​Taylor Byas is a fun-sized Chicago native. She's spent her last six years in Birmingham, Alabama, where she received both her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in English from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She is currently a first-year PhD student, poet, and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Journal, storySouth, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, and others.

​Rooftop Monologue
 
 
When I’m not thinking of dying, I like to play
God. Look; from this angle,  the world folds
 
inward like a Monopoly game board,
and those people below are more than just ants
 
to crush in the pretend-pinch
of my index finger and thumb. See the top
 
hat and thimble, the boats and silver dogs
backsliding along the sidewalks? I wore my old
 
Converse today. The soles unstitching
from the canvas, the beginnings of lips
 
around my toes. Enough flex
in the soles to cuddle the roof’s ledge the way
 
the other woman might hold a man after
a fight with his wife. I don’t want to jump,
 
only to be reminded of how thin the line between
breathing and falling. How fragile a crossing.
 
With the sun setting like that, it looks like you
could hike uphill right into heaven, these skyscrapers
 
steps for the giant. And the sky like hand-pulled
cotton candy, sifting into ropes of rose
 
and gold, stretching and re-stretching itself into
mouthfuls. Listen, I told you I don’t want to jump,
 
but what a view. Watch, the sky is hemorrhaging
twilight. Makes me want to scatter myself
 
on the sidewalk tonight.

​​Matt Mitchell is a writer from Ohio. His work appears in, or is forthcoming to venues like The Boiler, NPR, The Shallow Ends, Homology Lit, and Glass: A Journal of Poetry, among others.

Todd Dillard's work has appeared in numerous publications, including The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets, Booth, The Boiler Journal, and Electric Literature. His debut book "Ways We Vanish" is available from Okay Donkey Press. He lives in Philadelphia with his wife and daughter. Follow him on twitter via @toddedillard.

​Will


Your death came with instructions. 
I buried your hands in bluebonnet fields. 

I glued your teeth to glow-in-the-dark stars 
and glued the stars to my basement's ceiling. 

I pinned your ears to the alder tree in my backyard, 
found them a week later wrapped in burgundy cocoons.

Your death came with extra parts too: 
Elbow skin like two used bar napkins. 

Soy sauce dish of your collarbone. 
White hair, which scurried into corners like mice. 

I asked the galaxy in my basement:  What should I do?
But it was too busy multiplying, 

new stars blossomed every day, 
some with two teeth, eight, a whole grin.
 
I placed the extra parts of you in a Ziploc bag, 
placed the Ziploc bag in my kitchen's junk drawer.
 
Spring arrived like an ex in a dream.
The hair ran into traffic, and then

the cocoons burst like touch-me-nots. 
No sign of the ears, though, 

no sign anything else had changed at all.
Just a feeling, like waking up to a soft knock on the door,

but when you answer there’s only light
snow, which vanishes as soon as it kisses the ground.

​Under the Bed
 
 
I found my daughter’s strap-on.
 
I ran my finger its length, hard
but with a little give in the rubber.
I circled its tip and thought
not of all the dildos or penises I have known--
and I have known so many. But,
 
and forgive me for this,
I thought of my sons--
their young, small penises.
 
And I remembered their baths. The oldest--
his penis inflating and floating to the surface
to join the boats and rubber ducks.
 
Ten years later, I’d pick condoms off his bedroom floor,
after a girlfriend’s visit.
The youngest too, eventually. Beneath his bed--
condoms furred with dust.
 
And I remember when I ran marketing
for a sex advice internet thing
and brought the children along to my big
condom giveaway event.
 
What was I thinking?
The little one was six and asked if he
could have a rainbow one when he grew up.
 
Yes. I said yes to that--
yes to rainbows.

Heather Myers is from Altoona, Pennsylvania. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University and is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of North Texas. Her work has appeared in Puerto Del Sol, Palette Poetry, Reservoir, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2018 AWP intros award.

