 Dustin Pearson is the author of A Season in Hell with Rimbaud (BOA Editions, 2022), Millennial Roost (C&R Press, 2018), and A Family Is a House (C&R Press, 2019). He makes gif poems that he posts on Facebook and Twitter and adapts them into short films that you can view on his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCy0BS0iNlLm_l1bAqqR0OBQ?view_as=subscriber My Brother Outside the House in Hell
I fell asleep after I told myself I’d watch him. What convinced him there was relief to find in the flames outside when he’d seen already what I showed him? I woke to his smell. The heat of the door and his turning of its knob burned to the bone before he could get it open. His flesh fell uneven and beaded on the hardwood. The circling flames blew through. A plume of hellfire brushed me back from where I’d been standing, but I rushed to the one window to track him. I watched my brother running, the flames in a cruel attachment to his skin, his arms flailing. He ran with his mouth open, screaming, as everyone outside was, and crying, though no tears, no intimate evidence of conditions. The fire took his face, and for his black skull, all I could think was how we’d once been told that deep down the two of us were identical, beyond the arrangement of muscle and its appearance. I knew the house would never let my brother back in, but even waking from the dream, I knew I wouldn’t wake from any decision to leave us separated, leaving everything in the moment our eyes opened to unite us, but even migrating to the door, I couldn’t open it. Between burns on my hands and anticipating the pain of the outside, I failed each time. I walked back to the window, watched my brother disappear. I was left alone in the house, my brother finally let to roam. And though I knew under those terms we’d never see each other again, I knew we found a home outside the sea of each other.
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 DT McCrea is a trans anarchist poet living in Akron Ohio. Their work can be found at Honey and Lime and Taco Bell Quarterly. In their free time DT enjoys contemplating the nature of the universe and plotting the downfall of capitalism. On Occasion of My Own Death
Please read this poem as I walk into the ocean. Don’t read it on the beach with a crowd of listeners I don’t want to make a spectacle. You will know when it is happening. You will have a dream with many broken things: a clock a zippo lighter seven snapped human femurs laid at your feet. In this dream a cardinal will be perched in the window sill demanding repentance. It will hold in its left talon a daffodil. This will signify nothing. When you awaken from this dream this poem will be sitting on your lap. Someone will hand you a glass of water and when you look up you will see thirty folding chairs arranged at the foot of your bed occupied by eleven people. When you finish reading the crowd will say What a beautiful poem. What does it mean? and you will drink from the glass of water.  Noor Hindi (she/her/hers) is a Palestinian-American poet and reporter. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Rumpus, Winter Tangerine, and Cosmonauts Avenue. Her essays have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Literary Hub, and Adroit Journal. Hindi is the Senior Reporter for The Devil Strip Magazine. Visit her website at noorhindi.com. Unkept
I’ve been saying goodbye to everything. The artichokes on my kitchen counter — tiny hearts quivering under a knife, my grandmother’s aging knees — persistent and achy, the way my mother sometimes looks at the sky — all glimmer and home. In dreams, my car drives backwards, I run too slow, I am sitting atop a streetlight, smashing a bulb between my teeth. I’ve been exercising my body away. Here, take this machine called my sadness. Toss it in a lullaby, it needs tenderness, spring, maybe a little hymn to hum it to sleep. Zina’s favorite flower was sunflowers. They’ve been following me around everywhere I go. A decade’s past. My best friend and I are breaking up, but I’ve been grieving for so long my eyes become flutes. I wish to ask my grandfather what happens after we die, but everything I say sounds like a quiver. It’s so hard being a person. I promised Zina she’d live forever. She gave me the sun instead.  Linda Dove holds a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature and teaches college writing. She is also an award-winning poet of four books: In Defense of Objects (2009), O Dear Deer, (2011), This Too (2017), and Fearn (2019), as well as the scholarly collection of essays, Women, Writing, and the Reproduction of Culture in Tudor and Stuart Britain. Poems have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America, Best of the Net, and Best Microfiction. She lives in the hills just east of Los Angeles, where she serves as the faculty editor of MORIA Literary Magazine at Woodbury University. Mid-Life with Teeth
What if you don’t jump the shark, you just swim up to it and touch its body with one of your fingers. Its toothsome grin wrapped in the skin of silvered shingles, after storm after storm roughs them. Gills like shuttered windows. The whole machine turning on you, a house in a hurricane-force wind, time you thought you could weather. You want to do something besides just starting over, over and over again. You want the arrow, which resembles a tooth in the mouth of this imaginary shark, to hit home and stick, sprung taught from your fingers. You want to stop throwing away body parts. You imagine your discarded breasts, floating on the tide like a bottle. Inside is a message that something is trying to end you. It is small and hungry. You hurl all this flotsam back to the surf as far as you can. They are bait for the shark. They will bring it closer. What’s left are two scars-- mouths, straightlined and unamused—running over your heart. You will fill the scars with color, with ferns and starlight and wings, like repaired cracks. You reach for a word—kintsugi—to describe your body as a bowl, the gilt-filled breaks. This is the life of an object. The shark, of course, is an empire of greed.  Lyd Havens lives in Boise, Idaho. Their work has previously been published in Ploughshares, The Shallow Ends, and Tinderbox Poetry Journal, among others. Lyd will graduate with their BFA in Creative Writing from Boise State University in 2021. I only mis-gender myself when Fleetwood Mac comes on
