Morning comes like a Hall and Oates song.
There’s a blackberry seed in my tooth-hole.
I guess, at some point, my filling fell out.

My phone says to me lover. My body
says, about the whiskey, don’t do it again.
We gathered under the strawberry moon.

My cat emerges from the sofa, his age betrays.
Four years is the longest time I’ve spent
doing anything, which includes nothing.

Driving my friends to the bar fills me
with a lifetime of accomplishments.
A sticky grin takes me over, gladly.

Joy stretches to my throat.
Buying flowers in the grocery store
raises my heart rate to something hunted.

---

Em Beckert is a Chicago-based writer and teacher, their work can be found at @pitymilk_press, and soon elsewhere too 🙂 

the first boy who doesn’t love me back laughs himself across the bridge and tells me to hold my breath. he holds my elbow as i step up onto his skateboard and i tell him i must look stupid for trying. the park benches are all green and empty. he does not understand because he is not afraid of looking. he tells me all he can see and it is covered in tired, shimmering dust. he grins for anything at all, even falling.

in fall, he lends me his favorite book. i softly hold the pages instead of dog-earing them. i finish it in one sitting and bring it back to him the next day with my bookmark still inside. he brings out rain-splotched tarot cards and tells me to pick one. he and i fall asleep on my couch in my farmhouse watching Downtown Abbey. he takes me on a hike and i can only remember how sweaty his hands were and that he calls me lucky.

i ask him to go to the winter ball with me and he tells me he has visual snow. i do not know what this means and he smiles because he knows. he wears a tacky gray sweater over his button-up that says he does not know what he is doing here. it has a logo but no letters. i am a guiding shadow next to him.

i slip his fingers underneath the wrists of my black sleeves and tell him to move instead of dance. when the music starts to make him sick and the colored lights start to change too quickly, we leave through the back of the cafeteria. it is a quarter ‘till the sky is all green and empty. i want to kiss him and he smiles because he knows, but i never do.

standing at the edge of the river, wide-mouthed and joyful and alive, i remember the rocks he pulled me across several miles down. i watch him glow and my lips buzz with closed questions in the night. he asks me if i can imagine tv static falling from my eyelashes. i tell him i can often not imagine anything at all.

---

Allen Means is a queer poet from Boulder, Colorado. He currently resides in Miami, Florida, where he collects love and language, among other things. His work appears in Chaotic Merge and Nimrod International. He tweets @allenWhy

---

This poem previously appeared in Chaotic Merge Magazine.

soundtrack: eve, the roots

& is this turning
back time never heard
it resurrect dry wilted
fresh rain tender stream
sunlight thaws cold
can you feel it
warm brush lips warm
kiss every numb away
you roughed eve out of wonder
dulled splendour
keep saying dull but how else can i say
you said it best
let me fuck with it
a most tender instrument
shaped through desire legible
lower lower
i thought i loved someone once
it felt like eve
the roots took out ‘cause i need you
you can’t erase need that easy
though
it runs flow ready like current
steady moving under steady
& that says nothing of what it means
to reminisce study your sound
bring it back moving let’s trace it
steve spacek made eve
crispy layers already you metabolized
i mean you broke it down & the roots
made it live instruments
is that ?uest calling out b♭
what restoration repeats this
prayer like i repeat
listen listen
i thought i loved him once
it felt like eve
but so far i’ve only loved you
& i only keep loving you
more

---

Tina Zafreen Alam is a diasporic Bangladeshi poet who doesn’t believe in space, time, or borders. Currently based in Toronto, she loves J Dilla, Wong Kar-Wai, and the Toronto Raptors. When she is not writing, she is watching basketball, listening to music, dancing, or communing with the city’s squirrels.

---

This poem previously appeared in FreezeRay Poetry.

after “Housekeeping” by Marilynne Robinson

O, make of my teeth. a sieve.
drink. from this. font of mercy.
make of my body. a community.

lips nets. filter all impurity.
every virus. every bruised silted
eye. sifted. through. every hurt.

sold. let tears collected. saltcrust.
make from them. crystalized. calyx.
tinkering grass. swaying. invisible breeze.

realized. glazed stalks. bowing. to receive.
caresses. gentle kiss. on the forehead.
gentle hand. on the back. gentled.

fingertips. sepal split. let me reach. up.
with both fists. & grasp the wind. that
joy withheld. cast into the sky. for me

to find. now. to harvest. to harness.
to imbibe. how then. to live. now.
with such hunger. on the wind. with danger.

fanning out. in every direction. if i could.
lay a table. for four hundred thousand.
for all of the empty chairs. lost. and we are.

still losing. pushed away. from the table.
here. i set a place. for every heart. take up all. silver.
every syringe. gather up. the mercury. every

fevered thermometer. cobble together. each scalpel.
open chested. melted into. oneflowingsubstance.
pressed. then cooled. into utensils. for our feast.

this is one way. we remind our.selves we are. alive.
we survive. by silver linings. we dine on. &
even while falling. peeled away. from seats.

full. too early. it is salt-glinted things.
that shine us. into understanding.
we were always. whole.

this is how. i will sing. for you our supper.

