 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.
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 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.  Michael Bazzett is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently The Echo Chamber, (Milkweed, 2021). A recipient of awards from the Frost Place and the NEA, his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tin House, The Threepenny Review, The Sun, The Nation, and Granta. His verse translation of the Mayan creation epic, The Popol Vuh, (Milkweed, 2018) was named one of 2018’s best books of poetry by the NY Times. Find out more at www.michaelbazzett.com. from The Book of Unknown Facts
Because it occurs at subsonic levels outside the range of human hearing, it’s a little-known fact that the full moon howls. After a cloudburst in summer, the ground is riddled with puddles. When a poet drinks a cup of coffee, an angel falls asleep. º The very moment the moon becomes full, it begins. We might describe the sound as otherworldly if we could hear it. These puddles paradoxically offer us windows into the sky. This is not a form of equilibrium. º The groaning does not register in our ears. It merely moves as waves through the water of our bodies, rippling our cells like lily-pads. In this moment, an observer who looks down can see up, and thus discover the something that is not there and the something that is. This occurs so that the angel can dream white roots into the dark soil of the coffee grounds. These grow like fine hairs until the seed splits open. º Choirs of insomniacs attest to this silence, which they sometimes compare to what hovers above a pond after the plop! of a bullfrog. When a rain puddle holds the reflection of the cloud from which it came, the cloud can briefly see itself through the eyes of its child. A shoot then pushes its way to the surface. If transplanted, it grows into a tree and in seven years it bears fruit, most of which comes thudding down in the rains of October. º Yet wolves can hear it. When the puddles dry up, so too does this avenue of self-knowledge, leaving a blind-spot on the ground. The fruit lies in the grass, bruised and uneaten. When deer come to eat the windfall, the fruit is transmuted into bodies capable of astonishing leaps. º So a wolf howls at the moon offering both a reply and a kind of translation and thus becomes a poem.  Carrie George is an MFA candidate for poetry at the Northeast Ohio MFA program. She is the graduate fellow at the Wick Poetry Center where she teaches poetry workshops throughout the community. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee, and her work has appeared in Peach Mag, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Removing and Repositioning
Narrative, like memory, can take any form. Consider perspective: the person telling the story, their agency, their hungry, hungry hands. I might tell it like a lost girl hoping to put her trust in any human thing—even a boy with hands. I might tell it like he didn’t mean what he said to come across the way it did. I might tell it like benefit of the doubt. Like every boy has hands. Like every boy’s hands go where hands are destined to go, even if that going is counter to my silly wants. I might tell it like we were friends. I might tell it like I knew what he asked of me every time. I might tell it like it was a hallway I mean a room I mean a dark corner I mean behind a tree I mean a nightmare I mean a closed door I mean a broken light bulb I mean a torn clothesline I mean a bathroom stall I mean a packed audience I mean an alleyway I mean a river I mean the produce aisle I mean backstage at theatre camp I mean a windowsill I mean in the back seat I mean the closet where the brass instruments sat in leather and collected dust I mean He might tell it like claiming the meal he deserved  Jess Smith is currently an Assistant Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University. Her work can be found in Prairie Schooner, The Cincinnati Review, 32 Poems, The Rumpus, and other journals. Student Evaluations
Not too hard. A very fuckable face. Hard. Made me want to read more poetry. You will really like it!!!!! She only gave good grades to leftists. Cute outfits. Cute brain. You will fall in love. Dumb. I thought poetry would bore me. Too much. I’d take her again. In my dreams, her eyes float out of her face and up to the ceiling, her jaw unhinges and slaps the floor. In my dreams, I pull her ears to stretch her face wide open like an accordion. She wants you to learn. Not enough. Very caring. A voice like a lullaby.  Jenny Irish is the author of the hybrid poetry collections Common Ancestor (Black Lawrence Press, 2017) and Tooth Box (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022), the short story collection I Am Faithful (Black Lawrence Press, 2019), and the forthcoming chapbooks Hatch (Ethel, 2022) and Lupine (Black Lawrence, 2023). She teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and facilitates free community workshops every summer. Rusalka
No dreams. No buttercream. No nesting bowls. No sugar beaten into shape. No doe and fawn in the wildflower field. No toast crisp and cut to soldiers. No soft-boiled egg. No eggcup. No little throne for a beheading. Mouse tracks through the flour. A hole burrowed through the bread. No eat your fill. No second helpings. Before birth, I was the rough work, good enough. A daughter, I became the failed spell cast with petals and a candle flame. Crinoline, velvet ribbons. My child- mother’s father picked a name. No magic in our meeting. No songbirds. No rare light. A tall girl, legs limp from kicking. A wet infant with a greenish slick of hair. No two fingers touched to the forehead. No two fingers touched to test the temperature of the baby’s bath. Everything pink, until a finger’s snap switches it to black. No lullabies. Farmland plowed and harrowed. No girl left fallow. Take me to the river. Show me where the deadfall caught the body. No more pretty, pretty. No more use for an ivory comb. No more haunted wanting. Girlie, at last, left alone.  Terri Linn Davis is Associate Editor for Five South and is an adjunct at Southern Connecticut State University where she teaches writing composition through essays on monster theory. She is the recipient of the Jack and Annie Smith Poets and Painters Award (2018). Her poems have most recently appeared in The Daily Drunk Mag, Janus Literary, Emerge Literary Journal, Ghost City Review and elsewhere. She has been invited to attend the 2022 Kenyon Review Writers Workshop for poetry. Terri Linn lives in Connecticut with her co-habby and their three children. You can find her on Twitter @TerriLinnDavis and on her website www.terrilinndavis.com For the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
Mary Toft (1701–1763), was an English woman who created controversy when she convinced doctors that she had given birth to rabbits. This resulted in the ruin of several famous surgeons and the respect of the medical profession in general. In 1726 (after miscarrying), Mary Toft stuffed her wanting cervix and labored her full womb into a bucket-- giving life to three severed tabby legs and the backbone of an eel. Later, a local surgeon with thirty years of delivering mothers presumed to see for himself; he complained that Mary was sullen and stupid, until she writhed and pushed out a baby bunny. Before long, she’d birth seventeen rabbits—some without bodies—full of corn and hay, knife cleaved, half grown. England’s doctors believed Mary. For their children marked-- born cleft lipped and knock-kneed, born still, they knew the sin was a woman’s: imprinted by the intensity in which we watched the wasps hunt in the garden; the way, sometimes, our eyes never wavered whether they sampled Gladiolus or the rotting meat of field mice. After they delivered Mary of several pieces of flesh, she was captured, like Miller’s daughter, and she lay there day after day full fevered—barren. The king charged her as a vile cheat and imposter. They hid her in jail because the real tragedy was the mens’ reputations and the drop in meat sales—England too disgusted to cannibalize rabbit stew and jugged hare. I am like you, Mary, marked by blood feeling. I know the clotted milk of infection, the dead rabbits, the weight of it sewn in. I know: I know what it’s like to feel so empty you stuff whatever live thing you can find into the hollow space inside you. |
