Welcome to the 30/30 Project, an extraordinary challenge and fundraiser for Tupelo Press, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary press. Each month, volunteer poets run the equivalent of a “poetry marathon,” writing 30 poems in 30 days, while the rest of us “sponsor” and encourage them every step of the way.
The volunteer poets for June are: Kristina Byas, Shavahn Dorris-Jefferson, Jess Tønseth Lee Gleason, Jingyu Li, Shane Moran, and Stefanie Zito.
If you’d like to volunteer for a 30/30 Project month, please fill out our application and warm up your pen!
April - Poem 27
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Drive-thru Car Wash / Bob Bradshaw
I love losing myself
in the yugen
of broccoli forests, living
“in the moment”
at Safeway.
Yet nothing
beats a car wash
with its cloudbursts
and flash floods
and its sudsy clouds
washing up against my glass—
And fierce rains sweeping
across my hood,
my beetle
now a submersible,
long slats flailing at it
like the legs
of a deranged giant octopus
escaped from 20,000 Leagues
Under the Sea.
And though I feel
like a guppy, its bowl
overflowing, the faucet
at full blast,
I’m as safe
as if I were riding a car
on Santa Cruz’s Big Dipper
—pushed along, as we all are,
by forces outside
our control.
And yet as a bright light
breaks over me,
my car emerging
into the Ordinary
again,
I wonder what
it’s like for a babe
in a womb being pushed
along,
as if it too were riding out
on rollers,
its old world--
of dim waters and tides--
being left behind
for an almost
inconceivable
life. A new
yugen.
Relationship Advice / Stan Galloway
Jealousy clamps
a leg, bites through the flesh,
holds you at the bone.
Suspicion filters rose from daylight
shifting everything Othello green
smothering affection with a dingy pillow.
Distrust demonizes innocence
creates ghosts where no spirit ever wailed
and sucks the marrow from integrity.
Snow / Ava Hu
*
We are whirls
in bark and wood.
An amulet of snow
heavy with moon.
Has the die
been cast?
The serpent turns
with her tail
in her mouth.
The hero turns
and refrains.
Branches bend
under the weight.
Inhale.
The earth is a desolate
wilderness.
The earth is desolate,
dear wilderness,
without you
I am snow.
*
all the steps from the pole barn to the berm / Kirsten Miles
measure Place road gently carrying that
rib bound vessel beating out to sea
past the little ponds blueing down the sky
elegant Long Tails glide over mirrored peaks
Hooded Mergansers with their impossible crests
slaty sided Harlequins, their mousey peeps
returned these years since river Elwha flushes
back her path and claims her mouth
Bushtits and Pacific Wrens flit, eagles whistle
over the growing crest of surf as the path
turns towards the Strait
metering the breeze along the spit where
sand is still learning its own course
loose grains silt down footprints on the bank
yesterday’s channel is today’s dry bone
the current drifts a restless
scrimshaw for steelhead and salmon to scry
This is the way
I am built of the same silt same wild
unpatterned spilling
the same stubborn refusal to fit
I’ve spent my seasons dammed
up steel struts straining before the thrust
unmakes the bank
the way the heart must lose its shape
to find its reach
see how the river takes the weather’s pitch
gale winds scrape the gray skies clear
tides lap or ravage, she makes a braided delta
tosses the skeletons of prehistoric trees
today her mouth widens
sand spits trail from her eyes salt-singing
each day newly carved
Main Street BookShelves / Sergiy Pustogarov
i wish i knew which way my words would
go,
between collapsing
sonnets
and lines spiraled so
far away;
they aren’t even free
verse
anymore,
just something i like to label
not quite there.
still slipping between
agents’ fingers,
readers’ minds,
and journals’ grasp.
i’ve spent the afternoon
passing up the
main street
small town
bookstores,
staring through the
windows
to spines lined up like
soldiers marching to
their next homes bookcase.
but i’ll just go home tonight and
type words onto a
screen
for others to wonder what
happened in
my life.
hollaback duplex / nat raum
the fever jostles you like earthquaked skyscrapers
swaying in hopes their foundations are sturdy.
even sturdy foundations hope for chaos sometimes—
who doesn’t want to be a bit undone? sameness bores,
wanting those who don’t usually unravel to bare teeth
at their enemies for once. the fight in you is innate.
once your instinct takes over, enemies ought to flee
in droves. you feel hungry. you need to sate the itch,
unsatisfied after decades of starving. hundreds
of hands stroke your throat at once. it’s up to you
to take your own and grab back, fracture wrists
and hearts and ties to that which no longer serves.
no more heartbreak—untie the tethers and release
yourself into feverish sky, still gently quaking.
An exchange about my dog./ Daniel Avery Weiss
you do not have to optimize for productivity / MK Zariel
a text message poem
most of my tasks are basic self care.
i'm reading lacan for the first time. it's not going very well.
yes, that's happened before.
plans ended early so i'm killing time:
someone implied i was cis today and it really bothered me
i won't hold her accountable so it might be perfect!
dealing with a bunch of interpersonal crazy stuff.
he clearly is just afraid of culture <can you ask not to talk politics?>
that means we don't shit talk people's art in front of them
i've seen people of all genders do this.
if he's a poetry reader at all, that'd be great to know
tell me before inviting twenty different people.
yes, i'm sure
if it's not a hell yes, it's a no
April - Poem 26
untitled / Maureen Alsop
First Driving Lesson / Bob Bradshaw
The car—leaps—forward.
Whoa! Easy…easy, he says.
The car—jerks—ahead--
--stops--jumps again.
It's like our dog
when I’m walking him
and his radar’s picking up
another dog nearby
and I keep having
to yank him back
on his short leash
from running off.
Obviously the car
needs a tuneup.
Maybe it’s the brakes?
I offer. The instructor
shakes his head.
You might want
to keep your left foot
off the brake pedal
when you drive.
Slow down
when we take curves,
he reminds me.
Yeah yeah.
I've always aced
my classes. I'm expecting praise
as we take our first turn.
Jesus! God!
he shouts, leaning back
into his seat
as if slammed
by G-forces.
Let’s take another
turn! I need the practice,
I say, overriding
his instruction
to pull over…
Okay, the first lesson
didn’t go great.
I failed it,
my dumb instructor tells me.
I say I’m available
tomorrow. Maybe
in two weeks,
he says. That’s
when I start
vacation.
Picking Blackberries, Circa 1970 / Stan Galloway
After Erin Murphy
never quite enough bowl or bucket, balancing
the last ones like soldiers on a crumbling castle wall
Evergreen, Himalayan, Cascade, Mountain
sweet varieties of childhood, all with thorns
some small, some oblong, some without a shape
we braved the heat of August, proud
of purple fingers earned at seven cents a pound
Untitled / Ava Hu
*
We are pulled by things
we cannot name.
Is it the mind’s nature
to bend bamboo
just enough
so it won’t break?
Do thoughts have sounds?
The beating beneath my jacket,
does that have
a sound too?
We are photographs
of a river in sudden release.
A house made of rising water
before it floods the lungs.
*
If My Mother Met Noah Kahan / Sergiy Pustogarov
she’d probably hate him
just like me.
we’d be smoking weed together
in the backyard
of an old rundown
farmhouse that
we decided to visit
back in the north just
for one week.
we would be intoxicated on
speeches that
hate on the patriarchy,
while we both just keep
trying to climb the ladder ourselves,
questioning whether the world should
know our name.
will we just curse our
future with fame and money?
we would talk about
the north with all we left behind.
little black sheep running away from
the flock,
trying to see if
we could find somewhere
we belong.
and i don’t think we quite have
found that place yet.
happy here
but not truly knowing how
the way of life works.
but today we remember the beauty of
mountains and auburn leaves,
nestled within mountains named after
grandparents we never met. but
we guess that they probably fought
for the racists,
the bigots,
and the colonists.
its still got a quaint charm,
just to run away from.
we chuckle over the church next door.
where our childhood friends will
still walk in on the morrow,
dressed in their suit and ties;
reciting lines
we learned were the only thing that
mattered during childhood here.
but since then we ran
for the hills,
down on the other side of the mountains.
just trying to avoid the
wreckage that has overtaken the towns behind us.
but we still come to visit on nights like this,
telling stories unlike the way our
mothers told us for years.
but my mother won’t meet noah kahan,
his words are just to pure for my company.
but god i miss the northern lights
so i’ll just start over again.
against rot / nat raum
all the stones on my altar are red. this is how little i know
of desire right now, or maybe i know too much of desire
and not enough of the fruits it can bear—they hang low,
close enough to bite if i had the balls. indeed, i’m terrified
to even finger waxed skins, let alone pick seeds from teeth.
the sun doesn’t have to set for me to cast sex spells; hunger
can exist at all hours. i run the highlight reel and fuck off
to bed, afternoon sun-dappled ass in the air. i’m too shy
to invite company, so i have to manifest it. something
is coming. someone is cumming. and i can only see it
when i close my eyes and remember i too am body—
these folds of skin, this limerence, this soft celestial.
No, Okay, I Love You / Daniel Avery Weiss
He's in a bottle—
neck, thin and wily,
uttering stale things to
legs that can't peel
themselves from the
sheets, as corpse-like
as he will be in a
week.
No, his tongue hobbles,
one of the first words
to reject its way back
into his brain of snapped
plastic and burnt rubber.
No, no, no, he breathes,
bubbling up at nurses.
Okay, he confesses the next day,
and I see it as repentance
for his first word back
being fuck you at the
first stirrings of mortality,
a rejection of a rejection
of a rejection of a rejection
of a rejection of
the brain, the way it drags
him into its crevasses
which are really just
bigger hospitals and
myriad memories that
could have happened.
Something weasels past his lips and
I must ask for clarification:
Are you trying to say, “I love you?”
Speaker and poet now enter. We witness
as one his nod, the breathy desperation of
his I love you, witnessed as a
see you tomorrow,
and tomorrow and tomorrow,
as a have a good night,
as a good night,
as night,
as night,
as night,
letter to a straight bro / MK Zariel
the sky was the color of a week-old bruise or
a buffering screen when you stared me down
on the sidewalk, your cacophony of college merch
and offensive slogans as bright as day. you jeer out
casual judgments, vacant glances—your drunk friend
wears something overtly misogynistic—a red logo
on your tee shirt and every tee shirt—like a bloodstain
you wear to prove that vulnerability terrifies you.
i hate that i still wonder what you're thinking
when you stare at me. i will unravel any man who asks me
if i'm a boy or a girl again. i will put off transitioning
solely so i never look like you. i will, realistically,
silently judge your fashion choices and keep walking
and talk shit with my friends and hate that all i can ever do
is file away another data point on how not to be. the sidewalk
was the color of regret and spilled drinks when you stared me down like
a silent curse that ricochets through the air—i walked past, you
continued shouting. nobody shouts anymore, don't you know?
we all learned to shut up because you never did.
April - Poem 25
untitled / Maureen Alsop
First You Grew Up, And Now You’re Leaving Us? / Bob Bradshaw
The doctor pulled you out,
the room blood
and howling cries,
but we hadn’t parted
completely yet…
that would take years.
Even from the start I was like play-doh
in your hands.
Who shaped who,
sweetheart?
But here we are,
and a young man stands
at the altar with you—
ready to kidnap you,
to whisk you away.
Who gave you permission
to grow up, to fall in love?
Was it your Dad?
I’ll never forgive him
for allowing you to walk
away, into what?
A man’s arms? That’s
all it took?
After decades
of my love, my prime years
spent focused
on you?
Men…they do this to us
in the guise of love.
They take from us
what we value most.
And now Dad
insists on the bride’s
first dance? Mom booted
to the sidelines watching…
Is that my place now?
The sidelines?
What am I to do
tomorrow? Pick up
your room?
Dust your old dollhouse?
Oh, to retreat with you
into its rooms again….
The game of love and parenting
was rigged against
mothers long ago.
That young man you married?
He will never love you
as much as I do.
Never.
The Poem and I / Stan Galloway
After Denise Dunahel
My speaker wants to be someone
no generic cloud-embodied voice
the way I wanted to be Tarzan
when I was 12 and reading through an old mirror
not launching myself from branch to bole
but protecting the world from wantonness
and discovering a willing woman in my arms.
At 16 Jessica 6 escaped her false world
into mine, complete with a decrepit government,
finding her renewal, without death,
free will restored and choosing me,
or at 17 torn between the snark of Solo
and the earnestness of Skywalker
and either way embracing the cloud-clad Leia
saving my own universe, inside my head.
I tell the poem I’ve outgrown those adolescences.
The poem laughs, pointing to my college textbooks.
You just learned, the poem says, that Jane and Jessica were really
Daisy Miller and the Wife of Bath when not controlled by
male authors synthesizing life through their own broken lenses
letting characters dance inside an artificial ring.
Lolita was Nabokov’s Leia, but they don’t exist.
Well, Nabokov does, we both agree, the poem and I,
and none of us is whole without our second selves.
Love Poem / Ava Hu
What is the sound of one hand clapping? — Buddhist koan
*
Gateless gate.
The body half
out of the ground.
Shining lantern, mirror.
Coincidence
or an omen?
