No dating until you’re thirty
was the rule my parents erected

like a concrete wall built for destruction.
It was the reason my first boyfriend
had to lead me in darkness through brush
with the canvas of our Converse soaking
in grass dewed by yesterday’s rain.
Under a tree, I discovered the electricity
of my breasts, how nerve pulsations
can write letters dipped in honeysuckle
from nipple through spine to clit.
Metamorphosis of lips to portals
opening worlds all goo and lightning.
The Venusian taught me
how soft hands can bend flesh to fire

and how a boy always finds a way
To leap over a wall.

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Anmol Priya Desai is a nonbinary poet and astrologer. They are currently an MFA candidate at Oregon State. You can find them on Instagram @anmolpriyadesai

Today a pomegranate broke open on the supermarket floor, & sucked the breath out of my mouth while I coughed up red seeds. I want to be more like the Olde Times Buffet across the street from Publix with the big sign that says “best quality food available,” but you hold me back with a hand in my gut. Imagine if I knew myself so well; to say, yes, of what is available to me in the panhandle of Florida I am doing my best. Which is to say, of course not everything is great, and yes some parts of me are questionable. I could tell you which, but I’d rather not. Some parts of me are good, even in ways you might find surprising. This is a fine way to think of yourself if you are a buffet in Tallahassee, but what if you’re human, like me? What if, like me, you hit a pedestrian with your car because you were annoyed at the driver behind you? What if you saw two cardinals in the road, one couldn’t fly, and you circled back to help them but got scared? And now I think of the cardinals all the time, the birds themselves, the one flying awkwardly between his companion and the side of the road, but also the symbol of them and me, the color red, a hand in my gut. I read one time that two neutron stars were so bewitched by you that they became one big angry cloud of gold and platinum. All the happy scientists and howling wind can’t save me from you. Can’t keep my dog from swallowing a toy squeaker whole & dying.

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Claire Nelson is a poet and human living in the coastal empire. You can find her work at low tide. 

I miss California with a hole like opera in my septum. It reminds me of being born. Instead of leaving Mom And Dad‘s for a South African defense contractor who found rent control between startup bubbles, I wish I had fallen in love with a wannabe actor in the sexier spread. Fog looks extra alpha with palm trees. Really underlines the whole dystopian thing the city’s got going. Founders fled to Austin, anywhere they considered immune to homelessness, hiking up housing prices with a plague of spent pupae trailing behind. A splintered mess for those who can’t afford to be capricious to sweep up and make best with. Promises wince unfulfilled.

It’s a long story, but I left too. After relinquishing the stability of a $1200 three bedroom apartment at Golden Gate and Masonic. Four years with a war profiteer was enough. So I opened my arms again to Death City, brought to us by Doomed Future. Is this an art project, an advertisement for a film, or a general warning? I grew up here, home of the sheisty fashion accessory, zoo gang on instagram. It’s got that sick shine. Nobody does it better. Perception shaped my caution.

I keep my eyes peeled for 20s balled up in sidewalk cracks, splattered pigeons in alleyways, dog shit anywhere you can step. Money fame celebrity. Okay, and? They’re all phony to me. I’m tired of loudly pronouncing my underdog status anytime I walk into a room. Tired of drivers blowing through stop signs and red lights with speed of service reserved for Jason Statham movies. I should’ve been an actor. I should’ve had a plan. You’re only hot when you’re hot. And Mom And Dad wanted me to go to college because neither of them did and I am trapped in other people’s image. So now I’m a poet, writing another ode to California. My hazy skies never as blue as memory.

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Alexandra Naughton is a writer, publisher, and literary events organizer based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is the founder and editor-in-chief of Be About It Press, established in 2010. She is the author of a place a feeling something he said to you, a memoir novel told in second person, and poetry collections such as  Rapid Transit (Black Lawrence Press, 2018), My Posey Taste Like: The Paradise Lost Edition (Bottlecap Press, 2017),You Could Never Objectify Me More Than I’ve Already Objectified Myself (Punk Hostage Press, 2015), and many more. Her first novel, American Mary, won the 2015 Mainline contest and was published in 2016. Her work is widely published around the web and in print, and she performs often. Stay up to date with her by checking out her website and subscribing to her Substack, talk about it.

