we’ve picked a color to make her happy / honey blonde or burgundy / a hollering red / blissful obsidian / a dreamy lavender / after the wash & waking / of each strand / with something to keep moisture / I touch the scalp with ease / bring only good gifts / & listen to the singing in my lower back / neck / arms & wrist / when I conjure the souls of these digits / to practice / my pinky gives me the most pain / when I am braiding / shouts at its bend / ties yarn or kanekalon / at the square root of someone’s head / someone who I love / & my shoulders hunch in defiance / & my forehead oils itself anew / & my knees bring their grievances / to the top of the bloodstream / & here / is my body / wilting in reverence. / if I could / I would destroy every memory / of standing in a mirror / with brush & head half done / the feeling of needing help / & no one to ask for it / I don’t know what the world expects / of little Black girls but / it isn’t / freedom / to know oneself intimately / to take pleasure in our many transformations / grow 18 inches of weave in the span of a few hours / & be recognizable only to those who love us whole / & consistently / I make braids or conversation / & the head I am working leans & aches / we cue a movie / coo a humble song / & ours is a texture architectural / mimicking the forest & its triumphant green / I take the shape of trees / I am as old as the unshed leaf / every spruce cedar & pine is showing off for me / & all my sisters deserve the sun’s reach / the wind’s kiss & howl / atop the scalp / proof we are the earth’s earliest kin / shapeshifting for protection / & when we are done / I slip each end through a candle’s light / or cloth and burning water / a small flame prayer / sent up in smoke / or sealed & soaking / in the center of my hands / this I learned / this I taught myself / a secret I pass to all I love who mirror me / I don’t know what the world expects / of little Black girls but / we never did this to be beautiful / though we did become so / in the process

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Ariana Brown is a queer Black Mexican American poet based in Houston, Texas. She is the author of the poetry collections We Are Owed. (Grieveland, 2021) and Sana Sana (Game Over Books, 2020). She holds a BA in African Diaspora Studies and Mexican American Studies, MFA in Poetry, and an MS in Library and Information Science. Ariana is a national collegiate poetry slam champion, instructional designer in ELA and Ethnic Studies, and a creative writing high school teacher. 

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Amy Jannotti (she/her) is a pile of dust in a trenchcoat living & writing in Philadelphia. She is the author of 3 chapbooks (most recently, ANGELS & INSECTS ARE CREATURE WITH WINGS from Kith Books). Her poems can be found in Olney Magazine, Black Stone / White Stone, Non.Plus Lit, & elsewhere. She tweets @cursetheground.

I thought our car’s interior
was made of blue velvet
I felt bad to rub snot into
ridges from under my fingernail

I remember, look left
then up at all those
pinned-up black curls
Aren’t you embarrassed?

You are a reflection of me.
Crying looks bad
–
It makes me look bad.

no, I misunderstood
then there was felt
potholes dissipating
asphalt ran under us

last summer I let a
boy break my heart
and he should’ve or
I wanted it, outside

I waited for a friend
outside a nail salon
when she came to ask
how I was I cried

on a sidewalk in queens
between her elbows until
I could not embarrass
her or me anymore – but

we stayed facing away from
but next to each other like
statues pointed at pigeons
she reassured she couldn’t

see my face – we laughed
I never told her about my
thoughts on dark colored
fabrics or about my small

town indiana road erosion
but she is from indianapolis
and knows primary colors
are a terrible lacquer choice

---

KRISTINE ESSER SLENTZ is a Maltese descendent, queer, cult escapee, and author of woman, depose (FlowerSong Press 2021, 2024). She grew up in northwest Indiana and the Chicagoland area—what her father calls the ‘bottom of the blue-collar.’ After receiving her GED, she completed her undergraduate degree at Purdue University, double-majoring in English Literature and Creative Writing, before earning a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing (poetry) from City College of New York (CCNY). She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at CCNY, among other places. KRISTINE is a Pushcart Prize nominee, finalist in the Glass Poetry Chapbook and F(r)iction’s Flash Fiction Contests, recipient of a CCNY English Department Teacher-Writer Award, a City Artist Corps Grant, and former Rifkind Fellow and Poets Afloat resident. She has displayed artwork in exhibits at the 5547 Project and recently in Pride & Joy at the Athenaeum Indy. She is the co-founder and organizer/host of the monthly experimental artist series, Adverse Abstraction, in New York City’s East Village. You can follow KRISTINE’s art on her substack, Carnations & Car Crashes. 

