Poetry

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Vile Affections

By | 2023-03-09T12:44:05-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

By Soon Jones   I grow up in a Florida church being warned about god-hating bull dykes and sissy fairy fags leaving the natural use of the woman, which is sex, because all a woman is good for is sex and tempting men. Yet when a woman tempts another woman somehow that is not about sex, [...]

Feeding Stray Cats in Ukraine

By | 2023-03-09T12:41:40-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

By Rebecca K. Leet   As molecules of steel madness concussed the air and no next breath was sure a vibration in his unbowed soul prompted Sasha to step outside and feed a posse of stray cats. The offering – from one displaced in the world to others also beggared – cost Sasha his right foot. [...]

Displacement

By | 2023-03-09T13:00:08-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , |

By Antony Owen   I am the fox-flame in the wood jumping through snow an ember chased to extinction by lesser beasts. I am permanent as the moth in amber its patterns decided by the white sun its fate decided by the earthlings. I am the glass-blower’s lips’ creation to consume whatever is put in me [...]

“I can experience joy alone”

By | 2023-03-09T13:41:45-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , |

By Tristan Richards   I meditate on this line while hiking away from the waterfall, and a doe pokes her head out of the snow, watching me, her eyes black and beady, her body sandy, the color of spring gravel turned mud. She is beautiful. I freeze, my heart in my throat. I become too aware [...]

What Is Truth?

By | 2023-03-15T21:10:04-07:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , |

By Wells Burgess    Deep in the South, men gather. First among equals, the Kingfish, upstage, and it is only he whose face you see; his minions – that includes me, Markie – have their backs to you. The Boss plays solitaire; the cards slap the table. “Markie,” he says, where we gon’ put that road?” [...]

September Together

By | 2023-03-11T11:19:42-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , |

By Elizabeth Shack   Last September, we hiked the forest beside the fog-drenched sea. Followed a swift stream bridged with salmon spawning, returning from gray Pacific homes. Switchbacked beside a waterfall sparkling down steep granite. Emerged into sunlight with a view of lichen-painted rock and the blue-white ice that once sculpted this verdant valley. Is still [...]

Scylla

By | 2023-03-11T11:18:10-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

By Bex Hainsworth   A nymph unburdened by beauty is a nightmare. My barnacle flesh scratches against stone as I curl up in my cave, full of octopus cunning; folding many limbs around myself, cruel, content. This was Circe’s gift: to make me a monster, a maneater. The distant roar of Charybdis rocks me to an [...]

Islands of No Nation

By | 2023-03-11T12:09:32-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

By Ada Ardére   We give them our children to fight in jungles and deserts, we give them our taxes to pave their roads, we give them our land to build their businesses, we give them our coasts to moor their battleships, we give them our waters to test nuclear weapons, and we have received nothing. [...]

Reputation

By | 2023-03-11T22:01:40-08:00 March 15th, 2023|Categories: Issue 139: 16 March 2023|Tags: , , , , , |

TW: SA By Frances Koziar   He speaks of his reputation while I think of fates worse than death, his name, when I would gladly give up mine for a good night’s sleep, to see those nightmares shaped like ordinary men slain before their groping hands reach me; he speaks of having a life ruined, not [...]

Justice Clarence Thomas Ate My Fucking Plums

By | 2022-12-06T13:34:58-08:00 December 7th, 2022|Categories: Issue 138: 08 December 2022|Tags: , , |

By Christina Bagni after William Carlos Williams   I have eaten the plums that were in the ice box and which you were probably relying on forever Forgive me you didn’t deserve them they were always mine to take Forgive me but the icebox was always meant to be empty it came that way and that’s [...]

The North Wind & The Sun

By | 2022-12-06T13:40:08-08:00 December 7th, 2022|Categories: Issue 138: 08 December 2022|Tags: , , , |

By Jacqueline Jules “Gentleness and kind persuasion win where force and bluster fail.”        —The North Wind and the Sun, Aesop                      The woman seated next to me on the plane, sees the star around my neck and begins asking questions. How can I be happy without eating ham? she wants to know. Or [...]

Two Poems by Renee McClellan

By | 2022-12-06T13:43:41-08:00 December 7th, 2022|Categories: Issue 138: 08 December 2022|Tags: , , , , , , , , , , |

Black Listopia I feel like an idiom that drips from Baldwin’s pen “that” angry Black woman negotiating sin I AM NOT YOUR NEGRO! A thing to be had Thick lips, curvaceous hips, or a fashion fad You can’t set me like diamonds Or string me like pearls Pick on my afro, then appropriate my curls I [...]

Prolapse

By | 2022-12-06T13:57:20-08:00 December 7th, 2022|Categories: Issue 138: 08 December 2022|Tags: , , , , |

By Tara Campbell   The uterus is tired. The uterus is sorry but it can’t seem to stay in one place anymore, which isn’t surprising considering how often it’s been poked and prodded and pricked by congressmen’s pens. The uterus would like to get in a word of its own, just one, even edgewise just one [...]

hegemony: footnotes in future history

By | 2022-12-06T14:00:53-08:00 December 7th, 2022|Categories: Issue 138: 08 December 2022|Tags: , , , |

By Yvonne Patterson   bookended with blood, The Reaving Era births in the conflagration of Origin Crusades, subjugates the populace and banishes science, ending in funeral pyres of anti-pogrom riots: The Reclamation Years. closing scenes, unlike the exuberance of symphonic finales, manifest in discordant notes. bright allegros falter. sonorous glissades collapse in coarse staccato. dark notation [...]

On Hearing of Russian Soldiers Booby-Trapping Dead Ukrainian Civilians with Land Mines

By | 2022-12-06T14:06:44-08:00 December 7th, 2022|Categories: Issue 138: 08 December 2022|Tags: , , , , , |

By Karen Kilcup   How do they do it— lift a heavy head and place the bomb beneath an ear? Slide the metal disc under a shoulder or thigh? Or worse: do they slice the swollen long-dead chest, flies fluttering, the stink unbearable, nearly? Do they carve a red-rimmed cavity large enough to implant the device, [...]