 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.
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 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.  Darius Simpson is a writer, educator, performer, and skilled living room dancer from Akron, Ohio. Much like the means of production, he believes poetry belongs to and with the masses. He aims to inspire those chills that make you frown and slightly twist up ya face in approval. Darius believes in the dissolution of empire and the total liberation of Africans and all oppressed people by any means available. Free The People. Free The Land. Free All Political Prisoners. YOU’RE NOT A POET TIL THE STATE BETRAYS YOU writing a poem is to punching a cop what punching a cop is to voting blue it’s like comparing apples to punching a cop unc, this whiskey is callin me your name again blood in the august sun dares me to jump dirty knife in the sink sings about vengeance untouched ammo screams about loneliness am i a punk for writing the state’s mortality can an empire bent on death ever die do pigs fly to hell or is hell already in them will angel wings make me a better fugitive devil on both shoulders says squeeze we all somebody’s child tryna get home you’re not a poet til the state betrays you NEW SHIT ABOUT OLD SHIT
these is between-job poems these is third shift politics these is no sick-time ramblings crooked teeth between coffee stains desk imprints next to handcuff scars edge of the counter kinda dangerous cobwebs fill the spiral in my notebook weaving a story about secondhand creativity speaker of the poem got a puppet mouth speaker of the poem breaks the fourth wall unfortunately poetry leaves the governor’s jaw in tact i write in third person so pigs don’t know who to choke i write of violence like a child forged in a lit furnace turn away from the carnage and the zombies will find you turn your back on genocide and you volunteer for the next noose death is a matter of how you interpret disaster economies sittin up at 2:00A.M. fightin sleep for a better casket siftin through used books for inspiration in the margins "When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs" by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach2/11/2022  Julia Kolchinksy Dasbach emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of three poetry collections: The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019), finalist for the Jewish Book Award; Don't Touch the Bones (Lost Horse Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize; and 40 WEEKS, forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2023. Her poems have appeared in POETRY, Blackbird, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. She is the Murphy Visiting Fellow in Poetry at Hendrix College and recently relocated to Little Rock, Arkansas with her two kids, cat, dog, and husband. When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs
how sometimes I don't love them their careless smell of childhood & sudden bloom their sweetness lingering to rot & sometimes I don't love his grandmother who always loves lilacs & smells of them when making threats of suicide if I marry the man who will become his father & all the lilacs in her garden will die if I move away or say the words I don’t & sometimes I don't love coffee if it's gone warm or the bed when I am too far from hitting it or the pillow sometimes I fucking hate the pillow when I bite it when making love isn't actually loving & I won't say fuck in front of him no matter how much I want to or tell him that sometimes I don't love his mouth & hands biting & scratching his head of curls drilling into my stomach or slamming into the wall & sometimes I want to tell him all the things I do not love but instead I reassure him after each I don’t love you, Mama, how much I do I do I don't know how to love without him how the lilacs will keep coming year after year how rot is its own sweetness  Sofia Fey is a Lesbian and Non-Binary writer living in LA. Currently, they are the founder of the Luminaries Poetry workshop, and poetry editor at Hooligan Magazine. They love to be with their friends, but mostly, to beat them at Mario Party. They tweet @sofiafeycreates. Outstretched Hand Disguised as a Love Poem
after Matthew Olzmann So this is what I've got, reasons why we might make it through this week: Because your lipstick on my water bottle. Because the way you laugh into my neck like one of those photos but actually in real life. Because you say "ay" when you bump into something, because even your accidentals are sexy. Because your hands are always fidgeting, your fingers dancing. Because your hot breath close to my hot breath. Because look at you, glowing and grounded. Because if anyone can hold it down, it's the queen of pentacles. Because it's the 42% earth in your chart for me. Because you'll tell me when you're scared. Because I'll tell you, I'm scared. Because when our state is on fire you turn to ask me how are my lungs. Because you love me like I want to be loved. Because I want and want and want and want. Because the hardest I've cum in my young life is the night you moaned I love you not once, but twice, you don’t forget when your chest swells like that. Because when we played uno you asked if we could be a team and then I never put another card down because it seems like you had every skip and plus two in the deck. Because I'm always worried people want me to leave and because you never make me feel like you want me to leave. Because I miss you as soon as I leave. Because I send you my emoji hand and you reply with two. Because first I was moving to write for TV, and then I was really moving to be with you, if only once, if only from six feet away. Because I have to know where we will go.  