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James King

After the End,
           after Alison C. Rollins

they told the ghosts we could go and
have anything we wanted, so
we all dropped to the ruin like blue needles.

So many of my friends haunted
houses they never had, but I
was always afraid of skeletons.

The sharpness of want drew me
to the dark backseat
of a car once fucked in, to recall

the scent of hips
and keys and pine-scented
air freshener that hung from the mirror.

I pushed into a train station,
begged the curling
flame in the sky to let me

let the subway move. I begged it
like an alarm clock but it threatened
to make me a roach.

For a long while, I became
one living girl, who slept on a pile
of phone booths. I

did my damnedest to be her.
I cried and slept. I waited
and waited for the phones to ring.
Carrie Bennett

The Stage Builds Itself Outside 1

In the first spring a stage appeared outside like a drawbridge. Once the set was assembled hot air balloons appeared in the distance like soft sailboats. Actors prepared their lines with their masks on. The stage directions told us to breathe as deeply as we could—“Hold your breath, now take a second breath, now a third”—until our chests exploded in sick dahlias. Once we were people who went grocery shopping with lists in our cold hands. We waited for new scripts to appear. The trees waited too. That was when the sickness was still on the sidewalks. I thought of all the uses of a marshmallow. “What does waste look like in your own mouth?” It’s less important now to be seen. On stage an enormous screen projected the audience back to themselves. When we were finally on stage we opened our mouths at once
like hundreds of butterflies. Outside the quietest applause filled the air like static or rain.

 
 





​

​
​Inside Every Play Is an Apology 

I swallow the scene whole. The sky first blue then gray then orange. It takes too long to learn the tree’s lines. In another scene the swan spins in water. The audience claps like wooden boxes. What do you wish to replicate? It’s never easy to follow the script. The day derails so magnificently. And my mind like scattering flies. In the next scene the swan stays stranded in the middle. She sobs out her breath at the snapping turtle. Two words stuck inside my mouth like magnets. I sit for a while and point at the swan. I try to organize the air chronologically. The days continue like a machine chewing at cement. How each morning is an application for more. 

Picture
              Tangible Things Sought, Lisa Segal. Mixed media.
Picture
                           Futile Repair, Mikayla Voller. Gesso and thread on canvas.
​Derek Thomas Dew

Roaming Burial 

 
The warm, smoky beach 
began to crawl through the room. 

The door repeatedly opened and closed, 
but quicker than anybody could get in or out.

Ever since the sand, jasmine is how  

to withhold a name,
and go on, marriage-less.

A secret a lack of origin, like our street.

Cloister stale with pigeons mid-forgetting us.

I gave the doorman over to the idea 
of citywide copper.

I made our embrace a lie by keeping my eyes open.









​
Lily Kosmicki

Creature of Habit

Where is the lightning held? 
In strange religions. Distant lights
Echo through the valley,
lightning through the core.
The big space fills a gap in me. 

The mountains are blanketed 
by clouds and by trees.
Turn wheels to make blood.
Turn wheels to make prayers.
I pry nails from wood with angled fingernails.

Do you remember what a chest feels like hanging off of you?










Neha Mulay

Aubade with Genesis

Say I want to walk in a dry ocean.


Would there still be lilacs in another house

I can’t fill? For the filament is creeping up

my nose again. Everything I want is bloodless.


The Fishermen are calling to storm, 

sky souring with locusts as I try 

to make baskets out of water –


I am as divided as this nation

ochre as the heart of earth. What 

dream will turn me now? What 


strange incantation?