A Rainbow, Just For A Minute


I imagine other worlds,
the one where my brother still breathes.
He runs around the yard, the space he takes
open and endless.

The heart holds
beyond its weight:
my family’s hurt, a lost timeline, anger
curled and sleeping on the porch
at night. The sagging of the trees.
A patched architecture. Holes in the floorboard.

The other children asked why I live
where I live. A woman saw into me.
She said, you have a light about you, a glow.
I believe this, and radiate
rings and rings of light
hot like the coils of a burner.

On a walk, in the woods:
a miniature house.
Eggshell blue. Lots of windows.
​Somewhere I could stay.

​In The Encyclopedia of Human Gestures
 
 
Kneeling again at the altar of my dog’s shit,
a genuflection of civic duty, the park equipped
with plastic bags to ensure my reverence,
I am struck by this position, for what better evidence
of the divine than the workings of the body, all
its wastes and its contortions, the joint’s ball
and socket rolling with the bend, the foot’s tension
arching to balance on the toes, the orchestration
of the hands that comb the grass to scoop the mess,
the same hands that will later survey this aging flesh,
the same hands that will run soft across the lush
landscape of your body, the one I know by touch
and scent, animal in my devotion, as we both
falter toward our demise, into days that host
obstacles our younger selves would dismiss,
lowering instead into a different type of worship,
one that requires no words, and isn’t this also
something holy, both of us bending to curve into
the other’s failings, blending all the broken parts together
in a silhouette that resembles prayer?

Conor Bracken is the author of Henry Kissinger, Mon Amour (Bull City Press, 2017), selected by Diane Seuss as winner of the Frost Place Chapbook Competition, and translator of Mohammed Khaïr-Eddine's Scorpionic Sun (CSU Poetry Center, 2019). His poems and translations appear (or will soon) in places like 32 Poems, BOMB, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Waxwing, and elsewhere. An assistant poetry editor at Four Way Review, he teaches English at the University of Findlay.​

​THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO TO A MAN


is pity him.
The drowsy daffodil

of his exhausted cock,
the padlocks of his hands

wrung open and equably useless--
how pathetic

is all you have to mutter
to crack him.

How sad
it must have been to have the god of his parents

be a flame
that incinerated each desire it tried to anneal

and how sad
for him his parents never noticed

the ash heap rising in his chest
and how they didn’t care

enough to muzzle
their god long enough

to ask him why he kept
the ash alone inside him and sometimes cleared in it

the vague angelic shape
of the first man

who forced himself on him.
What sorrow

to never have the chance
to say it was to see

if the wind is still
too weak to blow the ash away

which it always is and isn’t
that pitiful? Poor man,

his little boyhood
so much stronger than he is.

Wrestling him into thinking he
is the sole half-troubled maverick

to swagger from the ship
wreck of his past, extracting as he strides

from the ad-hoc leather scabbard
of his body the splinters

he will drive
under the ocean’s rough unvarnished nails.

Ben Purkert is the author of For the Love of Endings, named one of Adroit's best poetry books of 2018. His poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Yorker, Poetry, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, The Believer, and elsewhere. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers and is the editor of Back Draft, a Guernica interview series focused on poetry and revision. He's currently working on a novel because he likes to sufferrrrrrr.

THE ONLY EARTHLING

they picked on me because
I was different the only one with
a blue dot on my forehead they rolled
a boulder over my face they kicked

my shins just to watch me bloom
Tell us about Earth they cried
but I knew not to answer I only
turned a bluer shade the other kids

were like a snake that swallows
a mouse and for a minute the mouse
is neither mouse nor snake simply
the shape of one life passing
​
through another I remember life
back home it wasn’t so terrible
our house had a screen door
to keep the bugs out

THE ONLY FRIEND

a giant mosquito had me over
for dinner it was a nice time I was
a nice dinner he could’ve finished me
then and there but saved some

for later he said he still wanted
to be friends though I found it hard
to believe he could fly with such
difficult wings he tried to prove it

but was too drunk and got only
inches off the ground so I let him
jump on my back and he yelled See
I’m flying then I swore I heard him
​
start to cry but what does crying
sound like before the tears hit
the ground before they fall
suddenly to their knees

Originally appearing in Flypaper Poetry Issue V.