Proclaim, “Earth
is my witness.”
Sound in the body.
A bell under the skin.
At first, someone
was afraid.
Earth as my witness.
At first, someone
held back.
Earth as my witness.
The object of thought
seeking itself.
Two hands
become one.
*
Diving into Lake Crescent under the Snow Moon / Kirsten Miles
six figures in bathrobes, phantom breath rising
nostrils frosted in the February bite
bare feet stationed on the snowy dock
edge inky lake lapping below
five inaugurate the newest
a deep breath just before you jump
its warm bubble shields the heart
paddle hard as soon as you hit the water
here, stand closest to the ladder
five bodies vanish, plunged into the still dark
I pull the night into my lungs
The lake waits like an open cave
I am the last witness, and now propellant
the leap is a severing
liquid ice breaks around me skin on fire
a sudden concussion of clarity
The ladder rises like a prayer,
and I am leaping up it, back to the dock, back
where we are six seal skins reborn laughing
electric in the milk-glow moon
How to Apologize from a Narcissist / Sergiy Pustogarov
say you’re sorry // but we both know you aren’t.
say you didn’t mean it, // so i shouldn’t be upset.
say you don’t really care // that it hurt me, // or whether i // flinched.
say it’s my fault // these emotions are mine, // not your problem.
tell me to stop placing // my fragile heart in your hands
while you blame me // for what you did.
say you’re sorry, // then turn away.
say that should make me happy, // now you’re wounded.
i must have done something. // it’s never your fault.
how unfair.
say you’re sorry. // you aren’t.
say nothing.
leave.
sonnet for syanna / nat raum
the nightmares form themselves, it seems,
and come alive in graphite on the page.
we have this in common, rhena and i. how
else could i hope to communicate the worst
of it? words may never be enough. i close
my eyes and see every shadow of the night.
faces i do not remember take bites of me,
and i arch my back in pleasure. fantasy worlds
call when awake, glitched-out mythical
creatures or not. all we ever wanted was to be
understood. i haven’t taken a lover in over a year;
the thought disgusts me over half the time. still i’d climb
mutant vines skyward and sigh in the clouds if someone
got close enough bear me, for even a moment.
Shino Haibun/ Daniel Avery Weiss
There are two thousand three hundred and fifty steps to melting him into a sunset, each of which requires having skipped the previous step. There are centuries of bothered potters stifling silicosis so she can surface, each yielding masters who prefer mud over memory. There are fires, little golden things, little golden things that eat the sky, and little golden souls to turn the leftovers into pyrite on porcelain, each of whose bodies froth with envy at stars surrendering themselves to clay. There are ingredients which want you dead, and each must be the other to yelp the tinny spontaneity of the vase in your kitchen. Chance was born and died in this muck. Burn it.
My glaze tiles are wrong.
The porcelain wields
a false orange.
on blocking out / MK Zariel
i know the general outline of who i was: the pulsating sparks
the crushing of fire against velvet, the energy only qualified
by the bounds of time. i know i would have said i didn't have much
to live for, and i know that was a lie, and i know i was held but unseen—
i know the general outline of a constellation of parts, i know the muffled shouts,
i know the difference between bystanding and cold complicity—
i know boundaries like scattered files on the floor, i know the half-whispered
oft-repeated phrases that populate them, i know the feeling of sparks dimming
to accommodate cold touch, cold water, the weight of a body no longer real—
i know the constellation aligning.
April - Poem 24
untitled / Maureen Alsop
My First Great Grandchild / Bob Bradshaw
“Granddad you look so young!"
Ashlyn, six years old, says,
gazing at my photo.
I wasn’t much taller
than a bonsai, I say, spreading
my dusk like canopy.
“How’d you get so old?”
I shrug. “Granddad,
I love that bird’s nest
atop your head.
You look cool! None
of my friends’ grandparents
are as cool as you!”
Could you and your daddy
build a bird feeder,
and hang it on me?
“YES!” and Ashlyn sprints inside
—but when she comes out
she’s a teenager,
wearing a spring dress
and sandals,
and carrying an obsidian
bird feeder. A translucent
water bottle hangs
on one side.
“You look handsome,
Granddad!”
As I’m about to offer her
my last yellow blooms,
her mama calls her in.
Red hummingbird sage
is spiking the air
when Ashlyn returns—
in her twenties,
carrying her first
baby.
They gaze
at our famous
bird feeder—Ashlyn
as optimistic as spring
about their future.
—While winter
slips onto me a soft
white robe
from inside the house
Ashlyn lifts her baby
to the window.
“Look, sweetheart,
snow!”
Day 1,154 / Stan Galloway
Beauty makes no sense in a world / where friends die*
To wake in the night to the shaking of the bed-
room from a new crater in the parking lot
should not be normal
should not be ignored by a compassionate world.
Power out on a sub-freezing night
should be an emergency
not an irrelevant circumstance.
No one talks of Mariupol or Bucha anymore
but bodies still decay there.
Coffee at dawn and roses replaced in the broken window
do not erase the morning’s obituaries.
“Elegy” by Josh Schneyer [Eunoia Revew, 8 Apr. 2026]
Prediction / Ava Hu
*
My pencil drawing
of a small house
built with soft talismans
to bring in the light.
The author writes us
in black and white
lines across rivers
and fields.
Pink sakura blossoms
sweep across the page.
What do we hold
onto from this life to the next?
Does hunger mean
taking everything at once?
The way you let go,
I let go too.
*
BiPoLaR RoCkEt ShIpS / Sergiy Pustogarov
i DoN’t WaNt tO hUrT yOu,
So LeAvE mE a SiGn In ThE sTaRs.
i’Ll SeE iT aS i’M fLyInG bY.
A rOcKeT sHiP iN tHe NiGhT,
tRyInG tO fInD mY rOaDmAp
ThRoUgH cOnStElLaTiOnS,
uNtIl ThEsE rOcKeTs BuRsT aLl ApArT
AnD sUdDeNlY i FaLl DoWn
tO tHe EaRtH.
FoRmInG nEw CaNyOnS
wItH tHe DeBrIs FrOm My CoLlApSe.
I kEeP gOiNg On ThEsE jOuRnEyS,
a NeW oNe EvErY qUaRtEr.
NeW sTaRs I’vE fOuNd,
aNd NaMeD aFtEr ThE sOuLs
WhO i LeAvE bEhInD.
i WiSh I KnEw HoW tO sTaY pLaNtEd;
FuLlY gRoUnD iN eArThS mAgNiFiCeNt CoRe.
bUt DaIlY,
NeW cAlLiNgS.
nEw AdVeNtUrE,
My SoUl WaS nEvEr MeAnT fOr.
oNe DaY iT wIlL aLl SeTtLe DoWn,
ThE eArThS gReEn PaStUrEs
sOoTh My WoRn OuT sOuL.
BuT i HaVeN’t FoUnD tHe RiGhT mEdIcAtIoN fOr ThIs YeT.
self-portrait as a citadel / nat raum
all slabs of formstone and stacked-up
barricades, there is nothing this body
can’t weather. who needs a tower
when you were at once built and taught
to repel the forces of evil? everything
is supposed to be black and white
like this—you’re good or you’re bad.
when you don’t tell the truth, that’s a lie
by omission. there’s a reason no one talks
about what lurks within the city’s walls;
they still want to sleep soundly and say
there’s only splendor here. they don’t tell you
this, but when you build your walls this
high, you’re stuck with what’s inside them.
I Blanked and Forgot the Meaning of Life in the Back Pocket of My Jeans Before Putting Them in the Wash. / Daniel Avery Weiss
O, the glorious Point of it rests in the Hands of
someone I knew for a bit in college, who
teased the absurd wit from the hands of a situation
like a thread from a threadbare
comforter, thereby exposing something abysmal
and, like spilled milk, hilarious.
How very public.
Let’s be frogs, you and I.
on people-pleasing / MK Zariel
the text chain glows like an unwanted spiral, the mood lighting
of your house equally piercing, illuminating a bunch of trash
that you pretend not to see. i try to set a boundary like a human
and i see the no-compute flare behind your eyes
and it is a brick wall. it is a loud obtrusive walk that kicks up dust
and envelops all. it is a buffering window. it is a rerun—
the television flickers in and out in your room, the sound
like a white noise if it were overwhelming. you talk over it,
but pause it when anyone else talks. you get upset
when people anticipate your needs and when they don't.
you write a letter—and i've done this a thousand time over—
and my exhaustion cuts like a blade. it is the specific pallor
of someone who's pulled an all-nighter in the airport
and been yelled at the whole time. it is anarchist infighting.
it is a conversation with a void. it is an attempt to reason with one's cat.
i don't know why you claim to be emotionally intelligent
citing the two theorists you've read, only to develop
a mysterious amnesia for boundaries. you perform an idiocy
that lingers as long as you need it to—and it is the cloying
smirk of a politician. it is a soundbite. it is a problem player
at the d&d table. it is ad copy for nobody. it is the refusal to hear
anything you didn't optimize. you talk about your diet.
i begin thinking that if i dematerialized out of sheer disgust,
i'd lose weight (all of it), and you'd be proud. you talk about
your opinions of people you don't know. i wish i never knew you
never came into your sphere of influence, not close enough
to gossip about. you talk. i break.
April - Poem 23
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Search / Bob Bradshaw
I’m sitting here,
legs dangling,
from the highest book shelf,
thinking of you
and your cat
El Senor.
Climb down
from the shelf,
my heart advises.
Go out, find someone
just like Ann.
But I could drift
down the Yangtze,
ride a barrel
down Niagara Falls,
drift through Rome,
Florence, Venice...
I could cross
Times Square,
or listen to folk music
in a coffee house
on Bleeker Street,
or scan the crowd
gathering this afternoon
in Washington Square…
What are the odds
of meeting
someone just
like you,
Ann?
She would need
to be your long lost
conjoined twin,
separated
at birth.
She would have to feel
the way I do
about your absence—
wondering
if I will ever
feel whole
again.
Cleaning Crew / Stan Galloway
A jury of turkey buzzards
presides in the old white pine
above the cabin
weighing evidence
sniffing through the rising mist
the smallest twinge of rot
knowing another deer strike on U.S 259
will feast them today.
Before the sun has topped the ridge
they flap up to a thermal and glide
in ragged spirals
down the mountain.
Possession / Ava Hu
*
This sinking boat
possessed by air.
Master of weather.
Keeper of branches.
Snowy thread
as it unwinds.
As far as the sound
of a falling branch.
White-eyed angels. The music
of branches winding into
other branches. Heaven.
White world. This boat of glass.
Who knows the sound
of a branch falling
when no one
is listening?
*
in the high-shouldered glow of May / Kirsten Miles
it appears in a topology of hardwoods, a sixty acre wedge
of forest that still speaks its first language
light filtered through lobes of white and swamp oak
spring fed ripples lined by mountain laurel, native thickets,
undiluted by invading vines, or stilt grass rivulets braid teasing sparkles
between roots and burls rising from gravel bars
in the cup of the fluvial curves
sun-tipped fingers pointing toward
slivers of sky in a secret knot of streams
the Golden Club fires its torches, lining the midstream
amidst banks lined with rare ferns, green ribs waving
a river of their own ephemeral witness,
between asphalt progress, a peninsula of concrete and
dumpsters perched above the mouth of the spring
How hard it is to shield what is quiet.
clinging to the gravel, never wet leaves, roots veined into earth
despite flood or drought refusing to vanish
until the water itself is asked to leave
What Happens with SSRIs, Abuse, and Dreams / Sergiy Pustogarov
she shook my shoulder,
calloused hands wrapping my deltoids so
hard the prints were left on my skin the next morning.
all i could hear was her shouting in my ears:
you belong to me.
you must do what i say.
shut up and sit down.
shocked with fear and perpetual confusion i
stood still.
the floor below me swayed as i questioned
my rights to not sit down.
the boards began to ebb and flow
as i told myself nowhere was safe to seat this hurting body.
the walls began to close around me
as i became closer and closer
to that final decision: i would not sit and
be beaten more.
suddenly i found my voice.
yelled no and made it all stop.
the breath left the room as her lungs
inhaled. shock swept over the
floorboards. the walls jolted in their march to
my toes.
then she marched me out the door , around
the building and through the back of
some murky place she called
the church.
Her piercing cry ripped through
the building as she yelled out
the pastors name
and ordered he come here.
does this child dare have the right to
say that they do not want another
beating
bruising
scarring.
i say they are mine.
i will treat them how i dare.
the pastor bent down his ear,
graciously held my face.
and whispered softly so almost no one could hear.
don’t worry child.
this too shall pass.
your mother doesn’t own your soul.
so i ran away.
from my mother.
and the church.
sonnet for shrike / nat raum
After “The Lesser Evil” by Andrzej Sapkowski
my apologies to blaviken, but renfri vellga
is my problematic fave—who among us,
given the chance to right our own wrongs
the old-fashioned way, wouldn’t slaughter
a village to get to the root of the problem?
solar eclipse be damned, i too would strike
all parties responsible for my misshapen
sense of self. i am not always the hero
in my own story, but so often, the cataclysm.
i won’t defend my fallout, the hollow eyes
of all i meet who plead for mercy. violence
begets violence begets violence—so the circle
spins. i find fault a funny concept, in that
it’s always mine when the fracas is done.