I’m not a woman, but part of me is always going to be a teenage girl, screaming into rivers and watching herself weep in the mirror. Sometimes my hair grows like a curse word. My lipstick smears, and my teeth find a new hysteria to fantasize about. I still identify as a spiteful bitch. The gold dust settles on my cheeks, but I don’t. The tables have turned, and now my father is afraid of me. Damn my fury, damn my forgiveness. I’ve learned to fight like an anarchist racehorse-- my legs will give out before my heart does. When I was still a girl, I cut all my hair off in mourning. Twice. When I was still a girl, I found my grandmother’s childhood braid framed in an attic. She sliced it off herself while angry at her own father. I sleep with scissors next to my bed, just in case. I practice a running start. I tell the mirror what I want to tell my father: you will never get away from the sound of the [ ] that hates you.  Stephen Furlong is a poet living outside Kansas City, Missouri. He currently is an adjunct instructor at Metropolitan Community College- Longview. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from places like Bone & Ink, Louisiana Literature, and Pine Hills Review, among others. Additionally, he currently serves as a staff reviewer for the journal Five:2:One and works specifically for the subset LitStyle. I Don’t Know About You, but Mostly I Just Want to be Held
a line from Mary Ruefle I am reaching my arms out in the dark looking for light, if it came, would it be a gift? I wouldn’t know whether to accept or decline, there’s something about wandering that keeps me up at night. That and the nightmares, which have returned-- admittedly, I doubt they ever left. Sometimes I’m able to go back to bed, sometimes I just want to be held—still the distance between us feels like light- years will pass like shooting stars, miracles if we believe in miracles, hope hangs in the balance like the last word of a line— I’m still trying to write about the love I’ve been given. I think it comes through the blinds, the patch of sunlight my cat always seeks out, warming up his back, I can feel him shake off the cold and he sprawls out, as to soak in every drip of the sun.  Dorothy Chan is the author of Chinese Girl Strikes Back (Spork Press, forthcoming), Revenge of the Asian Woman (Diode Editions, 2019), Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold (Spork Press, 2018), and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets (New Delta Review, 2017). She was a 2020 finalist for a Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University, and a 2014 finalist for the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire and Poetry Editor of Hobart. Visit her website at dorothypoetry.com Because You Fall Too Fast Too Hard
Why don’t we split the steak for two medium rare and the $21 Caesar salad, is what I always want to say on dates, because I always come hungry, but scratch that, I don’t share food with men I’ve just met, and boy, you’re the most adorable thing here, but I’m thinking about how Marlene Dietrich once said that her favorite food was champagne and hot dogs, and throw in some cheddar mac and cheese and you’re golden, and I could really bite down on a wiener just about now, extra relish, yellow mustard, dreaming about the ways you’ll kiss me later, our tongues touching, me licking your lips in a total Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman move, and what we’ve got going on is attractive- successful people infatuation, like if I was on the McDonald’s menu, I’d be a McLovin’ with double the cheese and fries, and oh yeah, I’m extra campy, the one non-kids menu item that comes with the Hello Kitty toy, and did you know that in the early days of the millennium, couples in Hong Kong would go on dates at McDonald’s, like it’s the hippest thing ever, and I remember adding chili sauce to my fries and licking that soft serve of green apple and vanilla in Singapore, and yes, yes all of the above is delicious, like sharing this bottle of bourbon with you, and I’m the type of woman who knocks over the banana stand at the grocery store, the smell of whiskey on my lips, and don’t you just love the rise and the fall of our mouths meeting, the tingle you can’t resist, but I don’t want to fall in love that easily, and I hate it when men fall in love with me too easily, and let’s just enjoy the loss of control now, the tingle of bourbon, the kiss me harder moans, the oh really, boy, kiss me harder, kiss me under the covers.  Kevin Latimer is a poet & playwright from Cleveland, Ohio. he is the co-editor-in-chief of BARNHOUSE. recent poems can be found in jubilat, poetry northwest, passages north, & elsewhere. MIRAGE
i am going to die in two days but i know this: in heaven, every dead mother skips across the concrete brick of the fountain. every mother’s head crowned with gold & daisies. every mother’s body lifted from brick now haloing around the water like a rainbow. dear God of swallowed moths & grief, dear God of irony; on every city block still-alive chalk lines begin to move & take to the streets. in every road, dirt-dusted dead mothers hold their arms out & smile. jumping out of every car, sons & daughters run into their arms like hurricanes.  MJ is a Black, queer non-binary poet and parent. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Foglifter Press, Kissing Dynamite Poetry, Rigorous Mag, & Borderlands Texas Poetry Review. MJ has received fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, SF Writers Grotto, VONA, & Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently the Community Engagement Graduate Fellow in the MFA program at Mills College. Let Me Be Remembered As A Mother
(Jennifer Hart speaks)1 You will say it long after the plummet. You will replace mother with monster. Still I know how I loved them right til the end. I chose sea so water would cleanse them. Bought snacks – bananas for six little monkeys – to line their bellies for Benadryl. Sleep. Knocked back beers so I could find my courage. You must know I loved those children. Enough to kill them. To pay that ultimate price. Give them to God so Hell could not take them. Know I loved them in how I chose their ends. You must know how I prayed, how I kissed them, and sung. Unhooked their seatbelts – so they could sleep more comfortably. I loved them like dolls. 1 On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove herself, her wife, Sarah, and their six adopted Black children off of a Pacific coast cliff in Mendocino, CA, killing the entire group. All personas are fictionalized.  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. |
