely, coyotes.

They are far enough away
that they have no real
relation to the emergency.
I sit at a glass patio table overlooking the
street and a plate of crepes, where before me
there is nothing but relation–
I caused the crepes;
I howl at the crepes;
I am the crepes:
thin-skinned and delicate
(two different things if you ask me).
Their fillings, too: smeared and spread thin.
The jar of preserves I held in my hand:
peach preserves / an act of care / self preserves.
Sliced blunt and smooth with the dull side of a fork.
Devoured. Appreciated.

I am a child laughing,
a woman screaming,
a dog barking and finally,
definitely,
a coyote.

Amber Bachiochi Thompson is an essayist and poet, as well as the founding editor of Too Well Away Literary Journal (currently on hiatus). Her work has appeared in Critical Read, Poet’s Billow, Rockvale Review, Ocotillo Review, and others. She lives in the OKC metro with her husband Daniel and loves cats, Paul Simon, and drinking lots of tea.

at the sip and save, 1978

Eileen Toomey

The walk-in cooler
is my favorite spot
in the whole liquor store.
Cases of beer stacked
like buildings:
Budweiser, Old Style, Miller,
chimney necks
of Boone’s Farm wine.

I ask my mother
if we are middle class.
She laughs:

Oh no, not even close.

She carries two six packs
of Bud and a pint of Seagrams.
I walk behind her hefting
a two-liter of Seven-Up.
My parents are playing cards
at our house with friends:

Middle class
lives in the suburbs
or neighborhoods like Evergreen Park.
Not here.

Aunt Dorothy and Aunt Rita aren’t middle class?

No! Not even close.
They don’t even have husbands.

She puts the beer and whiskey
on the formica counter
between airplane bottles
of Jim Beam
and plastic lighters.
She asked for Winstons, and yes,
she wants matches.

Middle class people own china
and go on vacation every year.

We swing through
the heavy glass double doors,
the store bell
ringing behind us.

They have cottages
in Michigan and Wisconsin.

The 8 and Halsted bus
pauses at the stop
in front of the Sip and Save
letting off people I don’t know.

Are we poor?

No! We live
paycheck to paycheck
like everyone else.

But we own our house now!
I sing.

Yep.
Why are you asking me this?
She pauses at the car door.

Everything is good
until Daddy goes to the hospital again,
I insist.

She is already behind the wheel
opening her cigarette case,
impatient to get on with the night.
She will let me stir
the onion soup mix
into the sour cream,
squirt Easy Cheese
on a few Ritz crackers.

Tufty grass. Two-flats.
Chain link fences,
peeling paint,
crooked front porches.

Working class means
you pay your bills.

My mom pulls out of the parking lot,
cigarette balanced between her lipsticked lips,
smoke rising from the triangular side window.

You have your fun, though.

Eileen Toomey’s works have appeared in The Rumpus, The Tishman Review, Fish Food Magazine, The Eastern Iowa Review, and the Museum of Americana. She lives in Red Bank, NJ with her husband, Michael.

when you come out of a war

Martine van Bijlert

seemingly unscathed like                           

                                             let’s face it                        

                                                            most people do

                       (because

                                      there’s always

                                                            so much worse)

it can make you

        feel like you shouldn’t

                                      live too much

                                             or too loudly

                                                            not too happily

some people wail and some people go silent but slowly

I’m starting to believe that the ones like us

who mute ourselves

                                                            out of respect or shame or

                                             guilt over what we didn’t

                               ask for either—

I mean there’s such a thing as a life force

I mean look at the trees pushing out their buds each year                            the flowers

with their blazing colours                            the birds testing the air after a storm tore

at their branches

Martine van Bijlert is a poet, novelist and non-fiction writer who grew up in Iran, now lives in the Netherlands and, in between, worked as an aid worker, researcher and diplomat, mostly in Afghanistan—a country she still closely follows from afar. She is a co-founder of the Afghanistan Analysts Network. She can be found at www.martinevanbijlert.com and https://www.instagram.com/mvbijlert/.