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"MORE BEAUTY" by travis tate

8/12/2022

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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.
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"Living" by Alissa M. Barr

8/5/2022

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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.
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“Man Shocked To Discover Brain Washed Up On the Beach.” by Ed Doerr

7/29/2022

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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.
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from "The Book of Unknown Facts" by Michael Bazzett

7/8/2022

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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.
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"Removing and Repositioning" by Carrie George

7/1/2022

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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 
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"Student Evaluations" by Jess Smith

6/17/2022

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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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"Rusalka" by Jenny Irish

5/20/2022

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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.

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"For the Woman Who Gave Birth To Rabbits" by Terri Linn Davis

5/13/2022

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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.
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2 Poems by Darius Simpson

2/11/2022

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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
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"When my son says, I don't love you, I want to tell him about lilacs" by Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach

2/11/2022

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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 
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<<Previous
Forward>>
    Jess Smith-
    Student Evaluations
    ​Jenny Irish- Rusalka
    ​Terri Linn David-
    For the Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits
    Darius Simpson- 2 Poems
    Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach-
    When my son says...

    Kaleigh O'Keefe- Autobiography of Joan of Arc
    Timi Sanni- In This World of Mysteries...
    Anna Attie- We Lose Her Over Facetime
    Ruth Baumann- 2 Poems
    Rob Colgate- Remember These Tulips
    Tasneem Maher- Pilgrimage
    ​Aerik Francis- Bebop
    ​Emily Blair- The best ham...
    Adrienne Novy- 2 Poems
    ​Daniel Garcia- 2 Poems
    Brendan Joyce- moving day
    ​Sanna Wani- 2 Poems
    Raphael Jenkins- 2 Poems
    Daniel Summerhill-
    2 Poems
    Ava Gripp- Your Grandfather Had Secrets
    ​stevie redwood- abolish the dead
    Ariel Clark-Semyck-
    2 Poems
    benedict nguyen- 2 Poems
    Gabrielle Grace Hogan-
    Girls Night at the Saturnine Aquarium

    Devin Kelly- 2 Poems
    Danielle P. Williams-
    Yutu 2018

    Alan Chazaro- In a Vernacular of Speculation
    Deema K. Shehabi-
    ​A Summer's Tale with Fire Birds
    Kayleb Rae Candrilli-
    2 Poems
    ​Julianne Neely- 2 Poems
    Jake Bailey- 2 Poems
    ​Fargo Tbakhi- 2 Poems
    Justin Phillip Reed-
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    Naomi Shihab Nye-
    2 Poems
    Keith Leonard- Jukebox
    ​CAConrad- 3 Poems
    ​Roya Marsh- for (insert name)
    ​Stephanie Kaylor- LONG DISTANCE
    Tongo Eisen Martin-
    A Sketch about Genocide

    ​Despy Boutris- BLOODTEETH
    JinJin Xu- Days of Hourless Mothers
    ​Ashley M. Jones- Flour, Milk & Salt
    Sam Herschel Wein- How To Cook Your Family
    ​Marianne Chan- 2 poems
    Jason Crawford- PReP
    Jee Leong Koh- 2 poems
    Geramee Hensley- Redundancy Limit
    Dustin Pearson- My Brother Outside the House in Hell
    DT McCrea- On occasion of my own death
    Noor Hindi- Unkept
    Lyd Havens- I only misgender myself when Fleetwood Mac comes on
    ​Linda Dove- Mid-Life with Teeth
    Stephen Furlong- I Don't Know About You, but Mostly I Just Want to be Held
    Dorothy Chan- Because You Fall Too Fast Too Hard
    ​Kevin Latimer- MIRAGE
    MJ- Let me be remembered as a mother
    Taylor Byas- Rooftop Monologue
    Matt Mitchell- FINE LINE TRIPTYCH
    ​Todd Dillard- Will
    ​Heidi Seaborn- Under The Bed
    Heather Myers- A Rainbow, Just For A Minute
    Donna Vorreyer- In The Encyclopedia of Human Gestures
    Conor Bracken- THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A MAN
    Ben Purkert- 2 Poems
    Emma Bolden- What Women's Work Is
    ​Chelsea Dingman- Lockdown Drill
    Raych Jackson- Pantoum for Derrion Albert from the Plank
    Elliot Ping- in the eighth grade
    Devin Kelly- POEM FOR MY FRIEND MATT WHO AT THIS MOMENT IS RUNNING 300 MILES ACROSS TENNESSEE​
    Kwame Opoku-Duku-
    ii. dance moves
    D.A. Powell- Sneak
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  • Home
  • ABOUT
    • HISTORY
  • CONTENT
    • POETRY
    • PROSE
    • ARCHIVES
    • MUSIC
    • COLUMNS >
      • TIMEFIGHTERS & UNBELIEVERS
      • unearthly horoscopes from your dreamy, vaguely occult ghost
      • Heartworms
      • Just Sucking
    • INTERVIEWS
    • REVIEWS
  • CONTACT