Kali Yuga
Either we birth 
                                 obsidian
or the time comes
                            for this play
to turn 
             berserk
                            as a bee
in an ear,
                 not the end, no,
more a leeching
                          just earth
                                         disowning us
spring arriving
                        with nowhere
                                                  to land –
 
Raoul left mother
                            around the same time
color began to leave
                                     the reef,
there must be
                                 an imprint
of death
                    in our clean-cut stones,
look, again,
                       you are receding
paramour,
                           the world
and my eyes
                        crusted
                                        with salt
streets imprinted
              with bullets and choke,
all night I dream
                 of salves & brass polish,
wake,
               the rosary beads
                                               slipping
this hour
                     like a windowless room
cave
                      of black ink
let me make
                      a hull of you
almost
                 in the way
we make bones
                          of land
heat making sick
                                     fire
losing luster
                          yuga
curling up
                          yuga
ready
                      for sleep
cocoon
                no longer
 
 
Paramour,
                            no court
will have us now
                         we are turned
like remain
                     in teacup & sun
skin-to-skin
                       pigmented
motherless               
                        moth-struck
 
mute & sport-drunk
                       
                                         in the back-garden
 
hills hoist singed
 
                                     garden sink upturned
 
we never did get
                               new tiles
 
but we spent 
                            months
 
            flipping
 
                                   through color










Garrett Stack

Mine

My ear yawns on a pillowed hill
pouring choking smoke into her canary

lungs. She turns from my slurry
cold as coal and wakes and wakes until

woke, rises slow, starts the sooty coffee
drip, drops grey eggs into blackest cast

​iron. She’s exhausted but better still than lying
too near here and my open pit mind.










Allie Rigby

To the Listener \\ Whose Listening

These are trying times                                          by the bottle open,
bottle to drink I want,                                          I need new ways to feel

change, not bristle pinpricks I’m talking
about unsettling these are unsettling times

staying grounded hustle culture,                       hard on
good day—see, I’m a bit boxed in here

totally great, overall—                                          accepted the struggle,
what now, malaise nestles deep

unlike the soft grooves                                         of a Matilija poppy,
these are unsettling times                                    I’m talking about,

accepted the great struggle overall in               bristle pinpricks. I wanted

a boxed salve, new ways to feel
by the open bottle—now what?                       To drink

​trying times when                                                  these are trying times,

by the bristled bottle, bottle-opened,              laugh at the drunk now.










J V Birch

Funny dreams

You left and came back with another, 
her young son in tow. I turned 

into a doll, spent nights getting lost in 
huge rooms shifting with shadows 

and space and no air. And you, standing 
in a doorway I could never reach. 

Household things loomed in between us, 
as if I must tidy my way through. 

I spoke only tiptoe. Now you’re gone, I 
find it’s still there when I linger, 

the fathomless panic, pulling me back 










Rachel Turan

Immersed

You stop your
Tiny home on wheels
In park unknown to you
Jaw out sniffing, mission sent
Seeking
Not the gentle light
Scattered, shadowless
Or the echo of the
Bouncing ball, the small
Exaltations
You seek write-ups of the past
Those that shout in the same
Learned language that they gave to you
The chainsaw’s distant itching towards each
leaf’s death
Fall lost against the concrete structure of the
frog war










Prudence

I couldn’t see her anymore
She had become the hill’s shadow
And underneath me grew the fungus
That choiceless, I scraped away
Until her far-flung echo fed the spores
And let them multiply

Wandering, there was a cat
Brooding toothless and with
its confidence spread out; a faded map
Thinned and immediate but blank

And I took her in with all her hesitation
Mine lodging itself between my fingers
Her soft, age-speckled fur
Scattered over my empty lap

Inside her mouth
The fungus multiplied
just in time
For her to suck and salivate and
swallow it down.










Picture
Nebraska Bridge, Greg Clary. Photograph.
Picture
Reaching Grasping, Mikayla Voller. Mixed media on canvas.
Picture
Sixth Turtle, a Healthy Turtle, of the Land, ​Ilya Gutner.  Pen on notebook paper.
Picture
Sixth Turtle, a Healthy Turtle, of the Land (Alternate view), ​Ilya Gutner.  Pen on notebook paper.
Picture
Always, Cynthia Yachtman. Ink and acrylic on paper mounted on wood.
Picture
When the Street Lights Come On, Lisa Segal. Mixed media.
CM Preston