---

Adrian Dallas Frandle (they/he) is a queer fish who writes to and for the world about its future. They are Poetry Acquisitions Editor at Variant Lit & Associate Poetry Editor at Pidgeonholes. Their chapbook Book of Extraction: Poems with Teeth is out now with Kith Books. Find more online at adriandallas.com 

---

This poem previously appeared in Moist Poetry Journal.

After Frank O’Hara’s “Having a Coke with You”

Having fish and chips at lovely’s
Having a leather jacket you’re in a crinkly top
Having a past is not permissible
That’s why tonight i’m 90s ethan hawke
Having a diet coke explaining the past to my friend
Our past involves all the same people but in different accounts
Maybe they treated me differently cause i’m ethan hawke:
A composite of white male longing
You think this hawke stuff is toxic, and say
A culture of individualism leads to paranoia
Worrying about being canceled is an indulgence
We raise our drinks to the angelic choir of haters
Having a coked-up convo I miss that
You can go back you can never return, is that what they say
Snapped from the gates of dysfunctional heaven
At the lesbian bar we will not get a table
From where we stand it looks like straight people in vests
These days I leave early to go write abt what a great time I had
And you are the love of my life and have no spatial awareness
You piss the whole street off
Standing everywhere like a tree without its glasses
Your top still crinkling
It’s perfection

---

Scout (they/them) has poetry published in HAD, Hot Pink Mag, and Ursus Americanus press, with poems forthcoming in dream boy book club and lowly dirt children. They live in San Francisco with their girlfriend and their cat. They’re on instagram @boredgeoisie__. You can find more of their work at scoutfaller.com/poems.

---

Murdo Homewood is an early church historian, poet, and worried transsexual, living and teaching Latin in Edinburgh. His work can be found in Prolit, Glitter, and little zines he makes for his friends. When not writing about long-dead saints, last night’s dinner, or a bird he saw, he can be found on the train, carrying cake.

---

Amelia Kindall is a writer living in Austin, TX. You can find her on Instagram @tracksuitminotaur.

What is it about Glen Campbell’s Wichita Lineman
cued up everyday for months on end, I can’t imagine
a day without longing for its soft mellow whine, in its
essence, a whistle-while-you-work-song, wishing for

vacation, wishing for your work to align you with
another, and the song actually did that, penned by
Jimmy Webb and covered by everyone from The Meters
to REM to Z and J at our wedding, each of them still

on the line, I need you more than want you and
I want you for all time, yesterday, another storm,
a transformer blew on the line, the whole street
sparked blue, the lineman came to fix it around nine

and was up working into the morning, we peered out
the window, dared one another to go outside and serenade
him, he’s still on the line! we wondered if climate change
has him busier than ever, wondered if he also wonders

how to pay his electric bill each month, despite so much
work, so much love, wondered if he also loves The Rhinestone
Cowboy the way we do, without irony, with a high tolerance
for schmaltz, wondered if he has someone he wants for all

time, and if I listen close enough, I begin to think of strangers
like him as people I know, I begin to think of people I know
as if they were strangers, but not in a sad way, it’s a respectful
distance, full of love and mystery, the way I hope I know

anything, tethered to uncertainty, wanting for all time,
a great wedding song when I come to think of it,
I don’t even remember hearing it at our wedding,
we were sparking blue every which way,

but our friends were still on the line, stoking the fire,
and when I think of it I can hear them now, still on the line,
a whiff of jasmine riding a September evening’s breeze,
right around the time the temperature drops and the asphalt

is relieved of the sun, sends its warmth right back, the way
the guitar line blossoms out of the vocal, still on the line, the way
your love relieves me of my expectations for love, the way
a love song is also a work song, this labor of love, the only way.

---

Lou Turner is a writer and musician in Nashville, TN. She is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at Randolph College and the author of Shape Note Singing (2021), her debut chapbook from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press. Recent work has appeared in The Continental Review, HAD, EcoTheo, and in OEI’s ‘Aural Poetics’ issue edited by Michael Nardone. Turner’s latest record ‘Microcosmos’ is out now via SPINSTER and its title track is featured on playlists from Pitchfork, NPR, and Uncut Magazine.