The Train of His Great Midwest / Daniel Avery Weiss
And what is that train I hear?
With a dozen full bodied whistles
and a hundred little passengers,
living each their little lives as they
pass? And do I hear you there,
singing some sallow song?
And what is that window that I see?
And is that you, humming some
Minnesota hymnal praying a
man into a river? Does this
glass you forge hide you from a
mountain you have mourned?
And dear, do I see the ash of a
river’s lavish valleys
sat between your teeth
as a bluebird, and dear,
for whom do you take a bluebird’s life?
Our passenger flying sideways?
And what is this home
to whom you are bound?
Its thousand bricks of clay
dug from a canyon in the meadow of
your soul? And dear, what answers are bore
of the fruits of your travel?
speculate / MK Zariel
recall the day i apologized to you for being trans—
hazy afternoon, social awkwardness, auras crashing
into each other—hazy boundaries, social change, and nobody
but the one individual most likely to accept me.
so in my friendgroup, what are most of the people?
you chide me. so what am i? says the inner voice—
i know, a few moments in, that i had only self-repression
to apologies for, among the weeping decay of the trees
among the people you were before someone tried to define you.
so in the universe, what are most of the people? you say, hoping
that bias passes like a 2010s trend long forgotten—we'll outlive them
at least long enough to learn who we are without them.
April - Poem 22
untitled / Maureen Alsop
My Perfect Reader / Bob Bradshaw
What would she be like?
I’d settle for one reader,
much like I would
for one umbrella
during a downpour.
I’d also want my reader
to be beautiful,
and tall.
But not so tall
her face is veiled by clouds…
a reader whose height
requires me
to reach her
by climbing
a firetruck’s ladder,
wobbling
on the top rung
as I read my latest poem,
the wind riffling
its pages.
No, I want a reader
like an Audrey Hepburn
searching for a stray cat—
a poet—
in the rain
in an alley.
I wouldn’t mind getting wet
if I could be clutched
to Audrey’s
chest!
Desert / Stan Galloway
The lone and level sands stretch far away*
I thought we had built something wunderbar
explored new landscapes
airports
foods
laughed long into the night
over the word funicular
defended each other’s
dignity
reputation –
until you said you had to go it alone
and promptly found someone else journey with
leaving me looking at the ruins.
* “Ozymandias” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Book of Breathing / Ava Hu
*
Your mind
is a river.
Death, a field
of offerings.
If the weight
of your heart
is lighter
than a feather
pass through
the serpent gate.
Remove your gold rings
and bangles.
Remove the crown
from your brow.
Stop thought.
Stop breath.
Set the heart
under the left arm.
The book of breathing
inside your chest.
Become the form
you desire.
Your mind
is a river.
We are the last
two lines.
*
Warhol In the Bungalow / Sergiy Pustogarov
we paste posters of Andy Warhol
above our beds
And collect newspapers each morning
To pulp into paper mache
Adorning the cracks along the wall next to Andy
Hoping the slopping scraps of paper
Will cover enough peeling paint
To woo the next humble lover
Into our bed
as we touch their bodies
We hope to grasp their memories
Pulling them out with each kiss
So we may learn
What the past was like
We are seeking siblings
Family
And hope
In this crazy chase we have told
Ourselves is just for love
After fucking
We snort a line of cocaine
Off each others insolent pecs
Gasping for air between each set of fitful coughing
Completely ignorant as to
The rules of doing drugs
In the middle of a studio apartment
On the 115 floor in New York City
But somehow we made this
Altar a place
To collect the past
Like little marionettes
Coming for the stroking of a dick
And leaving as a scholar
A bungalow in NYC
A museum of the past
And portal to the future
Mixing drugs and sweat
Cum and with scraps of margines
Together we march on
Together we are the city
abundance finds me / nat raum
in money, yes, but also in love, that spiteful force
which eludes me still, not for lack of flip-turns
in stomach and quickening heartbeats—i have always
been able to allow myself to fall, but the problem
is in the plummet, the hurtling, the things i yell
when control leaves my body: fuck you i hate you you’re scum
and no one believes i don’t mean it and who could
blame them, when venom makes up the meat of the anger
behind my voice, when i fear the affixion of too much, not enough,
or both in tandem, when he asks for goldilocks’ porridge
and i bring back big bad wolf—extra fangs, hold
the patience—and maybe i don’t want abundance
after all, i just need to know there is a holding room
somewhere for all of this feeling.
Sickness Insomnia / Daniel Avery Weiss
A number of things:
The life inside
A series of malfeasances
By an immune system
Cells
Progenitors
How a virus looks like a typo
How sickness includes
My nose
A sneeze
A hundred slumbering explosions
Awaken
i'll do it later / MK Zariel
it could be my last night on earth and i'd still spend it
procrastinating. the tasks pile on like weeds on
a suburban crank's monoculture lawn. the numbers
are slightly scary. i have been type A for a long time
witness my shrug when someone asks me
if i need to take a break. we live in a world in which
being a good student means exhausting yourself,
then rebel against it and decide that being a good anarchist
means exhausting yourself with a smile—that being
an anarchist at all means forfeiting one's ability
to delegate. my friend tells me that, after thirty years
of organizing, she's only now learned that she
can tell other people to do things. i hate that i can relate.
i have been left-wing since middle school and a people-pleaser
since conception. i think i came out not crying but instead saying
no, really, anything is fine. it could be my last night on earth
and i still won't answer my freaking email. somehow i think
this is cosmic confirmation that i'm a bad person. even as
a practicing Discordian, i can't seem to let go of the moralistic
preaching that seems to have all of humanity in a polite chokehold.
i could unlearn that, but it would be a task. i could take a deep breath,
but it would be a task. i could procrastinate, and i could die,
and i could live.
April - Poem 21
untitled / Maureen Alsop
The Life Of A Failed Poet / Bob Bradshaw
“Poets write about misery,”
my friend said.
He appraised me
with his sad eyes.
"You’re a failure.
Happiness
doesn’t look good
on a poet’s resume.
You need more Trochees,
Dactyls in your life--
preferably
starting at the beginning
of your lines
the way Misery
must begin each day
of your life.
You’re plagued
with the Anapest,
making your poems
and your life too
lighthearted.
Not to mention
outbursts
of Spondees
when your team homers.”
And not to mention,
I add, at night
in bed with my wife!
OH, MAN!
He goes on. “All of us have rage
living quietly in us
like bullets
within a revolver’s
cylinder.
Just pull the trigger!”
Seeing me smile
my friend shakes his head.
“You’re incorrigible.
Name one good poet
who’s as happy as you!”
What should I do? I ask,
desperate to be miserable.
He shook his head,
before striding quickly off.
“Stick to limericks.”
Meriem’s Lion Song* / Stan Galloway
to her doll, Geeka
Yesterday hunters carried in a dead lion.
It smelled quite dead.
No more will he slink silently on unsuspecting prey.
No more will his great head and dark-maned shoulders
strike terror in the grass eaters drinking at the pool.
No more will his roar thunder the earth.
The lion is quite dead.
When they brought his body into the village they beat it
with their feet and the butts of spears
making sounds like a ripened melon with the carcass
but the lion didn’t mind.
He did not feel the blows, for he was dead.
When I am dead, Geeka, neither shall I feel the blows.
Then I will be happy.
*borrowed and adapted from The Son of Tarzan, chapter 5, by Edgar Rice Burroughs
Ordinary, extraordinary / Ava Hu
*
Scent of summer rain
on the river. What
we take we will remember,
secret notes on a secret river,
memory as long as the wind.
What’s yours is mine,
what I remember I forget,
the way your name sounds:
bells in the churchyard,
the fresh-faced wind.
What’s yours is mine.
Everything we are:
tiny spaces between the stars.
Collisions. Blind negotiations.
We are invisible incantations.
The clamour of the river’s
slow dance
to the sea.
*
black sun / nat raum
“Black Sun is a reference to a certain eclipse, better known in the context of the Curse of the Black Sun, or Mania of Mad Eltibald. It was a prophecy made by the mage Eltibald that foretold the end of the human civilization in the hands of sixty girls born during or after a certain eclipse … It might be that the Curse became a self-fulfilling prophecy, for some of the girls who managed to flee [their] persecution later inflicted cruelty on others because of the treatment they had suffered.”
—The Official Witcher Wiki
what else could it be? the moon walked
in front of an oversized star, cast its permanent
shadow over my body. i emerged in the dark
and thought surely this must be as bright as it gets.
any brighter and it would sear, i convince
myself, and prophecy agrees—i am fated
to rend all i hold dear with my own two hands.
claustrophobic as i am, you have to believe me
when i say i’d gladly be hogtied if it stopped
the destruction of which i’m capable. my grasp
is always too hefty, too firm to gently cup a moth
i’m too chicken to let go anyway. i’ve gone and grown
attached again. divination points toward the clock.
i know what half-lives are, have felt gold degrade
in real time before. the end of you and i is no different.
it’s because i was made like this that i drive lovers
away. it’s because those lovers ran that i’m bricked further
into the holding cell of my own overreactions. clip
my tongue and watch what happens—i will still find a way
to break things anyway. and you should know: the eclipse
will take your eyes if you look directly into that corona.
Clear-cut Forest / Daniel Avery Weiss
Shreds of dank wood.
Greenbrier thorns
stab at my feet.
for the wreckage / MK Zariel
there are better days to come says a teenagerly scrawl
on a decidedly abandoned dumpster. can confirm, although the bar
is on the floor. the air is heavy with repressed emotions
and the aftermath of severe weather—it's hard to tell which—
the subreddits aching with ambient climate anxiety
and people wondering where to belong. i make a little idle
small talk with someone growing aggressive by the second,
edge away, make an excuse, come up with something
believable, if not fully true. leave, rejoin, walk away—
protect trans kids says every sticker on a decidedly
overwrought lamppost. i don't know if i need protection
anymore. maybe i just need a break. i drift through a room
avoiding interaction solely because all the cis people
seem to know each other. the gender binary is nature's
AI slop—self-replicating, impossible to distinguish
from anything real.
April - Poem 20
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Oh, That Merseybeat! / Bob Bradshaw
How Am I?
Old age is good. I don't miss
the tropical heat waves
of menopause.
Still, there’s the fear
of falling, breaking a hip.
And my pacemaker
can’t keep as good a beat
as I had in 1963.
Gerry & the Pacemakers
were my favorite band!
How Do You Do It?
#1 on the charts!
Oh god, Rory
And The Hurricanes!
Rory's pummeling rhythms
like good sex!
Remember
The Cavern Stomp?
The floor so cramped
all we could do
was hold
hands
--and hunch forward,
lean back,
shift our feet
--maybe share a cigarette,
and who knew,
with the right song?
the right band?
the kisses would be flying
nearly as quickly
as the rapid
drumbeats!
To Know Me / Stan Galloway
my civilization . . . does not go deeper than my clothes*
one hundred and eleven neckties
at the end of a career
but not a single suit that fits –
clothes have never made the man
just costumed him
created a predictable façade.
to know me is
to see beneath the shirt
to feel the sweat of digging on a summer day
to smell the garlic coming through my pores
to hear integrity in the timbre of my words
to taste truth in my thoughts
and understand me bare –
vulnerable in trusting you.
*Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Return of Tarzan
Love Poem / Ava Hu
*
We move through space.
Seers and prophets
summoned by the explosion
of dust and heat.
The unseen
becomes seen:
dawn, stream, current,
the many-tailed surge.
We move through space
between forms.
Folded current, your heart,
the lines between birches
unfasten
in weather and wind,
until the world
enters your mouth.
*
On returning from Birdsong Nature Preserve / Kirsten Miles
The live oaks canopy their knotted limbs
arching ghost lace tree tunnels
Spanish moss feathering evening light
tiny scales raised to catch any breeze
mouths open in pursuit of the humid Gulf breath
April is the month of rising sap
the lush green fur, resurrection ferns
that ride the tops of fat oak branches
are a scorched rust, a brittle curled skin
Now moss and fern and tree wait with a holy
patience in the long kiln, one thickening of clouds
lowering down in shower, a sudden voltaic green
meeting the rising mist of the road
we are waiting for the sky
to remember its only job
Do n Yo ur Sh oes No w Part 1 / Sergiy Pustogarov
b r o k e n
d o o r
f r a m e s
s c a t t e r e d
a l o n g
a
r o c k I n g
h a l l w a y
I t ’ s
b l a c k n e s s
n e v e r
f u l l y
I l l u m i n a t e d
e x c e p t
f o r
t h e
f l I c k e r i n g
s o l e
l a m p
a t
t h e
e n d
o f
t h I s
e x p a n s e
t h e
s w a y
o f
t h e
f l o o r
s t o p p I n g
u s
b e f o r e
w e
r e a c h
e a c h
w I n d o w
t o
s t a r e
o u t
a t
t h e
h I s t o r y
w e
k e e p
s e e k I n g
a l o n g
e a c h
n e w
e n t r a n c e
s o m e h o w
w e
k n o w
t h a t
s I l e n c e
c o m e s
f a s t e r
t h a n
u s
w h e n
w e
f o l l o w
a l o n g
e a c h
n e w
d o o r
g r a b b I n g
t h e
h a n d
o f
a n o t h e r
j u s t
a s
t h e y
s l I p
p a s t
t h e
t h r e s h o l d
l o s t
I n t o
a n o t h e r
a b y s s
chasing the high of hydroplaning / nat raum
i actually am interested in seeing
god, thank you—sweet nothings
and deistic comparisons from lovers
don’t do it for me anymore. i take
my dirty martinis the same way i was
bottle-fed my kinks—vulgar. olives
are best served from a jar, brine ice-
cold. now twist the dial to the right.
i need to be a little terrified to feel
sane. when the sun shines, i smoke
my joints in twos like cigarettes.
and when it rains, i slip and slide
across a wet carpet of cherry
blossom petals on pavement.