Have Gone Circumscribing 

A rustling praise day
so the fluidic sincerity lives on in a banana, the poetic house of the father,
the loving
bed that is sensible and resplendent.
I want you to fly on my heart. 
In the first take, the soft woman
is struck by a giant. In the second
scene he returns, to swim and to weave.
There are no havocs but nauseous cycles
of knave and marine
cathedrals of handsome rusted broken glass.
You are going to ask where are the fill?
And the resolute springtime?
And the thunder full splattering its starry skies and hating them full of vicinity and toucan?
It was the night of the lobster.
Behind the furious land of melancholy love.
It was the day of the iguana. 
It was the sunrise of the toucan.
Return to the homeland of the productivities.
I saw how perfumes are mixed
by the enchanting tree.
The chimney around hers
a history we tell in passing,
with notions of honor
and a passion for journalism and oceanography
of your opaque dark movie when you hold out your foot. 
It was the midnight of the ostrich.
A loaf of bread baked with atrocious tiredness and salt. Wave of wave of wreaths rolling down the sea. 
A springtime focuses its dream of a beginning, its old ending, the new beginning of the writing order -
its smooth gates.
Here I am, somber hips silenced in the city of movie. 
​

​





​
​Amber Mooers


Another Chore

I hate putting dishes away
They all stick together 
An amorphous blob pretending
 to be a jenga stack of meals past
Like candy left in a hot car

A plate mates with the mug 
stacked precariously atop it
the dishes whisper promises they cannot keep
I see warped reflections in their curves
My hand makes contact 

I become honey
My fingers glue to the cereal bowl
They dissolve into the white ceramic glaze
Who will put us away now?









​
Adele Evershed

Skewwiff
​
I woke up yellow—decrepid
Something not quite right
People born by the sea are older
Yet this weathering surprised me
The compression of the thing settled in my gut
Rigmaroling me round the room like a drunk
But I still couldn’t fill up the empty spaces 
Time once felt slippery in patches
Skidding past—a flibberty-jibbit
Now it hangs like a promise—each day a small fable 
I dig out abeyant words
But use them in all the wrong places
Washing them with my breath
So they can exist for a short time--
Caper about creating their own mild breeze
They are flashes of wit contrary to the sun’s course
Amorphous—they float away on a riptide
and I am too gutless to call them back









Picture
Alone in the Snow, Derek Thomas Dew. Photograph.
contributors
Carrie Bennett is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellow and author of biography of water, The Land Is a Painted Thing, and several chapbooks from dancing girl press. Her third poetry book, Lost Letters and Other Animals, will be published by Black Lawrence Press in early 2021. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals including Boston Review, Caketrain, Denver Quarterly, and jubilat. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and currently teaches writing at Boston University.  

Lily Rose Kosmicki is a librarian at the public library and by night she is a collector of dreams. Her zine Dream Zine won a Broken Pencil Zine Award for Best Art Zine 2018. Her work appears in Bombay Gin, Interim, Seisma Magazine, and elsewhere.

Ilya Gutner lives with his friend, two cats and a loose coterie of stray dogs, in the back shed of a farmer's house in a village on the city outskirts of Shanghai, and is a student of philosophy.

​
Neha Mulay is an Australian-Indian writer and a current MFA candidate in poetry at New York University. Her poems have appeared/are forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, The Maine Review, and SAND Journal among other publications. She is the Web Editor for the Washington Square Review.

J V Birch lives in Adelaide. Her poems have appeared in anthologies, including Australian Love Poems, The Emma Press Anthology of Aunts and The Hunter Writers Centre Grieve. Her work has also featured in a number of journals and magazines across Australia, the UK, Canada and the US, including Ink, Sweat and Tears, Not Very Quiet, Plumwood Mountain, Magma, Cordite and Mslexia. She has three chapbooks with Ginninderra Press – Smashed glass at midnight, What the water & moon gave me and A bellyful of roses - and a full-length collection, more than here. She blogs (very occasionally) at www.jvbirch.com

A sculptor by trade, Amber Mooers incorporates writings heavily into her process oriented work. Her visual art can be seen at ambermooers.com, or in her studio in Durham, North Carolina.

