 Michael Battisto has work that can be found or forthcoming in The Normal School, HAD, Poet Lore, The Shore, MoonPark Review, and elsewhere. He has lived in many places, but now he lives in Oakland. You can find him on Twitter @mbattisto3 or @michaelbattisto.com. My Friends
My friends and I exchanged dead fathers until our smiles were the same. We drove through old songs to other states to find what the midnight there meant. Expecting our bodies to be bankrupt by thirty we pawned our arteries and stomachs for chemical epiphanies. We might fast for a week to buy tickets to stripped auditoriums, where the music slowed us into the present tense. We sold seats to canceled concerts and smoked our guilt with the profit. We borrowed each others clothes and partners and beds and confessed our shame through relapses, then slept on the nude floors of stranger’s houses. We listed our dissonances on the walls of our ashtray apartments. We snorted cocaine off stolen exit signs and made sure no one went. Eric and Chris play-fought with knives and threatened to let the other win. We were children humming our innocence and hammering on ourselves with fists. We bought cigarettes instead of food whenever we could and predicted when each other’s bodies would end. In our conversations we declared silence obscene, and left blank pages in our hidden diaries for our friends to write helpless commentaries and promises we almost believed we would keep.
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 Ben Togut is a queer poet and singer-songwriter from New York City. His recent work is published or forthcoming in Mumber Mag, The Offing, Hobart, and elsewhere. Dear H
I scrub flies from the shower, dark shapes from cheap tile. I can’t enjoy autumn—any moment you’ll text. I make playlists to fill the quiet. I listen to Joni but I only think of summer, your easy smile. Do you remember that day in Iowa City, the light in the trees? Today I learned you ended your life. Today I went back to the old house, stood at the same intersection where I stood on so many mornings. At the edge of your life, did you search the night for meaning, for one last star? I lie awake. I wonder how we fare in this project of living.  Saba Keramati is a Chinese-Iranian writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Michigan Quarterly Review, AGNI, Passages North, The Margins, and elsewhere. She is the current Poetry Editor at Sundog Lit. Self Mythology
I learn and I mourn for not learning earlier. The mint grew but was not eaten. A harvest turned to waste. The old brick of this house keeps the wandering night air cold and inside. I cannot fathom my mother before she was my mother. What forgiveness is necessary, for someone doing their best? There is no relief, only the swell of an inward tide back toward the self. I learn and I mourn. There is no anger, only truth. Only consequence. Only: I, gazing at the past of my own body, the shell of myself melting, meaning I will drip to a future where I am a mother; am my mother, and all is what she helped create. There is also what we broke. There is also what we mended. One day, too, my daughter will break upon the shore, and still she will float back. I see it endlessly.  Originally from Texas, Shannon spent twelve years in Turkey and is currently located in Québec City, where she is pursuing a doctorate in clinical psychology. Her debut poetry collection, Such Excess of Light (2021), was released last year with Kelsay Books. Recent work has appeared in CERASUS, Viewless Wings Press, Agapanthus Collective, The Anti-Languorous Project, Plainsongs, and Wild Roof Journal. You can connect with her at shannonlise.com. THE WAVE IN MY HEART IS A GREAT GREEN WAVE
You and I know all about how the rain comes late like an afterthought, like a kiss you could have given. Time is a story full of green windows closing, mostly forever. Every morning somebody else who could have been saved, saying, what light it was, that almost found me. Study the dried-up places on the dark road to God’s house, find out how much longer you should have waited, where you should have stood beneath the window, what it would have taken – such small wings. If the person had woken up one more time, maybe it would have been the day they noticed their name – the watergreen shine of it, field of lilies falling to light.  Lauren Saxon is a Queer, Black poet and engineer living in Portland, ME. She loves her cats, her Subaru, and spending way too much time on twitter (@Lsax_235). Lauren is Editor of Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and her work is featured in Flypaper Magazine, Empty Mirror, Homology Lit, Nimrod International Journal and more. Her first chapbook, "You're My Favorite" is forthcoming with Thirty West Publishing. Selected publications can be found on her website, www.laurenMsaxon.com WHEN I TELL THE FLOWERS HELLO, SHE KNOWS
— After Paige Lewis that i am talking to directly to Her i’ve grown weary of saying the phrase you left us though it was your choice, of course, to leave alternatively— i acknowledge that your decision was actually a simple change in residence that these days, instead of merely one body, you call every shade of purple home sometimes in sunsets, but more frequently in the flowers that i find, conveniently scattered amidst my path i am walking to work and there you are blooming oh hey, my love i say to you, in particular sometimes i pretend to be annoyed to be frustrated to see so much of you yes? i ask, what do you want this time? always with a smile in my voice even when you were alive i remember how much you loved attention and while this has become our routine i am often shocked to see you in places where nothing should grow to see you on days when there is no sun when i want, so badly, to join you there you are— saying Hi in a voice that is somehow, softer than the bellflower petal itself it stops me in my tracks and with a deep inhale i realize this is the closest I can get to you next i hold your home directly in front of my face so close that it sometimes brushes against my nose now & then in a different realm, you are standing just inches from me and this is my favorite part-- when the flower flutters gently in the wind i rush to inhale what must be your breath saying hello, once more  Lisa Summe is the author of Say It Hurts (YesYes Books, 2021). She earned a BA and MA in literature at the University of Cincinnati, and an MFA in poetry from Virginia Tech. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Bat City Review, Cincinnati Review, Muzzle, Salt Hill, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. You can find her running, playing baseball, or eating vegan pastries in Pittsburgh, PA, on Twitter and Instagram @lisasumme, and at lisasumme.com. On Polyamory