Des Plaines River Flood / Daniel Avery Weiss
Water laps at my feet.
The riverbank obliterated.
Scores—
armies
of oaks
rise from the surface, petrified.
There is no swamp here,
and the trees, they
cannot swim. A squirrel
dances through
its last breaths.
supportive rival / MK Zariel
April - Poem 19
untitled / Maureen Alsop
A natural antifreeze, the body thaws, and I practiced small noises at the beginning. A room I
remember. Dawn’s false polish is a crutch. The thing I miss will not be this spell. The singing
trees? Maybe. The turn in my body, most definitely.
The moment the pasture mends, the complaint moves separate from the practice of oxygen.
Practice Amnesty, my mother feels in the water A sugar, a crack in the mouth happier than
embarrassment. Because I am here.
Personal Time / Bob Bradshaw
After sex
you quickly turn
to your cell phone,
and its glow.
You study its screen
as if it were a translucent
crystal ball,
our future just
out of focus.
Entering your life
proved as easy
as slipping
an obsidian engagement ring
onto your finger.
Babe, remember the beach,
our lives lived in sandals--
how we cuddled
in the dusk
under the pier?
Do you recall…
“Not now, I’m watching
a podcast.”
Your phone’s screen
fills with fake snow flakes,
adrift in the air
with the notes
from a Bing
Crosby song.
I’m forgotten, a chore
checked off.
Should I ask for more
personal time
for Christmas?
You laugh at your screen.
Remember when we used
to laugh together?
Magnum Opus / Ava Hu
Sun inside sun.
Water tangled inside water.
Magnum opus
as chaos among branches,
heaven to earth,
earth to body.
What conceives itself
also gives birth:
milk of nebula, salt
of the philosopher’s stone,
mercury, dew, fog,
the Holy Spirit rising.
Elemental as stars
on your eyelids
squeezed closed
tight.
The primitive answer:
go towards it,
everything that reaches for you,
everything that carries the light.
Merlin finds a blue-gray gnatcatcher / Kirsten Miles
concealed behind a post oak leaf
copy-catting bird
calls into her song (a true poet)
tail flicks spiders off branches
a cornucopia in the canopy
we feeder our birds
(away from mirrored windows)
goldfinch cardinal titmouse wren
the usuals curate
our morning reading
hold our phones up
to the moss veiled canopy
presses the mic
red-eyed vireo materializes
into my palm
her breeze-silked question
downslur tone slips
a tiny symphony in
her upswing note
livens our day
ovenbird’s s t a c c a t o b u r s t
peppers the soundscape
a cacophonic mask
(my father’s hearing aid rings)
merlin catches the worm-
eating warbler’s tri i i ll
under a phalanx
of white oak leaves
entire worlds
live in the canopy
audible and unseen
we press end recording
filing away the liquid gold of the wood thrush
(check the morning list
who remains)
left-justified images
pin each liquid tone
infinitely on recall
library of avatars
behind glass
forest abridged
One Foot in Front of This Body / Sergiy Pustogarov
one foot
placed parallel
to the cracks in the floorboards
the other waits,
perpendicular,
refusing alignment
a chandelier
hangs from the ceiling,
its arms stretched out
as walkways
for the insects all around.
they crawl their thin devotion
along glass and wire,
marching toward flight.
taking wing,
they cross the room,
land on my foot,
and i follow them,
one foot in front of this body.
sonnet for voegesite and exfoliants / nat raum
i like luxurious things. my standards
are low—this means lavender incense,
steam shower, terpinolene in bloodstream.
i wouldn’t know what to do with a porsche.
i cannot place it on my altar to manifest
the rapid demise of capitalism. instead
i suck sediment from overripe pores,
dissolve my dead skin cells with foam
and my bad dreams with the stone
of innocence. i reverse the ten of swords
and poke each person who has hurt me,
just as a warning—betrayal releases itself
in the presence of deployed spines. i am
still my own best defense in that regard.
Poem Composed of Words My Opponent Used to Defeat Me in Words With Friends in Alphabetical Order (a Pseudoabecedarian) / Daniel Avery Weiss
Airy and approximate, my eyes sample
blame as a screen declares, THEY WON!
Drat! I don’t say. These days, I sip blue light like a sad martini.
Ex post facto failure. My phone's wretched
gown of a phone case unusually physical in the moment,
its allure purring somewhere in my nervous system.
Jai! something yells. Something, something, something one
li away from someone. I am here to
outrun a thing that mothholes your digital soul.
Quai positioned to import words of no import, a
res hall comes to mind, fruitful nonsense and
runes dotting the walls. But these dreams, these sweet
veils part themselves to me only after one unskippable ad—
whup the white farmers’ flawless green landscape, harvest
wonky neon wheat that dots plaid picket fence paradise!
Zee. What a silly letter to declare itself and win
deciding / MK Zariel
the internet ripples with unexamined labels
used and discarded like clothing—being transmasculine
and butch, i have to admit that anyone who dates me
by definition is gay—and straight. i long for a discrete
category sometimes, to be gay like a historical figure
like an archival portrait, like one of those fucking losers
in the Mattachine Society, who i owe my current survival to
yet still find kind of sexist. it's funny how that works.
queer history gives us the tools to dismantle it, yet we remain
somewhat lacking in self-awareness. the anarchist infighting of
the 1920s repeats itself today, just with shorter speeches
and less of Emma Goldman being obviously closeted. we still don't know
how to plan a meeting without driving one another up the wall
and we still don't quite know whether we're gay or straight
or both at once. i don't know if i necessarily care. if someone's
Midwestern relatives would call me a slur, i'm probably gay—
and i hate that this matters so much to everyone else.
April - Poem 18
untitled / Maureen Alsop
I came from the place of fire I wrote don’t write, invent complaint. People stopped leaving me. People came day in day out to find praise which was better than everything I’d been used to giving. In the hibiscus season, people wore the noise outside my head. Harder I said I said where is the leader now. I was eager for every wish. I was parts of the wish and far pushed to become it.
Wu Wei / Bob Bradshaw
I loved my ’61 beetle.
I could hear in its chugging
four cylinder engine
its steady advice:
"Just keep going.
Keep going”.
Driving along Big Sur
I saw the sea
for the first time—
its arms spread out
as if saying “Take it
all in…”
Like a red-winged blackbird
I wear my heart
on my sleeve.
Yet I know the wisdom
of letting go—
like the coast’s cypress,
the storm’s winds
surfing through it…
“Go with the flow,”
a friend advised.
“The future’s like
your beetle, without
a gas gauge
or even a way
to know how far to go.
You're a poet.
Trust your gut.
Wherever it leads.”
That sounded Zen,
advice the Kerouac in me
wanted to hear.
Years later,
my heart’s mileage
piling up, I travel
the off roads mostly,
tapping along to music
on the radio, as happy
to be singing alone
as I would be if Bob Marley
and the Wailers
were bouncing along
in my back seat
jammin’…
One and Two / Stan Galloway
Alone contains the word one, not two
As do abandoned and lonely
One is found in stone and bone
Things hardened against abrasion
Together sounds like two from the start
Connection as in network and trustworthy
Two become artwork and understood
Soft, alive, empowered, too.
Water Walker / Ava Hu
*
Moon crosses water.
High winds, witchcraft,
the rising of waves.
Walk on water water.
Water whose devotion
knows no end.
Speaking water,
shivering water,
water with many mouths.
Do you lift
the feet of the god?
Do we live in salt?
Can we walk on water?
*
Driving his Bluejay to Tallahassee / Kirsten Miles
into the sultry southern air this car
the same deep, ink-wash blue of that
Volkswagon hatchback that carried us through
the seventies when we were young and invulnerable.
the AC is a ghost, and the air is a riot of wild ginger
honeysuckle, a spicy, blooming that fills me
I describe it when he calls, erasing for a minute that
metallic scent of his hospital room, all the wires
he is finding his footing again
a stubborn rally in the heart of the storm
the machines losing their argument with his will.
I am steering our memories toward the celebration
the Bluejay humming a low, steady prayer
this feels less like a goodbye
and more like a reunion
as my father’s stubborn pursuit of life
which introduced us accompanies me
I lean into the curve, breathing easy in the petaled air,
driving through the scent of everything that’s still alive.
On the 25 / Sergiy Pustogarov
quarter
century
flip
it on its side
roll
it round
the table
guess
which side
comes up
first
lucky
poor
never
know
which
one you get
till
all the fate
is told
heads
or
tales
never tell
their
truth
till halfway
through
the game
life
never shares
its secrets
till halfway
through
its thrall
guess
i’ll be back
at fifty
tell yall
which one
made
it better
heads or tales
coping mechanisms / nat raum
my body finds the concept of recoil to be an afterthought.
i am not immune from being the problem—after all, ask
for impossible things, get incomprehensible results.
i could still stand to move a mountain or two, terraform
my shrinking territory into something easier to traverse,
hazardless. sometimes i think i have sculpted enough
for a lifetime; sometimes i see only progress ahead,
jagged dead pines studding craggy peaks, deep rapids
which swallow those brave enough to dare. looking
behind me is carnage, ahead still a void. and i still
discover bruises of my own, say where did this come from?
and shove my thumb into the center of gruesome
purple blemishes—i have to test the pain, push myself
to every one of its edges. i am as pink inside as outside,
as soft as i always have been. it’s all relative. the present
finds me identifying five things i can see,
four things i can hear.
Sonnet of Marmalade Chicago / Daniel Avery Weiss
I yearned to eat the yellow as a child.
A skyline yawning wide with sulfur wings.
A hundred late night lemon lives alive
in looming towers. Children teethe on each
and every planet in their path—the men
in suits and oath that yesterday looks like
today. Stupidity is just a thing
that carves a face from light pollution. Street
lights can digest a city whole into
a snowbank now—the gnarled limbs that gave
this here its somber glow, which so gave name
to clouds and nights, are now a mess of LED.
And what am I allowed to do but lie
awake and mourn the orange in my head.
(personal) growth / MK Zariel
social awkwardness is not a knife; it is a dull ache
deep in the marrow of my bones. i get annoyed
and yet don't notice for a solid month—don't notice
until i'm already venting, brittle truth and honeyed lies mingling
to form something still easy to ignore. i try to paraphrase
to explain with the utmost accuracy—by then you've walked away
you've cast off understanding like the layers
you shed in the early days of summer. i try to apologize,
i watch my cat chew a plastic plant, i find it somehow relatable.
i used to long for destruction and now am almost
content with artifice. i read a thinkpiece, set a boundary,
stop exaggerating, start crashing, watch my cat chew
a living plant, and hope to grow toward the sun one day
without claw marks holding me down—the greenery here
is full of perfect little monocultures, attempts at normalcy
i learn to avert my eyes like a desperate soul
with a seasonal allergy. social awkwardness is a pesticide
and so is the fear of not being believed. with it in the air i grow
twisted, toxic. i am a violet wilting at the center, queercoded
even in decay. will you walk through this field of poisoned lavender
and find it sweet despite yourself? i am a plastic plant
currently being eating by a determined feline with a grudge
failing at boundaries and not quite sturdy enough
to avoid a collapse.
April - Poem 17
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Bleak sun
Born sun
Subdued sun
Warrior sun
Smut mouth sun
Ancient sun’s spiel
Victory sun
Lost sun
Resistant sun
Spike sun
Sidewinder sun
Stereoscopic sun
Consummate sununfolding sun
Gambled sun of a thousand garbled dreams
I am taking the perched sun, the perfection of illumination
Ploughed sun
Shared sun
Late sun and evoked
Lofty journal documented sun, expressionist, realist, symbolic
Apple blossom sun-grenade
Blinkered sun blind
King Kong…Writing From New York / Bob Bradshaw
After my fall
I’ve lived a quiet life
in an artist’s attic
growing orchids.
From the roof I can see
the spire of the Empire
State Building.
How grateful I am
that before I plunged
to the ground
I managed
to set Ann down as gently
as I would an orchid
on a ledge.
Old, I keep in shape.
Every day I go down
in my Adidas sneakers
to the basement gym
to lift weights.
Done, I throw a barbell down,
the floor jolting.
Recalling Ann
still leaves me shaken.
I ease my way
to the spa,
the heated water jets
meant to nurse my pride—
my loneliness
a weight too great
to be lifted.
Ann’s strong hold on me
refuses to let go.