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Ave Goorbarry is a writer from South Florida. Ave’s writing has won awards regionally from Scholastic Art and Writing and has been previously published in A Thin Slice of Anxiety, Words & Whispers, the Origami Review, and elsewhere. Ave is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Diet Water Magazine. 

the hare is fast
the hare multiplies, grows, jumps
over flower and foe, and is prized
for neither fur nor flesh nor
friendship to man, too small to be
feared and too large to be
hated, burrowing beneath
and in cartoon memory
transforming rocks to roads
evading the hunter’s gun
quick-witted and wondering
when the clover will grow?
ask the rabbits in the field,
one yesterday had its hundredth daughter
and she was born
murmuring that winter
would bloom white tomorrow,
a message from the before and after
place the hare knows so well
Alice’s worst timekeeper,
follow the rabbits
and they’ll take the long way
underground and put on
the old role of Chiron,
with a carrot instead of a coin
and big ears for sad stories
and no chance of bringing
anyone back up with you.
nobody reincarnates like
a hare, the generation that
led you down the tunnel system
gone and returned by the time
your sister shakes you awake,
and gazing down from the moon
monthly the same trickster, round
like birth and guarding the entrance
of another lucky month.

---

Julia Gwiazdowski is a Philly-born and based poet. Being gay and trans, she often writes about queerness and gender but also cannot resist ekphrastic pieces and love poems. Julia has been previously published in Wizards In Space, Stone of Madness Press, and Three Line Poetry. She can be found under the username @atreenamedjulia on Instagram, BlueSky, and Tumblr.

On Sunday—sheets stripped,
bed bare, afternoon edging toward
gold—my sister picks up

on speaker phone. As she feeds
her brand-new daughter—
backdrop all static and shift,

a chorus of coos until, suddenly,
that hush of relief—my own child
emerges with wordless urgency

to show me the split in her fingernail,
pink and soft as a shell
tossed to shore. I take her hand,

try to smooth what is sharp—
cradling the phone
between cheek and shoulder

to catch my sister’s half-formed
sentences, my niece’s chirps
and starts. My daughter

frees her hand, skips away
singing. Light breaks through
the blinds, fills the whole room.

---

Emily Patterson is the author of So Much Tending Remains (2022) and To Bend and Braid (2023). Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and appears or is forthcoming in Rust & Moth, SWWIM Every Day, CALYX, Sweet Lit, West Trade Review, tiny wren lit, The Shore, and elsewhere. Emily holds a B.A. in English from Ohio Wesleyan University and an M.A. in Education from Ohio State University. She lives with her family in Columbus, Ohio.

I am headlining an apology tour
plums and paydays in the icebox
mommy’s little hubris of god
got carried away again
tailgating someone else’s ritual
a lesson in humility, a good humbling
bent over and expelling bile
like a good time girl should
a three calyx fold in baby pink
center stage in paradise

I promise you can call me
mine and want by the cure
I, too, bunny the fool
ardently love fucking around
but never one dalliance
just a bender
surrending me to
six color gardens
miserable at the honky tonk
my full heart bucks
to be bad, too

I’m supposed to believe
with love comes pain
old heads will tell you
you’re no deer
quanda a roma
I call my love
tommyknocker
roughneck
he could die down there

it is “tell me I’m pretty” hour
in my fertile crescent ruin garden
I draw on the grotto to preserve its fidelity
meant to feel abandoned at the aqueduct
answer the crying calls, apologize
the Virgin Mary, convertible
I catch you at the center of lucky
scrawled on the furthest wall
ever preen and come to be a fuck up?
ever sleep and stand redeemed?

I am a pile of water
me and my contrition
may the galleria ossify
and the stairs swallow me
I use your picture to pick my teeth
so rest in piss phantom solitaire
it’s why chefs kids love fast food
the cobbler’s daughter has no shoes

bless the unholy and the dirty
high highs, the low lows, and good enough
doesn’t anyone have a job anymore?
maybe window licking
in the hall of gems, in the pudding club
there is no rest for the wicked
only evil on quick wash
there are no such thing as problems
only opportunities

so this is the second song
where we stand in symmetry
where lightning might strike us
at the overlook
my toothache deliverance
all love songs
in cipollino marble
in crocodile tears
so I am the center
yours in murder
miss monster

The hormonal implant has taken hold
and I cannot seem to stop buying plants.
A kind woman sold me a pothos while
misgendering me over and over

like petting a cat the wrong direction.
I’m pushing an unwieldy orange cart
at Home Depot to buy one supplicant
succulent. She quakes in the cupholder

on the drive across punctured Washington.
I’ll protect you, we say to each other.
She’s holding a sword behind her back.
We are ready to fight a minor god.

The first time I killed a plant I complained
I had better things to do like read books
as though books are not made from plants
as though weekly water was such a weight

My tricep pumps progestin now
I carry the watering can up the stairs.

---

Olive Esther Kuhn is a Philadelphia-based writer, translator, and organizer whose work focuses on queerness and surviving capitalism. Their first book, Losing Lorca: a mixtape critique, was published by Recto y Verso Editions in 2020. Their work has also been published in Laid Off NYC and La Voz Magazine (translation and literary criticism) and Socialist Alternative (political reporting). Olive writes and performs music under the project Spidr. Their work can be found at oliveestherkuhn.com & spidr.bandcamp.com.