BATEMAN

God… I guess… I was probably returning videotapes.

American Psycho (2000), Mary Harron & Guinevere Turner and Bret Easton Ellis

i never admitted fault / at confession either / the priest would / say whatever & i’d look down on / varnished rot-vein floorboards or / lie that i lied about / something i did not lie about what / did i have to be / sorry for everything / that happened happened / to me / i wasn’t penitent / i just felt / bad confession / i choke up every time / Boyz II Men surprises Will / for little Nicky’s christening / & memorized every way / they have to say i’m / sorry confession / when i was 11 / i downloaded torrents & a / trojan confession / at 25 i danced in the shower / to MJ’s performance of “Man / in the Mirror” & was / surprised when I slipped / as Michael’s palms swept the / stage confession / when i was 19 / a virus / wiped my computer / again confession / i think i’m the plum / my friend bit at 14 / beautiful skin & flies in the pit / bodies in the spit he / wretched confession / i had so many / secrets i thought i was / happy confession / i was never found / by a woman / to be what i am / i told her & left her / lonely confession / sure it was more but always / i made sure / i was / clean confession / my boy told me hey / but you’re still a good / dude confession / the devil speaks / to you in your own / voice he’s no / ventriloquist confession / at 27 i tore down drywall / strapped on a mask / & stripped out lath / i sawed wall studs & pocketed dust / sat fetal on the piled curb / & a guy said come on / man don’t do / that / i said thanks & went on / sobbing on / concrete between two cans boiling over with my / trash confession / i wiped my face i felt / better i did not / change

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Tim Lynch was awarded a 2025 Emerging Artist Fellowship by Delaware Division of the Arts. His poetry appears most recently in Tupelo Quarterly, ONLY POEMS DAILY, and Gather, with fiction in StoryQuarterly, Broken Antler Magazine, and Afterimages. His work has been nominated for Best of the Net, Best Microfiction, and the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Delaware, where he is a paraprofessional for children with disabilities.

The human brain generates 20 watts of electricity.
Or so the AI Overview tells me unprompted
when I search how much a thought costs me,
how much energy each flex of my fingers
are required to press each of these keys.

Do you know how much energy
is wasted by the AI Overview being generated?
I ask. It hesitates. I find an answer
under the links to buy a novelty brain mug.
Oh, just 6 bottles of water to cool the servers
every ten seconds. And they promise to be eco-friendly.

Did you know almost all their water filters
are falsely advertising their efficiency?
Yeah, there is no reliable way to remove
all the shit to make it drinkable again. All
the bacteria, the chemicals, the forever
plastics dancing in your cells.

Dear search, how much energy does plastic consume
inside the body? The AI has no answer because
we have no answer. Like a game of snake
an ouroboros on an old Nokia. Those invincible
bricks, where did they go? Other than swallowed
up deep inside, of course. Bit by micro-bit.

Did you know the human brain with a thought
could light a small bulb? 40 Joules in 2 seconds.
AI Overview pick-pocketed that info for me
because it doesn’t actually think anything or know that
the human brain is so efficient in ways we don’t
even understand. Or maybe I’m too harsh.

After all, we still don’t know what an appendix does,
but we still carve it out when we need to.
We know we can live without it if removed
before it explodes on a random Tuesday.
Well, depending on if your shit boss doesn’t
hesitate to call the ambulance.

And did you know that on the stretcher to the ER
as you clutch your side and bile of bits and brick
scratch your throat, you might use your last moments
the 2 second spark of the brain electrified and dancing
to ask the question through sweat and pain:
“Do you know how much this will cost me?”

---

Carmen Barefield (she/her) is a poet and writer living in Salem, Massachusetts. She is a graduate fellow of The Watering Hole and a Roots. Wounds. Words. fellow. She was also longlisted for the 2025 Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s First Poem Contest. Some of her work can be found in The Elevation Review, Incessant Pipe, Molecule, Popshot Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and others. You can find out more about her at carmenbarefield.com.