How can I forget how
at first Ann swooned
like a cut flower
when she’d see me?
I couldn’t help myself.
I stared back,
feeling the way a gardener
must feel getting
an exotic cutting
from the other side of the world
holding it
—loving it—in his palm
for the first time.
Don’t orchids
thrive everywhere today,
in Europe, the Americas,
Skull Island?
Their gauzy
delicateness
belies them.
Hardy, robust
as gorillas. More so.
We can’t live anywhere.
Beauty can.
After the Breakup / Stan Galloway
Lachrymose has nothing to do with lactose.
It’s closer to lacerate or just plain lack.
Those words might bring a boy to tears:
salty percolation of grief through the eyes
heartsick blood through tissue
the hollow where you used to be, unfilled.
Comet / Ava Hu
*
What is the sound
a comet makes?
Forces of nature
we can't control:
the moon wired your heart,
planets enter each other’s dark.
The theory of everything
pulls inward
to the size of a hand
closing around an apple.
*
Wine Corks in the Trash / Sergiy Pustogarov
Cabernet,
Next to sparkling rose.
The corks lying in a cupboard.
Give me yours,
And I’ll add it to the jar.
Each floating wooden block
Disappearing as soon as I drop it in the glass bowl.
Where did these go?
A secret I held
Between my fingertips
for just two seconds.
Pick up the trash off the floor.
Gather up the papers.
Stack them in piles on the table.
A thousand moments thrown down.
Grasping at straws
To make them into piles,
Neat and collected
For the future mind to see.
Wonder where the trash will go now.
Out the back door
To another man’s home.
He gathers, digging,
Searching for some refuse
Just to make his home warm at night.
I cast it out
And all along
It was gold for another man.
A secret I let go of,
Dripping through my hand
To hit the ground outside.
And now it’s watering the earth of another.
there is a goddess / nat raum
and she has bpd. be honest.
ebbs and flows are natural—
earthquakes and cyclones, too.
i know we want order by design,
but what of chaos, her switch
backs in roads already winding?
something unpredictable awaits.
Two Tables Over at the Diner / Daniel Avery Weiss
I puncture the yolk, and a flurry of feathers comes
flooding the air.
Why do you think Jews move to Israel? Israel [inaudible].
Rye bread swinging seductive swirls of brown
and hurricane gray.
Hitler wanted us to be more white, now it's [inaudible].
My partner orders milk. I must confess I saw
the cow in the corner of the room.
You know, in 20 years the Dems are expected [inaudible]? It's scary.
The cook presses down, hard, and his flesh, fresh
from the deli, stirs in hissing plumes of smoke.
Have you seen the protests on the college campuses? The universities [inaudible].
It began to hail outside.
Windows that never crack.
“Can you do me a favor? I think you're depressed.” I'm not depressed, it's
just depressing. I'm not like that. I got two kids.
If they moved to Israel, I'd follow them.
“I know, but [inaudible].”
The cashier takes our cash and skewers
a copy of the receipt on a small metal pole. Flight from the premises.
falling behind / MK Zariel
you talk to your cat like a person & stay
in one of two or three places, so at peace with your
surroundings as to seem anxious to anyone
who doesn’t know you well. you talk to me like a person
too (or maybe that’s just how you relate), casual admissions
laced with nothing but good humor & unspoken pasts
you don’t talk about your feelings. your D&D characters
are exclusively loud, rude jerks. sometimes i wonder if that’s
your shadow self, if you enjoy the way that apathy
lets you take up a little space, show a little anger,
be a little real. sometimes you move like you’ve never
been told to make yourself small, yet you do it anyway—
are you scarred or just polite? closeted or just
certain that the ritual of transition is beneath you?
i never understood people who responded to my coming out
with we like you anyway—as if my existence
is cause for a referendum—you instead fill the void
with strangers’; assumptions and ignored stares—
you are, by all objective measures, cool. i don’t know
what that makes me, too earnest or similtaneously
too gay and not gay enough at the same time. it’s funny
how that’s always the problem. sometimes i dream of a world
where your peace extends a little further.
April - Poem 16
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Hyperbolic unable to stick the lens to the sky sun
Pitter patter sun
We love Whitman forever stand in his shade and weep sun
Blanket: sun
One done and done sun
Dun-colored sun, of course
Morphed sun or morphological sun or morphine sun
Where is the
Rehearsed sun
Preplanned pancreatic sun
Death star of Dionysus
Need I say it
Mute sun
Injured sun
Rapture sun of nosebleed
Nose to the sun
Spaceship view of
Performative sun
Generational sun
Eliot’s Gerontion sun, a depraved sun, for sure, with many other features
Generous sun, give me some foxglove
Traditional sun
Liberated sun
Paper-mache sun, what earth is this?
Sunday sundae sun
Distrustful loathsome lover sun
Triangular sun (at dusk)
Subdued sun
Haloed hallowed held
Multitudinous sun
Awash with
Dribbling diminished dementia disordered sun of contagion & hysteria
A bloke’s sun
Old-mate-sun
Misguided sun
Bay sun
King Kong / Bob Bradshaw
What was Kong thinking
as he carried off Ann?
He gazed down
at her as tenderly
as if she were Skull Island's
first orchid.
Ann screamed,
and kept fainting
as if the steam and clouds
of the jungle island
were chloroform fumes.
Did Kong think opposites
would eventually attract?
What were his plans?
"The Eighth Wonder of the World!"
Kong became the biggest star
in The Big Apple.
How I cheered
when he broke loose,
his chains shaken off
like party streamers.
I knew it would turn out badly
when he kidnapped Ann,
climbing the Empire State building
the way any ape
takes to the treetops
when threatened.
What was his plan,
to live forever with Ann
in the world's tallest tree house?
What did Kong know of Helldivers,
their bullets swarming him
like bees from a broken hive?
We gathered around him as he lay
in the street.
Was Kong just another romantic
who could never
think things through,
just another fella
who had fallen for a girl?
Or like many of us, was Kong more,
a creature unable to adapt
in a fast changing planet,
Ann Darrow like the old ways,
something he could never
cling to forever?
How It Ends / Stan Galloway
The ring lies on the shelf
the dust of disconnection
deflecting sun
a dark circle that once meant
what?
Can you promise yourself until death
when you wake up to the dawning awareness
that the one you’ve given your life to
no longer thinks of you?
Intimacy devolved into indifference
emotional eviction long before awareness
love like rose petals fallen from an old bouquet
unswept in an empty room.
Honey Guide / Ava Hu
*
We drift
to and fro in a boat.
Topography of what
we mean to say:
the lines of mountains
pull to a thread at dusk.
Put your hand over the side
of the boat.
The spotted honeyguide
leads us to the hive
hoping we destroy it
so he can eat what we leave behind.
*
Spring on west 11th street / Kirsten Miles
pink peony snouts are breaching ground in the verge
love-in-a-mist throws delicate green tangles
amidst the California poppies rising from
western cedar mulch I shoveled over the grass
my contribution to lawn replacement now
a thoroughfare delighting neighborhood dog
walkers, threading through the bleach-bright driftwood
tall iris spears, donated rhododendron, silvery artichoke
last summer the lupines stacked their star shaped leaf clusters
thick purple buds tightly tiered in colorful spires
the neighborhood held its breath, or at least I did, anticipation
drawing me out each morning with the dawn
today nine deer, those local demi-gods, carefully dismantle each
new shoot, pulled from the ground and laid neatly to rest
Hour Glass Crystals / Sergiy Pustogarov
she sat at the desk,
heard the scrape of the wooden chair
along the creaking floor,
and turned the hourglass on its side--
peering as the sand crystals
pulled by an invisible force
fell to their opposing ends,
and the clock stopped ticking.
here she said,
“i can remember this moment--
when times stands frozen,
as the moments are no more.
this is where love is born,
when power knows no greed,
and brutality cannot steal from being--
for nothing is yet to be born nor die.”
but as she sat there, she heard the rush of oceans
from inside a simple ball of glass;
and knew that even then
the waters were calling back for their power.
gravity began reaching out her arms
to claim back the sands of time.
for existence, if ever frozen
loses hope for the tide to come tomorrow.
social transition (non-transgender version) / nat raum
here i am mixing beer with lemonade and saying
i’m a failson, job a rapidly moving target. tax day
said you didn’t need that body, right? those organs
so shiny and unharvested, those legs you wish you could
cut off anyway? i shove the feeling down and ask
table twenty-two if they want more bread to soak
up their piquillo pepper sauce. i am impermanent
and impotent at once; i don’t know where to keep
putting all of these skeletons i am amassing. what
i want to know is how can you hear i’m a hurricane,
say no, i love you for the precise curvature of your eyewall,
the power behind the winds, then back away when you see
the true strength of the storm? you promised
an exorcism and delivered another dent in the armor.
what, you thought this was the only time i’ve wrestled
my demons and lost? you don’t even know my full name.
Post op for cataract and the azalea / Daniel Avery Weiss
After a distant friend’s social media post
Broken pinky and the rosebush.
Intravenous immunoglobulin and the tulip.
Bomb and the forget-me-nots.
Names on my cast and the dandelions.
Gutted house and the magnolia.
Thigh fracture and the begonia.
2nd degree burn and my basil.
Tape over needle in hand and the foxglove.
Post-regret scar and the lavender.
Eighteen stitches removed and the marigolds.
COVID test and the water lilies.
Our bodies die and dill.
self-portrait as my cat / MK Zariel
i’ll make a small tortured sound anytime someone
leaves the house and i don’t know why—desperate
for community, for something to cling to
i’ll knock something over and it will be loud
and immaterial. people are used to me
by now. every stranger i meet talks about me
like i’m not here. i scratch the couch
and it doesn’t respond. i scratch the wall
and leave a mark like graffiti like an endearing
story to be told online. i am a meme template
i am suspicious of most food i am in need
of attention and also want to be left alone
i could chew on this. i can’t quite manage to fall over.
April - Poem 15
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
In the grass, the sun a beleaguered invocation—
Blank sun virtual sun simulated flame
Crude sun
Erudite sun
Native sun
Static sun
Since brightness. Your body is live.
Baedeker sun
Bastard sun
Another sez so sun
Then there is the blind wayward sun
When Did Old Age Arrive / Bob Bradshaw
Old age shuffles into my life
with wide box shoes.
Large print books
more and more arrive
from the library.
I thought losing my youth
would be okay.
But here I am,
mysterious bruises
on my hands.
I bruise as easily
as I once flirted,
as if it came
naturally.
And my hair?
It's like a white powder wig
Mozart would wear
—and Ben Franklin
before he chucked his.
Oh, if only I could discard
old age as easily
as Ben dispatched
his white hair!
Shouldn’t I have been warned
of old age’s approach?
Where was the alert
in big fonts on my laptop?
Who will address
this egregious,
this unforgivable error?
Who will fix this problem
of old age? Who
will make things
right again?
Cats Online / Stan Galloway
Why is half my Insta feed composed of cats?
Cats climbing
jumping
slapping
tunneling
pin ball
ing
opening doors
investigating paper bags
impersonating owners’ voices
or giving form to AI witchery
singing on American Idol
making pizza
pancakes
pierogies
Whatever happened to the cat
who ventured
from the deck
into 90 centimeters
of snow?
At least online
I have no mess to clean.
Infidel / Ava Hu
*
Infidel, my heretic,
beautiful bleeding
canyon, your hands,
gloss of blackbirds,
your hands, the lean
of saguaro,
the pink disappearing
Flower Moon,
collision, violet mountains,
the light changes so quickly
it’s hard to hold
the language
of birds
come morning.
*
mapping a brown eared bat in Tom’s Cave / Kirsten Miles
the mouth of a cave is a gangly invitation
for the limbs of an undomesticated girl
skin, muscle, and knobby knees undaunted
by bruise or scrape
three lamps lit the little limestone
pocket that summer, together a traverse
to a crawlspace, a lake of liquid
mud on the other side, two explore
she waits with lamp and notebook,
alone but for a small brown bat
a hanging knot of fur
and muscle, frosted in cave-dew
each droplet sparkling in the flame
an hour of spare carbide
ligh snuffed for the return
she gives the silence an hour
trades her eyes for the weight of dark
internal machinery, left without a task
begins to sing to itself in the dark
silence here is not empty
a crowd roars, waves break
press against her eardrums
strain to hear companions
the lap of a muddy lake
fingertips on damp rock
hard ridge against her spine
more tangible than still air
the bat and girl small cargo
of this windless ship of stone
yearning for the compass
of a breeze
her lamp a stored reserve
promise in the inky dark
touch now an illusory sense
listens with her skin
kindles her inner light
At The Grave During War / Sergiy Pustogarov
Remember the names of Palestinians killed in the conflict.
a mother
knelt at her son’s
grave
two hours after
the dirt
was shoveled
over his remains.
his thin arms and legs
had been
too mangled
to even
hold a viewing.
the family
forced to
mourn without
a final kiss
goodbye.
the wooden sign
stood there
with the words etched into it
with a burning torch
already desecrated.