Kaleigh O’Keefe is a gender outlaw and proud union member living in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Their poetry has appeared in “Breaking the Chains: a Socialist Perspective on Women’s Liberation,” Slamfind, and on indie music legend Ceschi’s album Sans Soleil. Kaleigh writes and edits for Liberation News, is a co-founder of Game Over Books, and hosts the First Fridays Youth Open Mic in Jamaica Plain. You can find them at www.kaleighokeefe.com. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOAN OF ARC
after Ansel Elkins “...and since you are fallen again -- O, sorrow! -- into these errors and crimes as the dog returns to his vomit…. we denounce you as a rotten member, which, so that you shall not infect the other members of Christ, must be cast out of the unity of the Church, cut off from her body, and given over to the secular power: we cast you off, separate and abandon you…” - The Trial of Jeanne D’Arc, translated into English from the original Latin and French Documents by W.P. Barrett. Chapter 33: May 30, the Last Day of This Trial, 1431 Let it be known: it was not merely armor. Ask the flames how much those clothes protected me. I was extinguished early, not even offered dignity to burn fully. The ashes raked away to display my womanhood for all to see. Nor was I a dog that returns to his vomit-- unless every peasant in France also turned canine at the sight of me. They reached out to touch my garments-- that vomit. Only eighteen, they believed me holy. In a hundred years had never seen anything so liberating as me. Look at me. Touch me. Can you feel the power of not being what you are told to be? "In This World of Mysteries, Sometimes, I Want to Be a List of Impossibilities" by Timi Sanni10/22/2021  Timi Sanni is a writer, editor, and Muslim literature advocate. An NF2W poetry and fiction scholar, his work appears or is forthcoming in Palette Poetry, Lucent Dreaming, Down River Road, Drinking Gourd Magazine, The Temz Review, X-R-A-Y Literary, and elsewhere. He is a reader for CRAFT literary and Liminal Transit Review and an editor at Kalopsia Literary. He is the winner of the SprinNG Poetry Contest 2020, the Fitrah Review Short Story Prize 2020 and third-place winner of the 2021 Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize. Find him on twitter @timisanni In This World of Mysteries, Sometimes, I Want to Be a List of Impossibilities
to go for a swim in deathly waters / and return neither wet nor bloody / to live and love / and not die these little deaths of heartbreaks / to bring forth new lives / from every shard of my frozen soul / and not first feel the pangs of demise // again / to live / and not die / but what? Other than variations of deaths / what / were we ever bestowed with as grace? I have given myself / to the wind / and to death / that it may take me at the toll of destiny's bell / but again I want not to be defined by life's compendium / of possibilities  Anna Attie is a writer and community organizer living in Chicago. She recently graduated from the University of Chicago with a BA in English Literature. Her journalism appears in In These Times, South Side Weekly, Inside Higher Ed, and other publications. Her poetry is forthcoming in The Offing. We Lose Her Over Facetime   Ruth Baumann is the author of Thornwork (Black Lawrence Press, 2020) & Parse (Black Lawrence Press, 2018). She is also the author of five chapbooks. She holds a PhD from Florida State University & an MFA from the University of Memphis. Solace
Three of six in the photograph in front of me are dead, young & overdosed, but this isn’t a poem about death, really, as much as it is about being still here. Being still here & trying to make music from that. C tells me about Thin Places, offers a holy explanation for the way the saltwater marshes calm me, make me either new or very old, shape me small, eternal, & honest. I would like to hold his hand, hand him that sense of connection. I would like words to give in the wake of all this nearby wreckage, deaths like wave crests passing by, sweeping & startlingly irreversible. But I suspect if we get still enough, we all already know what we need to know. I have no fresh ideas. Love is not novel. Inside me is something gentle & honest that I give all I can to tend. Rewiring My World God’s got both eyes shut some days, not from apathy but from wishing her creations could be nicer when they are bruised. I get it. Every meditation tells me to breathe out a few counts longer than I breathe in. Who says imagination can’t break like bones? God, I wish, too. |