Christmas Day at a dive bar
& God has blessed us all
with holy days & spirits poured over
this small glimpse at eternity

blurring bright against
the near-silent night
naive nativities of promised tomorrows
fester & foster today’s futilities

yet here we arrive
from memories of
everywhere we’ve ever been
before now & suddenly this

maybe in another world,
all our dreams come true
& every prayer is answered
& all considered is well
with peace & joy, et cetera

but if this world is not that
if heaven is hidden from sight
do this as often as you do this
in remembrance of…

the warm embrace of another
despite the nearness of life without

my wife’s coworkers ask about my poetry
and I tell them oh,
it’s slice-of-life kind of stuff.
Bird on a wire kind of stuff. They ask
but what are they about? and I tell them so,

they say that the only philosophical question
worth asking is whether or not to commit suicide.
I guess my poems are all questions
that don’t have answers yet.
and I made things awkward again.

One of them asks if I’m active
at the university poetry center and I say no,
but I know a few local poets.
We don’t really like each other much
and everyone laughs.

I tell them that all the modern poets
have cut marks on their thighs.
I tell them to look for the scars.
That maybe the old ones had them too
and it’s the skirts that got shorter.

That the ones who survive today get tattoos
over their wrists to hide the failure,
how no one’s proud of their scars anymore.
I tell them that an old poet friend once said
that every artist is either overcooked or under-easy
and that I always forget to turn the oven off.

That I used to give my poetry books to all the girls
I wanted to touch, like a preface for my hands,
and when I first met the girl
who’s now the woman I’m married to
I gave her my poems and she came to my apartment
and found me playing PlayStation,
chainsmoking drunk, and she said I really thought

you’d be more in touch with nature, then how
I took her hand and dragged her fingers
across the scars on my biggest organ and said
do you think I got these hugging a tree? just in time
before dinner arrived.

---

Joshua Lillie is a bartender in Tucson, Arizona. He is the author of the chapbook Small Talk Symphony (Finishing Line Press, 2025) and the collection The Outside They Built (Alien Buddha Press, 2025). He was a finalist for the 2024 Jack McCarthy Book Prize Contest from Write Bloody Publishing. In his free time, he enjoys searching for lizards with his wife and cat.

suspended in rock crystal. So much we didn’t see, the last time. Some say she crossed the ocean to France in 33 AD and mourned him. Even there, he found and called to her disguised as a winged creature. Cupid’s bowl of spilled pleasure — we didn’t see it, or this dove, this gilded eucharistic dove with a hinged door in its back, a vacancy we didn’t see. We didn’t see this silver arm, reliquary for a part of Saint Valentine, or this erotic mithuna sculpted in thirteenth-century India, an aroused couple about to be one body. Here’s a pink-and-white dress for a baby girl from 1956. The last time the soldier’s mistress wore this byzantine gold chain, wet with blue gems, was in the year 1,000. We didn’t see it, or the housekeeper who became Rembrandt’s common-law bride. She never had such opulent jewels. In 1650 he painted her, a hearty archetype of wife, holding her robe closed. Can I ever be so placid, so sturdy in relationship? In the museum I think, Yes. But back out in the city I’m this purple orchid opening easily in the florist’s hand, humid with tears when the man in the bodega speaks to me sweetly, calls me honey. The last time I lived in tenderness was 2019, with you whose body was shelter and scent, who sang, knelt, took your time, and fed. Is the whole world just one crumb in the belly of that dove? I turn because he calls to me, this pigeon flecked as the firmament in storm. In 2025 he leads me to a statue of a naked girl outside an apartment, an angelic adolescent chained like Andromeda to the iron gate. Her last time was long ago. Such a sense of being behind glass when I look into her eyes. There was so much we didn’t see, but it saw us. We shone for it. The past recognizes its imminent relatives.

It warms as it watches
you and me becoming
artifacts of love.

---

Rose DeMaris likes to take a long walk every day, whether she’s in NYC where this poem (a Japanese haibun) takes place, or in Montana where she lives most of the time. You can find more of her poetry at rosedemaris.com or on IG @rose.demaris.