10 year old boy
Ahed Bakr.
shrapnel still
burning down
even the war
never kept enough time
to say goodbye.
war never cared
for the process we call grief.
the fury of destruction
never said a mother could mourn.
next to this grave
lies another
grave dug.
destroyed before it
could even be filled.
another life
doesn’t even
have a place to rest
after all this fighting.
Flight of the Mack Trucks / Daniel Avery Weiss
Spring emerges with seven trucks
trundling on the riverbank.
Almost named,
they spit rubber into pot
holes and bump their grim beat,
bouncing, their dumb
founding, smoking parade exquisitely between.
Scores of water
logged trees, entirely
stumped at the rhythm pulsing
in their legs, consider the steel boxes
twisting onward nearby.
The Des Plaines,
flooded,
shivers as they pass.
closure / MK Zariel
i googled you and saw nothing but a little
bad design and a healthy dose of LinkedIn grifting,
somehow meeting expectations when the bar is at the core of the earth.
the air feels thicker now, pressing down like futurity—the trees wilt low
embracing the ground you used to walk on—and i reread your goodbye note
watching you carve a caricature for yourself, a creature made of
anxieties and things discarded. you try to tell me that
you just aren't that into me, and for some reason
you think i need to hear your critique of egoist anarchism instead.
i don't. i walk through the monoculture of your mind, the impeccable
groomed lawns, the wildflowers trimmed down—my house of stone, your ivy grows
and now i'm covered in you croons a mixtape—and nothing could be further
from who you were. why grow when you could stay conveniently small,
you'd say, asking me to do the same. i googled you
and saw prose that may as well have been written
by the large language model you call your brain,
and saw repression congealing around one all-important image
and saw earth waiting to crack open,
to bloom, to burn.
April - Poem 14
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Where are the illuminate horses? The young men in hunting costumes?
Shasta daisies collapse into bells under the sun’s tripod gaze.
An Idle lone pine lurches against a sunlit cliff face, a deep chasm where
Monastery monks
guide the lost ones in their journey
But what was it, the sacred travel, the fractious nature
Delphiniums rinsed of insects the lighthouse turning its need
The old vision? A memory of darkness—I'm thin & clear. Birds stitch
through waves whilst my dray overflows this abundance & peace
A Housefly Recalls Emily Dickinson / Bob Bradshaw
At first Miss Emily
would pass by me silently
in her simple, pique
white dress.
Still, I had the sense
our lives would always
be linked
in ways unpredictable.
I wasn’t like
the green bottle flies
or the bluebottles,
their iridescence
like a dragonfly’s wings
in a sunlit mist.
I wore a laborer’s
dull gray clothes
and moved
from room to room
like a domestic servant
humming Irish tunes.
Soon I could just whisper,
Pst! Pst!
and Emily would read me
her latest poem.
We were both introverts,
unlike "perty" Vinnie
who loved
crowds,
especially when Father
would throw
yet another college
commencement party.
All those young men, Em!
Their small talk
diminished them
in your eyes!
I didn’t impress anyone
with grandiose plans
and yet Em loved me -
she swore it -
more than Vinnie
loved either flattery
--or her cats!
"Are we so different?" Em asked.
"Me a poet, you a fly?
Aren’t we a pair ?
I’m a Nobody!
Aren’t you too?
If only we could hitch
Our carriage
To Immortality,
And ride out of Amherst
Together!"
Eating / Stan Galloway
Gluttonous death / will make a meal of me. --D.S. Martin*
We all die from something.
Eating is as good a way to go as any other.
I’m not too proud to fall asleep conjuring smorgasbords.
But I refuse to seek some Dahmer wannabe.
I’ll eat my way out on my own terms.
Martin, D.S. “My Final Credits.” The Role of the Moon. Iron Pen/Paraclete Press, 2025. 34-35.
Channel / Ava Hu
*
Pouring from the lips
of a god,
soil interior,
broad strait,
water to water,
your trace
in bolts
of lavender,
are we floating
restless, reaching
for one another
in a hurricane
of stings and breath?
I see where they light fires
on the river
for the dead.
A looking glass,
ritual object,
mirror, transmission,
you.
Mother { } Dowager / Sergiy Pustogarov
Requiem of the AIDS Crisis
bleached hair
on
the sidewalk
party busses
cheering
squeals
clapping
dark rooms
silent death
Mother
{ }
screaming cries
lonely
beds
kisses
forgotten
newer fruit
trailing ever
behind
{ }
barren funeral
empty coffin
ashes
burned
and
burned
burned
yet again
maybe now
safe
to handle
with twenty
layers of latex
{ }
Dowager
kinky
hands touching
ass
warped
into gray particles
still not enough
purify
more
never holy enough
blissfull
{ }
Mother
now honored
speeches
books
songs
musicals
nothing
for them
back then
now safe
and careless
no fear
of
silent
death
thank you
Mother
{ }
Dowager
Plum Vase with Cloud-and-Crane Motif (Goryeo dynasty, late 12th or early 13th century) / Daniel Avery Weiss
O, ye with the perfect neck,
swinging yourself as a thin rope
in gentle waves—flies
as black as eyes envy
the ginger likes of your
petty pace. Reinvigorate the
meanings in a cloud,
see to it that the clay watches
history slip into a humbling,
childlike
slumber.
perceive me like your surroundings / MK Zariel
a stranger downtown says she loves
my lesbian haircut, and i feel affirmed for two seconds
until she shouts out—“and your body, girlie”
and i thank her and i hurtle toward the void
Madison is a collection of lukewarm neon lights
and very cis opinions, nonprofits metastasizing
like invasive plants. everyone’s supportive
until you catch them on a bad day. i read a zine
in middle school claiming the butch lesbian body
is the only kind that can’t be commodified
under capitalism. how i wish that were true.
people can commodify anything
if you catch them in bad lighting on State Street
somehow both caffeinated and tired.
i try not to think about it. my gender is what
people see when they feel judgy. does that mean
my gender is high maintenance
and my pronouns are sit down / shut up?
my body is not a temple; it is a college campus
growing trashier by the day. it is a downtown
with one anarchist gathering and ten overpriced
restaurants for nobody. it was getting a little
too gentrified, then i transitioned. i go for a walk.
a stranger finds out what it’s like to judge thin air.
April - Poem 13
The Bridge contd / Maureen Alsop
The sea is alive and says he knows you. Is watching you. Each day was west and prophetic. The one who is full, the one who speaks through light, the great mind shaking in weakness and the body succumbing. Perhaps the sea will exist now. She is a seed of beginning to us—Wattle heath, redgum. Innocuous and near in this crimson afternoon. The pigeons, a static veil over the fetid postwar ground over a windless, blood-ridden
grassy landscape of hidden sand dunes, weathered pastures. We took from each other a tiny psalm as each raised an axe, a squared token, the sky— sounded our platform—the radio’s seething voices scratch the nightsky. Together we take something from one another. No, we destroy ourselves
A Heist / Bob Bradshaw
It’s lunch
and I’m unwrapping
a long hot dog
carefully, like it was
a priceless artifact
just arrived from Beijing
for the Asian Art Museum
behind me.
I’m happy.
Why shouldn’t I be?
It’s like any other day,
as I sit here watching
families line up
for the Academy of Sciences
to open.
That's why I ignore
a gull's approach,
his wings raised
like a street seller's
open coat.
As I go to shoo him off
his partner sweeps in
snatching my hot dog
with the deftness
of a Paris or NY
pickpocket.
There are never cops
when a big heist
happens in daylight.
Remember
the '78 robbery
when thieves dropped
through a skylight
at the De Young Museum,
kidnapping a Rembrandt,
well, not the old man himself
but his “Portrait
of a Rabbi”?
But I can’t wait years
for my masterpiece
of dog and mustard and relish
to be recovered.
But what am I to do
with no cops around
when that gull strides by,
my hotdog brazenly
held in his beak
like a Havana
cigar?
Kalahari Autumn / Stan Galloway
A cloud of quelea
descends on the tree
beside the waterhole
where the lioness
had coughed in the night.
The thunder and rain
refreshed the grassland,
cheered the air,
slicked trail and sunrise.
Soon no rain will fall,
the grass will mat itself,
the ground squirrels will
see a universe away.
Most animals will seek the delta
or rivers farther north
or die of thirst
because every rainstorm
might be the last.
Heathen / Ava Hu
*
Swirl of the river’s silk,
breath without a name.
River, take me in.
Carp fins fan over river rocks.
The river shifts course.
Lakes, tributaries—
your fingertips in water.
Come to me,
black rocks speak
over the pull of tides.
One last swirl, you said.
The water takes your ankles,
your heart
beats.
You slip under.
The water dreams you.
*
Ode to the Western Skunk Cabbage / Kirsten Miles
Our feet wetted in soft spring clover
e-street rabbits dot the roadsides
in spotted brights and darks.
Camelias pink up yards as we walk.
Shane park’s low slung bog western
red cedars a braided rampart
woody sweetness wafting around us
secret trails labyrinth through emerging horse tails
lattice the grass into murky depths
a primal, swampy incense.
Musk mingled with mossy earth
brilliant lanterns thrust skyward
rising from the black muck of the bog
and we, walkers on the cedar plank
are granted this: the sudden, sharp scent
the yellow spathe like a cupped hand.
To build a space for this is to admit
that our souls need more than a groomed lawn.
The swamp’s honest stink
the unfurling of feathery fern
reminding us that even the sodden mud
knows how to nurture light.
For My Mother (it’s me again) / Sergiy Pustogarov
this one’s
for the roses i’ve planted by random sidewalks,
and the bouquets i’ve given to women
holding my head when i cry.
this one’s
to the store aisles i slowly walk around the corner of,
wondering if somehow your grey hair will appear.
this one’s
to every phone call i always answer,
because i never know if it would be
your voice on the other side.
this one’s
for every ring i don’t get,
for every unanswered voicemail
i’ve left on your machine.
this one’s
to the way my heart broke
when i saw you, and you didn’t see me.
i’m sorry you looked so lost,
gasping for answers.
this one’s
for the day i asked another to stand with me,
on my own wedding day because
you were nowhere to be found
when i found the love of my life.
this one’s
for the mother who stopped being a mother,
and how i’ve learned that somehow life was still good--
because of the other mothers who didn’t step back,
but stepped forward for your child.
alternate universe: non stop ecstatic dancing / nat raum
my friend tells me the title of soft cell’s 1982 remix mini
and i imagine it: myself doing mashed potato roger rabbit
reject dougies, same moves over generations with different
names. there are only so many ways to move your body
to rhythm and i still haven’t learned to do it right. does it
matter? i don’t sing. i don’t dance. the spirit moves me
just fine—it’s that nothing besides surgery is that serious.
birds innately know the way to glide among cirrus striations,
and they don’t have little bird cops to say the angle of your wings
is imprecise. we ought to bury ourselves as impostors, resurrect
shamelessness. bees make honey to live, not to add sweet
to tea. when was the last time i lived for myself? i’d wager
years ago, wasted at art school parties, free of the concept
of flawlessness, arms waving at random like a tube man.
Haibun for the Tail End of Winter / Daniel Avery Weiss
Winter has stretched itself out as a cat, yawning its snowy limbs out wide and long until their muscles quiver, and then retracting. Whether this burgeoning spring pads out a circle, then lies down and rests (gentle purr like pollen!) or leaps into a tree, watches for prey—we will see. There was a man who pulled his dog's leash in tight so he could take one full minute to smell rich branches of pink. The dog stood still and blithely observed a nearby squirrel.
Cherry blossom
out my open window.
Leaf lands in my lap.
fluctuations II / MK Zariel
a text message poem
either i can solve the problem with a big boundary or i can't
in my defense it is late and i am tired (and gay)
this was a cis white dude with cis white opinions
they’re simultaneously too hard and too easy
i can't exactly recruit one of my friends to come and hang with him
while I'm out of the house.
i’m out of the house right now lol
i can’t think or text clearly
do you want advice on the cat disruptions in the early morning?
thank you for helping aid my continued procrastination, i really
appreciate it!!
these are the perils of being cooler and more mature than other people!
i feel like i’m so upset i can’t think
thank you for correcting me before i fully judged
April - Poem 12
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
I think of the older spirits who want to come and enjoy the folly. I think
of the sea turning in its angles and projections against us. You asked
how might i become u?
On wonder of recognition to my life at this juncture
The rippling surface of the dream—a courtesy, a fraction
and a flip-tide—the closing and opening of my soul in all
the ways you were alone/ unstoppable/ this grief/ this,
your grief or mine/
On wonder of recognition in my life at this juncture
You recede. Recognition recedes, the ebbing now.
Hair / Bob Bradshaw
At 20 my hair
was shoulder-length
like Il Magnifico’s.
Soon it was longer
than Raphael’s
or Botticelli’s curly locks.
Everywhere
my long-haired friends
and I talked art.
In a few years
my younger neighbors
looked at me
as if to ask,
"Why are you here?
You’re old."
Now? In my 70s
I'm as bald
as a frog.
Yet when I look back
on my days
in Haight-Asbury
I never worried
that I’d shed my hair.
Or grow old.
Wasn’t youth like a lover
vowing never
to leave?
What happened?
What always
happens.
In old age
don’t we always
ache
for the one
who got
away?