When you said it’s like a door that’s always locked, I said we’ll climb through every window. When I built a ladder, when each rung crumbled as I climbed, when I fell to the ground, when I built more ladders, when I fell to the ground again, you met me there, again & again, every time, in the dying grass, in the rain, in the rubble, all winter, & it was there, where we couldn’t stop looking at each other, & so we didn’t, so we stopped climbing, built a house we cut the keys to instead of breaking into one someone else had built, the bricks of it everything I tried to cling to every time I fell: the perfect pillow of your cheek on my thigh, the shirt you leave in my bed when I won’t see you for a week, your towel I leave hanging in the bathroom like you’ll still be here tomorrow.  Caroline Stevens is a queer poet from Minneapolis. She is currently a second-year MFA student in poetry at Vanderbilt University, and serves as the editor in chief of the Nashville Review. Field of Vision
Tell me the story again, the one where she and I both wanted what we now have: sunny room where the only audible noise is what comes out of us, our animal song. The way she tends to herself, carefully, after a shower, steam lifting off skin as she pulls a comb through long wet hair like a child guarding a snail shell. How the only line between presence and memory is the shape delusion’s shadow casts on the wall. This morning, for example, I could have sworn I saw her silhouette behind the curtains at the kitchen table with coffee, waiting for me to wake so she could leave the first mark on my day, as easy as the crescent moons left from my nails in the ripening tomatoes. Longing’s colors stack neatly, horizontally, like an Agnes Martin painting—blues so pale they seem white, the pencil lines invisible until another step closes the space between face and canvas. Let’s go back to Madison, or Duluth, somewhere the horizon meets the still lake in the same shade of blue, where the only way to remember that the two never actually meet is to believe it.  travis tate is a queer, black playwright, poet and performer from Austin, Texas. Their poetry has appeared in Borderlands:Texas Poetry Review, Underblong, Mr. Ma’am, apt, and Cosmonaut Avenue among other journals. Their debut poetry collection, MAIDEN, was published on Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in June 2020. The world premiere of Queen of The Night was produced at Dorset Theatre Festival this August and will have another production at Victory Gardens Theatre in Feb 2022. They earned an MFA from the Michener Center for Writers. You can find more about them at travisltate.com. MORE BEAUTY
after Andre Leon Talley quiet sleep is sought after but not necessarily needed-- neither, is needed, the birth of small flowers in a meadow or god’s request for rain, sky throwing its mirth in our faces like when your good friend has good news & good news is good news & this is how we profess our love for one another there are citadels of joy: a list of simple things that ache with undemanding sentimentality, for a reminder that the weeded garden often is still beautiful. & we call for more beauty, not to satisfy some need for consumption but to watch your eyes grow when you realize the wealth of worldly pleasure is, duh, in the eye of beholder, held for many moments until it blends into the next. More beauty! Look, the leaves sweeping the cement, riddle with weak trash.  Alissa M. Barr is a critical care nurse and writer originally from South Central Appalachia. She is currently living and working in Aurora, Colorado. Her work has appeared in Crab Creek Review, Salt Hill Journal, and elsewhere. Living
Once, in anatomy class, we were asked to select one skull from a shelf of skulls. Each one was a gleaming bleach white, except the one I chose—discolored with cracked eyeteeth. Nothing real shines. I held the weight of it in my hands lighter than I expected it to be. I loved the smell of gasoline. My grandmother’s kitchen burned by the grease overflowing from a deep-fryer. Brush alight in the barren fields. The smell of smoke clung to my hair hours afterward. Once, a boy with dirt-caked fingernails held a Bic lighter to the base of my neck. Threatened to burn me there. Is virtue a privilege? I slapped him. Once, I was obsessed with cleanliness. I wanted to scrape the world off my skin in thick slices down to the bone. Now I relish filth. I want to be good less than I want to be alive. I no longer believe in self-sacrifice. I don’t envy the lamb. I envy the one sharpening the knife.  Ed is a teacher and the author of 'Sautéing Spinach With My Aunt' (Desert Willow Press, 2018). He was selected as a featured poet for Cathexis Northwest Press, and other words can be found in or forthcoming from Water/Stone Review, Hippocampus Magazine, One Teen Story, Perhappened, Parentheses Journal, Drunk Monkeys & more. Readers can follow him on Twitter (@EdDoerrWrites) and visit his website (eddoerr.com). Man Shocked To Discover Brain Washed Up On the Beach 1
Does anyone expect to reach the end whole? Each step, a sloughing: a life measured in the weight of loss accumulating. The sun dims. A snow-blanketed bough snaps. The cold presses air from lungs. If we’re lucky, we offer our hearts willingly, chamber by chamber, in effigy. Without dust, how would we know that a house once teemed with life? You see, for thirty-six years, my guts have trailed behind me, a slack rope: even when I’m lost, I’m moored. Far off, waves shatter against the shore-- in moonlight, like these, we iridesce, so should you discover my brain washed up on a beach, know this: at the end of it, it’s a joy to be found. 1 Title taken from the headline of a CNN article published on 9/20/20. |