Until I thought to check, I thought I knew:
worms emerge from dirt to tar
on the run from drowning. Actually no one understands
their reasons. Maybe

worms emerge from dirt to tar
when vibrations ape a predator. Or are
their reasons maybe
traveling fast on slicked slab? Reproducing?

When vibrations ape a predator, or are
mock applause when I drop a glass
traveling fast on slicked slab, reproducing
language is beyond me. My speech breaks with static snow,

mock applause, when I drop a glass
knife voice. Sticking to the surface
language is beyond me. My speech breaks with static snow,
turns trail. Trail: proof and proof of absence. Here’s my opened-by-a-

knife voice sticking to the surface
of the steel. Spill
turns trail. Trail: proof and proof of absence. Here’s my opened-by-a-
mouth mouth. I say

of the steel spill
that I can be allowed to want. I’m saying
mouth: Mouth. I say
all

that I can be allowed to want. I’m saying
I’m
all
mouth,

I’m
just open
mouth,
and I’m

just-open.
I feed
and I’m
equalizing pressure.

I feed
like falling and I fuck like falling,
equalizing pressure,
meant to shed a wreck of men

like falling, and I fuck like falling
was becoming of the nymph stage. I claim I was
meant to shed a wreck of men,
their aims. I knew what needy grubs, what writhing life I’d swallowed clean,

was becoming. Of the nymph stage, I claim I was
on the run from drowning. Actually no one understands
their aims. I knew what needy grubs, what writhing life I’d swallowed clean
until I thought to check. I thought I knew.

we did not hold hands
often we clenched legs
under the table

hands were too public
for two who did not know
how feelings socailize

we sat on a bench
on the corniche
watching the nile at noon

it was full and calm
we could hear the wind sing
to the trees on its sides

you held my hand
and I looked
as you took it towards you

the wind stopped singing
and my heart wanted
to come out and taste the water

I said look how my hand
looks no matter
how many times I wash it

you said look how mine
sweats and then asked
if it bothered me

I held your wrist
and folded your hand
and brushed it with mine
again and again
until it is my hand that is wet

you smiled and looked down
happy and shy like a bird
folding into itself

I asked you for a kiss
I could not say it
I wrote it in a notebook
you once wrote your name in

words were too intimate
for two who did not know
how love talks

the notebook became
a pigeon back and forth
between us it held words
our mouths dared not admit

you wrote a falouka
is where you get one
you knew the nile
had none that day

no one teaches a girl
how to want
without bruising
the family name

so you swallowed it
and it bloomed somewhere
I could not reach

and I loved before
I had the language
then it came in a dialect
I had to translate for myself

so I spat it out
and kept the bitter ache

I would go through
your things
and asked about them

I claimed to get to know you
better through the small and ordinary
to break what ice may be left

you said I know
but I secretly hoped
I would be mistaken
for your watermelon lipstick
and go home with you

but you went home
and I stayed

I pass by the bench
and ask it why
are you still here
it says nothing but I hear
echoes of your laughter

so I sit and watch
the nile full and calm
but the wind no longer sings
it just blows
and I get cold easily nowadays
but I wait
a falouka might pass

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Muhammad Rabih is an Egyptian poet and translator writing in both English and Arabic.

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Fiona Martinez is a queer poet from Boise, Idaho and an MFA writing student at UC San Diego. Her hybrid work enters the natural world and the animal to understand embodiment, mixed identities, and the entanglement of violence and tenderness in our shared work towards liberation. Her poetry can be found in the Washington State Queer Poetry Anthology, Alchemy Journal of Translation, and Stonecoast Review (forthcoming).

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JeFF Stumpo’s prose poems describing his lucid dreams, as well as rendering the hopes and fears of people he cares about into dreamscapes, have appeared or are forthcoming in places such as The Journal, Prairie Schooner, Salt Hill Journal, DMQ Review, Subnivean, and Gulf Stream Magazine. He’s a survivor of psychosis and PTSD. He has a (poor) website at www.JeFFStumpo.com.