The Death of Catreus / Stan Galloway
News of death is never convenient:
postponements must be arranged
daily tasks delegated
supplies marshaled
travel details mapped out
chaos wrangled.
No time to mull the circumstances
rumors that it was my uncle
that Catreus was nothing but a pirate
Such wild stories should be dismissed.
Leave the guests to Helen.
Make the trip to Crete and back
as quickly as a stork
Then return to pick up pieces
put life back in order.
Early Spring / Ava Hu
*
Substitute the sound
of a flute for bird call.
The river rings
the bells of haiku.
The mind of a river
is here and now.
Ringing temple bells
break air,
shake leaves into essence
a listening.
*
imprecise efforts at welding / nat raum
we were supposed to be gold, supposed to be a david
rose and patrick brewer kind of love, where we are both
the flashy dramatic one and the voice of rationality
in tandem. what i mean is i thought this was real, despite
signs to the contrary, because i am trying to trust people.
we were supposed to be new cycles, not endless barbecue
dinners where i find out lies by omission. you said open up.
it’s safe here. i was okay to still fall asleep and dream of locked
doors, triple deadbolts. the light of the morning sieves
through clouds, silver at best. never was i precious enough.
There, the Apalachicola River unspools / Kirsten Miles
Cutting through the tupelo apiaries and the sundew.
You found your Helen, or perhaps she found you,
a woman whose heart beats in the same green meter,
mirroring your passion for the Florida I remember.
Together, you two returned me with my daughter
down the glass-clear pulse of Wakulla Springs
the same waters where, as a toddling child,
I first followed your boots and had my eyes blessed open.
You brought the wilderness to my door,
an orphaned bear cub tumbled
with a four year old in a thin nightgown on a wood floor,
fawns cradled like kin, you never let me get away
with childish selfishness.
Your voice like no other, wise, both bold and restrained, quick to laugh.
You, who marched me, awkward, into an officers' ball in my first gown,
wept together over The Yearling and wept again
with my children over its tender breaking heart,
knowing that to love the wild is to know its cost.
It was always a matter of looking closely, wasn't it?
From my first rain soaked hike in the pacific northwest
to name the swifts that spend their lives in the breezes,
in the mud of a paleoarcheological dig in Savannah with my daughter
returning to the Spanish moss-drip of the Florida panhandle,
a 300 year old dwarf cypress grove in Tate’s Hell
finding a miracle of access at Rish Park to give her back
again to our beloved Gulf Coast waters.
More than my first book of natural history,
than names of flora and fauna,
you gave me the gravity of the earth,
a world never empty
the holy, tangled history of the dirt.
Now, when the wind leans into the pines,
I’ll gaze through a pair of your eyes,
mine forever open,
reminding me that we are only as deep
as the things we stop to notice.
The Lament of Cognito Amor / Sergiy Pustogarov
as we climb to the top tonight--
a slow and steady cranking fills the air:
the turning gears creaking and groaning pause the world.
we have reached the initial plunge,
as we stand above it all for a single moment--
we see the land below spread out for eternity--
a circus laid out for the amusement of the rich,
unchecked without precautions for the masses--
ready to send millions hurdling down a roller-coaster.
the ride holds no basis in physics,
but rather claims the pursuit of a thrill for the few:
for death counts no longer matter this time.
jump down--
set off your paraglider, and hope
you will each the ground in safety.
watch as the cars fall off the tracks.
reaching up your arms in angst--
and wait.
catch--
one soul, and then another;
as many as these feeble hands seek.
breathe--
and do not die during this time
from a plummeting track upon your neck.
oxygen
will only assist the others,
when you have put on your mask.
Hypothesis / Daniel Avery Weis
He is alive in my dog's eyes.
He is alive in clay.
He is a microbe,
a macrobe,
and a bathrobe.
He is alive in my printer, where he
drinks from the ink cartridges, he has
peeled off the curtain he used to hide me
from the view of his indulging in his
favorite things alone
(cover the eyes of your children—joy
comes creeping in).
He is alive in a text box, which is an urn.
He is alive in the “fun guy” of the fungi
in a bad joke.
He is alive and playing pool (he is also
riding the balls like circus balls and guffawing
at how silly this image is).
He is alive in a suspicious rendition of für elise,
composed by my dog, which is the sound of
his heartbeat beneath the fur.
He is alive in between unstoppable forces and
immovable objects.
pathways / MK Zariel
my life is a reflecting pool full of algae and pollution
you can only figure out who you are by combing through
distortion, through the endless drift of people-pleasing.
i just gave a reading advertised as a midnight event
that turned out to start at 7pm. i felt a little guilty
despite myself. i will get hate mail from the militantly nocturnal
and then i'll wake up, knowing it was another anxiety dream
for nobody. artificial light reflects on the ceiling, the window
brightened only by distant neon—the entire Midwest a collection
of houses that look like each other. copy and paste neighborhoods
and you have a doom spiral, a human cost, a wayward rippl
that floods through everything. it's easy to procrastinate
when everything you're trying to do leads back to personal growth.
i don't want to heal. i take a deep breath. i want to have healed.i take a shallow breath. i cancel plans, smile despite myself,
make other plans, walk through liminal spaces only to get yeled at
i want to have been loved and i keep walking.
April - Poem 11
The Bridge contd/ Maureen Alsop
Fluid-submerged-angelic sun, within the rapport
of our language, the sun—?
Stagnant sun, surreptitious and cold. Tall, toppling,
tariff-ridden sun, what rooms
did you keep? Patterning back across the sea. Coralita
Flowers & Hibiscus Vines strangle out the light of this
wedding: the sea’s photograph, a blotted impulse,
bric-a-brac, deception.
Love In The Dentist's Office / Bob Bradshaw
My dentist leans over me.
She’s a voice behind the light.
When she takes off
her face guard,
she’s perfect—
like her smile.
I run my tongue
along my teeth, stones
ragged as a reef's.
I blush, ashamed
that my mouth
is so common.
I want to talk about Van Gogh
or Wuthering Heights
or….Jane Eyre
but words like "gingivitis”
pepper her vocabulary.
As a rebuke
she hands me a mirror.
"Do you see?”
Before I can ask her
to elope with me
to Fiji,
she hands me
two bottles
of mouth
wash
Agamemnon’s Engagement / Stan Galloway
Brother, you will think me fickle –
Nothing new!
That sister –
Clytemnestra –
she’s got brass
I go hard just seeing her
send a servant cringing to the stables
or survey a room along her subtle nose.
I’ll have her –
I know she has her eye on me –
and I’ll take her
to heights she’s never known –
she will ogle what’s beneath this armor
beg
for more.
You take the other –
I will be your advocate
but know you’ll have the poorer choice –
you will be bound to Sparta –
better that though than you living
in my shadow back in Mycenae.
As brother-kings, we’ll have everything we see!
Annunciation / Ava Hu
*
You are yellow
with pollen.
Counted apple seeds
in your palm.
Hymns stain
your lips.
A moth-winged flower
opens.
A single pistil
emerges
from the throat
of the flower
sticky,
potent.
When I shift beyond
the mind—
the blossoming
heavy, sweet.
A lifeboat,
a song.
*
Wakulla Springs / Kirsten Miles
i .
heels drag the sandy bottom
holding against the slight current
little waves lap along her cheeks
in the shallows
trickle into her ears
between her lips
hair sways with the slipstream
teasing toward the deep outflow
As though there were no terror
in a hole
ii.
the glass-bottomed boat a portal
the crystal surface colorless as air
suspended over wintering manatees
billowy eel grass darting minnows
the shadow of the massive spring
her father is a bright stroke against
the dark cave mouth
she is a small softness leaning over the rail
her skin a contracted shudder
iii.
this fear is not a wall
but a map’s beginning
she watches him clear the deep
finds the rhythm in the spring’s slow pulse
this is the floor of every cavern she will later crawl
the depth of every ocean she will one day cross
learning how to stay afloat
iv
fifty years later adrift
once more downstream
her daughter spies a least bittern in the reeds
manatee and calf swim alongside
pale shadows over those same green channels
minnows dart in the eel grass
night herons crowned in black
rise in a croak of surprise
no glass portal to reveal
the water’s liquid biography
urban sediment an opaque erasure
ghosting the spring’s mouth
The Secret of Us / Sergiy Pustogarov
i wonder if you miss the secret of us;
all that we held within our bosoms
at just nineteen years old.
skinny dipping in the river down the way--
and laying on each other’s chest after
puffing away at a pack of malboros.
we spent hours laughing together,
while our lips became magnets for each other;
and we laughed thinking about if mom ever found out.
we were mesmerized by the peach fuzz trailing on our chest,
while our hands stayed tangled together:
and we told ourselves this was forever.
when all along we knew this was just
a teenage fever dream,
that lasted every weekend for six months.
but it could never give us more than
a few days of solitude,
with the sun setting in the background.
and when the winds turned harsh;
my mother finally figured out
i was down by the boys all the time.
she slammed my bedroom door shut,
and screamed my name as a fag in the papers;
just to make sure i could never love again.
but i still taste your lips every time
that i hit a malboro drunk at the end of a night--
fifteen years later.
imagine you dance on highwires / nat raum
the issue is not the walking of the tightrope—it’s the strength of the net that catches you when you fall. you could balance for hours if only you had learned to trust nylon. too many things called themselves strong and then tore before your eyes for your liking. you know how to look for where the weak spots are. no one believes you. you are the kind of helpless you swore you could never be, wide-eyed in the presence of a spotlight and all these witnesses. you stand on only your left big toe. nobody claps. you skip and skitter to flute-notes and lose your footing. everyone gasps. deep down, you know even if you can’t find the places where weaving wears thin, they are still there, waiting to drop you one last time.
Poem on Fire (Read the News or I Will Cook Your Notebooks) / Daniel Avery Weiss
Your books are booking the book
burnings (your kindle is kindling).
I am going to microwave your mother
board. Pressing “add +30sec” is the key
board. I have taken your word salad and tossed it
out the window. Your five syllable words are
defenestrated.
Deleted your oeuvre, retyped it in Microsoft Word,
and exited without saving.
I have found your latest collection and eaten it,
page by leathery page. It was signed. I ate your name.
I cooked a reduction of your sonnet and now
there are six lines. I wept
at his wily grave and grieved my grieving father and
gorged on a yellow star. Eat this poem when you are done or we will be
disintegrated.
I need you to at least pretend you’re helpful / MK Zariel
a toddler points at a sculpture, saying someone couldn't have made that
the paper-maché gleams under museum light, crafted by someone
uncredited. i tell them that every object they've ever seen is a made thing
and much of it used to be trash. they look amazed, then underwhelmed, then
eventually distracted—the pasted-together dead trees shine with the certainty
that only art for toddlers can. it has one job—to impress without being destroyed—
and i know the damn feeling. i used to be trash too and then i was a girl
and then i was an object to project ambitions onto and then i was a useful idiot
and then i came out. every trans kid is a made thing—sculpted by
the relentless pulling-at-threads, intuition soft like a whisper
i can never tell if i'm having identity revelations or just
making something out of nothing—but hey, isn't that what art is?
the kids continue to gossip, this time about a girl in their class
who they call crazy. instead of telling them to be respectful i just smile
hey, i am too, but i'm pretty fun, right? nobody laughs.
i hope someone pieces me back together into something more beautiful.
April - Poem 10
The Bridge / Maureen Alsop
PAX it stands in my mind. I call her back.
Reenact the day
But you can mitigate the spirit only so many times
Attack Of The Giant Ants / Bob Bradshaw
I skidded to a stop, mere feet
from THEM!
—monstrous rust
colored ants swarming
in the middle
of the road.
I couldn’t
see anything, the things
crawling over my car,
my hood, peering
into my windshield
with huge, fiery red
compound
eyes.
A huge hiss!
They’d punctured
my left front tire
with their huge jaws!
Far ahead helicopters
were circling a brute,
its antennae
waving angrily.
I turned the radio on.
“Everything is normal.
There were reports
of giant ants,
but the reports
proved false.
There is no need
for concern.
If things change,
the public
will be notified. The pregame
for tonight’s Dodgers game
will return shortly.”
Menelaus Upon Missing Helen / Stan Galloway
Did I not know:
not with the mind
no words or tones betrayed her –
instead, in my very liver
dread that precedes any utterance
her need to bathe
to travel
to sleep apart
live life in pieces of her own
spend time on her own diversions
all the things she tired of sharing with me
Flirtatious looks abounded
Then the words:
You’ve got to let me see
where this thing with Paris goes.
And now she’s out to sea
thinking all life’s eddies will be smooth
that oars dipped in the water
leave no pain
that unspoken promises can’t simply drop behind
not seeing there the seeds of fire and sword.
Ark / Ava Hu
*
We vanish
under waves.
Salt on the skin.
The earth swallows you.
The marrow of cypress
reddens the water.
Lamentation, the bending
of boughs.
Have we lost favor
with the gods?
Plant, wind,
body and bone.
The moon crashes
into the earth.
Salt enters
the lungs.
Is there still time
to build an ark?
*
Twin Hazelnut trees / Kirsten Miles
leak leaf-light through
a century of rain
crowns splayed and wide under
light of the sky’s blue weight
roots explore an architecture of dark
seasons moss a language of limbs.