Rachel “Raych” Jackson is a writer, educator and performer. While teaching third and fourth grade in Chicago Public Schools, Jackson competed on numerous national poetry teams and individual competitions. Her poems have gained over 2 million views on YouTube. She is the 2017 NUPIC Champion and a 2017 Pink Door fellow. Jackson recently voiced 'DJ Raych' in the Jackbox game, Mad Verse City. Her latest play, “Emotions & Bots”, premiered at the Woerdz Festival in Lucerne, Switzerland. Jackson wrote a room dedicated to her city for 29Rooms' first installment in Chicago, through Refinery 29. She co-created and co-hosts Big Kid Slam, a monthly poetry show in Chicago. Jackson’s work has been published by many— including Poetry Magazine, The Rumpus, The Shallow Ends, and Washington Square Review. Her debut collection EVEN THE SAINTS AUDITION was recently published through Button Poetry. She currently lives in Chicago.

Pantoum for Derrion Albert from the Plank

In September 2009 Derrion Albert’s murder was caught on tape. The video spread through the
world quicker than the Southside of Chicago could be gentrified through the Olympic bid. Killers
are shown kicking Derrion in the face and smashing his head with a wooden plank.


​
His hands were soft on my hips.
We were brown together.
How often does that happen?
Wooden individuals shaped and dyed
to look the same as them. Brown like the next.
We all look the same to them. Brown like the next.
Sturdy.

Wooden individuals shaped and dyed
to look the same as them. Brown like the next.
There are many uses for a snatched tree.
Easy to be broken and passed around.
Each ring tells achievements of sorts.
Sturdy.
He needed a capable dancer.

There are many uses for a snatched tree.
Easy to be broken and passed around.
Each ring tells achievements of sorts.
A partner whose spine can bend
with the grace of politicians tongues
built on corroding law enforcement.
He needed a capable dancer.
I'm someone that will sacrifice my body
spreading through skulls.

A partner whose spine bend
with the grace of politicians tongues
built on corroding law enforcement.
We danced to the music made that day.
A slow melody assembled
from the dull connection with heads and
shrieks carrying his name.
I'm someone that will sacrifice my body
spreading through skulls.
Admire me.
Focus on me.
I beat them all.

We danced to the music made that day.
A slow melody assembled
from the dull connection with heads and
shrieks carrying his name.
We all look the same to them. Brown like the next.
Admire me.
Focus on me.
I beat them all.
His hands were soft on my hips.
We were brown together.
How often does that happen?

Elliot Ping (she/her or they/them) is a writer, neuroscience student, and lifelong Midwesterner currently residing in Columbus, Ohio. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Dovecote Magazine, Cultural Weekly, Kissing Dynamite, and The Knight's Library. You can find her on Twitter @elliotcping.

in the eighth grade
 
i got                                         whiplash, falling
on the                                      asphalt
play-                                        ground
where                                      basket
-ball hoops                             started the year
with nets                                 and ended
                                                  without
 
***
​
we started the year with you. i remember:
 
your brother left class. i stuck gum under my desk when the door clicked, thought back to picture day, thought forward to yearbooks, wondered if they would leave room for you, wondered how quickly we’d forget shared air.
 
***
 
you sit against the wall in P.E., throw the basketball back when it rolls to your feet, roll your eyes when asked to play. i roll memories between my fingers, marbles i shoot to hear them click together, fast blood pumping in the silence after a miss. i roll your name around my mouth, jawbreaker, see if it tastes any different. what they don’t tell you about grief is that it keeps you captive until you roll over for it.
 
***
 
they sent a letter home about grief.
 
your face was orange
            with foundation in
the casket
and we--
                        we were so angry. how
could they?