roguish royalty
& all that you’ve ever possessed
take take take & preen & print
& release what you’ve made
into a stream of who knows what
& filth & nonsense & shimmering
what-have-yous, we are worth more
than the muck we make our mark through
yes the lotus, yes the mud
yes necessary trudging for great bloom
& yet the myths seem
built to rationalize tragedy of
working class spilt milk realness
don’t give up,
your time will come
the darkest hour
is just before dawn
etc etc etc etc etc

i’m not saying the birthplace
of the phoenix is an ashy lie
just that i don’t want to accept
that rock bottom, that poverty,
that breakdown & death
are intrinsic to eventual success
all the witches i know continuously
calling in abundance to support
& sustain their magic
so many gifts & not enough money
there is sex work there is selling weed
there is waiting tables we all shuffle
our goods & make a buck somehow

when we were 20-something we had
more energy to work to then support
our less lucrative most meaningful labor
running from this job to that circle to
that rehearsal to that reading & now
pandemic-spent, exhausted, limbs
under-exercised from hours of staying
inside sleeping & streaming series
about royalty & queer romance budding
seem the only salvation i find my joy,
bursting open from the torrent of
my brain-cum-allness, nestled in bed
under the down comforter just like
my mother, inherited from her in fact
& have to pause the new sally rooney
adaptation to write:

just sitting in bed
like a proper american
watching tv and eating snacks

Goddess you did me right,
here i am divinity spinning
in all my cloistered dimensions
playing out livelihood
to the best of my abilities
& praying to be of service
exhaustion be damned—
where’s the spell for this?

---

Susannah Sian Simpson is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, and poet, based out of Durham, NC. They are the author of the poetry collection, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU, and poems have recently appeared in Triangle Poetry, bedfellows, Day Job Press, and the art book Pure Paragraphs. Performance work has been featured in Ugly Ducklings’ Emergency Index. They are co-creator of the series ALL RIGHT NOW! combining art and ritual with the intention of collectively reframing our relationship to time. 

---

boy blue (AKA Roger S. Jimenez) is a gay and Latino first-generation writer/poet from Miami, FL. Since the time the world stood still in 2020, Roger’s been using words and prose to dress his secrets up as poetry and display them to the world. As a double-major in Film and Creative Writing from the University of Central Florida, Roger has dedicated himself to a life of storytelling. When he isn’t penning poems, Roger channels his creativity into technical writing and content creation for local businesses in Central Florida.

---

Kir Alshanetsky is a poet from southernmost Brooklyn and the Soviet
diaspora with an MFA from Rutgers-Newark. You can almost sort of find them
in New York, still.

There was a universe in which I was useful.

It wasn’t great.

Payment fulfilled desire with erroneous accuracy.

I had everything and it was too much.

I taped the light switch on. I ate glitter.

The bright brightened til the point of hurt. The definition, hard to watch.

I don’t know what that was all about.

Maybe strawberries, maybe roses.

Did you notice a move to refute grounding details?

Kites wielded by my enemies took credit for the eclipse when I knew it was a body.

I swore it was.

Joint pain flared up. It was about to rain. Some people believed this.

Meaning kept meeting its makers so casually I became suspicious of language.

I hate that.

Meet me at the rose farm. It’s b.y.o. cut-resistant gloves.

What do you say about anything.

I’ll cover you if you can’t afford it right now. Don’t forget to stretch. Legend has it a penny in
the vase makes the roses look more alive.

There is a use for shame, less for symmetry.

---

T. Liem is the author of the poetry collections Slows: Twice, and OBITS.. Their writing has been published in Apogee, Plenitude, The Boston Review, Grain, Maisonneuve, Catapult, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and elsewhere. They live in Montreal / Tio’Tia:ke, unceded Kanien’kehá:ka territories.

There is a dog somewhere
In my building
That cries all day for love
In our shared shelter

Crying all day for love
I searched the staircases
And the old boxes people leave
By the dumpster when it’s too full

By the too-full dumpster
And I brought myself
To peer into the pool
And then I saw the dog

What a dog, what a dog
Weaving back and forth
On the skin of the water
Crying for love like water
When it blathers under a bridge

Crying with my cry
Shaking like I shake
Looking at my eyes with my eyes
On the skin of the crying water

And I felt that when I was looking
Through the heaps of trash
For what was crying all day for love
I felt that I was looking through myself

But what I did was jump
Into the water expecting to sink
Only to smash the dog’s face
Into ripples that have never stopped.

---

Megan Wildhood is a writer, editor and writing coach who helps her readers feel seen in her monthly newsletter, poetry chapbook Long Division (Finishing Line Press, 2017), her full-length poetry collection Bowed As If Laden With Snow (Cornerstone Press, May 2023) as well as Mad in America, The Sun and elsewhere. You can learn more about her writing, working with her and her mental-health and research newsletter at meganwildhood.com.

Tiny oblivion sinking in throat
Explodes and itself
In liver.
With passing exhales of smoke.
Flashing secret smiles.
My life orbited three streets
And two corners.
Under nose lights
Abandoned churches
Now recording studios
Or tattoo parlors.
Warm fuzzy orb
Growing in gut
And all you have to do
Is sit there and look at me
Like that.
Drowned by
These harsh red lights.
All this
Fleshing melting into another
And I will stand there
Alive with pleasure or whatever
Looking back at you.

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James Milanesi is a Phiadelphian poet who is retroactively late for work.
He is the curator and founder for a collective called Poet’s Row. His
latest chapbook, Momentary Sweetheart, is published with Bottlecap Press.