Stellar’s Jay’s perch—that blue spark of noise—
all sapphire and arrogance
chickaree darts a jagged thread
through latticed branches
deer fold themselves into our shadow
noses damp against the mulch
breath rising like a slow, white prayer
and they who stand— arms stretched high
where the sun breaks into coins
think to name the way we endure.
a story in the branches
reaching out to touch the wind
the work we do in secret
the ancient braid of wood on wood
the two of us, tangled at the bone
in the quiet geometry below—
how two people, a century gone, once stood
with mud-stained palms and a single bucket,
turning the soil until it tasted like a promise.
planted us side by side
now gone names softened by moss
the compass points of a life
tucked our feet into
this dark pocket of the earth.
now a single knotted pulse
The Barbell / Sergiy Pustogarov
man and woman in the gym.
girl straightens her hair in the mirror.
man flexes his biceps.
the man laughs with his girl,
plotting their next move.
then reaches around her front
to tussle the hair,
she had just laid down.
he smiles.
returns to the bench.
the girl turns around to say
i hate you.
i read the lips because
i can’t hear.
no other words were legible
during these deaf moments
in the gym on a monday night.
they turned back to the benches,
smiling.
i said
i hate you
to the barbell
just to return and smile.
i looked in my own mirror
and told the demon next to me,
i hate you
just to smile again.
auto-destructive asphyxiation / nat raum
cw: BDSM/kink
a hoe phase would break me and heal me
all over again, emphasis on the fission, but i think
i’m oversimplifying it. i wouldn’t have envied
myself in past timelines, peeling off a black oxford
in the understated amber streetlight streaming
through a mt. vernon window frame—back then
my body didn’t belong to me, but the night
and the bottle and the hand around my throat.
i’d say i could be the same shell of myself, but i am
one already, just a different flavor. i have gone
so long without touch that i bristle at the thought.
i know which thumb i want to trace my trachea—
that’s the problem. i never draw blood from the hand
that sustains me. i just want to choose the hand.
Parco / Daniel Avery Weiss
Graffiti in its homeland,
swaddling the aqueducts,
cooing lullabies to the great
dead snake. Porco
dio, it whispers. Porco dio—e
vaffanculo, Meloni. On the other side,
umbrella gyrates slow across
the pasture, interrupted by slippages of
collapsing Roman tufa.
Down, down, down, they must have
thought—we all go
down in history, rust or
ballad kill us.
I need you to at least pretend you’re helpful / MK Zariel
I say out loud to a computer while running on
six hours of sleep and no hours of rest,
after the crushing realization that finals week lasts approximately
ten weeks. i still don’t know how to feel sane
nor is that a standard to aspire to, or so
a very earnest work of theory says. i melt down and call it liberation.
i look into my todo list like a collage—a planning thread full
of difficult personalities, a shame circle, a harrowing truth,
a heart-to-brain-to-deflated-heart for people with more
commitments than named feelings. i need you to at least
pretend you care, i say to most institutions, knowing full well
that they won’t. in a way it’s easier when structures
are abhorrent enough to almost penetrate
the glassy-eyed sheen of assimilation—i wish i could take comfort
in knowing that even normal people see this as a problem. i can’t.
i still pretend i’m helpful.
i need you.
April - Poem 9
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Who’s Grumpy / Bob Bradshaw
You’ll need to speak louder.
Car alarms outside
are always going off.
Don’t get me started
on the nurses.
Pill pushers!
That’s why
narcotic agents
aren’t allowed
to visit!
The vegetables?
Salty mush!
And the meat!
Well, the flies
don’t complain.
And my room? Stuffy?
I’d sleep better
in a morgue's drawer.
Why complain?
Don't others somewhere
have it worse?
But, dear, if you could
do something about the clouds?
They’re never
positioned right—
too much light
gets through.
Some days
too little
Helen Contemplates Infidelity / Stan Galloway
Orpheus had Eurydice six months of the year,
sharing her with Hades,
but holding her,
delighting through the summer in their personal adventures.
Sharing wasn’t his idea
but true love let strict monogamy
be reluctantly released
to have her half time.
So why should Menelaus grumble
when I have a stout servant in the night,
knowing I’ll be taken for an hour rather than two seasons,
knowing I will love him no less in the morning,
knowing he can have me anytime I choose.
Pollinator / Ava Hu
*
They are marked by
red canyon.
God of the subterranean,
god of the yellow bloom.
Their feet, wet
with marigolds.
Do they watch to see
if Orpheus looks back?
Their bodies press
into flowers.
*
Tawney’s Cave / Kirsten Miles
The squeeze is the gate
palms pressing powdery dirt
toes pushing the slip
of her twelve year old body
the world has already
begun to demand she stand tall
but here the only way forward
on her belly
into a cool dark air
the hiss—a sharp, white secret
escaping the brass vessel strapped
to the crown of her young head.
She is a small moon in a throat of limestone
a quiet lever of bone and light
carbide headlamp cutting light into the opening
cavern lined with glistening limestone teeth
walls draped in flowstone’s velvet hush
knuckled spires rising here and there
tasting the ancient
damp breath of the earth
unlearning the sky
A tiny figure jeweled with droplets hangs
before her, a reassurance of life
in this world
of rock
some things
require us to get a little bit lost
in the tight spots
before we can finally
stand up and breathe.
massage boards for heaven / Sergiy Pustogarov
i’ve bought a thousand massage boards
trying to break the knots
that turn my neck
into stiffened old oak boards.
i’ve worked with reiki
trying to release the fears and woes
my muscle store as frantic pains.
worked with god too,
raising my voice from the beams
of an ancient farmhouse.
pleading for help to guide this soul
toward that desired haven;
while rewriting the lie
that heaven is reserved
for a three-word prayer-
whispered from the deathbed
of one who spent their precious breaths
killing a thousand smaller lives.
i’ve spent my savings
rewiring my nerves,
teaching them not to flinch
at those souls who wreak havoc;
still awaiting their free pass
through the pearly gates.
and sometimes,
when i’m bent over in the living room,
ass up, breath taught,
trying to untangle myself again:
i hear saint peter saying
welcome home,
you blessed broken heathen,
who never knew which question
unlocked the perfect gate.
so you asked them all.
you sought every path
through redemption’s burning traps,
hoping to one day it might be enough
to let your body
finally rest.
wind's howling / nat raum
a mourning dove, cataclysmically close
to back porch, throats gentle coos
into a starched blue sky. we had alley
doves on eaton—fittingly, i only knew
how to mourn when i lived there. still
i peel layers of myself imbued with you
off of my skin, trying to remain convinced
i am better off. still i know not how
to exist without you, the music of our shared
ecstasy or the ensuing stretch of misery.
sometimes i see myself as a parasite—
head buried in blood vessels, thirsting
until gluttonous coma arrives and i expire,
fall to forest floor, and learn to crawl again.
Seven Haiku for Early Spring / Daniel Avery Weiss
Sweet milk—
the cherry blossom
greets me.
We splay ourselves
in the dew,
the roly-poly and I.
The crane stoops low.
A snap, a splash—
a salmon.
Gull on the rocks,
heckling. An icy tide
envelops our toes.
Ice—
steam—
a toad's breath.
Magnolias.
A thin rustle of wind.
Petals.
Under the beech tree,
ants fluttering
across my lap.
how to navigate writer's block / MK Zariel
look up a themed call on the internet, find a thousand
variations on "sad" and various texting abbreviations,
say screw it and write another political screed
about being trans. (indie lit is a reflecting pool
into which one pours trauma—) say i'm done
and get rejected. say it's beautiful but not nearly
comprehensible enough—say where are the explanations
of why exactly you're doomed. (an inbox is a void
into which one sends praise and extracts money—)
tell an editor that you want to see trans joy represented,
tell Instagram that you want to know who you are,
tell nobody. join an organizing project and explain poetry
to three people, go to a reading and explain anarchism
to yourself. when people ask if you're an artist or an activist,
nod, wink, change the topic. (a college application is a series
of narrowing questions—into which one combines twelve practices—
into one cohesive brand—) talk to teenagers, explain everything
to everybody. look up a poem on the internet, look for an accessible one
for a friend who thinks poetry isn't for her, find neglected websites
and opaque verse, worry she's right. say screw it (because you're still trans)
and try to at least jot something down.
April - Poem 8
untitled / Maureen Alsop
Candy Cigarettes / Bob Bradshaw
You’d roll your tube
of candy lipstick
over your lips,
trying to look as sultry
as Brigitte Bardot
with her pout.
While you printed the air
with your fake kisses,
I’d open my pack
of chalky sweet
cigarettes.
The packs came in covers
similar to Dad’s
in King’s, Round Ups,
Stallions, Jolly
Winstons.
I’d smoke a cigarette,
halos wafting into the air,
as I imagined
James Dean
lighting up,
Natalie Wood and the future
loitering around
his Mercury Coupe.
Our future was a drag race
I looked forward to.
For now it was enough
that I looked cool.
James Dean
cool.
Examining Natural History / Stan Galloway
Pliny claimed,
There is a wild beast,
the oryx, who steadfastly watches
Sirius rise, then sneezes, as in worship.
I’ve seen the oryx
a hundred at a time
in Kalahari grass
preparing for the dusk
– none watched the sky –
perhaps one watched
shadows underneath
acacia trees for lions
it’s pickaxe horns
formidable defense
when threatened as a herd.
Black-backed jackals
give scant concern.
The rare strandwolf
has not been seen
in generations.
The Dog Star holds
no secret lure or talisman
despite its brightness.
The sneezing is more likely
from the chaff and dust
stirred up by winter’s Cape Doctor
cold and dry.
*my paraphrase from Pliny’s Natural History, circa CE 77.
Forest / Ava Hu
after words from Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo
*
Stories are living beings.
We, the river, we
the river. The river
we wash with the ash
from burning trees.
Mother Earth
will
not be saved.
She does not need
to be saved.
Jaguars crisscross
asphalt.
Give back the blood of the land.
Bones of our elders.
Give it back.
Stories are living beings.
Whistle of the piha.
Chant of howler monkeys.
The highway accelerates
destruction.
A god wakes
in the trees.
Put your hands
over your ears.
*
End of the World / Kirsten Miles
narrow strip of resilience
a thin green blade
one hundred feet above the ocean’s
slow rhythmic exhale
air vibrates
a hummingbird rises
salt-stung vines in the hush
on the edge of this great, vertical silence
we gather on this precarious spine
without boundaries
strangers form
a small huddle of breath and expectation
low murmurs blend with the tide, whispers in fragments
inky slate blue sheet of the Salish Sea
lapping the bluff’s sheer base, shifting with
a slow, muscular inhale
ocean softens into pewter
we stretch our eyes, wait together in the star struck dark
for the first thin wash
ghost light across the sky
a pillar of light pulls itself down — pale shiver of violet
more like memory than color
the sky finally yields
vertical curtains of emerald drape across the horizon
a rhythmic spilling
waves of fuchsia gyrate and whorl above our upturned faces
silhouettes against a solar panoply of voices
older than the earth under our feet
Oh Brother Where Art Thou? / Sergiy Pustogarov
solo goose,
no v formation,
no honks,
a single speck
in the blue,
not a painting
across the
sky.
just shoot
from any
side.
the goose flies on.
you missed
the only target
in the sky,
and dropped lead
into mere liquid.
water.
ripples.
no wings.
even the
frogs
stay hidden.
nature knew
you
were shooting
something
into its world.
just lead,
sinking
down.
we never
found the
remains.
haiku for the one getting away / nat raum
you loved me like ash
loves a beige sofa cushion—
stains are permanent.
God B / Daniel Avery Weiss
less America!
Go Dbles Samerica!
Godble Ssamerica!
G Odblessa Merica!
Godbles Sam Erica!
L And Ofthe Free!
Landofthe Free!
Land ofthefree!
La Ndo Fth Efree!
Land
Ho Meoft He Brave!
Homeo Ft Hebr Ave!
H Omeofthebr Av E!
Home Oft He Brave!
Hom Eofth Eb Rave!
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.
Awholeci vili za tion willdieto ni ght, n evertobe bro ughtba ckagai n.
Aw hole civiliz ationwi lldi eto ni g ht,ne v ert obebro ugh tbac kagain.
Awh olec iv il izat i onwilld iet on ig ht,n evertobe b r o u g htbackagain.
Awho leciv ili zat ionw ill diet onight, nevert obe brou ghtb ackagain.
who will die night, never to be brought back again.
on boundaries / MK Zariel
a text chain is a contained brutality, a collection
of sharp winds damaging each structure until
you can't even notice what's left and what remains—
logistical drift like the air slowly growing toxic,
like a thin layer of smog that remains unexplained. i have been
a people-pleaser for a long time—beware my verbal fillers
the award i'll likely win for a thousand repetitions of the accursed phrase
i'm fine with anything! a text chain is a poorly contained waterspout
and i an drenched in the remains of my dignity. did you know that "sure"
actually means "please don't"? did you know that i am somehow a
worse texter than ChatGPT? an email is a wind-swept plain full of
death traps buried under the sands, the rare oasis only found
when one procrastinates. do you love me anyway?