Derek Thomas Dew’s debut collection of poetry, "Riddle Field," received the 2019 Test Site Poetry Prize from Black Mountain Institute/University of Nevada Press. His poetry has been published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, Tempered Runes Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Button Eye Review, and elsewhere. He is a winner of an Oregon Opportunity Grant and an Omnidawn Publishing Workshop Scholarship. He currently lives in Oregon.

Rachel Turan creates digital art for a nonprofit and writes music and poetry for her sanity in the forgotten wilds of New Jersey. Her work has been published in Alexandria Quarterly Press and Toho Journal.

Lisa Segal uses typography, geometry, repetition, maps, crow imagery, text from her poems, and hand-built multiples to continually reinvent a personal vocabulary of shapes and patterns. She is a founding member and past chair of StudioEleven, a Los Angeles art collective. She has shown in various galleries in Los Angeles. A teacher of poetry and writing through the Los Angeles Poets & Writers Collective, she has written four books: Kicking Towards the Deep End, Trips, Metamorphosis: Who is the Maker? An Artist’s Statement, and her textbook, Jack Grapes’ Method Writing: The Brush-Up. She is a winner of the Los Angeles Poet Society Poetry Month Contest. www.lisasegal.com

Garrett Stack is a teacher and writer at Ferris State University in Big Rapids, Michigan. His work is forthcoming or recently published in the Great Lakes Review, American Journal of Poetry, Pine Row, and others. His first book of poetry, Yeoman's Work, was released as part of Bottom Dog Press' Working Lives Series in August 2020 and includes two Pushcart Prize nominees.

C.M. Preston is a Canadian poet currently attending the MFA program at The University of British Columbia.

Allie Rigby is a Bay Area poet and educator with roots in the chaparral of southern California. Her writing is published in the Manzano Mountain Review, Cholla Needles, Visitant, Living on Earth Radio, and more. Currently, Allie is pursuing an MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. She was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize for one of her poems.

James King is a writer and student from New Hampshire, and the recipient of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize from Dartmouth College. His work has appeared in the Stonefence Review, The Foundationalist, Humana Obscura, and Bluing the Blade. He lives with his family and a very noisy beagle.

Adele Evershed writes poetry and prose from a desk overlooking a wood in Connecticut. She has had poems published in a number of anthologies and online you can find her work in The Fib Review, Rainbow Poems, and Flash Fiction North.

Greg Clary is Professor Emeritus of Rehab and Human Services at Clarion University, Clarion PA. His writing and poems have appeared in The Rye Whiskey Review, The Watershed Journal, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Northern Appalachia Review, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Trailer Park Quarterly, Waccamaw Journal, Rusty Truck, Ant-Heroin Chic, and North/South Appalachia: Poetry and Art, Vol 1. His photographs have been published in The Sun Magazine, Looking at Appalachia, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, The Watershed Journal, Hole in the Head Review, Dark Horse, North/South Appalachia, The Bridge Literary Arts Journal, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel Journal, Trailer Park Quarterly, Winedrunk Sidewalk, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Avant Appal(achia). He was born and raised in Turkey Creek, West Virginia, and now resides in northwestern Pennsylvania.

Mikayla Voller is an Art Therapist and visual artist living in Brooklyn, New York. Through her work at a New York City nursing home, Mikayla supports older adults using Art Therapy to express themselves, connect with one another, and enhance their mental health and wellbeing. To cope with the challenges of the pandemic, Mikayla enjoys baking (albeit poorly), watching a lot of Schitt’s Creek, and taking long, contemplative walks with her dog, Jazmyn. In addition to making art for herself, Mikayla hosts virtual art events to teach small groups how to use art-making for self care. To learn more about Mikayla and her artwork, visit her website, mikaylavoller.com, and follow her on Instagram, @mikayla.voller.”

​Cynthia Yatchman is a Seattle based artist and art instructor. She works primarily on paintings, prints and collages. Her art is housed in numerous public and private collections in the Northwest and she has been shown nationally in California, Connecticut, New York, Indiana, Michigan, Oregon and Wyoming.

Erica Lane, Editor.
​Published February 1st, 2021
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